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Mari is seven the first time she sets eyes on the wriggling, chubby, pale mutant alien of a baby her parents have dubbed her “brother.” He cries incessantly for weeks straight and leaves her mom so exhausted that she forgets to pack Mari’s bento three times in the first month after his birth.
Mari hates him immediately.
“But Kaasan—” Mari folds her arms over her chest and groans at the ceiling while her Mom watches on with a gentle smile—“last time I let him sleep with me he wet the bed.”
“Yuuri-chan has agreed to wear his pull-up tonight.” Hiroko turns to the doorway, stifling a laugh when Yuuri’s scared eyes peek out half-hidden behind the frame. “Right?”
“Gross!” Mari scrunches up her nose and sticks her tongue out. “I’m eleven, Kaasan. Eleven. Practically a teenager.”
“Mari-chan.”
“I’m too old be sleeping with my baby brother.”
“Mari-chan,” Hiroko says again. She sits on the edge of the bed and pats the spot beside her, and Mari sighs and reluctantly complies. “You’re getting older.”
“Almost a teenager,” Mari repeats.
“Right.” Hiroko agrees with a quiet giggle, tucking Mari’s hair behind her ear. “And sometimes getting older means making sacrifices for those we love.”
Mari rolls her eyes and picks at a loose thread on her duvet. “It won’t kill him to sleep alone.”
Hiroko waits patiently in the ensuing brooding silence before sighing and patting her daughter on the shoulder. “Okay, Mari-chan.” She stands to leave. Her tone is even and non-judgmental but Mari still feels a pit of guilt sinking into her stomach when her mother heads down the hall, Yuuri in tow.
Yuuri sneaks into Mari’s room later that night when he thinks she’s asleep. She isn’t, but she doesn’t stop him. Instead, she waits for his breathing to even out, then turns to watch him sleeping next to her: his short eyelashes fluttering against his cheeks, still round with baby fat, and his chubby fingers clutched into her Gogo sleep shirt. She feels a strange, foreign emotion take up residence inside her—burning and heavy in her chest, but she doesn’t figure out the significance until a few months later when she catches a neighborhood brat slapping her brother’s Papico out of his hands and kicking dirt in his face when he bends down to retrieve it.
Her fists are flying before she even registers the piercing rage strumming fire hot up her throat.
The incident kickstarts an overprotective older sibling instinct that simultaneously out-shines and outlasts her previous hate. Her parents are hesitantly grateful for it. At least, they seem relieved they don’t have to separate her and Yuuri at the dinner table, anymore, or attend a crying Yuuri because Mari bit him in retribution for unauthorized use of her Gameboy.
They’re probably not thrilled with the new development of fielding angry phone calls because Mari threw the neighbor kid’s shoes into the river after he tried to push Yuuri off a footbridge, but by that time in her life, Mari has bleached her hair blonde and fully ingratiated herself with the local yankii by executing a perfect wheelie on her boyfriend-at-the-time’s motorcycle and smuggling cigarettes to school in her skirt hem. She finds it insulting that anyone would expect her to tolerate the snot-nosed little assholes who think it’s entertaining to pelt her brother with rocks on his way home from dance class.
“I’m going to quit skating,” Yuuri sniffles from the kitchen table while Mari rifles through the freezer.
“Don’t you dare.” Mari hands him an ice pack. The skin around his eye is swollen and mottled red. “I’ll lose all respect for you if you do that.”
It’s not something her mom or dad would ever say, but it seems to do the trick if the determined set of Yuuri’s jaw is any indication. Coddling that kid has never been the right approach. Honestly, he’s stronger than anyone gives him credit for.
It’s with pride and a twinge of jealousy that Mari sends Yuuri off to America a few years later. She doesn’t go with him to the airport. She also doesn’t make any effort to learn about the sport he’s dedicated his life to while he’s gone. It’s her own way of expressing resentment because she loves him but she’s not perfect, and she’d appreciate the opportunity to leave the family inn and travel the world, too.
She does continue to coach him through his anxiety, however. It’s their “secret,” though the fact that they call it that is more to protect Yuuri’s ego than anything. Their parents are well aware of Yuuri’s persistent and invasive fits of panic—Hiroko had first started to suspect it years ago when she’d noticed Yuuri complaining of stomach aches whenever Yu-topia’s main hall was especially loud and overcrowded with guests.
Hasetsu is thirteen hours ahead of Detroit. It’s 3:26 pm when Yuuri Facetimes Mari for maybe the tenth time since moving there four months ago. His eyes are wide and pointed somewhere off screen, and his Adam's apple bobs convulsively with each shallow breath.
“Breathe.” Mari tells him, wiping her hands on her apron. “I’ll count.”
Yuuri’s never seen anyone in regards to his mental health, not that she and her family don’t care. Hiroko had been quick to suggest professional help after bustling her son to the hospital when he’d passed out during a performance at his school festival. It’s something Mari will always give her mother credit for because, really, the notion of receiving help for mental illness was still heavily stigmatized through the grapevine of their coastal community’s gossip.
Yuuri knew that, too, and perhaps that’s why he took offense to it. Or maybe it was something else entirely. The kid was always in his own head, twisting around his family’s words to act as evidence for his abysmal sense of self-worth. Mari doesn’t get it, and she’s had to accept that she probably never will.
Either way, Yuuri had retreated even more inside himself after the incident. Something that—up until that point—Mari had thought to be an impossible feat. It felt like half a year had passed before she heard anything out of Yuuri’s mouth that wasn’t a polite standard greeting. Her soft-faced, sweet angel of a brother could be a real stubborn cuss when he wanted to be.
Counting breaths is something Mari knows to do from her own personal research. After all, Yuuri’s not the only stubborn one in the family.
“Better?” She asks when Yuuri’s breathing has evened out and some color has returned to his face.
“My head hurts,” Yuuri replies, rubbing at his temples. He doesn’t say he wants to come back to Japan, though, and he doesn’t say he wants to quit competing—even though these days it’s the main source of his anxiety. In fact, he hasn’t mentioned retiring even once since that afternoon almost a decade ago.
Even through the shadow of her own envy, Mari feels a swell of pride.
“Ask Phichit to get you a fever patch.”
Yuuri shakes his head and presses his free hand over his eyes. He’s never liked when Mari pesters him with questions and commands while he’s still shaking with exhaustion from the adrenaline letdown. “They don’t use those here.”
“Yuuri?” A voice calls out through the darkness of the room. “You okay?”
“Phichit-kun,” Mari says before Yuuri can answer. It’s moments like these when she wishes she had paid more attention in English class. “Can you get...cold? For brain of Yuuri?”
A conversation ensues that is mostly over Mari’s head. She does manage to pick up the word “sorry” falling from her brother’s mouth if only for the sheer repetition with which it’s spoken.
Over time, the late night calls come fewer and far between. Mari hopes it’s because Yuuri’s getting help or gaining confidence, but she fears it’s more likely that—without the constant interference of her family, the Nishigoris, Minako, or generally anyone who’s known her brother since he was five-years-old and taking his first wobbly steps on the ice—he’s started retreating into himself again. It’s a suspicion she considers all but verified when she’s saddled with the fucking awful task of calling Yuuri to inform him of Vicchan’s untimely death.
Mari knows how much her brother loves that dog. Sometimes she thinks Yuuri loves him more than he loves her, so it’s a little jarring when his only response to the news of his best friend’s demise is a resigned-sounding “okay” followed by radio silence.
She watches Yuuri’s next competition through sideways glances while serving beer to excited local fans just to catch sight of him. She’s never really related to the frozen lungs and racing heartbeats that seem to plague Yuuri’s existence, but she gets it that night: her chest squeezes every time she watches him crash to the ice with obvious distress drawn into the tightness of his mouth.
Mari fancies herself to be of even temperament—an emotional hardass—but she can’t deny the surge of cool relief when Yuuri returns home from Detroit: softer around the edges, weary-eyed, but generally okay—whole.
He’s clearly not happy, but when was the last time Mari was, either? Apathy is fine. For now, it’s enough.
Of course, things don’t stay that way for long. The precarious balance they’d been slowly building back—bit by careful bit—is completely shattered when Viktor Nikiforov explodes into town in time with a freak snowstorm, carrying with him the fanciful air of someone who believes it their life's mission to rescue her brother from a stagnant life in Hasetsu.
Mari doesn’t trust him.
She also doesn’t know a lot about him, except that Yuuri idolizes him and Minako refers to him as a notorious playboy: two facts that are more than sufficient to feed her skepticism.
Her mother is too open, her father, too distracted by the upswing in business Viktor’s presence will inevitably garner, and Yuuri, of course, is too blinded by admiration to be an impartial judge of character. So it’s Mari’s job to stand back and keep watch.
It feels like she’s regressed back to when she was fifteen: waiting with clenched fists for someone to try and steal Yuuri’s backpack or sling paint on his uniform.
“What’s up?” Mari leans against the kitchen threshold, arms folded over her chest as she watches Viktor struggle to slice an apple.
Viktor startles and looks up at her with wide eyes and a hesitant, scared smile. “A-apple,” he stammers in clumsy Japanese, “for Yuuri.”
Mari exhales audibly and unwinds her arms, a small smirk playing at the corner of her mouth. “You’re holding the knife wrong,” she says, even though she knows he doesn’t understand her. “Like this,” she takes the knife from his hand and demonstrates the correct posture.
Viktor is unduly delighted, and somehow she ends up spending the next thirty minutes teaching him how to cut the slices into little bunnies.
Yuuri thanks her for it later when Viktor is distracted helping Yurio organize his literal closet of a temporary room.
“Be careful,” Mari responds, which isn’t really appropriate but isn’t really not appropriate, either.
Yuuri smiles placidly—like he expected it. “He wants to know if you’d like to watch us practice.”
“Do you want me to watch you practice?”
Yuuri only shrugs.
Mari does end up going to one of his practices a week later, mostly with the intent to deliver a bento from Hiroko, but maybe partially out of curiosity. She’s not enough of a romantic to get teary-eyed about it, but watching Yuuri on the ice, looking so determined after weeks of listlessness is...nice.
“Your free leg is sloppy,” Viktor says when they stop for a break. Mari sits on a bleacher and pretends to be distracted by her phone. “You can do better.”
Mari is surprised by his bluntness but she’s careful not to show it. When she hands Yuuri his bento, she recognizes the set of his jaw from that day at the kitchen table so many years ago.
It sparks the flicker of a thought— a malformed, undeveloped whisper of a thing: ‘ Is Viktor replacing me ?’
‘No,’ Mari thinks later that night, watching across the dinner table while the boys pour over a notebook of routine elements, ‘replacing isn’t the right word.’
Viktor is taking a role in Yuuri’s life that Mari should have never tried to occupy to begin with. Because somehow, despite her unyielding insistence that Yuuri is made of stronger stuff than anyone realizes, she had begun to coddle him, too.
Maybe it was okay to let Yuuri do this...whatever it is with Viktor.
Maybe it’s okay, even if he gets hurt in the end.
Because Mari can’t spend the rest of her life fighting off her brother’s bullies. She can’t do it: not when Yuuri’s biggest enemy is himself.
Mari takes a step back. She applies to online courses for a Bachelor’s degree. Then, she drops out of those courses and signs up for Beauty School. She watches as her brother beats his past records and makes the podium in China.
She cuts Viktor’s hair when he asks.
“Do you think he’ll be okay?” Mari asks, lowering herself next to Viktor in front of the tv.
She wasn’t surprised that Yuuri had insisted that Viktor return to Japan when he’d heard about Makkachin’s poor health. Her brother knew firsthand what it was like to lose a friend, he wouldn’t want Viktor to be shouldered with the same regrets he’d been made to harbor.
She was surprised that Viktor had actually listened to him, though.
“He’ll do great,” Viktor says with confidence. There’s a little reverse image of her brother on the tv screen reflected back in Viktor’s eye.
‘Yeah,’ Mari thinks, watching as her brother lifts his arms into his starting pose, ‘I think he will.’