Chapter Text
They choose Yuuri in the early spring, just as the plum trees are beginning to bloom, just after another hard winter and three unbroken years of hunger. His sister’s jaw clenches, his father’s smile freezes, his mother’s calloused hands go limp. They do not protest.
They say they chose him for his stature, for his bright eyes, for his quietness and kindness: more practically, for the fact that he has no family to support. They say they consulted the signs and portents, counted the days, checked the hour of his birth, and knew it must be him.
The whispers go like this: they chose him for his standoffishness, his strangeness, because the Katsuki family have never been fishermen and do not understand the pain of losing a son to the sea.
In the summer, they ply him with rich food, fine clothing, all the earthly luxuries they can provide. They take him from the inn and give him his own lonely dwelling, where the people bring him offerings and prayers.
The food seems tasteless. In the heat of summer, he misses the warmth of the springs.
“There’s no need for you to be untouched,” they say meaningfully, drawing his gaze to his childhood friend, young and lovely and only recently a mother. “Offerings come in all kinds,” they say, and make it clear he would not be refused. He flushes and flinches and shakes his head, and at night he dreams and wakes up ashamed.
In the fall, they teach him all the things he never learned as an innkeeper’s son; tides and weather, what to take and what to throw back, how to weave a net and repair a hull. There aren’t enough days to learn a lifetime of work, but he tries.
Some nights, he is angry. Some nights, he is afraid. But he was always aimless, wasn’t he? Now he knows for what purpose he was born.
(They always go bad, after a while. Some take longer than others. But they always go bad, and there is always someone new.)
There’s no point in running away. They’d shun his family, pick someone else. Besides, where would he go?
When she was a little girl, Yuuko almost drowned. “It’s not painful,” she promises. “It’s cold, and then it’s like going to sleep.” She doesn’t turn her head in time to keep him from seeing her tears.
This year’s winter, the storms are yet worse. He eats plain rice, pickled plums, and just the right kinds of herbs and medicines. He drinks tea and meditates and grows thin.
He was never very good at meditation.
One day, he steps out onto the surface of a frozen pond, listening to the ice crackle as he walks. The surface is slippery, smooth, and he trips over it gracefully, almost smiling. But too soon, they find him, and coax him to the shore with nervous laughter. “Careful!” they cry. “Careful, please.”
When he was young, his mother used to go down to the sea, and talk to it as if speaking to an old friend. She goes again now for the first time in years. “Take care of him,” she begs, “Don’t let him be alone.”
He does not see the plum trees blossom the next spring.
He fasts for three days. The last morning, he drinks sweet rice wine, laced with something stronger. He drinks, drinks, until he fumbles with the cup, lets it fall and shatter on the stone floor, and stares blankly at its remains. “One more,” they say, tipping a new cup to his unresisting lips. He walks with two men supporting him, stumbling, clumsy.
In richer places, they would cover him in gold and silk, dust him in sweet perfumes, paint his lips and eyes. Here, they offer up the things that are precious to them: carefully patterned clothing, smooth stones sewn into the fabric; porcelain charms that clink against each other with each shuffling step; whalebone jewelry, intricately carved. The finest of fishhooks cling tightly in his flesh. The strongest of rope binds his arms in careful patterns, like a fisherman’s net.
The second-to-last time Mari sees her brother, his eyes are glassy and unfocused. He does not recognize her when she calls.
They sing as they lead him to the cliff, a beautiful place, a proper place; there are no rocks below, only water.
The people are silent, expectant, but the wind howls.
He can’t take the last step.
The cliff drops sharply below him, and the fall seems so long, forever and ever.
He can’t breathe. He chokes on air. His heart tramples over his lungs.
He can’t take the last step.
He can’t.
The hand that pushes him is not gentle.
His bones break on the waves, but the fall does not kill him. The cold shocks him mercilessly sober. He kicks and twists, but he is weak, uncoordinated, and his arms are tied. His next breath is salt and foam.
Yuuko lied.
Yuuri does not wake until his bones, wrapped in seaweed and picked over curiously by small crawling things, have been stripped free of flesh and pain.