Chapter Text
Everyone keeps secrets. Some little white lies, small things you hide from your parents and friends to keep them happy. This generally doesn’t hurt anyone, right?
Things like; you once broke your roommate’s favourite mug and instead of fessing up to it, you threw away the shards and now you pretend to be shocked every time they wonder where it is.
You once had the opportunity to lose your virginity to the guy you’d been crushing on in college but you threw up on him because you were so nervous and you never spoke to him again.
Maybe a tiny secret, like you keeping on lying to your parents about your supposedly amazing career even though you’re still working as a marketing assistant. Not even that, a junior marketing assistant.
Keeping those secrets isn’t so bad, Yuuri keeps telling himself. Especially when those secrets are kept to mask your failures, and you have the chance to make up for those. Right now. At this very important business meeting Yuuri is attending, representing his company, Agape Cola. It’s almost impossible to mess up, because the deal is basically already made. The only thing he has to do is show up, do his little speech and shake hands. Closed deal. Easy peasy.
Yuuri’s mind drifts off while the marketing executives in front of him keep talking about ‘multi-logistical formative alliances’, ‘synergy alternatives’ and ‘diffusion of innovation’. His brain reminds him of the importance of doing well in this meeting, and the possibility of a promotion that that might come with that. Concentrate, focus, and smile. Concentrate, focus, and smile.
Because Yuuri keeps repeating this mantra anxiously inside his head, he vaguely hears something about “so that’s why we’ve decided to rebrand, and we’re afraid our paths will diverge from here on out.” Paths will diverge?! That doesn’t sound like ‘business deal already made’ at all!
He whips his head up from his notes and looks at the women in front of him. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that last part?” he manages. The women exchange a look. “As we just said, we feel that the image that the Agape Cola brand projecting is too extravagant for the Sawdust Perfume company. We’re trying to pull in our clients based on a strong, masculine image and Agape Cola has just grown… too feminine to be a fit with us any longer. We’ll draw up the paperwork later and –”
Yuuri’s brain is working overtime. How could this be happening to him?! His boss, Celestino, said this was a done deal, he can’t possibly return to the office having failed! He needs this for his promotion, to make his family proud. Quickly, he springs to his feet, interrupting the women.
“Actually, I am of the opinion that Agape Cola and Sawdust Perfume could still work together in perfect agreement.” He says, becoming progressively louder because of his nerves, voice only cracking twice. “The femininity that the Agape Cola’s marketing strategy is projecting is only in the eye of the beholder!” Yuuri becomes a tiny bit more confident the more he speaks, picking up a can of Agape Cola that was on the table and waving it around furiously. “The lines between femininity and masculinity are becoming increasingly vague over time. Plus, even if this distinction were there, wouldn’t Sawdust Perfume benefit from the extravagant influence that a business deal with Agape Cola could have? It could help persuade women buying it for their boyfriends for Christmas!”
The women looked at him interestedly, so Yuuri finds the courage to keep going. “Perfume is hugely popular as a gift. Just focussing on the men in the market would be close-minded. We, from Agape Cola, believe it would be an incredible loss if we stopped working together. Together, we’ve stood strong for almost five years now, and we will stand strong forever!” Yuuri nearly yells, almost smashing the Agape can down on the conference table, he reaches for the ring pull for emphasis, and snaps it back.
And a volcano explodes.
Fizzy drink explodes out of the can, drenching the papers on the table, drenching the amazingly clean carpet, drenching the… executive marketing director of Sawdust Perfume.
“Fuck!” She yells.
“I’m sorry, oh my god, I’m so sorry! I-“ Yuuri fumbles.
“Does this stuff stain?” The woman asks irritably.
“Err… I don’t know.” Yuuri answers honestly.
“I’ll get a wipe.” Her assistant says.
Yuuri looks at the woman who basically has his entire future in her hands. His heart is beating around fifteen times the normal speed and his head is bright red. He looks at her hopelessly.
“Please, don’t tell my boss.”
Trying to take a sip from his (second) White Russian, Yuuri whines into the tiny microphone of his earbuds that are plugged into his phone. “Oh Phichit, it was AWFUL! I’ve never been so mortified in my life!” Except for the time he almost caught him sitting on the bathroom floor at 6 AM, stress-eating the muffins Phichit had painstakingly prepared for when his family would visit them the next day, Yuuri silently adds. He buries his head in his hands. “I’m quitting my job and my life and taking the next flight to St. Petersburg.”
“Ooooh and I thought I was the drama queen!” Phichit’s voice comes from the other end of the line. “No, but seriously Yuuri, it was an honest mistake! Yes, fine, it was a bit…” Yuuri hears some suppressed sniggers from his ever-cheerful roommate and sighs. “…clumsy of you, and maybe not the most clever thing to do when this was your big shot at a promotion-“
“Phichiiiittt!” Yuuri groans. “I’m trying to cope with the heavy weight of living and you’re making fun of me!”
“I love you, Yuuri. I’m also trying to distract you from your flight.” Butterflies immediately returning to Yuuri’s stomach. “Wait, did I say flight? I meant… Flight of the Bumblebee! Remember when we tried to play that on the piano?!”
Phichit’s good intentions won’t help him anyway. Yuuri pinches the bridge of his nose. It’s not that he’s afraid of flying. It’s just that he’s… wary. Being 10,000 meters above the ground in a metal craft, it’s all safe and science. Right? Yes. Right. Fear is for the weak.
Phichit apologizes again and tells him everything will be fine, absolutely fine. He promises to pick Yuuri up in Detroit and then they say their goodbyes.
Yuuri puts his phone in his pocket and downs his cocktail. This morning, he had too many nerves for the meeting to have any left for the flight to New York. He glances around JFK Airport terminal before walking to his gate. He takes a deep breath and tells himself to calm down, surely he’ll be perfectly fine?!
The two cocktails slowly working his way into his system, Yuuri is feeling better by the second. Straightening his shoulders a bit, he convinces himself he’ll be fine with every step he takes, looking straight forward, he’s almost at the gate, he’s smiling at the flight attendant and –
He smashes into someone.
He immediately smells the sweet soda that is now drenching is shirt, his brain taking a bit more time to process what happened.
“Watch where you’re going.” A grumpy woman hisses. “You spilt my perfectly good drink!” And she stalks off.
Yuuri, looking down at his shirt, thinks this must be karma and is ready to accept his fate. He walks up to the flight attendant, who saw everything and must think he’s a complete idiot, presenting his ID and boarding pass.
“I’m so sorry for your shirt!” She says sympathetically. “Things haven’t been going your way today, have they?”
“You could say that again.” Yuuri grimaces. Why didn’t he just stay in bed this morning?
“You know, there’s a few seats left in business class,” the flight attendant winks. “I might just be able to squeeze you in, if you wanted to.”
Yuuri can’t believe his ears. "You can do that?”
“When there’s seats left empty we can! Especially on short flights like this one. But don’t go around telling it to everyone.” She tells him, with a secretive smile on her lips.
Secrets, Yuuri thought, finally something he could wrap his head around. Maybe this day will turn out all right after all, he hopes, keeping his fingers crossed as he is led to a beautiful, spacious chair in first class. First class!
Yuuri is counting his lucky stars from the most comfortable chair he’s ever sat in, enjoying his second glass of champagne, of which there apparently is an endless supply on board. He looks around the cabin, curious to see who else is flying first class. He sees a few families in front of him, a young man with silver hair in casual clothes on his left and some older ladies behind him.
Yuuri casts another careful glance to the left as his champagned brain needed a bit more time to progress – woah. That’s an attractive man. Looking way too good, he’s 1000% out of Yuuri’s league. Strange, thinks Yuuri, he looks somewhat familiar, like Yuuri has seen him somewhere before. The man must’ve felt his look on him, because he looks over at Yuuri, light blue eyes settling on him.
Yuuri, embarrassed that he got caught staring for just a bit too long, pulls his face into an awkward smile and quickly hides his face in the flight safety instructions. Bad idea. Yuuri quickly puts those away again and takes another sip of champagne. He’s starting to get a bit drowsy when the pilot rudely awakes him by welcoming him to the flight, and could he please put his seatbelt on and thank you for flying with American Airlines.
Yuuri’s nerves come raging back as he grips the armrests of his (still so very comfortable) chair. He’s fine. He’s going to be fine. Phichit will pick him up from the airport and they will go home and drink more cheap wine and watch some RuPaul’s Drag Race and the flight will be fine and –
Oh. They’re fine. He’s fine. The plane is level and flies at a steady pace. If Yuuri closes his eyes, he doesn’t even really realize they’re flying. Mmm, the champagne is very delicious, and his chair is very comfortable, wouldn’t it be nice to just close his eyes for a sec and…
Yuuri is suddenly jolted awake. His chair seems to be shaking underneath him, and the room around him is making a lot of creaky noises. Creaky noises? Slowly the screams of the fellow passengers and the panicky speed walking of the flight attendants start seeping through into his brain. He’s on a plane, he’s on a plane that’s making an un-planely lot of noise, he’s on a plane that’s shaking, he’s on a plane that’s going to crash!
They’re going to die!
“What?” asks the silver-haired man sitting in the chair next to Yuuri.
“We’re going to die!” Yuuri yells, only now realizing he’s been talking (screaming?) out loud the whole time.
“I’m sure we’re not,” the man says kindly. “We’re just hitting some turbulence, is what the pilot just told us, I think we-“
“Do you THINK,” Yuuri says, turning around and probably looking like an idiot to this man with the beautiful voice and a slight accent that he currently does not have the time to place, “that they would tell us if we’re actually crashing? No! They would tell us to keep calm and that they hit slight turbulence and that we’ll be fine even though we’re totally going to die!”
The chaos in the rest of the plane is growing, a flight attendant hitting his head while trying to buckle in a child and falling to the ground, the old ladies behind Yuuri crying for their wives and husbands, someone running back to their seat from the toilet with their jeans still around their ankles.
“Oh my god,” Yuuri moans. “This is it. I’m never going to lose my virginity.”
“I’m sorry?” The man next to him says.
“I’m going to die in a plane crash and I’ll never have had sex!” Yuuri’s brain goes into full panic mode. “I’ll die and my parents will finally hear about my failed career. I’ll be a disappointment to them even after my death!”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” The man says politely.
“It is, I’ve been a disappointment to them ever since I faked that injury to get out of PE in second grade…
… I once got so drunk at an office party that I got the idea to photocopy my butt, the photo is still up on the wall today because everyone wants to know whose ass it is…
… I was talking about my ancient neighbour in the hallway with my roommate telling him ‘I thought she’d be dead by now’ and right then she walked by, I’m sure she heard because I keep finding our packages drenched even when it’s not raining…”
Yuuri’s mouth seems to be running away from him. The plane suddenly levels again, allowing Yuuri to breathe for the first time in minutes.
“I’m sorry,” he tells the stranger, feeling some sense of realization. “I don’t know what came over me, if you could please forget all that I’ve said in the past few –“ and the plane lurches again, dropping a few meters and shaking furiously. The gates in Yuuri’s brain that protected his secrets open and they all come crashing through like an unstoppable tidal wave.
“…I’ve never eaten oysters in my life…
…when my co-worker bosses me around for the twentieth time that day, I vent by watering his plant with orange juice…
…when I can’t spend Christmas with my family I stay inside and watch every movie from the list of Hallmark Christmas films with heterosexual couples wearing red and green for a week straight…
…when I’m having an anxiety attack one of the things that calm me down is sitting in a quiet room surrounded by a million of fairy lights…
…I had a sexy dream about my roommate Phichit, and I know we’re all gay, but I don’t see him that way, but I can’t ever tell him…
…I once took one lollipop from a candy store when I was five, and I still dream about going back to pay for it 18 years later…
…I think cherry blossoms are the most beautiful things Mother Nature has created and every time I walk through them I almost start to cry because they’re so aesthetically pleasing…
…whenever I’m feeling down I’d rather share my secrets with my dog than anyone else…
…I put an internship at the marketing department of some large cosmetics company but I just had an interview there and never got hired…
...I used to check the attic in my childhood home every night to check for vampires...
...sometimes I think about random prime numbers when I’m typing in my pin of my credit card just in case someone is trying to read my mind…
… Whenever my co-worker wants to discuss her love life with me, she asks me to go over the Buchanan numbers with her, which is basically an excuse to get a Starbucks…
“Sir?”
Yuuri looks up at someone tapping on his shoulder quite insistently.
“Sir?” The flight attendant repeats.
“Yes?” Yuuri says hoarsely, throat sore from his secret-spilling session.
“Sir, we’ve landed.” She smiles at him gently.
“I, eh, I, wha, we have?” Yuuri stutters, seeing the almost empty plane around him except for the man with the silver hair, realization dawning upon him. He’s been spilling his secrets to this complete stranger on a plane! A charming stranger admittedly, not that it matters, because Yuuri has never been this embarrassed in his life. He told him he’d been having secret sexy dreams about Phichit! That he thought his neighbour was dead! And about his addiction to bad Christmas movies!
He stands up quickly, face redder than it’s ever been. “I’m so sorry. I’m just… a nervous flier.” He stumbles over his words as he looks at his fellow traveller.
“That’s quite alright.” The stranger seems to have trouble holding back a smile, his blue eyes twinkling at Yuuri.
Yuuri promptly turns around and almost runs out of the plane.
“YUURI!!!” is the first thing he hears when he comes through the arrival doors, and before processing this he feels two arms hugging him so tight he feels as if he’s breaking a few ribs. “Yuuuuriiiiiiiiiii, I saw the ambulances, I heard about people coming out of your plane into ambulances, I heard about the turbulence, Yuuri, my dear, sweet Yuuri, are you OKAY?!” Phichit wails, lifting Yuuri off the ground.
“I mean,” Yuuri starts, all of his thoughts momentarily occupied by his friend squeezing the shit out of him, “I mean, we had pretty bad turbulence, but luckily I had my seatbelt on, and…”
“So how are you MENTALLY? How is your brain coping with this disaster flight?”
Suddenly all the secrets he spilled come rushing back. There’s a man out there who knows all his secrets. He’s about to tell Phichit all about this horrifying experience, but then Yuuri realizes Phichit would not take it so kindly that Yuuri had been keeping secrets from him. Phichit’s unofficial motto is honesty is the best policy, constantly TMI’ing Yuuri with every single detail of his life.
So keeping this story in, having enough room in his brain for a secret story as all others seem to have escaped from there, Yuuri quickly walks to the car with Phichit, hoping to avoid the silver-haired stranger. Yuuri’s quietness on the drive back is blamed on his fear of flying and his near-death experience. Phichit fills the silence with talk of his bakery, making sure Yuuri’s mind never wanders far.
The next Monday, after being almost violently peptalked out of bed by Phichit, Yuuri slowly walks up to the doors of the Detroit department of the Agape Cola Company. This is fine, he repeats to himself. You’ll give your explanation to Celestino, he’ll be disappointed but also laugh at you, and hopefully that’ll cheer him up enough to make him forget to fire you. Yes, he tells himself, you’ll be fine.
But when he pushes the door open, everything seems clearly not fine. People are running around frantically, Leo de la Iglesia from Designing tripping over his unlaced shoelaces while he runs to the elevator, Michele almost dropping a pile of important looking papers from the second floor, and Ji Guang-Hong frantically types nonsense in a random document on his laptop.
“I’m sorry,” Yuuri says to their janitor. “But what’s going on?”
“Ah,” the janitor says. “Haven’t you heard? The Boss is in the house today.”
“The boss? Celestino? Why is that such a big deal?”
“No, not the boss. I mean the Boss of Bosses. The Ultimate Agape Boss. Viktor Nikiforov.”
Yuuri stares at the janitor, not knowing if he’s serious. “Viktor Nikiforov? But I thought he was –“
“Retired, on his trip around the world, raising a secret family somewhere, or all three at the same time? No, he isn’t doing any of those things. Apparently he’s back to work, and the first thing he decided to do is check up on the Detroit department. Nobody knows what it means or why exactly it’s happening, but it is. So if I were you, I’d better get to your desk and pretend you’re working really hard if you want to make a good impression.”
Yuuri, still in shock like the rest of the building, thanks the janitor and starts running up the stairs. The elusive Viktor Nikiforov? So secretive that no one is sure what he looks like? The marketing genius who singlehandedly built an entire brand out of almost nothing? Is here?
Yuuri quickly walks to his office in the marketing department, where Celestino is giving everyone a quick warning to act natural, as Viktor Nikiforov is currently getting a tour of the building and could walk in at any second. Yuuri quickly sits down on his uncomfortable desk chair, mind quickly flashing to the heaven that was his first class-seat. Don’t think about that, he scolds himself, copying Guang-Hong’s idea of opening a random document on his computer.
He opens a file about Sawdust Perfume that he left on his desk last Thursday, and grabs a pen to tap it to his lips to look extra busy. He takes a quick glance around the rest of the office, and that’s all it takes to realize that everyone’s posed exactly the same. Everyone, even JJ, who usually can’t sit still for one second because he HAS to talk about himself at LEAST 78 times per hour, is sitting silently, tapping away at their keyboards or writing in a file.
Look natural, Celestino had said. But there’s nothing natural about the current state of the office. Suddenly, Yuuri gets the brilliant idea to grab a cup of coffee. What could be more natural than that?
He stands up gingerly and starts to make his way towards the coffee machine, when a glamorous man dressed in a sharp, navy suit (who, quite honestly, is exuding sex appeal), waltzes into the marketing office. “Marketing!” he proclaims. “Possibly one of the sexiest departments in the building!”
Yuuri glances over at his colleagues, confused. Would this be the incredible Viktor Nikiforov? Strange, he’d imagined someone a tad more timid, very enthusiastic but not this… exceedingly sensual?
“Don’t worry about him.” A voice Yuuri vaguely recognizes from somewhere chuckles. “Christophe can be a bit… over the top. But he means well.”
Two people walk into the office at the same time, following Christophe closely. One of them is Celestino, who makes some dramatic hand gestures as he introduces the two people. “Everyone, this is Christophe Giacometti, designer of the original Agape logo.”
Yuuri tears his gaze away from Christophe to glance at the other, more casually dressed man, who’s half-hidden from his view by Celestino. Yuuri seems to catch a flash of silver hair. That’s funny, he thinks to himself, that reminds me of…
Celestino steps out of the way and Yuuri suddenly has an unobstructed view of the second man in the room. And that’s the exact moment Yuuri’s heart stops.
It’s the man from the plane.