Chapter Text
Paris is still beautiful, Yuuri thinks.
Beautiful, in all its ragged, war-weary glory. The streets of New York and San Francisco glitter with a newfound wealth, and among the Parisians, the American tourists are bright, flashing lights.
It’s not the Paris of Yuuri’s youth, but it’s lovely all the same, all these years later. The gardens are in bloom, the cafes bustle with sticky-sweet pastries and happy children, and Ella Fitzgerald’s voice warbles out from radios in cafes.
“Blue skies smilin’ at me, nothin’ but blue skies do I see…”
Yuuri hums along, pushing his glasses up his nose nervously. He’s come here for something, though he doesn’t know what.
How does that make him different from the other tourists, expats he’s trying so desperately to distance himself from? Overcome by a sense of post-war ennui, dissolutioned with the so-called American dream, seeking, or perhaps trying to escape from a feeling he can’t quite name.
“J-J’aime les parisiens,” Yuuri stammers out, tasting wine not from his own lips, wrapped around a murky, shadowy figure.
“Non,” he hears through the warbling, radio static, “T’aimes un parisien.”
I love the Parisians.
No, you love one Parisian.
Men dot the streets as Yuuri strolls along, little crumpled statues of clothing and marred skin. Some are without arms, some without legs, some both - and Yuuri frowns, not quite able to meet any of their eyes.
They were there before, but now somehow their presence is bigger. Maybe it’s the crumbling buildings, the exhaustion still in everyone’s eyes, four years after the November armistice, maybe it’s the heightened sense that everything is changed, now – or maybe it's just Yuuri, unable to find the brightness in life anymore. The streets that seemed full of wonder and life have lost their splendor.
Yuuri sighs. What am I even doing here? He wonders.
He begins to hum, to himself, a tune from what seems like a lifetime ago.
I’m dreaming, dear, of you - day by day.
It all seemed so simple then, didn’t it? Maybe, probably in fact, it wasn’t really - but when Yuuri thinks back, all he can imagine are blue, blue eyes and long silver hair and lips syrup-sweet and soft. His parents were so proud of him, studying in Paris at barely eighteen - but then the war began and he could never quite regain his footing when he stumbled off the boat back in New York, Belgium just barely fallen to the Germans.
Write to me, he pleads, over and over again, write to me from the army.
Of course, my darling Yuurichka, but this will all be over before Christmas. I’ll have you in my arms come the spring, won’t I?
You’re so brave, Yuuri says in broken French, So brave, going to fight for France.
Even though what he wants to say is: Stay with me, please.
Yuuri dreams. His apartment is right by a rattling, late-night train - when it passes, it shakes and shakes and his books fall off the shelf, so he’s stopped keeping them there. They litter the couches and chairs, half-open, pages fluttering as wind whistles through the open window.
In the dream, the apartment rattles, but it’s not this apartment - it’s a dingy little thing in San Francisco, dingier still because he seems to be somewhere cramped, dark and trembling. Someone clamps a hand over his mouth, someone’s nails dig deep into his arm. He knows - he knows that breathing.
Mari?
Then, he notices the rattling, notices his own chattering teeth and pounding heart, how the earth seems to roil like the sea beneath him. The wood from the closet - right, he’s in a closet, his sister clinging to him and trying not to cry - splinters, the earth trembles beneath him, and suddenly the floor is split wide open and he’s falling, falling, falling-
Acrid smoke fills the air. All around him, there’s screaming - women, clinging to their babies, children, the screaming sizzle of hot metal and wood. He can’t see, he can barely breathe, where’s Mari, where’s Mari, where’s okaasan and otousan-
Aftershocks make the earth roil. Yuuri falls to his knees, a hand reaches out to pick him up-
Blue, blue eyes stare down at him. That’s impossible, Yuuri thinks, I haven’t met you yet.
“Why didn’t you come find me?”
Yuuri squints, half-blind without his glasses. “I’m sorry,” he chokes through his smoke-cracked throat.
“I waited for you, on the battlefield. When the Americans joined, I thought I might see you.”
This isn’t real, Yuuri thinks. It’s not real. Mari says it’s good I failed the eye test.
Behind him, something cracks. Yuuri barely has time to register a silver, pony-tailed head disappearing into the smoke of a burning San Francisco before shadow descends upon him, and he looks up to see rubble crashing down like hellfire-
Yuuri wakes with a shriek, sweat soaking through to his sheets. A train rattles past, and the apartment shakes, and cold, piercing terror strikes through Yuuri’s heart for an instant. It takes a long, painful moment for Yuuri’s heart to stop pounding. He lies back on his damp sheets and breathes, slow and deep, staring up at the wooden ceiling of his apartment.
His parents were fine. His sister was fine. Minako was fine. They rebuilt their inn even better than before, and business has been booming ever since.
He’s never understood these night terrors that plague him when there was no real harm other than the fear he felt in the moment of the earthquake, the fire.
When war was still on the horizon, and his friends were signing themselves away to service, he worried they might affect him in the trenches.
It was a secret, shameful relief when he was deferred due to his awful eyesight. This wasn’t just a night terror, though - to Yuuri, it seems a premonition. Why else would those eyes have been there? That face? Those sweet, sweet lips?
Sleep won’t come back easy. Yuuri sighs and wriggles uncomfortably in his sweaty pajamas, trying to calm himself with the memory of music and a strong hand on the small of his back.
In 1919, Yuuri had received a letter. It was in strange, warped ink, as though the hand writing it was trembling.
My Darling Yuuri,
The summer we spent together has long since past - winter creeps ever closer. I stopped writing to you with the intention that you would stop as well.
I am not what I once was, and it’s best you forget me.
He was younger, then, and heartbreak took to him like consumption. He spent long, lonely nights curled up in his bed, thinking of hot Parisian summers, of visiting the store with record players far too expensive for him to purchase to listen to music before being kicked out.
Of running his fingers through long, lovely silver hair, of sweet kisses and the taste of smooth neck, the rabbit-quick pulse of a vein below his lips.
The crooning song playing over, and over, and over again. Hearing it not from the singer, but a different voice, murmuring it soft and warm against his ear.
Let me call you "Sweetheart," I'm in love with you
Yuuri asked - Nikiforov didn’t sound French. Victor Nikiforov wasn’t a French name. And Victor laughed and told him that his family had fled Russia during the violence at the turn of the century, made their home in France, among the arts and music and lovely gardens.
Let me hear you whisper that you love me too
The clouds of war, looming over the horizon. They wrote, love letters marked with cologne, Yuuri reminding Victor of the stars and warmth and happiness of their youth.
Keep the love-light glowing in your eyes so true
He responded, for a time. His letters got longer, but said less and less. Then, with no word and the war’s end in sight, they stopped - for months, Yuuri wrote, looked for evidence of Victor, pleaded with all the forces of the universe to return Victor safely to him. He didn’t know how’d he’d learn whether or not Victor had died - then Victor wrote to him, one last time.
It’s best you forget me, he said.
Let me call you "Sweetheart," I'm in love with you
It’s 1923, and Yuuri is twenty seven. He much prefers jazz to the boring sentimentality of his youth, so when he buys a record player for his apartment, he knows exactly the kinds of albums he wishes to furnish his apartment with. He does buy an old copy of that old song, though, and to his unending frustration finds himself humming it as he goes about his daily tasks.
I wonder where Victor is, Yuuri finds himself thinking, more and more. The sights, the sounds, especially the smells - all of them bring him back to his youth.
After the third time of Yuuri orders his coffee and remembers Victor strange habit of taking his tea with jam, he decides with a frustrated finality that he should at least find out what happened to his childhood beau. If only to properly tell him off for breaking his heart.
What if he’s dead, Yuuri thinks with a jolt of worry. He shakes his head. There’s no reason to think that - other than the spanish flu, perhaps. No. Yuuri shakes his head again. This is just… a journey of discovery, nothing more. Whatever answer he’s given, he’ll - he’ll take it.
(Don’t leave me, he pleads, in tears. Come home with me. Stay with me.
Victor’s eyes are wet and shining, but his face is split into a grin. I have to fight, he responds, for my adoptive country.)
The records office is musty, heady with the scent of books and archives dating back decades - centuries, even. He asks, in French rusty from disuse, “Can I access the city directory for this year?”
The woman at the desk raises her eyebrow, but nods all the same. She directs him to a back room with a few rickety wooden tables and low, flickering lights, and Yuuri mumbles out his thanks.
“They’re all back here,” she explains. “If you’re looking for someone.”
Yuuri pores through the pages, classified by district, looking for that distinctive name. Nikiforov, Nikiforov, Nikiforov-
The last letter didn’t have a return address, so he searches desperately through the 1922 volume and-
Nothing. It’s as though there’s no Victor Nikiforov in the entire city of Paris. Maybe he’s moved? Yuuri wonders, worrying his lip. But where would he have moved to? Certainly not back to Russia, not after the revolution.
The volume from 1921 is much the same - no Victor Nikiforov in any neighborhood of Paris. He’ll be twenty seven as well, but there’s no record of an occupation, or an address, or a family.
Just as he’s finishing rifling through the directory, the receptionist calls to him that they’re closing for the evening.
“Can’t you let me stay here?” Yuuri pleads. “I just… I need to find someone.”
“Someone?” the woman asks, skeptically.
“I loved him, a long time ago,” Yuuri pleads. “I think he’s in trouble. He stopped writing during the war-”
“Are you sure he didn’t die in the war?” The receptionist snorts, cruelly. “You’re wasting your time.”
“How can you say that?” Yuuri snaps, chair clattering to the floor as he stands. “You don’t need to be so nasty about this.”
She glares right back, tired. Frustrated. She mutters, “If he was in the war, even if he’s alive, I doubt he wants to be. My brother is the same.”
A lump forms in Yuuri’s throat. Wordlessly, he puts the thick tomes away, and stalks out into the night.
The last address Victor had was in 1919, a shared apartment in a seedy section of the city with a man named Christophe Giacometti. Yuuri’s stomach clenches when he sees that, thinks of Victor spending his days in the arms and bed of another man. Leaving Yuuri to worry for weeks on end while he spends his days being touched like Yuuri used to touch him.
In 1918, he was honorably discharged from the army, after four full years of service. It doesn’t say why. In 1919, he was living in Paris.
Why does his name disappear, though, after that?
In a fit of terror, Yuuri wastes time poring through obituaries and death certificates from the following years - much to the interest of the receptionist, named Sara, as Yuuri now knows.
The days pass in a routine. He wakes, makes his breakfast, takes a long, strolling walk through the city to the records office. Sara greets him, half pitying, and guides him to the back, where he’ll spend hours poring through volumes and volumes of death dates.
What if Victor doesn’t want to be found?
The thought occurs to Yuuri more than once. He’s putting in more effort into finding Victor than Victor did in saying goodbye to him.
There’s nothing in the archives. It’s as though Victor Nikiforov simply vanished.
It seems like Christophe Giacometti, a roommate - lover? - from four years ago is his only lead. Yuuri groans and buries his face in his hands.
Sara offers him a pastry as he wanders out that evening, rubbing his eyes miserably.
“Yuuri,” she calls, soft. Contemplative. “What happened?”
Yuuri blinks. “What do you mean?”
“Why are you trying so hard to find him? He rejected you, and petty revenge isn’t worth this kind of effort.”
Yuuri winces. Thinking of Victor - it hurts so much.
“It feels wrong,” Yuuri manages. “We - we were in love. We were kids, sure, but we were in love - and we wrote so often, love letters to and from the front. He was talking about marrying me, once the war was over, and suddenly…”
He sighs, taking a bite of the pastry.
“You think something happened to him,” Sara says.
Yuuri nods. “The letter didn’t feel like him. The handwriting was his, but it was… Wrong. I didn’t realize it at the time, but what if he didn’t want to send me away - what if he felt like he needed to?”
Sara nods, carefully. “The war probably changed him,” she murmurs. “It changed so many. Created these hollow men.”
“Or maybe he just fell in love with someone else,” Yuuri mutters, the name Christophe sour on his tongue.
Sara sighs sympathetically. “Good luck, Yuuri. Not many stories have happy endings, these days.”
Thoughts swirling in his head, Yuuri takes the long way home. At night, the street people move around - some congregating around jazz clubs and bars, waiting for tipsy patrons to drop their change into little cans and hats, some vanishing into the night. Yuuri wonders if they have a soft place to sleep.
Tomorrow he’ll find Christophe. He walks along streets lit by gas lamps, hears jazz and raucous laughter spilling out from the buildings. A part of him wants to go buy a drink - he can’t do that back home, after all, and he pauses in front of a bar. He hears bright, loud laughter, sees gleeful faces, and finds he can’t find it in him to join them.
He’s always been more prone to melancholy than his peers, though less so since the war ended and melancholy became the norm, and he watches some obvious Americans laugh and smoke and down drinks they’d be arrested for back home.
Yuuri stands, watching them, watching a jazz band perform inside the bar - until the owner notices him and shoos him off.
“Get out if you won’t pay for a drink,” he shouts in thickly accented English.
By the time he arrives home to his rattling, shaking apartment, night has completely fallen.
Christophe’s existence, and possible relationship with Victor, lights a fire in Yuuri’s belly. He flies through the most up to date directory to find his most recent address - still in the same seedy part of the city. The directory lists his occupation as dressmaker and that somehow makes Yuuri even angrier.
It’s far enough that Yuuri needs to take the metro, and he emerges from beneath the earth with renewed vigor.
I’m going to knock on his door, Yuuri thinks bitterly, And I’m going to ask him what on earth happened to Victor.
Women wander tiredly through the streets, shopping for fresh vegetables and fruits. The clock chimes eleven - clearly, these women have had a late night, and Yuuri can’t help but think-
“Ohh, isn’t he cute?” A woman with far too much rouge and a dangerously low neckline pinches his cheek, flushed dark with alcohol and glee.
“He is cute,” comes a familiar, albeit slurred voice, accompanied by strong arms wrapping around his waist. “And he’s all mine!”
Yuuri rings the bell to Christophe Giacometti’s most recent known address. He waits, heart pounding, bouncing his leg nervously-
After the longest few seconds of Yuuri’s life, the door creaks open, and a tall, blonde man fills the doorway.
Of course he’s taller than me, Yuuri thinks, miserably.
“Christophe Giacometti?” Yuuri asks, meekly, trying to muster up his courage again.
Christophe nods, and Yuuri notes he’s wearing a luxurious purple robe - the peek of tan thigh beneath it hints that the robe may be all he’s wearing. A sick sort of anger bubbles in Yuuri’s chest as he imagines Victor appearing behind him, equally undressed, love bites all over his neck-
“I’m not sure I know you,” Christophe purrs in English, edging his leg out of the robe, just a little. “To what do I owe the pleasure of such a lovely visitor?”
“I’m not here for you,” Yuuri gasps, horrified.
Christophe blinks. “Oh,” he sniffs, pulling his leg back into the robe. “You see, I was confused. Because this is my house.”
Yuuri groans in frustration, rubbing at his eyes while Christophe looks on, bemused and a little annoyed.
“I’m,” He takes a deep breath and switches to French. “I’m looking for someone. The last records of him showed he was living with you, nearly four years ago. Please, do you know anything about the whereabouts of Victor Nikiforov?”
Christophe’s mouth drops open in shock, bordering on incredulity. Yuuri winces.
“He was my roommate,” Christophe says. “Years ago now. What on earth brought you to my door in search of him?”
Yuuri explains, voice trembling, “You're the only lead I have. He doesn't seem to be anywhere, so I was hoping – maybe you knew something? Is he even in Paris, did he move?”
Christophe shakes his head, slowly.
“Please, come in,” he sighs, “I’ll tell you what I know.”
Inside, the apartment is cozy but well-maintained, with bits of fabric strewn about and two separate sewing machines on two separate tables. Yuuri marvels at the glittery feathers and sequins and beading on one of the gowns - clearly not dresses for daytime wear.
Yuuri frowns at one of the mostly completed creations while Christophe pulls on proper clothing behind a divider.
“This looks a little misshapen,” Yuuri mumbles, “For a woman, at least.”
Christophe pops his head above the divider and winks. “They’re not for women,” he smirks, stepping out while dressed in some semblance of normal clothing. “Can I get you something to drink? Tea? Coffee?”
Yuuri shakes his head. “Please,” he breathes, “What happened to Victor?”
Christophe sighs again, running his hand over his goatee. “I’m not… entirely sure.” He closes his eyes. “I can tell you up to what I know, though. Hopefully it’ll help - I’m worried about him.”
Yuuri wants to throw up his hands in frustration and shout, what good are you, then?
Clearly, though, Christophe is worried - so Yuuri is right to worry.
Christophe gestures for Yuuri to sit down. He rustles around in one of his drawers, mumbling to himself, before pulling out a faded photograph and placing it down before Yuuri.
It’s Victor. His hair is short-cropped, his eyes are grim, his cheeks look hollow, but it’s him - next to a few other men, equally grim, equally hollow. The date on the photo reads 1917.
“Victor lived with me for a while, after the war,” Christophe explains, “I had just moved to work in the Moulin Rouge as a dressmaker, and his military pension didn’t properly cover an apartment, and he couldn’t really make it up more than a few flights of stairs - didn’t talk to me much, at first. I figured he was shy, you know?”
Yuuri nods, swallowing around the lump in his throat.
“He didn’t seem to have much in the way of family, so I tried to help him out, but I think it was just too much.”
“What was?” Yuuri snaps.
Christophe shrugs. “I don’t know. Nothing. Everything. He’d find a job, but then be out of work a few weeks later. He could barely focus during the day - then, he started disappearing. He’d come back in the morning, not knowing where he’d been the night before - didn’t smell like alcohol, or anything, just didn’t know where he was.”
“Victor,” Yuuri whimpers, clutching at his chest.
Christophe’s face contorts in pain and he continues, “Nights turned to days, to weeks - I’d ask him where he was, but he’d just shrug and say he was looking for something. Then, one day, he stopped coming home entirely.” Christophe sighs. “I think the war did something to him. Shell shock, you know? I didn’t know - I didn’t know what to do.”
“Did you at least try to find him?” Yuuri shouts, unable to stop the burst of emotion. The thought of Victor with shell shock, alone all this time-
“Of course I did,” Christophe says, taken aback. “Tracked him down through half the city and begged him to come back, but he refused. Told me it was best I forgot about him. What could I do after that?”
“You could have - you could have taken him back with you!” Yuuri splutters, “You could have made sure he was safe! Called the police! I don’t know, there must’ve been something-”
“Doctors still don’t know how to fix it,” Christophe snaps, “How was I supposed to know? I tried, I really did, but god - there was nothing I could do. We were perfect strangers. He needed more than me.”
“You’re right,” Yuuri says, horrified. “He needed - he needed me, and I wasn’t there-”
Christophe’s expression softens. “You couldn’t have known,” he soothes, as fat tears begin to trail down Yuuri’s cheeks, “You couldn’t have. It’s frightening, the things shell shock does to a person. Doesn’t matter how safe they are, it’s like - it’s like they never left the war.”
Yuuri lets out a low sob, thinking of the letter, how he should have known something was wrong-
Christophe offers him a tissue and he blows his nose, loudly.
As he wipes his eyes, Christophe eyes him curiously, and asks, “What did you say your name was, again?”
Yuuri blinks through the tears. “Oh,” he says, “Uh, Yuuri.”
Christophe smiles, softly. “He’d talk about you,” he says. “When he was lucid. Kept saying he needed to write to you, but I never saw him actually do it.”
“He did write to me,” Yuuri whispers, “Told me to forget about him. I can’t though - please, do you have any idea where he might be?”
Christophe winces and shakes his head. “I can tell you where I found him last time,” he says, “But that’s about it. Yuuri, I’m - I’m truly sorry.”
Yuuri nods, unable to mask his disappointment.
“Take this,” Christophe says, nodding to the photo. “Hopefully it will help you find him.”
The door to Christophe’s apartment closes with an awful finality. That was the last and only lead that Yuuri had for Victor’s whereabouts - no occupations, no current residences. Yuuri sighs, supposing he could begin to check patient lists for sanatoriums and war hospitals, but that could take months, and Victor needs - well, maybe not him, but he needs someone. He needs help.
Yuuri stares down at the photo, at the grim emptiness in Victor’s eyes, so different than the sparkling blue he remembers. It hurts so desperately, not knowing where Victor could be.
The metro rattles on his way home. Yuuri's head hurts.