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“Have you learned anything from this, Vitya?”
Yakov’s voice is gruff, breaking through the quiet, make-believe peace of Viktor’s bedroom. Yuuri is sleeping still, soft and warm in the circle of Viktor’s arms; it’s a testament to his exhaustion that he hasn’t woken up from the boom of Yakov’s voice in the room.
“Have you?” Viktor shoots back, smile at odds with the cold gleam in his eyes. He watches Yakov clench his jaw and grit his teeth and he smiles, smiles, smiles, even when all he wants to do is bare his teeth and say, “He was good enough, has always been more than enough, even before he proved it to you by saving me.”
“Your boy is a monster,” Yakov says, grimacing, like it was never a point of pride that his Yuuri could spill so much blood without even flinching.
“My Yuuri is hardly a boy,” Viktor replies, smile falling away to reveal the truth of him: cold, aloof, immoveable. “And he saved me. Is that not enough?”
“He destroyed more than what was necessary-“
“He thought that he had lost me,” Viktor says, terse and unwilling to listen to the belittlement of his love’s work. “And you know what loss does to a man.”
Yakov gives him an inscrutable look. “Do you?”
“You took care of me when I lost everything.” Viktor presses a gentle kiss to Yuuri’s brow, smiling warmly when Yuuri nuzzles further into the warmth of Viktor’s embrace in response. He says, looking down at Yuuri with such affection that Yakov feels uncomfortable, “And I was left cold, bereft, empty. I was barely aware of what love was as a child, so I processed loss like it was something to forget.”
He looks up, sees Yakov watching him silently, and tells him, “My Yuuri is not the same.”
Yakov raises a brow at him, a silent gesture for him to go on with what he wants to say.
“My Yuuri is fire,” Viktor murmurs, right hand curling over the crown of Yuuri’s head, “because he knows love. What I never had, he’s always held close to his chest, and if a man is to lose what he’s always had the chance to keep close-“
He cuts himself off, eyes a-gleam when he sees the way that Yakov swallows as if realizing the depth of what he means.
“You understand, yes?” Viktor says, smile bright despite the chill to his tone. “This is why we don’t mess with people who have lost everything.”
Because a man with nothing to lose has nothing to hold him back.
“That you would learn to understand this from what we thought to be a whim of yours,” Yakov says, voice an almost-grumble as he eyes Yuuri, sleeping soundly in Viktor’s arms with his head nestled in the crook of Viktor’s neck and shoulder. “Ridiculous.”
“Better now than never,” Viktor says, tone amused as he lightly nuzzles his cheek into the crown of Yuuri’s head.
And it’s an odd picture, the Pakhan Yakov had raised with his own hands to be cold-blooded and cruel, looking so soft and fond and vulnerable-
but not quite. Not really.
For all that his heart is bare on his sleeves, there’s a thrumming tension under his soft gaze that tells Yakov he is anything but soft, given the right motivation. That for the next time Viktor will almost lose Yuuri, he won’t find ice under that steely gaze, but an all-consuming fire.
Viktor smiles, something knowing in his gaze as he regards Yakov with a brief look. He says,
“I would have never learned my lesson, otherwise,”
And Yakov knows.
If Viktor was graceful chaos before, there’s no telling what kind of destructive power he now holds with Katsuki Yuuri by his side.