Chapter Text
Public figures by their very nature had public personas. The private self as it was is too fragile a thing to suffer much scrutiny and demanded protection. Yuuri Katsuki, as an international competitive athlete, by default, had a public persona, or rather he had listened very quietly to the media consultant the JSF sent him to when he first won nationals and did his best to follow the truly dizzying amount of rules and regulations (that put the complexity of the figure skating scoring system to shame) of interacting appropriately in the public as a representative of the JSF. A task he accomplished best by doing and saying as little as possible. During interviews he would resolutely stick to the safe subjects of his season’s plan and his hometown, sidestepping any personal questions that might occasionally be flung his way.
Yuuri Katsuki the person wasn’t very interesting anyway.
Yuuri’s eyes blurred as he re-read his paper for the third time, his laptop perched on his stomach and probably altogether too close to his face. He set it down on his floor for a moment, removing his glasses, and rubbed his eyes.
It was going to take him six years to graduate by this point. His poster of Victor smiled genially back at him from the foot of his bed. In theory the poster (a going away gift from Yuuko) was supposed to be motivating, but in reality it was becoming just another reminder of how very far from his goal he was. Yuuri pressed his face in the pillow, maybe just giving everything up and hiding from society for the rest of his days might be the more reasonable option here. This was also the same moment that Phichit decided to barge into his room, half dancing.
“Yuuri! Get up! We’re going to Pride!”
There were a lot of things that Yuuri enjoyed about living with Phichit Chulanont: he kept his clutter to his areas of the apartment, he was always happy to share his take-out, and he was a genuinely kind and wonderful person to be around. Everyday Yuuri felt honored to be Phichit’s friend, especially because he was self-aware enough to realize that he was hardly the easiest person to be friends with.
But sometimes Phichit would get it into his head that Yuuri needed to be socialized.
Yuuri turned over towards the wall with a little disagreeing whine. Isolating himself from all civilization was clearly his destiny.
“C’mon, you’ve got to go. Pride is a quintessential American experience.” Phichit said, coming over to Yuuri’s bed and tugging on his sleeve.
“I’ve got work to do.” Which thanks to the nature of being a college student and a competitive figure skater was always true, and gave Yuuri a ready-made excuse. He made an abortive motion towards his laptop that lay abandoned on the floor. “Besides, it’s not really my thing.”
Phichit got a wild look in his eyes (and that was when Yuuri knew that his cause was hopeless, but he wasn’t going to yield, not right away). Phichit stalked over to the bottom of Yuuri’s bed and gestured at the walls. “Oh, really? And you paper your walls with Viktor Nikiforov’s face because it’s fashionable, hm?”
On Phichit’s walls was a collection of printed out memes he spent hours painstakingly cutting out and rearranging into the most perfect collage of near incomprehensible internet humor.
Whenever Yuuri was feeling particularly stressed and in need of distraction he would often find himself sitting on the floor with a pair of child’s scissors bought from CVS (because Yuuri’s mother would know if he was dulling the good kitchen scissors cutting paper) helping Phichit add to his ever growing collection. It was soothing, he had to admit, even if the contents were something of a mystery to Yuuri; except for Left Shark. Yuuri keenly understood and related to Left Shark.
All this to say that Phichit had absolutely no place to stand when it came to questioning Yuuri’s decorative decisions.
“You know it’s not like that. I admire him, everyone at the club admires him.” Yuuri said, and resisted the desire to point out that his walls weren’t ‘papered’ with Victor. In the first place it was next to impossible to find large high quality posters in the United States, and what Yuuri had managed to scrounge up was nothing compared to what he had been able to achieve with patience and diligence back home. Yuuri bit back this fact, which would not help him.
“Yeah, and I bet Victor would go to Pride to support his friends.” And that, was perhaps true. Victor was known for pushing boundaries, for being surprising, for testing himself to the very limits of what he could achieve. He was also according to interviews a little bit thoughtless (not like Lochte, but, well, no one really expected genius athletes to be smart) and would probably agree to things like this without much thought. He also enjoyed parties, at least according to everything Yuuri had read.
Yuuri sighed. “I’m not… going to dress up.”
Phichit squealed upon realizing he had won, but paused. “But you love dressing up.”
“This isn’t ice skating.”
The Pride celebration was no more and no less what Yuuri had come to expect from American public celebrations. Namely it was loud, hot, and filled with people. Phichit was of course sucked into a large group of friends upon arrival, some of them Yuuri recognized from the rink. Overall, it was pretty OK, that is until someone recognized Yuuri and asked for a picture.
Yuuri would have tried to get out of it, except that he could feel Phichit’s eyes on him even as his friend was in a pile of people taking a selfie. Victor would be nice to his fans, Victor would be nice to his fans, this person was wearing too much cologne and touching Yuuri’s arm in a way that was way too familiar, Victor took pictures with his fans all the time.
In another minute it was done though, and the person looked really happy as he babbled about putting it up on his instagram, but Yuuri was already moving away as subtly as possible even as he waved goodbye and turned back to see where Phichit had gone.
Even if that had been sort of awkward it was over in a few minutes and Yuuri had actually made someone happy. Phichit would probably be proud. The rest of the day flew by in a similar overstimulated haze of blasting music, brightly colored costumes, and Phichit doing everything to get Yuuri to dance and Yuuri doing everything to not embarrass himself.
By the time it was over, Yuuri was relieved to be back in his apartment and taking a shower. Alone and looking back on it he could admit that it hadn’t been a day badly spent. It had been hot and crowded, but most everyone had been infectiously happy and he’d even seen a few people dressed up as Victor, who was apparently something of an icon according to Phichit who’d caught Yuuri staring. He could honestly say he was glad he went, not that he could ever let Phichit know.
At practice a few of his rinkmates even came up and mentioned they had been surprised to see Yuuri yesterday. All at once Yuuri found himself somehow involved in a circle of discussion about how they had spent the day previous. They all joked about some of the more eccentric costumes they saw and whether they could ever get away with wearing some of them on the ice. It was sort of nice to actually know about what everyone was talking about and even be able to contribute a little.
Half the circle suddenly called out to someone, and Yuuri turned to see Phichit come out of the locker room, and Yuuri paused, Phichit looked upset. Yuuri stood there uselessly in concern not wanting to pry, but at a loss. Luckily for Yuuri, Phichit came right up to him and pressed his phone into Yuuri’s hand. “I’m so sorry, Yuuri.”
Yuuri glanced down and saw that the screen was displaying a news article. Then he read the headline:
Is Japan’s Top Figure Skater Yuuri Katsuki gay?
06/12/2014
Just this morning pictures were released that show Yuuri Katsuki, Japan’s premiere figure skater, attending a Pride event in Detroit. Now the question is on every fan’s mind, is Japan’s ace skater gay? It certainly is not unheard of in the figure skating world, but Katsuki has been habitually very reticent about discussing his personal life, is this his way of coming out? This reporter thinks…
Yuuri read the entire article numbly, his stomach sinking to his toes. It was remarkably thorough for something that was put out so quickly, going back through interviews he doesn’t even remember giving, claiming that his way of speaking was purposely feminine, and that his fans had always had their suspicions.
“This is all my fault, Yuuri. I didn’t think they would make such a big deal, sometimes I forget you’re…” Phichit trailed off with an embarrassed look.
“An international athlete?” Yuuri could hardly blame him. When you spend enough time playing Mario Kart with someone you tend to forget the rest of the world’s perception of them. Now Yuuri was going to have to deal with reporters trying to call him to get his reaction. Dealing with the sudden traffic to his largely inactive social media accounts would be a pain too. Yuuri froze: what if some reporter tried to get in contact with his parents?
Not that he thought for a moment that they would be angry or even upset if Yuuri ever told them that he was like that, but that it would be one more burden that he would be placing on them. One more sacrifice they would have to bear for their selfish boy who was always pursuing his own happiness without a thought of others. And to hear about it in such an impersonal way…
Breaking out of his spiral of worst case scenarios Yuuri could see that Phichit felt really bad. And well Yuuri was hardly the greatest sort of friend on a good day. Phichit really hadn’t known that this would happen. Yuuri took a deep breath.
“It’s OK, Phichit, at least they didn’t drag you into this. It’s not like the fact that a figure skater might be gay is really news anymore.”
Phichit nodded, and Yuuri’s other rinkmates, given a chance to read the article, made snide comments about the nosy press, and patted Yuuri on the back with their support. It didn’t make the tightening in his stomach go away, but it made it perhaps easier the bear. He was hardly the first skater to be speculated about, and he wasn’t going to be the last. He wouldn’t lose his scholarship or any of his modest sponsorships, not over something like this.
Then Yuuri was saved by Coach Celestino asking loudly why none of his skaters were on the ice, and everyone scattered at once. Yuuri went through his warm-ups but already knew that today was not going to be a good practice.
The worst part about the article, more than the invasion of privacy or the unwanted attention it was going to bring him, was the simple fact that it wasn’t as if the article was wrong.