Chapter Text
Viktor Nikiforov died at 10:32pm in Saint Petersburg, Russia which meant his ghost appeared in Hasetsu, Japan at 4:32am.
Yuuri Katsuki, who was sleeping at 4:32am in Hasetsu, Japan, woke up to a stranger’s voice yelling Дерьмо!! which was, as far as Yuuri knew, not a real word.
The non-words continued, and Yuuri pushed his comforter off to squint down at the end of his bed. His idol of over a decade was standing there, staring at his hands and swearing in nonsense words that were probably actually the very real language of Russian.
Yuuri did not immediately panic. His walls were covered in photos and posters of Viktor Nikiforov. Waking up to his silver hair and firm jawline wasn’t out of the ordinary for Yuuri.
Then Yuuri realized his posters shouldn’t be animated and started screaming.
Viktor, who had seen he was in a dark bedroom standing in front of a sleeping person, was completely distracted by the fact that he could see anything at all through his previously solid hands. When the sleeping person moved, he barely registered it. When the no longer sleeping person screamed, he did the ghost-version of jumping out of his skin, which meant the lights flickered briefly and all the pictures on the wall fell to ground.
“Um,” said Yuuri. He was crouching on his bed and sweaty. He had grabbed his pillow at some point, perhaps to protect himself from the... ghost. Viktor Nikiforov’s ghost. Viktor Nikiforov’s ghost was in his room. Was this some sort of stressed-induced hallucination?
“English?” Viktor asked tentatively.
Yuuri nodded. His heart was pounding. What the fuck .
“I appear to have died,” Viktor said. He sounded sheepish. Also like he was speaking from another room, because Yuuri’s hearing went all muffled when he was panicking.
A panicking mind tends to hone in on extraneous details, and so instead of realizing, like a normal person might, that the appearance of Viktor Nikiforov’s ghost in your bedroom probably made him your soulmate, Yuuri’s brain zoomed in on the fact that Viktor’s ghostly freak-out had knocked all the framed pictures over, but the posters were still up on the wall for all to see.
No! Yuuri’s brain screamed, and his mouth screamed, “Out! Get out!”
He chucked his pillow at him.
“Uh,” said Viktor, “I don’t–”
Yuuri lept through him and ripped a poster from the wall.
“Huh,” Viktor said, and stared down at his own non-corporeal body in morbid fascination while Yuuri tore all the posters off the walls.
In the end, Viktor didn’t get out of Yuuri’s room, but Mari did barge in swinging a broom like a baseball bat.
“GUESTS ARE NOT ALLOWED IN RESIDENTIAL AREAS,” she bellowed in Japanese, and Viktor, not understanding a word of it, smiled winningly at her.
“Oh,” Mari gasped. “Oh, Yuuri . I’m so sorry.”
It took a moment for Yuuri to figure out why she was sorry, then he realized that meeting Viktor Nikiforov’s ghost meant that Viktor Nikiforov was dead .
And that he was Yuuri’s soulmate.
Yuuri’s brain shut down.
--
Mari woke Yuuri’s parents, who took the news that their son’s soulmate had died (and shown up to haunt Yuuri for the rest of his mortal life) much better than Yuuri himself had. They gathered downstairs, still in their pajamas, and Hiroko hummed while she made them an early breakfast. Mari managed to explain to Viktor where exactly he was using her high school English, since Yuuri was too busy trying not to hyperventilate and googling things like “help my soulmate is haunting” and “what to do when die.”
“We need to alert the authorities,” Yuuri announced. Viktor cocked his head, and Yuuri repeated it in English. “Google says,” he added.
Yuuri desperately wanted to go back to his room, hide in his comforter, and read this clickbait article about people who turned out to have celebrity soulmates instead of calling the police about Viktor Nikiforov’s ghost, or even thinking about Viktor Nikiforov’s ghost, but unfortunately being haunted meant Viktor would have to join him in hiding forever in his room.
Mentally saying a solemn goodbye to all his privacy, Yuuri dutifully called the police and reported a new ghost.
“Russian, you say?” the officer said. “How annoying. We’ll call national. Can I have your contact information?”
“Yuuri,” Viktor said, poking his shoulder. His finger dipped through the fabric of Yuuri’s shirt and sent chills up his arm. “Can you do me a favor?”
“Uh… y-yeah,” Yuuri agreed, hoping the favor wasn’t something like “please have me exorcised, I’ve recognized you from the Grand Prix Final and I don’t deal with second-rate skaters.”
Luckily, Viktor just wanted him to update his twitter.
“Mm, put ‘Rumors of my death have not been exaggerated.’” He paused, thoughtful. “Hashtag going ghost, hashtag found the boo.”
Yuuri squinted at him. “Are you sure that’s how you want to announce your death to the world? You don’t want to… to call family first, or something?”
“It’s easier this way,” Viktor replied. “Besides, ghost voices don’t carry over the phone half the time. Oh, post a selfie of us!”
The selfie came out as a very uncomfortable looking Yuuri with a glowing orb next to his face.
“It’s perfect,” Viktor pronounced. “Post it!”
“It looks like the beginning of a horror film,” Yuuri protested.
“How else am I going to share my soulmate with the world?” Viktored pouted.
Yuuri flushed bright red. Soulmates . It… he… okay. Okay. He could do this.
Three selfies later, and Yuuri deemed the photo good enough for Viktor’s twitter.
“Ah,” said Viktor, his shoulder phasing through Yuuri’s as he peered down at the phone. “I’m so lucky to have such a beautiful soulmate.”
Yuuri felt his face turn some color that was either green or red or both– maybe even blue, he might have stopped breathing sometime during this interaction– and nearly dropped his phone.
“I’m– um– I’m going for a run. To clear my mind,” he said.
Viktor came with him, since he was an immortal spirit bound forever to his soulmate. Great, just great, Yuuri thought.
--
Every once in a while, Yuuri decided to “take a run to clear his mind,” completely forgetting that running-to-clear-my-mind was something people in books did, and not actually something that helped him, personally. He didn’t mind running, exactly; he usually ran a few kilometers in the mornings, although his recent bout of depression had killed his workout schedule. But he didn’t actually like running. It was boring, monotonous, and let him dwell too much on his own traitorous thoughts.
Today, his traitorous thoughts were basically: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.
Viktor glided along behind him, completely in awe of his new ghostly ability to fly. He would occasionally admire the scenery– Hasetsu was, afterall, a picturesque seaside town, and Yuuri’s back muscles were also very picturesque, even with the love handles– but mostly he just stared down at his feet, hovering ten centimetres of the ground.
After running the length of the beach promenade, Yuuri decided to hop the fence and take to the sand.
“Careful running on sand,” Viktor warned, speaking for the first time.
Yuuri, who had already slowed to a walk, rolled one shoulder and headed to the water.
“How’d you die, anyway?” Yuuri asked, stopping just short of the dark waterline in the sand. The wind tossed his hair around about, but left Viktor untouched.
“It’s a bit embarrassing,” Viktor said. “I was texting and driving.”
This prompted a dry, humorless laugh from Yuuri.
“I’d be mad at you,” Yuuri confessed, “if I learned from television that you’d done something so careless.”
“I know, I know,” Viktor sighed. “Chris just sends such compelling voice messages.”
Yuuri frowned. “Christophe Giacometti?” He asked. He was proud to say he knew about that friendship through personal observation and not his obsessive following of Viktor’s media presence.
...although Viktor probably assumed it was from online quasi-stalking, since he didn’t seem to recognize Yuuri at all from the Grand Prix Final.
“Yes,” Viktor answered, making a completely useless motion as if trying to kick the sand. “He seemed very upset I was thinking about retiring. He made up a song about it, and I needed to tell him his voice was better drunk.”
“You’re retiring ?” Yuuri gasped, offended.
Viktor’s eyebrows stitched together. “Yuuri, I’m dead. ”
Yuuri considered punching himself in the face before inserting his foot directly into his mouth. Instead, he ran back home on soft sand, his quads screaming in protest.
--
Yuuri returned home, demanded Viktor wait outside the bathroom while he bathed, and then discovered over two hundred notifications on his phone.
Thirty-seven were from Phichit across various forms of social media. He’d sent Yuuri eight different news reports on Viktor’s passing: two of them were released before Viktor’s tweet and contemplated if Viktor’s ghost had appeared somewhere, and four of them included bios of Yuuri himself, along with rude conjecture over whether or not Yuuri will “share Viktor with the world,” and “Nikiforov’s spirit’s eventual fate.” One dismissed the tweet as a hacker. One of the articles was in Thai, and Yuuri could only guess at the written content based on that fact that it included his selfie with the Viktor-orb, since Yuuri didn’t know how to even begin reading Thai.
Phichit had also sent a snapchat and two tweets that were just photos of the selfie on Phichit’s computer screen, all taken from different angles, with various forms of WTF? written across them.
The most recent whatsapp from Phichit read: DETAILS, KATSUKI!!!
There were some concerned messages and missed calls from Celestino, various Hasetsu residents, and skaters (including a DM from Cristophe Giacometti, which Yuuri was too sick to his stomach to open). The rest were from strangers.
Very carefully, Yuuri turned off his phone and set it down on his bedside table.
“I’m going to make lunch,” he said.
“Okay,” Viktor agreed, and they both stared at each other for a few moments. Yuuri couldn’t help but think about how long Viktor had been trapped in the hallway while he bathed, not able to move further than a few meters from Yuuri.
“It’s normal to narrate your life when you’re first being haunted,” Viktor ventured. He sounded unsure of himself for the first time since his appearance. “You don’t have to feel like you’re controlling me just by living your life.”
Yuuri was not an expert on soulmate-ghosts, but being haunted was common enough that pretty much everyone had at least a few ghosts in their lives. During the tourist high-season, his family’s inn used to hire a cleaning woman named Kyoko who was haunted by a teenager named Mayumi. Discrimination against ghosts and their soulmates was illegal, but Kyoko still had a hard time finding employment– the fact that Mayumi had died when she was only sixteen made people uncomfortable, and so did her penchant for whining about being tied to Kyoko while Kyoko had to do “boring” work.
It wasn’t fair to Kyoko, Yuuri thought, that she couldn’t just live her life. But it also wasn’t fair to Mayumi, who couldn’t go off and just be a teenager. She was stuck forever with what Kyoko picked out for them. And Yuuri didn’t ever, ever want that for his soulmate.
“Okay,” he said, tightly, and went to see what they had in the kitchen.
--
“Ah,” Viktor said as Yuuri added leftover rice from breakfast to an omelet. “That looks delicious .”
He then proceeded to watch Yuuri very closely as he ate it. Creepily closely. Yuuri wondered how obvious it would be if he turned around and ate with his back to Viktor.
“I’m going to miss eating,” Viktor lamented. Yuuri paused, chopsticks halfway to his mouth. He hadn’t even thought about that. There were a lot of memes about ‘don’t eat pizza in front of your soulmate.’
Unfortunately, any guilt Yuuri felt was immediately squashed by what Viktor said next. “Luckily, you’ll be missing it with me, since you’re on a diet starting today.”
“Huh?” Yuuri said.
“Well you have to drop a few kilos before the season starts,” Viktor said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“What… what season?” Yuuri asked. HIs stomach was churning. If Viktor had planned to sabotage his lunch, he’d succeeded.
“The skating season ,” Viktor stressed. “You’re going to be the comeback story of the year!”
Yuuri hadn’t even been sure Viktor knew he was a skater; this was either a dream come true or his ultimate nightmare. He thought about getting up and running away. That wouldn’t work though, because Viktor would just be dragged along with him.
“I’ve heard of ghost coaches before,” Viktor continued, oblivious to Yuuri’s raising panic. “So it’s definitely legal. We’ll have to get over some logistical problems, but I’m sure we can manage.”
Yuuri thought about getting up and running away anyway, even if Viktor came with him. Viktor continued to muse out loud about coaching strategies and how he’d have to adjust them for being a ghost.
Yuuri’s stomach flipped. Was this nerves? Happiness? He didn’t know, but it put running out of the question.