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Yuri should’ve known better than to accept any more group invitations to Hasetsu for any reason. But everyone said a Japanese festival is a truly can’t-miss event and everyone else was going, showing off pictures of their cool yukatas online, and damn it, he had to go too.
So far, it hadn’t been the worst trip ever, but his breakfast still turned in his stomach when Victor exclaimed, upon entering the common room of Yu-Topia with his arm draped over his fiance’s reddening shoulders:
“You were amazing last night, Yuuri!”
“Oh no,” Yuuri groaned, “What did I do? I hope it wasn’t anything like you on the roof top?”
“Not at all!” Victor grinned, catlike. “I won’t say in front of all our friends.”
Everyone either snickered or averted their eyes, except Chris who congratulated them and said something to Victor in French with such a gross intonation Yuri was glad he didn’t speak the language.
This was a bad way to start the day.
—
Yuri’s yukata was the best. There was no question, no discussion. He looked cooler than all the rest of those losers. Had he copied Otabek’s sleeveless style from their promotional trip to the onsen last month? Maybe. But you couldn’t prove that and he’d deny it. For a while, he strutted around the festival, feeling proud of himself. He took pictures of every fashion booth, it was all so cool. He played a game with Victor and boasted to everyone about winning. Given everything that had happened last time he was hanging out with all these idiots, this trip to Hasetsu was bliss.
But then Victor went off with Katsudon and sometime around his second rotation of the festivities, Yuri realized how very alone he was. He stood on his toes, which didn’t do much, and gazed around the stalls, looking for his companions. Where the hell had everyone gone?
He’d never been happier to see Georgi, although Yuri’s face expressed nothing but disgust and distaste. Georgi was studiously scribbling in a small notebook as he walked at the edge of the stalls.
“Memo, memo, memo,” the older Russian spoke only to himself. He didn’t seem to notice Yuri, so the tiger decided stalking his rinkmate would be more fun than actually hanging out with him. What the hell was up with Georgi anyway? Making notes about random things he was seeing? When he didn’t write anything down, Georgi started humming to himself:
“Walk, walk, walk,” as he passed stall after stall. Yurio liked this game and replied softly:
“Sneak, sneak, sneak,” from a decent distance behind.
“Walk, walk, walk,” Georgi kept seeing something in his periphery and became suspicious. “TURN!” he shouted, spinning around and hoping to catch his stalker.
“DUCK!” Yuri whisper-shouted from between two booths.
They repeated this process twice before Georgi got wise.
“Walk, walk, TURN AROUND SUDDENLY!”
“ARRRGGGH!” Yuri roared like the caught tiger he was.
“There you are,” Georgi scoffed, tucking his pen behind his ear, angle aligning perfectly with the point of his hair. “Yakov says you won’t answer your phone.” He began flipping back several pages through his notebook. “He gave me a message for you.”
“I don’t want to talk to old greasy bald heads when I’m trying to enjoy myself! If I wanted to do that, I’d hang out with Victor!”
“Memo, memo,” Georgi scanned the page, “Tell Yurio to buy a shower toilet for me. He must mean a bidet. I bet he wants one of those fancy Japanese robot toilets.” Georgi laughed, “Where do we even find those?”
Yuri was furious. “I AM NOT BUYING AN ASS-RINSING TOILET FOR YAKOV! THAT’S DISGUSTING!”
—
Meanwhile, Emil, Mickey, Guang Hong and Leo were gathered around a fundoshi vendor where Chris was having some translation issues. The vendor stood shaking and staring at the beautiful Swiss man, his gaping mouth not forming words to reply to Chris’ request.
“I want to be your fundoshi,” Chris said for the third time in Japanese. It looked like the poor vendor was about to faint. Chris ducked his head, embarrassed. He’d been practicing Japanese for this trip and still, apparently, wasn’t getting the simple request right. He gave up and tried English: “I want a fundoshi.”
Several minutes later he emerged, resplendent, glowing with pride in his purchase. Hands on his hips, Chris did a catwalk turn. His ass cheeks positively shimmered with the many-colored lights of the surrounding lanterns. Everyone but Mickey clapped and cheered.
“What does it feel like?” Leo asked.
“Very comfortable and breezy.” Chris smiled. “Much cooler than the yukata!” The hot summer night in a festival densely packed with people was getting to everyone.
When Victor and Yuuri spotted Chris, the others were all inside, changing into fundoshi of their own.
“Chrisuu!” Yuuri applauded, his face reddening.
“I’m so glad you approve,” Chris purred.
“I must have one!” Victor leapt at the stall. It was a ‘shut up and take my money!’ kind of moment. Victor was in and out of the stall in record time, faster than the others who were still struggling to figure out how to tie fabric and secure… things. “What do you think of mine, Yuuri?”
Yuuri’s eyes were unblinking, taking in everything all at once, his lips hung only slightly parted. His tongue worked stupidly behind his teeth like it was too big to be used for talking and was better suited to salivating and slurping.
“Here.” Chris came to the rescue, snapping Yuuri out of his state and handing him his phone. “Take pictures of us!” Chris blew kisses and kept an arm around Victor’s shoulders and pulling him close. Yuuri took photos as they posed.
“You two la-look…” Yuuri swallowed, trying to seem totally in control of his muscle movements. “Great. You look great. As usual. Your off-season bodies are still so -- so toned.” He took way too many pictures, on all three phones. Chris and Victor soaked up the compliments and hammed for the camera, showing off and perhaps getting a touch too close to an R18 rating.
“Yuuu-rri! You should buy one! Wear a fundoshi with us!” Victor cheered, disentangling from Chris to dive into Yuuri’s entire personal bubble. He was not ready for mostly naked Victor. Well, he was getting ready, but this was not the time or the place and he needed to think chaste thoughts.
“No, Victor. You’re the ones with the hard bodies.” He pinched his little inch of an off-season roll above his hips.
Victor danced from foot to foot, big saucer eyes going gooey. “You would look so cute!”
Chris laughed to see Victor begging like a puppy at a dinner table.
Yuuri was unmoved. “Victor! Don’t make that cute face at me!”
Chris whistled. “I bet he always gets what he wants with that face, though! Too much positive reinforcement, Yuuri.” And Chris swats one of Victor’s bare cheeks. Victor whines, but leaves Yuuri alone about the fundoshi. He’s far too distracted when the rest of the skaters emerge scantily clad from their own change rooms.
“Ohhh!” Yuuri slapped a hand to his forehead. “Why is everyone wearing this?!” He was going to look like some sort of producer for a male strip show walking around with these guys.
The gathering, now infinitely hotter and cooler simultaneously, continued perusing the festival until they came across Georgi and Yuri arguing over a statue.
“No I’ve seen this before, it’s in Mario,” Yuri said, gesturing to the gape-mouthed stone squid. “They must really like that game here.”
Yuuri looked like he was in pain. “That’s --”
But before he could continue Guang Hong piped up. “Oh! Look! Minami just posted a video skating that new skater’s routine.”
“What new skater?” Yuuri asked, and flushed at how icy it sounded, even to him.
“Minami’s been obsessed with him! Such a fanboy!”
“Pfft,” Yuri snorted, taking another picture of the statue before turning to Yuuri. “About time Minami figured out you’re the last person he should copy.”
Everyone laughed except for Yuuri. He’d come to a stop, still flanked by Chris and Victor, flirting over Yuuri’s head. At Yuri’s words Yuuri sagged, leaning against the statue’s broad pillar.
—
Yuuri’s mind fought the wave of surging emotions that crashed into his gut. No, no. It was stupid and irrational to be angry at Minami-kun idolizing someone else! Why did he feel this way?
Yuuri stared into the swirling mouth of the statue. What did Victor always say? Positive affirmations? But Yuuri’s (Minami still loves you, everyone still loves you) were too slow. The frail counterarguments did little for his plummeting stomach, and his traitorous mind used them to conjure images of the past. He kept seeing Minami’s lovestruck eyes, shimmering and overflowing with admiration, eyes Yuuri might never see again. A dark voice in his head chanted:
You didn’t appreciate him enough. You didn’t support him enough. Encourage him enough.
Worst of all, Victor’s voice joined the chorus: “How can you hope to motivate yourself if you can’t motivate others?”
That was it. Even though it was a memory long gone, even though on that day Yuuri did in fact inspire Minami-kun and had encouraged Minami often since, the memory of Victor’s disapproval and its associated sting was all it took.
A wretched voice, still sounding sort of like Victor, damn his brain, concluded:
Now Minami’s over you.
Yuuri felt familiar tentacles squeezing around his heart, groping up his throat, slime stinging his eyes. He didn’t realize that when he opened his mouth, everyone else saw the black bile he felt choking him. He sputtered dark fluid down his chin and gasped jet fumes, blackness swirling into the air.
“Is he sick?” Yurio asked. But then everyone saw the glowing redness of Yuuri’s eyes, the shadow of looping limbs, undulating all around. The arms of the beast reached in all directions, spreading the darkness beyond their usual, easy target.
The demon Yuuri always felt on his back was real tonight not just for him, but everyone around, incensed by the festival’s energy.
Victor’s eyes narrowed in concern, “Yuuri?”
“Drown… drown in despair!” A voice that was Yuuri’s, but marred with infinite sadness, groaned to the ground.
“I see…” Victor breathed.
Yuuri stared into his own chest, chin scrunched down, shoulders curling inward, knuckles cracking as fingernails cut through the skin, reaching out as jet black claws.
“THIS IS SO FREAKING COOL!” Yuri crowed, snapping a picture for Otabek. But then he stopped before hitting send. There was something so beautiful and tortured and… he didn’t think sexy, but the word teased his consciousness before his brain revolted and tamped it down, out of existence. He would keep this photo for himself, though.
“Destroy EVERYTHING…” the voice, like a thing underwater, garbled and distant, demanded. The other skaters felt the words in their marrow, raising the fine hairs on arms and legs held by the sight and the sensation of Yuuri’s demon.
Georgi seemed least affected. “I’ve seen this before,” his tone entirely too calm, “we need an exorcism.”
“A what?!” Leo balked.
“An exorcism!” Georgi said, flicking through his notebook. He stopped at a page - no one asked why he happened to have exorcism memos - and read. “Joy and happiness are often used to combat demons of darkness, including but not limited to: despair, wrath, jealousy, darkness, destruction, and void.”
“What the fuck, Georgi.”
“DESTROY,” Yuuri-demon howled, claws scraping upwards. The roar was loud enough to hurt their ears, and the energy rung out from Yuuri like waves, nearly knocking them off their feet.
“OK - Ok - Joy? What’s Joyful!?” Mickey panicked.
“Let’s sing!” Leo suggested. Unfortunately, English Top 40 hits were all they had in common, and so awkwardly, out of tune, the group began to chortle.
Victor didn’t sing. He kept watching Yuuri as though he, too, had seen this before. Certainly not the tentacles, glowing eyes, and black slime puke, but he’d felt Yuuri like this before. He’d felt like his lover, his fiancee, his perfect student, was unreachable, somewhere far away and overburdened, swathed in a veil of darkness so thick Victor couldn’t see him on the other side.
He and Yuuri had numerous conversations since the Cup of China about how to deal with this. There was no single solution, no magic wand either of them could wave. The well-intentioned, spirited singing of their friends, ridiculous “lyrics” pulled from Georgi’s memo pad, was not going to do it. Although he couldn’t help but smirk at the way Chris tried to get the others to dance with him while they sang. And Chirs only knew one type of dancing.
Victor realized everyone was focused on the demon and exorcising it; they were paying more attention to the demon than its victim. It was a rookie mistake he’d made several times, focusing on the way Yuuri behaved when he felt like this- the tears, the avoidance, the self-deprecating statements. To exorcise the demon was treating the symptom, rather than the disease. Everyone was retreating as they sang, avoiding the tentacles that stretched to tangle and ensnare more victims. Yuuri’s vaporous mouth, contorted into a wicked smile, emitted a hissing sound as he reached for his friends with his claws.
When the others dodged and backed away, Victor stepped closer.
“Yuuri?” He spoke in a normal voice, trying not to sound too distraught. Yuuri had a way of guilting himself into a state if he thought he was to blame for Victor’s pain. “Yuuri, remember Makkachin chasing seagulls on the beach?”
Yuuri’s glowing red eyes lost their piercing glare for a second. His head seemed to turn in Victor’s direction, only enough to notice. It was all the encouragement Victor needed.
The squid demon caught Yurio’s ankle and tripped him. The tentacle went taut, attempting to pull the young man into the gaping black hole of a maw. Chris and Georgi tried to free the Ice Tiger, ducking as tentacles dashed and spiraled overhead.
“Yuuri, remember training with Yurio at Ice Castle, how he taught you quads when I wasn’t looking?” The tentacle loosened on Yuri’s leg and Georgi and Chris pulled him free. Victor smiled. His eyes stung with carefully concealed tears, but his smile grew brighter, stepping closer.
“Remember that day when I came to find you? The sakura was still blooming although it was snowing?” As hot as it was in mid-July, Victor could still feel that snowfall, individual flakes hitting his skin, like the snowflake engraved in each of their rings.
Yuuri’s eyes, dazed and no longer glowing, though still red, blinked for the first time since the possession started and looked directly at his fiancee. Victor held out his arms to the man, ignoring the beast at his back.
“What was the most important thing about those precious memories, Yuuri? What was it, my darling?”
The tentacles were receding, but the hissing - no longer coming from Yuuri’s mouth- grew louder, angry at feeling its host slip away.
Yuuri swallowed what was hopefully the last of the black bile, his eyes changed from red to a ruddy clay kind of brown, closer to his natural color. Victor could almost touch him, almost embrace him. The tentacles’ little suckers clung to Yuuri’s shoulders, a last ditch effort to maintain its grasp. Yuuri wet his lips.
“You did all the work?” he scratched from a parched throat.
Victor resisted the urge to cry once again; there were few things more painful in life than seeing the ones you love suffer. He only smiled and shook his head.
“You worked very hard, Yuuri. All last season, you worked so hard. Tell me what else connects all those beautiful memories? Makkachin and Yurio and I? Please?”
Yuuri blinked a few times again, his body shuddered, like shaking off the beast.
“Love?”
The suckers gave up their fight for his skin. Only the red marks of their hateful kiss remained. Victor fell forward and encased Yuuri in his arms. He let his tears trickle out in relief. Everything was going to be okay.
“That’s right Yuuri, I love you so much.”
And the beast, and even its shadow, slinked away into the statue once more.
—
Yuri had twigs in his ass from that damned thing dragging him across the ground. His awesome yukata had not only grass stains but some gross blackish ink shit all over it.
Ugh.
“What the fuck!!! Why does this shit always happen when I come to Hasetsu! Why can’t you freaks ever be like normal people! Fuck!”
The others were trying to laugh it off like some shared drunken delusion, snickering when Leo announced, after a quick text with Minami, that apparently he’d just been studying Yuuri’s old 2012 routine all along.
Idiots.
“Hello!” Yuri yelled, but for once everyone was paying too much attention to other Yuuri.
Fine. Yuri huffed and stalked away, though he didn’t make it far before he felt the pull of his friends like a magnet, keeping him anchored to the edge of their circle. He crossed his arms and glared and took out his phone to ignore them, only to see the photo of Yuuri with his red eyes and sharp black claws.
“... god dammit,” he cursed to himself, and went back to be with his family.