Work Text:
TEN YEARS AGO...
Fifteen year-old Yuuri Katsuki scrolled through Tumblr, bored. He'd scrolled so far that he'd actually encountered the blog posts he'd reblogged last night along his dashboard, with only one new post in the meantime according to the icon in the top left of his screen.
The "Viktor Nikiforov" tag always gave him some solace. Seeing the same role-model (and admittedly, teenage crush) on thousands and thousands of posts. Of pictures from his Twitter account, pictures of his legendary smile, pictures of a fashion shoot for Men's Vogue, aesthetic posts with brushes mixing silver paint, videos of his performances at competitions...
But there was one guilty pleasure that Yuuri took in his browsing habits: fanfiction.
The tags were saturated to the point of dripping with Real Person Fiction ('RPF' for short). People writing fanfiction of Viktor in-love with other ice skaters and other Russian celebrities, or the other ice skaters and other celebrities fawning over Viktor and trying to win his affections in love triangles that would be fitting of the average daytime television soap opera that Yuuri's mother loved to watch while doing a bit of cleaning up around the hot springs.
And then, of course, there were the self-inserts. Where some imagined themselves as ice skaters who would come to fall in love with Viktor, and be caught by Viktor's coach, Yakov Feltsman, in the changing rooms afterwards when making out - or returning to a hotel room and doing all kinds of things. Things that, if discovered, would be considered scandalous, and would probably end up on the front page of every tabloid newspaper and magazine from Afghanistan to Vietnam or possibly the plot of a biographical movie in ten to twenty years' time.
But Yuuri's favourite were X Reader fanfictions. The ones where the legendary Viktor Nikiforov made love to the ambiguous "Your Name (Y/N)". Where they met while Y/N was working their part-time job as serving staff in a five-star hotel, or met as two cops investigating a brutal homicide, or at the vet's when Makkachin had to go in for an annual check-up, or discovering that they now had full-colour vision when they met Viktor for the first time.
Eventually, he couldn't help himself, and decided to write one of his own. Where there was no instance of "[your name here]" or "[insert your hair colour here]". Where the two were on first-name terms, where the two were dating, where Yuuri had to awkwardly explain with a bright red face that he'd named his own dog after him, that he'd had a crush on him for years, that he probably knew more about Viktor than Viktor himself knew.
And in the middle of it all, as cheesy as it seemed, Viktor knew everything and loved everything about Yuuri too. About his favourite food, about his hobbies outside of ice-skating, about everything he secretly ever wanted in his life thus far. And that he was more than ready and more than willing to give it to him too.
Once he finished it, he looked over it from time to time. But he never published it. As his own career was taking off, everyone had told him one thing: keep your digital footprint clean.
If something like a Viktor Nikiforov/Yuuri Katsuki fanfiction tied to Yuuri Katsuki himself could be scandalous. An embarrassment. It could ruin his career before it even launched. It could never be published online.
And so, it faced abandonment in the middle of the 'Documents' section of his laptop's hard-drive. Until...
PRESENT DAY
Yuuri Katsuki finished his performance of 'Yuri on Ice' with a flourishing movement of his hand in the direction of his fiancé, Viktor Nikiforov, who was positioned behind a video camera on a tri-pod.
"Aaaand cut!" Viktor called as the CD stopped and he pressed the "STOP" button on the camera.
Yuuri panted as he skated slowly over, and Viktor handed him a tissue and a bottle of water while he fiddled around with the camera.
"I think this could be a good idea, Yuuri," said Viktor, carefully saving the video to the SD card and doing his best to avoid pressing Delete by mistake.
"Yeah. It's a thing Celestino used to do with me when I had practise sessions with him. We can look back at the footage together and see where I might to work on. Especially as you usually only notice some mistakes a few hours later."
"Right. I'll let you clean yourself up and get changed. We'll go home then and get a look at this footage on a computer or something."
"Well my parents were never really into computers for anything other than bookings or playing Bejeweled Blitz. We'll look it over on my laptop. It has an SD card reader too," said Yuuri as he stepped off the ice and wobbled on blade-point to nearby bench that he and Viktor had commandeered for rest and for keeping their equipment safe.
Back home, Yuuri arrived at his and Viktor's now-shared bedroom to find Viktor waiting there for him. "Alright, I got some pens and notebooks for us," said Yuuri, handing a notebook and pen bearing the hot spring's name and logo to Viktor "It was all my dad could spare right now, but it'll do the job."
"Right. If you could get logged in or whatever, I'll get the video up and we can start our little note-taking exercise."
Yuuri quickly powered the laptop on and logged in. "Okay, the password is 'katsudon' - just in-case you need to lock it or anything. In the English alphabet and all lowercase."
"Right..." said Viktor, looking at the sides of the laptop to find the SD card slot, putting it in as he found it. After a few button presses, the laptop rang out.
"There we go. I'll just open the folder it's in now. Documents..."
A few clicks later, and Viktor raised an eyebrow. "Mm? What's this...?"
"Eh?" Yuuri got up off of the edge of his bed to see what had happened. Maybe it was just a pop-up to say his anti-virus software needed renewing or something like that. But when the word document opened up on-screen, Yuuri's mouth dropped open in horror as he finally remembered that he'd forgotten to delete it.
"'Making Out with Viktor Nikiforov by Yuuri Katsuki'," Viktor read.
"Viktor, no! I, er, can explain..." said Yuuri, panicked.
But Viktor ignored Yuuri's protests and kept reading, a smirk eventually curling up on his face the same way Makkachin was currently curled up in the corner.
Yuuri, at the same time, was ready to curl up in a ball and die of embarrassment. Worse case scenario; he was made an embarrassment by international ice-skating superstar Viktor Nikiforov, the tabloid going nuts for the story of their engagement ending so messily, the hot springs being flooded with reporters and fans now baying for his blood, the 'banquet incident' being leaked to the press, him being stripped of all titles and medals, barred from competing in ice skating competitions for life...
Viktor finished reading and laughed. "Yuuri, it's okay, really..." he said, putting the laptop down on the desk again and going over to Yuuri. "Trust me, I've read enough of those fanfictions before myself..."
Yuuri simply couldn't believe it. "You read fanfiction about...yourself?"
"It was hard to get away from reading it, to be fair. Seriously though, never Google yourself if you're famous unless you have a strong stomach, I learned that the hard way. But you're always so hard on yourself, Yuuri." He leaned in closely to Yuuri and whispered in his ear: "I, personally, thought it was very good..."
"Really?"
"Mmhmm. I was also thinking maybe you'd like to do a re-enactment of it before we go to look over the tape. And maybe..." he gently held Yuuri's chin "...turn your fanfiction into reality..."
Yuuri, still as red as Viktor's old tracksuit bottoms, looked up. "I think...I'd like that very much..." he said, quickly getting up and bolting the door. The video could wait, but this "reenactment" could not...