Chapter Text
The first time Yuuri met Viktor Nikiforov, the sea was screaming.
The air above Hasetsu’s beach was heavy, the clouds unnaturally dark for mid-morning autumn. Waves lapped at the shore, peaking and retreating in an unnaturally irregular pattern. A tiny form knelt among the shallows, black hair whipping in the wind as sea-salt water pulled at his legs, and he stared into the ocean his village had fished for generations.
The sea serpent was massive. It was bigger than any boat he had ever seen, bigger than the largest hall in his village, bigger than the cliffs that hedged the far corners of the beach. The serpent was massive, and it was a cold, deep turquoise that melted into the storm of the ocean.
Its head was cavernously open around a jaw that could swallow his family’s entire home in one bite. It was writhing, spitting water from the deep of its mouth, its body thick and sinuous and scaled, its tail whipping back and forth and whisking torrents of ice white spray into the air.
It was screaming, so loud and fierce that the air seemed to quiver, and when the scream finally died away, another crying voice rose through the ringing aftermath.
“-back! Yuuri, Yuuri, get back here, now! Yuuri!”
Yuuri’s eyes were fixed, magnetised, he couldn’t move, he couldn’t look away from the blood that dripped from teeth the size of a grown pine, from the lemon-yellow eyes that were piercing even from this broad distance-
Warm hands gripped his arm, pulling him from the water and carrying him away with a crunch of wet sand. It was as if a trance had been broken and Yuuri burst into motion, straining against his captor.
“Hey – wait – no!” Yuuri cried, pushing desperately against the firm, strong embrace. “No, wait, I want – I wanna see, I want – Mari, let me-!”
His words drowned as another splitting shriek shuddered through the beach. Mari’s fumbling run stuttered as she cried and hunched forward, one hand curled to protect her ear, the other grasping at Yuuri’s squirming shoulders.
“No, Yuuri – it’s too dangerous, we need to go, we need to get to safety-” Mari was shouting hoarsely over the screams of the serpent, and Yuuri wasn’t listening, because-
“Mari, there’s dragons!”
A deep, inhuman roar rumbled over the beach like intensely deep thunder. Yuuri gasped, clutching his sister’s arm where it had shifted to press across his chest, and the sound shook through him in an intimate shudder.
Suspended above the spitting serpent was a horrifically beautiful dragon, a dark and gorgeous beast. Its wings stretched and stretched, massive and golden brown, and they dominated the sky as the beast hung in the air. The wings were beating gusts of wind so powerful that even from so far below, Yuuri could feel his hair ruffling through the deep whumphs of each stroke.
Another roar, another trembling shake through Yuuri’s lungs as Mari carried him – dragged him – away from the treacherous shore, and then the dark of the clouds was split apart by a column of white-yellow flame, rushing from the dragon’s mouth in a thick column.
The serpent shrieked as the flesh behind its head was seared. This time, even Yuuri cringed and desperately plugged his ringing ears against the sound.
The dragon’s fire was bitten off, the beast itself moving away, higher, circling around. The quiet of the moment struck Yuuri as Mari scrambled over a grassy dune, towards a wood-plank fishing hut that was cradled by the husks of red-leaved trees. The serpent had dipped under the waves, the golden dragon was a smudge between heavy clouds – and in the silence, Yuuri could hear another slowly repeating whumph, distant, like a whisper, but growing louder and faster with every passing second-
And from above the cover of the fishing hut burst a blue-green length of scales that stretched on and on and on, so low to the ground that Yuuri could see every sharp claw where it was curled up against the second dragon’s stomach. Almost-translucent wings shielded the sky from horizon to horizon as the dragon swooped over the village, casting a broad and lingering shadow. A strong current of air buffeted Mari, sending her yelping to her knees with Yuuri shielded beneath her, until the dragon finally passed and the last tuft of its lightly feathered tail slipped from overhead to join the battle over the sea.
“Wow,” Yuuri whispered, eyes wide and bright over Mari’s shoulder as the dragon met its peer in the sky, and then they were turning, flanking the serpent which had re-emerged from the waves, and another roar was building, rolling across the beach, and-
The scene slipped away, hidden by the dunes and the hut and the trees.
“No – wait, Mari,” Yuuri whined, struggling again, but Mari only shushed him, grasping the back of his head and running awkwardly along the beaten mud path. “I want to see, I want to-”
“Yuuri, I’m sorry, but we have to leave, we have to go, you’re not safe, we need to-” Mari was panicking. Her voice was threatening to slip into hysterics, and Yuuri finally turned from the vanishing glimpses of the battle, turned to take in his sister’s tear streaked face, the tiny sliver of blood about her ear, the way her face was pale from shock, but her cheeks flushed with desperation. “We need to find okaasan, o-otousan, we need to make sure they’re alright.”
A cold shock flooded through Yuuri at the thought that his mother, his father, his parents might not be alright. He had been so struck by the terrible beauty of the battle before him that all other thoughts had vanished. Fear came then, a deep, sick feeling in his gut that Yuuri had never felt before. What if they were too late, what if his mother and father were-?
Yuuri wasn’t fighting anymore. Yuuri, young and pale and wrapped in a wet mud-brown yukata of cheaply dyed linen, was gripping Mari, burying his head into her shoulder and hoping, praying that they would make it to their parents in time.
Mari was running, slipping in her sandals until she gritted her teeth and kicked them off. She ran twice as fast now, out of the thin brush, through the wooden gate framed by the first clay tiled homes, along the narrow stone paths that snaked between the maze of houses, past the abandoned racks of drying fish, past the heaps of half-knotted fishing net, past the empty town. They broke from the core knot of the village, running through trees that became thicker, up a slope that became steeper, along a path that became muddier and rougher.
Yuuri’s face was cold, his fingers red from gripping Mari’s shoulders, and his ears ringing with the shrieks and roars that washed over them at intervals, shocking them every time with their ferocity and strength. And then-
…whumph.
whumph.
Whumph.
The trees around them shuddered against the wind, the leaves fluttering at the edge of their fragile grips, long grass stirring at another gust, another deep beat of air from the sky-
Another dragon.
The third was beautiful; a deep, consuming black, with a hint of crimson-red at the edge of each scale, a stunning vision that Yuuri could only glimpse through gaps in the branches above him. It passed above the path that Mari ran along, and the dragon was so big and so close to the ground that it took a full ten seconds for it to pass from snout to tail. For every one of those ten seconds, Yuuri could not bring himself to look away.
The last black-red scale vanished and Mari cried out, curling around Yuuri as the wind-gust wake of the dragon tore a half rotted tree from its roots to shatter across their path and leave dirty, muddy streaks over their faces and clothes.
“C’mon, c’mon,” Mari shook herself right, hiking Yuuri a little higher on her hip and scrambling over the damp wood, resuming her hard pace. “We’re almost there,” she panted. Yuuri bounced as she ran, gripping and hoping. “We’re almost there, we’re almost there, we’re almost there-”
Yuuri twisted in Mari’s arms, caught sight of a familiar string of paper lanterns in the bristle, and then Mari sobbed in relief. The trees broke open into steep wooden stairs, and above those steps was a clearing, and nestled in that clearing, at the base of the mountain and half-hidden by a mess of half-tamed forest, was a single-story home of wood panels and paper screens and curled clay eaves.
Yuuri gasped as Mari climbed those steps, as the garden and tended ferns came into sight, with more low-hanging lanterns to guide visitors into the inn, and the ever-present curl of steam from behind stone walls that protected the natural hot spring of the hills.
And kneeling on the smooth wooden veranda, hands shaking as she packed and unpacked and re-packed her basket again, was Hiroko.
“Okaasan,” Mari choked out, and Yuuri finally slid from her arms as they raced together across the well-worn earth, onto flat stones that marked a pathway to the door, to their mother.
Hiroko’s eyes were red-ringed, hidden behind spindly glasses, and she was gasping with relief as she raised her head to see her children safe.
“Mari, Yuuri, you’re alright,” Hiroko stumbled to her feet, stumbled down the stairs, stumbled into Mari’s arms and then knelt to scoop Yuuri up, squeezing him so tight that the breath wheezed from Yuuri’s chest. “You’re alright, you’re okay, thank the gods, you’re okay.” Hiroko was crying, heavy wet tears that tore at Yuuri, and made him bury his nose in his mother’s neck, trembling.
At once a shriek and a roar split the air in a horrible echo, and Hiroko flinched, her hands curling around each child tightly. Yuuri turned in his mother’s and sister’s arms, looking out beyond the worn wooden steps that led to the inn, beyond the treetop leaves, beyond the unnaturally quiet seaside village, and-
Even from this distance, the serpent was unfathomably big. Even from this distance, Yuuri could still see its outline clearly, could still see its jaws snapping as two dragons flitted around it- two? I thought there were three-
Whumph.
The ground trembled, Yuuri would swear for years to come that the ground trembled as a brown-gold mass of leg and claw crunched into a fifty-year-old oak tree like it was straw. Wings gentled the fall with gusts of air strong enough to rip the headband from Mari’s brow, to send Hiroko’s basket of clothes and keepsakes tumbling across the wood of the en, to tear open the paper walls of the inn’s guest rooms.
A second hind leg cracked into the bark of a pine tree, and then two slender forelegs as thick as the buckling pine curled over the edge of the clearing, each paw glinting with claws that would have rivaled Yuuri’s legs in length if they weren’t retracted into the flesh of each toe with care.
And then a long, long neck curled forward and down, a neck thicker than Hiroko was tall, peaked with a row of honey-coloured spikes, and accented with earth-brown feathers. The neck curled down, and the head – the face, the teeth, the whiskers, the massive, massive eyes – came closer and closer-
The jaw of the dragon skimmed the grass of the clearing, its breath loud and heavy with the excursion of the flight, and with the neck finally depressed against the ground, a lithe body at the base of the dragon’s neck came into view.
Yuuri couldn’t help gasping, couldn’t stop himself from stepping from the circle of his mother’s arms just a little.
The slim rider was just a little shorter than the spikes of their dragon’s spine, and they stood with an arm curled around one for balance. They wore dark protective leather armour, strapped with pouches and knives, and they boasted a sleek bow at their back. Their hair, gathered at the back of their neck in a messy bun, was a stunning, stunning silver.
A thick gold-brown foreleg extended carefully, providing an uneven length of scale and muscle for the rider to slide down with practiced ease.
“Are you alright?” the rider was approaching fast with smooth and confident strides, speaking in simple, awkwardly accented Japanese. His voice was gentle, soothing, and young. “Are you hurt, any of you?”
Hiroko, curling Mari under her arm and tugging at the back of Yuuri’s clothes, opened her mouth to answer, but-
Ffthromphh.
Mari flinched back, squeaking a little at the sudden, harsh puff of breath from the dragon. Curls of hot air distorted their view over the forest and shifted the silvery hair of the rider as they – he – turned to glance at his dragon quickly.
“We’re okay,” Yuuri finally, finally couldn’t hold back anymore. Ignoring the urgently hissed “Yuuri!” from behind him, Yuuri squirmed from his mother’s hand and stepped forward, his heartbeat throbbing in his chest and throat as his eyes strayed to the dragon that was sitting beside his house. “I mean – Mari’s sort of hurt, her ear’s bleeding a little bit, but mostly we’re okay. Are you – are you really a dragon rider?”
The young man’s eyes glanced to Yuuri’s mother and sister, but returned to Yuuri – and then softened.
“Yes. My name is Viktor,” Viktor spoke with quiet, peaceful authority, and he was close enough now that Yuuri had to tilt his head back to see Viktor’s face, to see those rich blue eyes staring down at him. “We need to leave, now. Will you and your family come with me? My Makkachin will take you to safety, so the lingwilóke can’t get you.”
A shiver ran down Yuuri’s spine, but it wasn’t at the mention of the sea serpent.
“Makkachin,” Yuuri repeated quietly, twisting his hands, and glancing between Viktor, the dragon, Viktor, the dragon- “Is that – is that their name?”
Viktor’s eyes creased just a little as he smiled.
“Yes, that's her name. My Makkachin. Would you like to ride her?”
This was a dream. This had to be a dream, one of the best dreams where he was flying, because there couldn’t be a dragon in his home, there couldn’t be a dragon rider here, there couldn’t be, Yuuri wasn’t ever this lucky-
“Please,” Viktor voice rose to speak to Hiroko and Mari as well, as calm and reassuring as ever. “My dragon will not hurt you. My fellow rider saw you as he passed over the village – you three are the last of the villagers who have not been taken to the mountain already. Let me take you as well, please - so that you will be safe.”
Yuuri was squirming, bouncing on the heels of his feet, and he turned to meet his mother’s eyes plaintively, begging without words-
“I can’t-” Hiroko finally managed, and Yuuri didn’t wilt in disappointment, he didn’t- “My husband, I haven’t found him-”
His father. Yuuri froze, his breath caught, where was his father-
“He might already be on the mountain, for all we know,” Viktor voice soothed them, but there was a touch of urgency in his tone now, and the shrieks from the sea were becoming louder than ever. “Please, okusan. We don’t have much time.” Viktor reached out, offering a worn leather palm to Yuuri, and Yuuri didn’t hesitate, couldn’t hesitate – he reached out with dirty fingertips and took Viktor's warm hand, looking over his shoulder and pleading with his eyes for his mother to follow.
Hiroko was cringing, looking over to the empty basket and the items strewn about the tattered inn, and Yuuri could see that she was about to hesitate again, delay again, but then a scream came, splitting the air with hateful sound, and Yuuri glimpsed past Viktor to see the serpent rearing, to see water hissing hundreds of feet away, to see two dragons fighting with talons and fire and dexterous speed. The serpent was closer now, it was almost to the shore-
“Come, now!” Viktor finally snapped, and he scooped Yuuri into the fold of one arm – the leather of his armour was thick and butter-soft, smooth to the touch – before marching forward and pressing his other arm around Hiroko’s shoulders. Viktor led her and Mari across the clearing despite her weak protests, and in no time at all they were standing at the base of Makkachin’s foreleg.
“Up, quickly!” With a push from Viktor and a frightened but reassuring look from Hiroko, Mari was clambering on first, gripping scales for balance and slipping clumsily. Hiroko clumsily followed, and then finally Viktor swung himself up, Yuuri still held tight in his arms.
The dragon was warm. Warm and moving and alive, Yuuri found, when he reached out to reverently touch a scale the size of his thigh.
They climbed to the peak of the dragon’s back, Viktor catching Hiroko when she stuttered over the shoulder bone, and Yuuri watched as the ground grew further and further away, becoming a distant and terrifying thing.
“Here, sit, please,” Viktor ushered Hiroko and Mari into a broad leather saddle that was strapped across the hollow at the base of the dragon’s neck. Mari was forced to hike her skirts up, to sit with her legs splayed wide across the arch of the dragon’s spine, and Hiroko took a seat behind her, holding her daughter’s waist and shoulders tightly. Viktor crouched to hastily fasten a handful of straps about their waists and thighs, before kneeling at their back. He curled around Yuuri tightly, warmly, and he smelled like sandalwood and sweat.
Makkachin’s breath shifted the scales beneath their feet, shifted the edge of the leather saddle, shifted them as they swayed against the movement of her chest.
“Hold these,” Viktor said, finally pressing a knotted rope into each of their hands, ropes that were tethered to the front of the saddle, short and rough and sturdy. “Hold tight, lean forward, and don’t let go.”
“What if otousan isn’t there?” Yuuri asked quietly. The serpent’s shriek sounded across the beach and the village and the hills, and Viktor glanced in the direction of the ocean, his face settling into something hard and cold. “Viktor-san?”
“Hold tight,” Viktor said shortly.
The wings. The wings drew up around them, shifting with a sighing rush, spreading out, out, out – and Makkachin’s chest was rising, too, as her legs straightened. Yuuri yelped and held onto his knot with white fingers, pulling himself down even as Makkachin stood taller and taller, twice as tall as Yuuri’s house. Yuuri could see the roof, the hot springs, he could see every house in the village, he could see-
The deep bronze wings, leathery and large, massive, spreading, spreading, spreading, overtaking Yuuri’s vision in every direction, swinging up with slow and profound energy, suddenly swooping down-
The bottom dropped out of Yuuri’s stomach, his chest fell forward into the saddle, his eyes clenched closed, and he screamed as the raw, brutal, guttural force of the dragon’s push heaved them off the ground, as the wings buffeted the air, as the legs snapped any remaining strength in the oak and pine they had landed on, as the earth vanished, vanished, vanished-
Mari was screaming. Hiroko was screaming. Viktor was a warm, constant strength at Yuuri’s back, an arm pressed around Yuuri’s shoulders to keep him close, still, safe.
The scream of terror – excitement? – finally died in Yuuri’s throat, and through wind that whipped his hair into his face and slapped his sleeves against his arms, he finally opened eyes he hadn’t realised he’d closed.
It was beautiful.
The forest, the shore, the stretch of the blue horizon. The clouds were closer, now, heavy and grey with waiting rain, and Yuuri knew that if they climbed any higher he could have touched those clouds with his very own hands.
Makkachin was banking, listing to one side in a slow glide, and her wings pumped once more – whumph – with a small, sickening swoop in her climb that left Yuuri pale, and sweating, and alive.
And behind him, a steady unmoving constant, was Viktor. He was tall. He was so tall, kneeling over Yuuri and Hiroko and Mari, and he looked calm, in control, muscles moving under his leather armour as he responded to the minuscule shifts in Makkachin’s flight. He wasn’t tied to his dragon at all; he had only one hand resting lightly against the tall spine-spike behind him, and yet he was perfectly balanced, poised in a ready crouch.
And before the flight had even truly begun, Makkachin’s wings were pumping gently, messily slowing their ascent, drawing them down towards the plateau atop the village’s sheltering mountain.
Yuuri blinked through the bracket of Viktor’s arms, past the beating of Makkachin’s wings, down the column of Makkachin’s neck, and found that he could see a loose throng of adults and children and elderly villagers strewn about the plateau. At their approach, many of the tiny, tiny children darted back into their parents’ shadows, and even some of the taller forms retreated into the cover of trees and shrubbery.
Makkachin touched down on the sparsest stretch of dry dirt, shifting rocks and pebbles and dust as she did, and the shudder of gravity would have thrown Yuuri from Viktor’s grasp if it weren’t for the ready, tight grip Viktor had him in. Makkachin’s wings drew back, tucking away, and Viktor leaned forward to unwrap the straps from Mari and Hiroko’s legs with deft hands.
“Go now, carefully,” Viktor said, his hands gripping each of his passengers' shaking fingers and making sure they didn’t trip as they gathered their legs beneath them and slid inelegantly towards the extended foreleg, their unconventional ladder.
At Mari’s first touch on the dry ground, a cry came from the lingering crowd of the villagers.
“Mari!”
Yuuri’s head whipped up from where he was curled in Viktor’s arms. They slid down the bumpy surface of Makkachin’s leg, and Yuuri’s voice joined his mother’s and sister’s in joyful relief.
“Otousan!”
“Anata-”
“Hiroko, Mari, Yuuri,” Toshiya wasn’t crying, but he was pale and fluttering about them as they came to stand on the top of the mountain. He was smiling and gasping equally in relief, and his hands finally came out to grip Hiroko’s firmly, his eyes shimmering a little as he took in her wind-swept face, and recognised that she was unhurt.
Viktor didn’t let Yuuri’s feet touch the ground. Instead he stepped forward and passed Yuuri to Toshiya, nodding to the shorter man before he stepped back respectfully.
Even as his father’s familiar arms closed around him, Yuuri turned to watch Viktor retreat.
“Viktor-san!” Yuuri called, and Viktor paused from where one leg was raised to step onto Makkachin’s paw. “Are you gonna come back, after?”
Viktor’s eyes lingered on Yuuri, on the way he wasn’t shying away, on the way his father was drawing him towards the other villagers despite Yuuri’s squirming protests.
“Of course I’ll come back,” Viktor promised with an eye-creasing smile, and then he was gone – climbing Makkachin’s shoulders at twice the speed he had before, hoisting himself to kneel firmly on the broad, flat saddle without a single tie or knot to balance with. Makkachin was heaving up, her wings were drawing back, her legs pushing off the side of the mountain-
Toshiya stumbled to his knees at the weight of the wind, and by the time Yuuri had squirmed from his hold and blinked his hair away, Makkachin was gone. Within moments, she and her rider were nothing more than a fleeting flash of dusky gold that soared over the landscape of the village and its beach, that hung over the ocean and breathed fire and heat onto the approaching menace of the massive, massive sea serpent.
Yuuri pushed at his father’s grasping arms, earning him a weary “Yuu-ri” – but Toshiya eventually relented, and Yuuri eagerly darted to the overlook of the mountain, a peak of land that had been cleared of trees and that provided a stunning panorama of his village below.
A thrill of boyish, excited horror shot through Yuuri’s spine.
The serpent was on the beach.
And the serpent was dying.
Now that the third dragon – Makkachin, Yuuri named her with a shiver of excitement – had returned to the fight, the serpent was flailing. Under billows of flame, flashing claws, and lethal whips of Makkachin’s tail, the serpent was flinching more than it was attacking, crying more than it was shrieking. The dark dragon, with red-tinged scales, was moving in sleek tandem with Makkachin and her rider, while the third sleek blue-green beast swooped about with nimble acrobatics.
And just moments later, when the serpent finally fell – when it crashed to the shore, crumpling the fisherman’s hut, shattering the shallows where Yuuri had been kneeling – the village cheered, Yuuri cheered, and the dragons roared their victory over the burned and bloodied carcass that was staining the sand red.
The dragons turned to soar over the village in a luxurious swoop, and Yuuri stumbled along the ridge of the overlook as they dawned over the edge of the mountain, desperate to catch a wisp of wind as they passed.
To catch the eyes of the young, silver-haired rider – Viktor – who had saved him.
“I want to be a dragon rider,” Yuuri whispered, and his voice was lost in the dragons’ wind-wake that tore leaves from the early-autumn trees and pulled at the clothes of the villagers around him. “I want to be like you, Viktor-san.”
The shadows of the dragons passed, and the deep grey sky broke into thick, cleansing rain.