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Yuuri holds his outstretched palm out the car window, watching intently as the warm, whooshing wind weaves invisibly through his fingers and propels his hand into a gentle wave. He can smell the salt in the air, crystallizing into a glittering white patina at the base of rusty street lamps and crunching hot under the car’s spinning tires.
It’s all familiar, but Yuuri feels unsettled, anyway. The flat-bottomed clouds are hanging too low, possibly, or the car is moving too fast. Or maybe it’s just him.
Probably, it is.
Yuuri isn’t sure when it started, but everything feels wrong lately in a way he can’t express or escape—like the rhythm of his heart is off by a half beat.
“Roll the window up,” Mari complains from the seat next to him. She’s sitting with her head leaned back and her legs wide apart, fanning herself with some idol magazine. “You're letting the cool air out.”
Yuuri doesn’t want to roll the window up. The ac smells like mildew and it’s hard to ignore the inexplicable pounding of his heart in his ears without the sound of the rushing air to drown it out.
He should’ve brought his cd player. He could be going over his routine in his head, but his Mom had insisted that the trip would be short and he’d been too panicked with trying to sort out why she wouldn’t tell him where they were going to think properly.
Now, they’ve been crammed in the car for nearing thirty minutes and Yuuri is growing antsy with anticipation of the unknown. There’s no way they’re dropping him off somewhere because he embarrassed everyone by missing all of his jumps at his last competition and crying in the car on the way home, right?
Deep down, he knows they would never do that. He knows it, but he still needs the confirmation.
“Yuuri!” Mari snaps, and Yuuri fumbles to roll the window up.
“Kasaan,” Yuuri says, tracing his nails down the crumb-ridden seam of the car seat. “Where are we going?”
Mari sighs, exasperated. “For the millionth time: It’s. A. Surprise .”
“You’ll know soon,” Hiroko says patiently. “Would you like a mandarin?”
Yuuri shakes his head. He’s dizzy with worry and sick from the smell of the recirculated air but admitting it feels like certain death. His parents have never raised a hand to him in his life, but the thought of being willfully vulnerable is completely anathema to him.
Anyway, how can he ask for help if he doesn’t even know what’s wrong?
Yuuri tries and fails to deepen his breaths—concentrating on it only seems to make the oxygen thinner and the pace of each respiration faster. His lips are numb and his vision is burning out in spots of white like a dilapidated film reel when Hiroko’s voice cuts through the ringing static.
“Yuuri-chan, we’re here!”
It takes a monumental effort, but Yuuri lifts his head, blinking away the darkness encroaching his sight to see a sign for a poodle rescue.
He cries. His family laughs about it later—claiming that he was moved to tears from joy.
Yuuri doesn’t have the heart to correct them.
+
Yuuri stares at his reflection in the train window, wondering how it’s possible that he can appear so normal and calm when it feels like his heart is trying to stampede up his throat and out his mouth.
He’s memorized all the stops and times and gates and airport layouts for his trip to Detroit, but a familiar sense of foreboding is crowding out the rest of his thoughts and he can’t stop flipping his phone open and double checking everything. ‘Departure is at eight pm. It is eight pm, right? ’ He clicks the power button to see his ticket. ‘Okay, 7:55, close enough. The train should arrive at the airport by six pm so that gives me plenty of time to get through TSA before the Tokyo flight. As long as there isn’t a huge crowd. Is Thursday a big travel day? Oh god, I should’ve searched this beforehand.’
It’s easier to let his mind hone in on this task than allow it to roam to his destination, to the roommate he has yet to make contact with, to his new coach. Celestino had seemed nice enough in their interactions, but somehow that makes Yuuri’s fear worse because he really, really doesn’t want to disappoint him.
As terrified as Yuuri was to finally make the decision to express confidence in himself and his career and move to Detroit, he’s more terrified of arriving and being immediately deemed a lost cause and sent home. It’s an unfounded fear because Celestino has already seen the recordings of his performances, but even so, he isn’t yet aware of the specific...challenges...that Yuuri faces.
Yuuri knows he should’ve prepared him. Celestino had said he wanted to provide the best environment for his skaters to succeed, and if that meant helping to find a therapist for Yuuri that didn’t make him want to crawl into his bed sheets and never come out, Yuuri feels reasonably confident that Celestino would.
But, Yuuri thinks, watching his expressionless face in the window as the train pulls up to his stop, maybe he had just wanted to seem normal for once.
+
“Yuuri.”
Yuuri groans and turns his face into the cold metal something rattling against the side of his head.
“Yuuri,” the voice says again, and this time, the sounds are recognizable as a name. His name.
Yuuri peeks his eyes open, but it doesn’t really do anything to orient him to his surroundings. The world is swirling around him in fleeting blurs of vibrant light and inky darkness and the ground rumbles beneath him—loud but strangely soothing, like the earth is purring.
“You alright?” The voice asks. There’s a hand on his head suddenly and fingers combing comfortingly through his hair.
Yuuri thinks he is, but it’s hard to take stock of himself with his brain feeling so liquid and disjointed. He starts to pat himself down instead, to make sure everything’s still attached. “I’m not wearing a shirt,” he observes, though it’s hard to say around the ungainly thickness of his tongue.
“English,” the voice reminds.
Yuuri presses a hand to his face and makes a muffled whine which isn’t really English but seems to deliver the message of his general state of well-being.
The voice laughs, which is a nice sound—a familiar one. “You’ll be alright,” the voice says and Yuuri feels so endeared by this strange, unearthly presence that he believes it. “How much did you drink, anyway?”
‘Oh ,’ Yuuri thinks. He’s drunk. That makes sense.
He gets little flashes of memory then: getting roped into traveling across town to a holiday party by Phichit, drinking to abate his social anxiety, participating in a long game of beer pong and then getting dragged into a round of spin the bottle that has Yuuri somehow losing his shirt, donning red lipstick, and making out with everyone in the circle at least twice.
He’s also fairly certain there was some kind of incident involving mistletoe and cringeworthy pickup lines about naughty lists and jingle bells, but he tries not to think about it. Some things are better lost to the blissful amnesia effect of alcohol.
“Two more stops and you can crash,” Phichit—Yuuri realizes now—says. He guides Yuuri’s head against his shoulder and weaves their fingers together.
Yuuri feels Phichit’s hand in his— soft and warm—and lets the bus rock him back to sleep.
+
“Are you okay?”
Yuuri startles and pulls his sleeve from his nose. “Oh...yes. Sorry.”
Viktor frowns a little and crosses his legs. It’s not quite a pout but it’s close, and it’s so incongruent with the Viktor Yuuri thought he knew from interviews and magazine articles that he almost wants to laugh.
“My head hurts,” Yuuri admits. He wouldn’t normally say anything about it, but they’re not quite to a place of comfortable silences yet and Viktor’s fidgeting and intermittent sighing are making Yuuri’s adrenaline high warp into a familiar heart-pounding, feet-sweating fit of anxiety.
“I’m not surprised—” Viktor uncrosses his legs again—a difficult feat in the close quarters of the train—“I still think we should get x-rays when we get back.”
Yuuri sniffles, tasting the old blood in the back of his throat. “They said it’s not broken.”
“Just to be sure,” Viktor’s hand hovers over Yuuri’s knee, but he pulls it back—curling his fingers into his palm. He’s so close Yuuri can smell his cologne—still pleasantly fragrant after all these hours. “I hope the bruising fades before China.”
“Do you think they’d deduct me?” Yuuri asks. He’s feeling a little detached from his thoughts and the words slip unfettered from his tongue.
“Hm?” Viktor smiles gently, visibly relieved that Yuuri is finally talking to him after a full two hours of silent travel. “Don’t underestimate my makeup skills,” he says. “But no more face plants until after you win the gold.”
‘How can I avoid it when I’m falling for you? ’ Yuuri thinks.
Viktor raises his eyebrows and Yuuri distantly wonders if he can read his thoughts. That’d be pretty embarrassing. He probably wouldn’t spend so much time thinking about Viktor’s ass if he knew he was privy to his every internal observation.
“Are you sure you don’t have a concussion?” Viktor breaks the barrier of physical contact between them by gently brushing the hair back from Yuuri’s forehead to check for bruising. His fingers are soft and cold, and Yuuri has to close his eyes to clear his mind, just in case Viktor really is a psychic.
“You’re tired,” Viktor says. Yuuri mentally ticks another box for the ‘Viktor as potential telepath’ theory. “Here.” He wraps his arm around Yuuri’s shoulder and eases him closer to his side. “Lean on me, I’ll wake you when we’re back.”
It’s a testament to just how out of it Yuuri is that he doesn’t argue. He nuzzles his cheek into Viktor’s shoulder—careful not to brush his still sensitive nose—and glances up at Viktor’s face, so close to his own.
There’s a soft pink blush dusting his high cheekbones. Yuuri doesn’t question the source, but he does wonder what it would feel like to kiss him there—if it would be warm like his shoulder under Yuuri’s head.
Viktor snorts a little in his effort to contain a laugh. The sound of it is unbearably cute. “Sleep,” Viktor says, “before you get us in trouble.”
And mercifully for both of them, Yuuri does.
+
Yuuri curls against the plane window, his feet propped up in Viktor’s empty seat beside him. The extra space is the only upside of Viktor’s going back to Hasetsu ahead of him, but Yuuri would trade it in an instant to have Viktor here now, holding his hand and anchoring him in reality.
Yuuri notices the flight attendants rolling down the aisles with drinks. He’s thirsty but the thought of interacting—of having to lift his voice over the loud drone of the plane and flag someone down later for his trash—is exhausting, so he screws his eyes shut and pretends to sleep.
If Viktor were here he’d get him water without Yuuri having to ask. He’d get them a bag of pretzels to share and would let Yuuri use his tray table so he doesn’t have to give up any leg room. He’d offer to pay for in-flight wifi so Yuuri can talk to his friends and family, and when Yuuri turned him down—too exhausted to interact—he’d encourage Yuuri to lean into his side and would massage his neck, his shoulders, his arms, as he tried to make his brain calm down enough to let him sleep.
Yuuri is perfectly capable of traveling on his own, but he doesn’t want to, anymore. And now he feels like he’s going to cry which is maddening because they’ve only been apart for three days.
His dependence is scary in how new it is.
The pilot makes an announcement about their descent: twenty minutes, she says. Yuuri starts mentally preparing himself for another lonely train ride with his own fatalistic thoughts as his only companion. The plane dips through white, gossamer clouds and it occurs to Yuuri that he’s going to have to give this ...whatever it is...with Viktor an expiration date. He could lie to himself that it’s for Viktor’s sake, too, but that seems egotistical in a way Yuuri really isn’t.
It scares him that his anxiety is better around Viktor, that he feels happier and more carefree, that for the first time in years, Yuuri is able to connect to all the love in his life without the lingering fear of being a burden.
His life, overall, is better with Viktor in it, and that terrifies Yuuri because he can’t be sure Viktor feels the same.
Or...he could be sure, but that would require speaking honestly about his feelings, something that has never been Yuuri’s area of expertise. (Unless he’s in front of a room full of reporters on a nationally televised broadcast, apparently.)
The airplane lands and taxis and Yuuri sits patiently, waiting for the aisle to clear out instead of fighting through the crowd. He spends the time memorizing his speech in his head: words that sound shockingly (or not, if he’s honest with himself) like a breakup.
Of course, he forgets it all when Makkachin runs up to the window and he sees Viktor’s face: tired and frazzled in a way Yuuri’s never seen him before, but here. Solid. Real.
Maybe it’s okay to hold on to Viktor a little longer, Yuuri thinks as he flings himself into Viktor’s arms and feels 72 hours of tension and frustration melt away with how right it feels. Or maybe it’s not, but he doesn’t really care.
Yuuri isn’t great at being selfish, but he’s always been a quick learner.
+
Viktor looks exhausted. He tells Yuuri that Makkachin is fine—bouncing around the inn and begging pets off strangers as if he hadn’t just survived a recent brush with death— and his face when he says it is weary in the way that suggests the comedown of recent panic, but soft with relief and...
kissable, really.
Yuuri doesn’t kiss him. He does force him to take the window seat for once. Despite Viktor’s insistence that he’s fine and awake and wants to hear all of the details about the Rostelecom Cup post his departure.
“You hugged Yakov?” Viktor breathes, an amused smile playing at the corners of his lips.
“Mm,” Yuuri confirms. It’s maybe a bit embarrassing in retrospect, but far be it from him to begrudge Viktor a funny story. He’ll probably hear about it from Chris soon enough, anyway. “Everyone, really.”
“I’m so jealous.”
Yuuri shrugs. “It wasn’t great. Seung Gil’s hugs are as stiff as his skating.”
The statement is so casually savage that Viktor can’t help the giggle that bubbles its way out of his throat. Yuuri laughs, too, from the overflow of nervous energy more than anything.
“I’m so tired,” Viktor admits, wiping at tears.
“You look it,” Yuuri says. He realizes too late how that sounds.
Viktor takes it in stride. He touches a finger to his mouth, his eyelids lowering in the way they do when he’s asking for what he wants but is trying to play it off as a joke. “I guess I need some Yuuri hugs to revitalize me.”
It’s hypocritical to be irritated, but Yuuri is.
He moves without thinking—wrapping his arms around Viktor and tucking his head into the crook of his neck. He doesn’t cry like he did in the terminal, but it’s a near thing. Especially when Viktor starts rubbing his back and whispering apologies in his ear.
They don’t discuss his performance just then. Viktor is never one to shy away from brutal honesty when it comes to Yuuri’s skating, mostly because he thinks Yuuri is brilliant and knows that he is tough enough to take it. It would be insulting to both of them to sugar coat.
But this performance is mired in more than technique, and it represents things neither of them has been able to plainly address.
For now, it’s enough to be close, to feel the other’s heart beating in their chest. To know deep down—in some unspoken, uncharted place—that it’s beating for them.
+
Yuuri goes to swing his bag into the overhead bin and winces when the movement sends a pulse of dull pain radiating down his spine and through his pelvis.
“I’ve got it,” Viktor lifts the roller bag out of Yuuri’s hands and secures it over their seats. “Okay?” He asks, settling into his seat next to Yuuri. First class this time: Viktor had insisted upon it. Nothing less for a silver GPF winner, he’d said.
Yuuri looks up from twisting his ring on his finger. “Yeah, just—” he shrugs, blushing a little—“you know. Sore.”
It’s Viktor’s turn to blush. “I suppose before a 14-hour flight wasn’t the best timing…”
Yuuri shakes his head. It’s not like he hadn’t wanted it, too.
Viktor gives a gentle, soft-eyed smile and weaves his fingers together with Yuuri’s, squeezing his hand. “How am I supposed to leave you—”
“Not now,” Yuuri interrupts. He doesn’t want to think about how hard their inevitable— if temporary—separation will be. They’ll do what they have to for their careers as they always have, but for now, Yuuri just wants to bask in the glow of his record breaking skate and the successful expression of his love for a little longer.
“I want to kiss you,” Viktor whispers, kissing Yuuri’s knuckle just above his ring.
“I thought you would only kiss the gold.” Yuuri teases, eyelids lowered in a beguiling way he’s only recently learned how to intentionally exploit.
Viktor marvels at the sight of him, backlit by the diffuse morning light: soft and sweet and so incredibly beautiful . “That’s right,” he agrees, brushing his fingers over Yuuri’s cheek and guiding their lips together for a slow kiss.
+
“You made it through TSA okay?”
Yuuri watches Viktor pace his kitchen from the laptop screen on his tray table. “Yes, Vitya.”
“Did you remember to pack your meds?”
“Yes, Vitya.”
“Make sure to ask for a drink if you’re thirsty. I know you hate going to the bathroom on the plane but it’s a long flight and we can’t have you getting dehydrated.”
Yuuri huffs back a laugh. “Yes, Vitya.”
“Good.” Viktor sighs, appeased for the moment. “I don’t know what to do with myself. I might just wait at the airport.”
“Vitya.” Yuuri wishes he could reach out and brush back the tangled bangs from Viktor’s forehead. “There’s still ten hours—”
“I know, I know.” Viktor leans his elbows on the kitchen bar and rubs his fingers over his eyes. “I’m just...excited—” he drops his hands from his face—“I’ve missed you so much.”
They’d seen each other only two weeks ago when Viktor had insisted on flying down to Hasetsu to help pack, but Yuuri gets it. Being apart from Viktor knocks his equilibrium off center: everything feels wrong and empty in a way that isn’t easy to explain but is noticeably there, tarnishing his every interaction.
“Yeah,” Yuuri agrees, rolling his headphones cord between his thumb and forefinger. “Think up any new ways to troll Yurio, lately?”
Viktor smirks and drums his fingers on the counter. “You remember that meme he showed me?”
“The whoosh cat thing?”
“Yeah,” Viktor confirms. “He thinks I think he originated it.”
Yuuri hides a laugh behind his hand. “Do I want to know why?”
Viktor angles the laptop down to an assembly line of envelopes, cut out memes, and handwritten notes with seemingly sincere inscribed sentiments like “wow!,” and, “a real knee slapper,” and, “Yuuri and I are so proud of you.”
“You’re mailing them?”
Viktor nods, pulling the laptop screen back up to his face. “I don’t know how to attach images, remember?”
Yuuri shakes his head. It looks like disapproval, but Viktor knows Yuuri is amused by his teasing of Yurio. “You’re awful,” he says.
“Yes,” Viktor smiles, leaning his head in his hand, “but you love me.”
“I do,” Yuuri agrees easily.
+
“Isn’t this bad luck?”
“What?” Viktor looks up from adjusting Yuuri’s lapel. “I’ve already seen the suit, honey,” he says, gazing at the vision that is his soon-to-be husband in the car seat beside him—remarkably handsome with his slicked back hair and perfectly fitted, custom-made white tux. “I helped you pick it out.”
“Right,” Yuuri leans back in his seat. Their rented limo is spacious (and extravagant for just the two of them, but Viktor had said it was his childhood fantasy to arrive at his wedding in a limo, and who is Yuuri to argue with how adorably cute that is), but at the moment it feels cramped and stuffy, like his family’s beat up Honda over a decade ago. “We should’ve googled it,” Yuuri frets, fumbling with his cufflinks.
Viktor notices the signs of Yuuri slipping into anxiety brain so he starts rubbing Yuuri’s knee—quick to intervene. “I’ll make sure no one opens any umbrellas indoors,” he says. “And no ladders or black cats allowed.”
Yuuri twists his ring around his finger—rubbing the warm underside with his thumb. It’s become something of a nervous habit in the last few stressful months of wedding planning. “Mm. I don’t know. That seems a little discriminatory…”
“So just no cats in general,” Viktor reasons.
“Then who’s going to walk Makkachin down the aisle?”
“Yurio’s allowed but no other cats.”
Yuuri turns his eyes up, considering. “Fair,” he concludes.
They both laugh.
“Whatever happens—” Viktor takes Yuuri’s hands in his own—“I’m happy as long as I get to marry you.”
Yuuri looks into Viktor’s eyes— clear blue and overflowing with affection—and thinks of the glittering briny roads, the rattling buses, the cramped trains, the gossamer clouds, and all of the endless miles that have brought him to the day where he would marry the man who made every inch of distance feel like home.
“Yeah,” Yuuri whispers his agreement—inarticulate from emotion but earnest, reverent.
“Me, too.”