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Russia is not an isolated little island, so one would have thought that Yuri Plisetsky would, at some point, have gotten exposed to eating with chopsticks. One would be very wrong in that.
“Stop laughing!” Yuri’s face is blotchy, knuckles white from his death-grip on the chopsticks as though they would disappear into thin air should he unclench his hands just a little.
“A good thing they aren’t alive,” Victor says, putting considerably effort into forcing a neutral-bordering-on-innocent look on his face while he grabs the next bit of sushi, pointedly at ease. He lets the silence drag on until Yuri looks at him, reluctant, his angry expression wavering as he tries, rather obviously, not to let his curiosity show. For the most part, he fails. “Or else you would have suffocated those poor chopsticks.”
For a moment, Yuri is visibly processing the insult, before he screams, a high-pitched sound of wordless frustration and fury. Victor is honestly impressed; he would not have thought Yuri to behave like this in public. As it is, three quarters of the other patrons turn to look at them, and that only compounds Yuri’s misery and humiliation.
He slams the chopsticks down onto the table with clenched teeth, standing up fast enough that his chair teeters on its hind legs. Mila reaches out to catch it, but her hand crashes into Yuri instead. The chair clatters to the ground, but Yuri doesn’t seem to care. He throws Mila a last venomous glance and storms off in the direction of the restrooms.
Yakov sighs and picks up the chair. “You should know better,” he says, voice heavy with reproach. For a moment, Victor considers feeling bad, but—Yuri has it coming, with that attitude of his (and he’s not even in puberty properly). He shrugs, unrepentant. Yakov frowns at him, but then only sighs again and returns to his food.
Nobody says anything for a long minute. Victor ignores it, takes the next sushi roll, dips it into the soy sauce and chews, slowly, unhurriedly. Bored. Piotr breaks the silence by standing, his gaze on Victor laden with emotions he has no desire to unpack. Piotr is a couple of years older than Victor, and good, but compared to Victor he is mediocre at best, and it rankles him. Victor meets his eyes, but does not stop his methodical eating.
Piotr breaks the stand-off, mouth twisting. “I don’t understand why you have to keep picking on him.”
Victor considers the question for a moment. “Somebody has to take him down a notch every once in a while,” he says, because that sounds mature and serious, and is a different answer than because I am bored and he makes it easy. “He is too thin-skinned, it will be the downfall of him one day.”
Piotr scoffs at that reasoning but doesn’t say anything. Instead, he turns on his heel and disappears in the direction of the counter. Mila follows his departure with a silent, judgmental face. When she notices Victor looking at her, she raises an eyebrow and shakes her head, clearly amused.
“You are such children,” Yakov grumbles and stands, “I will go rescue the bathroom from Yuri, before we have to replace another set of mirrors.”
They have a moment or two to share a grin, Mila and him, before Piotr returns, still glowering and clutching a fork and a knife in one hand, and Victor cannot help himself: “Oh, are you, too, trying to suffocate the cutlery?”
It borders on a miracle that Piotr doesn’t actually stab him, Victor thinks, and smiles into his sushi.
~*~
Mila comes home, and is greeted by silence. That in itself is not something that would be weird; her flat is small, cozy, and while she shares it with Georgi, he is out as often as he is in front of his computer, and so it usually is quiet when she returns.
“Hello?” she calls out again, straining to hear if there are sounds coming from further into the rooms. Nothing.
She curses lowly under her breath and prays that everything is all right; she’s just made a short trip down to the grocer’s and figured there would be no harm in leaving Yuri alone in the meantime. To say she has second-thoughts now would be an understatement.
She looks in the kitchen first, and then peeks into the bathroom (because what if he has slipped and cracked open his head?), but both are empty and still exactly the way she left them, from what she can see.
She pulls her bottom lip between her teeth as she makes her way to the living room, opening the door quietly. The room seems empty at first glance, but she does notice after just a moment the blond hair peeking over the back of the couch. She makes her way towards it and finds Yuri hunched over something—probably his phone. She is tempted to sneak up to him and try to catch a glimpse, but in all honesty—she’d like their living room to remain in one piece, and a Yuri temper tantrum is not the best method to keep it that way.
“There you are.” There is an audible sigh of relief in her voice, and, much as she thought he might, Yuri scrambles to shut off his phone before she can see what he was watching.
She raises one eyebrow, a teasing smile spreading over her face. “Whatcha watchin’?” she asks, tone as suggestive as she can make it. Yuri’s cheeks turn rewardingly red, and for a moment, he actually seems at a loss for words.
“Er—” he hesitates just a moment too long, eyes flitting down to his hands that are stuffing—chopsticks? She suddenly knows what he has been doing, and she can almost feel the teasing edge of her smile vanish.
Yuri bares his teeth at her, embarrassment making way for anger. There is nothing he hates more than being pitied.
“Want me to help you with, er—” she gestures towards the chopsticks, unsure whether she should actually voice the entirety of that question. She doesn’t.
Yuri is still teetering on that edge between utter embarrassment and mortified anger, finally settling on faked nonchalance. “Forget it, hag.” His face twists into an ugly sneer, and if she were Victor, she would point that out, rile him up some more. But a, she isn’t, and b, as previously stated, she would rather prefer the living room to remain undamaged, so she keeps quiet. “It’s stupid to eat with sticks anyway.” For a moment she thinks he will hurl them at the wall next to her head—it would not be the first time—but he just stuffs them into his pocket with a thunderous expression and stomps off towards the guest room he’s sleeping in while his grandparents are on their vacation.
“Let me know if you want some help,” she tells his retreating back, and only allows herself to smile once his door is shut and she can be sure he won’t catch her. She might not be that much older than him, but confronted with his decidedly childish behavior, she feels like a real adult.
~*~
“He seems so angry,” Yuuko says and sighs, never taking her eyes from the lean teenager hunched over the table. Yuri is alone in the main room of the onsen, and she is not entirely sure if he is glowering like that because he has to eat alone, or if is glower is the cause for his being alone. It might be both.
She can feel Takeshi shrug behind her, leaning in kiss her cheek. “I will go pick up the triplets from pre-school in a moment; can you unlock the rink later?”
She turns until she faces him, going up on tiptoes to kiss him. “No problem,” she says, still close enough to him that her lips brush his with every word. She can feel Takeshi smile, and can’t help herself but kiss him again. “I will see whether I can draw that ball of teenaged fury out of his shell.”
“Good luck with that.” Takeshi grins and gives her a quick peck on the cheek before heading for the door. Yuuko sighs again, and then moves further into the room.
“Mind if I take a seat here?” she asks, and then does just that before Yuri has a chance to answer her. He glares at her, but his expression reminds her so much of an angry little kitten that it’s more adorable than intimidating. She is wise enough not to remark on that.
Yuri looks like he wants to retort with a scathing remark (his prickly personality is something they have all gotten to know rather quickly), but before he can put it into his halting, curse-riddled English, Hiroko shows up.
“The usual?” she asks, beaming at Yuri, who has a mulish expression of reluctant agreement on his face. It must be terrible to be this young, this angry at everything and everyone, Yuuko thinks, and takes a short moment to feel grateful she (and more importantly, Takeshi) has left this part of being young far behind them. They both nod at Hiroko, who bustles back to the kitchens, promising to have it ready “in just a minute, dears.”
Silence settles. Yuri fidgets for a moment, before he pulls his phone back out. She leans back, content to let the silence stretch on, and watches Yuri play aimlessly on his phone. Hiroko shows up shortly after she left, placing two glasses of water at the table, and giving Yuuko a sympathetic smile. She smiles back, tries to say he’s not actually that bad without words, and probably fails. But Hiroko grins anyway, pats first Yuuko and then Yuri on the shoulder, and disappears again.
She doesn’t see Yuri’s venomous glare, but then it probably would not have bothered her at all. She’s dealt with Takeshi after all, Yuuko thinks, and goes back to watching Yuri stare intently at his phone.
He manages to endure her eyes on him for several minutes before he finally snaps. “What are you staring at?” he finally demands, voice full of vitriol, primed for an altercation.
Yuuko allows herself a small indulgent smile. “You remind me of my husband,” she says, and fully intends to leave it at that, change the topic, except that Yuri sits up from his slouch suddenly.
“Huh?” he asks, and when she doesn’t answer fast enough, he tacks on, “What do you mean by that?”
Yuuko smiles again, aware that her eyes have probably acquired a far-away look. “He used to be a lot like you,” she finally settles on, and lets the silence come back just to see how impatient Yuri gets, how he is obviously curious but loathes his own expressiveness. “Not quite as angry, mind you, but he had that same restlessness.”
“I’m not restless!” Yuri denies. She looks pointedly at his fingers tapping nervously on top of the table, and is rewarded with a flush and his hand disappearing in his lap.
“He used to take it out on Yūri.”
He smirks at that. “The pig deserves it.”
Yuuko tuts but ignores the remark otherwise. “He grew out of it, lost that nervous energy and calmed down.” She pauses and takes a sip of her water. “You know, the world will not always be out to get you.”
“Pah.” Yuri scoffs, disbelief written plain on his face. “What do you know about any of that?”
“I, too, was young at one point.” She smiles at him, tries to be reassuring in the face of his discomfort. Maybe she should not torture him much longer. “Just—it will get better, as cliché as that sounds.”
Yuri’s face twists, a clear expression of just how useful he thinks that advice is.
In that moment, Hiroko comes back, two bowls in her hand and her perpetually cheerful smile firmly on her face. Yuri looks a little relieved at her intervention, barely scowling at all when she puts down a set of actual cutlery next to his bowl of katsudon, while Yuuko’s ramen come with actual chopsticks.
“You still don’t know how to eat with those?” Yuuko asks.
For a moment Yuri looks torn—he probably wishes they were still comparing him to Takeshi—but he covers his slight embarrassment quickly. “No; chopsticks are overrated anyways,” he says defiantly.
She smiles. “It’s probably better to learn on noodles, not the pork,” she says. “I can show you later how to do that—eat noodles with chopsticks, I mean.”
Yuri shrugs, trying for nonchalance but falling about a mile short. Without further ado, he attacks his pork cutlet as though it has offended him personally, and Yuuko sees no reason not to do the same. She settles on simply eating her noodles though, no need to kill them all over again.
“You said you could show me how—” Yuri doesn’t finish the sentence, scowling at his bowl.
She takes pity on him. “Wait a moment,” she says, and dashes for another pair of chopsticks. He takes them from her with a wary look, holding them as though they will bite him any moment.
“No need to be scared.” Yuuko doesn’t laugh through the sheer power of her will. “Look at me. Try to hold the lower one here, like I do—no, not quite.” She puts her own chopsticks down and gently corrects his grip on only one. “Yeah, that is better. And now the second one—” she tries to put it in his fingers in the correct positions, but his fingers are clenched so tightly she would have to use force to pry them loose. “Relax a little,” she tells him, and he scowls again.
“Ugh.” He bites his lower lip, the scowl moving into a frown of concentration. It takes him maybe a minute—a minute Yuuko uses to eat a couple more mouthfuls of her noodles before they go cold—but finally manages to carefully flex his index and middle finger.
“That’s the way to go!” She grins at him, but he doesn’t pay any attention, still staring at his fingers. She gently takes his hand in hers and pushes the second chopstick into his grip, molding it until it resembles the correct one. “And now you only have to relax enough to actually use them.”
He does look up at that, the scowl back in place. The chopsticks in his hand do not move. He huffs and puts them down.
“Chopsticks are totally overrated,” he reiterates, sounding frustrated as he goes back to attacking his food with a fork.
Yuuko has to leave before he is done eating to go and unlock the rink, but she would not be surprised if the chopsticks she had given him did not return to the kitchen.
~*~
They come back from Barcelona late at night, a strange tension between them that makes Yūri choke on his words, unable to say anything. So he doesn’t, stuffs his hands in his pockets and follows Victor and Yurio at a more sedate pace, the latter still hyper even after the long and dragging flight.
He watches the two of them, unable to tear away his eyes from Victor’s lean and elegant lines, the way the streetlights glint off his hair. There is a nagging voice at the back of his head, telling him Victor is sacrificing yet more of his career for him—if he wouldn’t coach Yūri, he would have more time to train and—
He squashes that line of thought before it can go further. He has just placed second in the Grand Prix Final, for god’s sake, he should not worry about hypothetical scores he can hardly influence quite yet! He grimaces at himself, and of course that’s the moment Victor chooses to turn around, the happy expression sliding off his face, making way for what clearly is concern. Yūri tries to force a smile onto his face, which might not be quite as effective as he would like it to be.
We will talk later, Victor mouths at him, and then turns back to Yurio, presumably to keep his mood from spoiling when he notices that Victor hasn’t paid attention to anything he’s said.
Which… Yurio’s presence is something Yūri isn’t quite sure about. He had been there when Yurio had invited himself along; though to what effect he isn’t quite sure. It hasn’t been to gloat—Yurio barely paid any attention to him on the way back, not even to shove his gold medal subtly at Yūri—and so far, he also hasn’t bothered Victor about coming back to Russia.
Maybe it’s the promise—that Yūri will come back to Russia along with Victor—or maybe Yurio doesn’t quite trust this promise or—whatever, in any case, he is here for now, and if Yūri has learned one thing this past season it’s that wherever Yurio is, chances are that there will be another skater showing up not so long after, and oh dear, he can already feel a tension headache building.
It is staved off a little by returning home, the delicious smells of his mother’s cooking wafting at him from the open door where his parents and the Nishigoris and quite a few other neighbours are waiting, and when he smiles, it is not even faked.
His mother shepherds them all in, and then Victor is by his side, his hand a reassuring warmth on Yūri’s hip, and Yūri allows himself to relax just a little.
Inside, there is a banner—a banner, and Yūri can feel himself blushing, except that it does not only congratulate him, but Yurio too, who of course soaks the attention up like a sponge. Victor takes that moment of reprieve to kiss Yūri, a short, sweet kiss that is like an island, and then there is Katsudon and champagne, and the rest of the evening is a complete whirlwind.
It quiets down considerably over the next days, and they fall into an easy routine of skating, training and just hanging out. Victor seems to have a strange obsession with chopsticks, especially as they relate to Yurio, and Yūri can’t help himself.
He pulls Yurio aside before lunch one day while Victor and Maccachin are somewhere else. “What is it with you and chopsticks?” he asks, hurriedly, before Victor returns and cracks a joke or makes a careless comment as he does so often with Yurio. Yurio scowls at him. “Nothing,” he says, crisply. “
Yūri looks at him for a moment longer, unsure of how to proceed. “Are you sure?”
If looks could kill, Yūri would have been dead by now (several times over, in fact, but that’s not the point here). “I’m perfectly capable of eating with those primitive sticks,” Yurio spits out, and Yūri has his hands raised and is backing away before he consciously is aware of what he is doing.
For some reason, that makes Yurio scowl even harder, and his gait is more a stalk than ever as he follows Yūri to the dining room. With a very pointed look, Yurio picks up three pairs of chopsticks, which is unexpectedly considerate of him.
It’s… a little painful to watch him try to use his chopsticks though. Perfectly capable turns out to be more of wouldn’t starve, and Yūri has to tap Victor’s leg with his foot twice when he looks like he wants to make a comment. Victor pouts at that, but Yūri would very much like Yurio’s food to end up in his mouth and not all over the room should Victor push him over the edge. And with those two, that is always a possibility.
It takes him a while—a much too long while, actually—but he finally realizes one of the main problems Yurio faces in his quest to eat with chopsticks. “You shouldn’t hold them quite that tightly,” Yūri says, trying to keep his voice quiet and gentle. Yurio tightens his grip in response, stabbing at the noodles in his bowl. Yūri frowns. “No, seriously you—”
“Fucking idiot,” Yurio explodes suddenly. “Fuck off and leave me alone!” He grabs his bowl and stands, stomping away in the direction of the door leading to the patio. Yūri stares after him, bewilderment chasing all other thoughts out of his mind.
He turns to Victor, who is not exactly grinning, but clearly wants to.
“What?” he asks, slightly dismayed. He’s mostly gotten used to Yurio’s unpredictable outbursts, but something like this, where he actually leaves the room, hasn’t actually happened all that often.
“You got a sore point of his,” Victor shrugs, and turns back to his noodles.
And there’s clearly a story there, but Yūri isn’t totally sure he wants to know, so instead he turns back to his own katsudon—his mother is clearly spoiling him—and resolves to ask at some later point. Preferably when Yurio is far away and there is not even a chance he could overhear.
~*~
They’ve been in Hasetsu for a couple of weeks, training and, in Yuri’s case, ignoring Yakov’s demands that he come back home, when there is a knock on Yuri’s door rather late at night. He isn’t expecting anyone; Victor and the piglet usually use the evening to do things Yuri determinedly does not want to think about, because, gross, so he puts his phone aside and hides the chopsticks he was totally not practicing with. For a long moment he stares at the door, trying to will it into divulging who is on the other side.
The person knocks again. “Yuri?” a quiet voice asks, not quite small, but also not self-assured. Yuri scowls. The piglet had seemed a lot cooler back when he had only known him from afar.
“Yes? What is it?” he asks, his voice coming out harsher and more guttural than intended. He scowls harder, angry at his own body for betraying him like this (and he knows this is normal, but it’s bloody inconvenient to not be able to trust his own voice). Though, it’s just the piglet, so no harm done, no?
The door opens, a little hesitantly, and reveals Yūri, dressed down in sweats and a black shirt, and there is something about him so vulnerable that makes Yuri’s gut twist. He scowls to cover that feeling up, shoving it into the deepest corner of his mind, where it belongs.
“There’s somebody here to see you.”
And that—Yuri snaps to attention in a fraction of a second, goosebumps traveling all over his body as he tries to squash the hope and anticipation. His heart has decided to start racing, and he has to take a deep breath before he trusts his body to obey him even remotely.
“Oh?” He arches an eyebrow, trying for nonchalance. He isn’t sure if he succeeds, but the piglet is fooled easily (or chooses not to show he’s noticed, a voice whispers at the back of his mind, which he promptly shoves into the direction of that gut-feeling-that-never-happened).
The piglet turns and leads the way without further comment, and Yuri finds he has not many options except to follow along. The silence seems oppressive, giving Yuri’s traitorous thoughts too much room, but at the same time, he cannot think about a topic they might talk about, and gods, what if he is wrong and it is Mila coming to see him?
And then they round the corner, and he catches a glimpse of what can only be black leather through a doorway, and his heart—just barely calmed down—jumps back into overdrive, his traitorous body making his hands sweaty. He clenches them into fists, takes a deep breath and looks again.
“Yuri!”
And yes, even biting his lip is not enough to contain the smile that wants to show at seeing Otabek, and—it’s already a lost cause, isn’t it? Before he can think any further on it, he breaks into a run to cover the last couple of meters separating them, launching himself into Otabek’s arms. He isn’t disappointed, because his friend catches him, and he hides the even bigger grin in the dark leather of Otabek’s jacket.
When he steps back, he sees that the piglet has gone over to the counter, talking to his mother. She smiles at him, a soft, private, pleased smile, and Yuri is torn between scowling at her and smiling back.
“Whatcha grimacing at, Yurachka?” Otabek asks, running a hand through his hair. Yuri scowls at him, his chest going momentarily tight at the familiar nickname.
“I guess I’m just hungry,” he says, loftily, and Otabek laughs.
“I think Katsuki is ordering lunch right now.”
“I have,” the piglet agrees, head ducked a little and cheeks flushed. “I hope that Katsudon will be fine for you both?”
Yuri scowls again. “It will do.”
The piglet has the gall to laugh at that. “I will let you two catch up and see if I can wake Victor in the meantime,” he says, and then is gone.
There is a moment of awkward quiet, before Ota asks, “So, how have you been?” and Yuri launches into a rant about Victor smirking at him every time he uses his fork, and Katsuki’s attempts to teach him and—
Otabek’s hand on his arm is a calming and comforting weight on his arm, derailing his train of thought and shutting him up. For a moment, he just breathes.
“Do you want to learn?”
He wars with himself for a moment—a long moment, but—the humiliation he can avoid if he just—if he can use chopsticks far outweighs the possibility that Otabek might be a bad teacher. He nods.
Otabek goes over to the counter and grabs two pairs of chopsticks, sliding them out of their paper covering on their way back.
“It’s really not that hard.” He smiles, not with his mouth, but with his eyes. Yuri is distracted for a moment, wondering about when he has gotten to know Otabek well enough to realize this. “Once you have the hang of it,” he clarifies, and then Yuri cannot afford to be further distracted, because Otabek is pushing one pair of chopsticks into his hand, adjusting his own in his hand effortlessly.
“I see,” Otabek says after a mere moment, and rounds the table. He comes to stand behind Yuri, close enough so Yuri can feel the heat coming off his body even through both their t-shirts. His heart speeds up, and then Otabek leans forward until his chest is actually touching Yuri’s back, and his heart stutters for a moment. “Like this.” Otabek’s fingers are cool and calloused as they gently correct Yuri’s grip.
They work on that—picking up chopsticks and holding them right for a couple of minutes; long enough for Yuri to wonder in the back of his mind where the piglet and Victor are. But then Otabek steps up his expectations, and he pushes his single-minded focus back on getting those bloody sticks to move just the way he wants them to.
Victor’s face later, when Yuri picks the chopsticks to eat his katsudon like he’s always used them and only fumbles slightly as he picks up the meat and noodles, is entirely worth it.
He’s still slower than the others at the table, can’t chat and eat simultaneously, and he does drop a piece of his meat back into the bowl at some point. But that last one isn’t truly his fault; he’d been just eating noodles when he had caught sight of Otabek’s face, and the expression… it makes something in Yuri’s stomach flutter, and it’s not food disagreeing with him. It feels more like a promise, and suddenly he wishes lunch were over already, because that promise in Otabek’s face is making using his chopsticks just as hard as it had been in the beginning.
Thankfully, Victor doesn’t pick up on it, and the piglet drags him off to the rink or something before he can make a comment about Yuri’s newfound ability. Yuri is a little hazy on the details, but there are more important things than knowing where Victor and his pig are off to. Namely that they are off to somewhere.
“You did pretty well there,” Otabek comments as Yuri leads the way to his room. Mrs Katsuki had asked them after lunch—and after Victor and the piglet had already been off—whether it would be a problem for him to share his room with Otabek, because the rest of the onsen was filled up. Apparently Katsuki placing second and him, having placed first, both staying there, was quite the draw; Yuri isn’t entirely sure that’s true, but there are quite a few people staring whenever they eat dinner or watch the news in the evening. In any case, he’s not going to complain about Otabek staying with him—he’d be crazy to!
The quiet drags on, not uncomfortable—it hardly ever is, with Otabek—but charged with something that has Yuri biting his lip. “I deserve a reward, don’t I?” Yuri finds himself saying before he is even aware he will, and Otabek chuckles.
“What sort of reward?” There is a weird quality to his voice—Yuri can’t quite quantify it, but it makes him shiver.
He stops, feeling his cheeks heat as he searches for words in his brain, but it is empty, filled only with the hammering beats of his heart. “Er…”
“Like this?” Otabek asks, and then he is crowding Yuri back against the wall, one hand on his hip and the other on his chin, tilting it up slightly. And then—Yuri closes his eyes just a moment before Otabek’s lips meet his own, a soft, gentle touch that is over way too soon.
Yuri’s body follows Otabek without any input from his mind, trying to chase his lips. Yuri opens his eyes again, meets Otabeks gaze head on, and he wants, all of a sudden, wants Otabek in ways he has been only peripherally aware of before, and before his—friend? Boyfriend?—can move away, he slides his hands into Otabek’s hair and pulls him back in.
It’s a little too forcefully; their teeth clank against each other and Yuri only barely avoids smashing their noses together, too, but it doesn’t matter, because Otabek chuckles into his mouth (which makes Yuri’s mind go blank for another long moment) and rights them, meeting Yuri head on for the kiss.
When they break apart again, they are both breathing heavily, staring at each other for a long moment before Otabek chuckles again.
“Maybe we should move this out of the hallway,” he suggests. For a short moment, Yuri resents that he is still able to form a coherent sentence, but then Otabek takes his hands and links their fingers, and Yuri definitely can’t even form a coherent thought anymore as he follows Otabek down the hall.
The last one might be a vague thanks in the direction of those stupid (maybe not so overrated) chopsticks, and then—well, then there are better things than thinking, anyway.