Archive of Our Own

The sky above the port was a color that, a long time ago, someone might have described as a television tuned to a dead channel, but Viktor was eight generations too young to remember what that meant even if he could have remembered anything at all. He was being lead by the arm through the crowd towards the shuttles, and he took a few more steps automatically before he stopped dead with the realization that he had no idea how he’d gotten there.

A blond man had been pulling him along. He looked about Viktor’s age, maybe a few years older; he was tall and broad-shouldered, but still had the awkward air of a man adjusting to his limbs. His hair was just long enough to be pulled back into a small ponytail. When Viktor stopped, he stumbled and stopped as well.

Viktor tried to shake him off, but the young man tightened his grip. “Don’t make a scene,” he snapped. “I told them the drugs would wear off too quickly.”

“Let me go,” Viktor tried to jerk away again and was startled to almost manage it with a strength he was unaccustomed to. “Or I’ll scream.”

“Don’t you know who I am?” the man said, studying him.

Viktor blinked at him. “Should I?” There was something faintly familiar about his features, particularly his eyes, but Viktor couldn’t place them.

“Yes, but,” the man dropped his arm. “You’ve—lost some of your memories, okay?”

It had always been a risk, but the words still came as a blow. He’d had the port in his neck for more than two years now, implanted a few years before his sixteenth birthday, and he’d been carrying data since then. Every download was potentially dangerous. Viktor had thought he was careful enough and skilled enough to avoid something like this, but obviously not.

“What happened?” he said, carefully. The man could also be lying; he could have drugged him and brought him here—had admitted as much, really—and Viktor’s memory could be perfectly intact. He reached around to push his hair aside and find the port at the back of his neck.

His fingers settled easily against the port. He reached up and found the ends of the short strands, barely tickling the back of his neck. That answered one question—some time had passed. “When the fuck did I cut my hair?”

The man’s eyes widened. “What?”

“When did I—I had long hair!”

“Years ago!” the man said, and then the blood drained from his face.  “Fuck. How—when do you—“

“How old am I?” Viktor demanded.

“Twenty-eight,” the man said.

It was Viktor’s turn to go pale. “Fuck.”

“How old—“

“Eighteen.”

“ Fuck.”

“What happened?” Viktor managed. Ten years seemed like a long, long time, although now that he was looking for it, it felt believable. He was taller than he’d been at eighteen, more muscular; his hair was short. The docks were not quite familiar. The signage was different, and there was a new type of high-speed rail running from the shipyards to the city.

“I’ll tell you on the shuttle,” the man said. “Come on.”

Viktor followed him numbly. They got on a ship flying over the bay towards the Electric Strip, one of the commuter lines that was still nothing more than someone’s bright idea the last Viktor remembered. The man led him to an empty compartment towards the back.

“What happened?” Viktor repeated, sitting down.

“We’re going to fix it,” the man said. “Your memory, I mean. So don’t panic.”

It was a bit late for that, but Viktor could appreciate the sentiment. “They can undo data-induced neural damage now?” Viktor asked. Last he had heard, it was irreparable, but it had been a decade.

“Sometimes, but this isn’t that,” he said. “We wiped it on purpose.” He seemed to see Viktor’s expression change from confused to going to throttle someone and flung up his hands. “Hey, you agreed.”

“Why would I agree to that?”

“We fucked up,” the man said, flatly. “We got hired to get some tech plans. Pay was good because they were valuable and it was risky, or that’s what we thought. But when we downloaded it, we realized there’s some bad shit in there. Info about this corporation, Davacorp? And the politicians they’ve paid off. And if they figure out we’re the ones who got it, they’ll murder us.”

“And they’re dangerous,” Viktor said.

“They have some crazy modded hitmen,” the man said. “And they don’t stop until you’re dead. Ever.”

Viktor nodded. “So you wiped my memory.”

“We backed it up first,” the man said. “We can delete the data, obviously, but if they find us they could tell it’s been there and you’d be fucked. But your memories are on a drive. And we’re going to break into the mainframe and wipe out every sign we were there, and then you can have them back.”

“Ten years,” Viktor said, faintly. “Who’s we?”

The man looked startled. “This information broker, Phichit,” he said. “I guess you hadn’t met him yet. And this razorboy out of Kyuushuu. You wouldn’t know him either. Mila, who I guess you do know.”

“Little Mila?” Viktor said.

“She’s twenty-three,” the man said.

“Right,” Viktor sat back. “And—“ he was about to ask and who are you but then it clicked. He did recognize the features, just on a much younger boy.  “Holy shit, Yuri.”

“Yeah,” Yuri said.

“You were so much shorter,” Viktor marveled. “You had a bowl cut.”

Yuri scowled, and Viktor wondered when he saw it how he hadn’t recognized him immediately. “Okay! It’s been ten years!”

“Ten years,” Viktor said. “You’re all grown up.”

“Yeah,” Yuri said, still scowling but less pronounced.

“So where’s the drive?” Viktor asked.

“It’s safe,” Yuri said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Who has it?”

“You don’t remember them,” Yuri said. “So it won’t mean anything to you now, but trust me, you weren’t worried.”

Viktor nodded, then thought about it for another moment. “Huh.”

“What?” Yuuri squinted at him across the compartment.

“That drive,” Viktor said. “I gave it to someone other than you.”

“Yeah,” Yuri said. “You did.”

Viktor was quiet for a moment. “I must trust them a great deal.”

“Yeah,” Yuri agreed. “You do.”

---

It was entirely possible, Viktor considered, that the Electric Strip hadn’t changed at all in the ten years he’d forgotten. It was still a tacky conglomerate of neon, lines of clubs and bars and restaurants and shopfronts that were poor veneers for drug peddlers and smugglers of weapons or human beings, facade after facade of shining glass. Viktor stiffened instinctively as they wound their way from the drop-off to the bar where they’d be meeting Mila and the street samurai Yuri had referred to as Katsuki. He was used to men putting their hands where he didn’t want them, whistling across crowded streets, mistaking him for a woman or else not caring.

Sometime between eighteen and twenty-eight, he’d shed most of his feminine features. No one would bother him now.

There was something light about the feeling, light like the short hair he kept being startled by whenever he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the mirrored windows. He was still trying to mentally adjust his image of himself when they arrived at the bar. It was the sort of place with a single narrow entrance and no visible signage—a real fire hazard, not that the sort of people who frequented it were the sort of people who cared.

There were places in the Electric Strip that were designed for tourists, for students looking for a thrill or businessmen picking up prostitutes, that flared neon signs and looked the part. And then there were places like this. It was the sort of bar that kept its secrets, which was exactly the kind of place they needed.

To the front of the establishment were a few booths along the wall and then the bar itself, the rows of multicolored liquors lit from behind in a fantastic prism of hedonism. The people at the bar were drinking and saying little. A group of young men negotiated at one of the booths; in another, a young redheaded woman sat, tapping her fingernails against the table impatiently.

“Mila,” Viktor guessed as he and Yuri sat down across from her.

Her eyes lit up. “You remember!”

“Sort of,” Viktor said, carefully. He studied her face in the unnatural light of the club. It was familiar; she hadn’t changed as much as Yuri, but she also looked older, her features narrowed.

“He remembers when you were thirteen , ” Yuri said sourly.

Mila stared. “What? But that means you don’t remember—“

“Yeah,” Yuri interrupted. “Let’s save it for when Katsudon is here.”

Mila looked like she wanted to say something, but held her tongue in the face of Yuri glaring daggers at her. Viktor took one look and decided that he didn’t want to get between them.

“I’m getting us drinks,” he announced, and stood up.

It felt fundamentally wrong to be buying alcohol for two people he still pictured as a thirteen-year-old and an eleven-year-old, but even little Yuri was now older than Viktor felt and he wouldn’t take kindly to being left out . He was still grappling with the feeling when the bartender looked up and said, “Yeah, what do you want?"

He thought I have no idea but his mouth said, “Three vodka on the rocks.”

“Make that four,” said a man standing beside him. Viktor turned to look, faintly startled to realize he hadn’t heard him approach. The man was Japanese and dressed in all black, a utilitarian mix of leather and some sort of polyester for shielding and movement. It could have looked tacky on someone else, but on this man it just looked deadly. His hair was slicked back, leaving Viktor staring directly into his large brown eyes.

His mouth went dry. He was temporarily spared from coming up with a response when the man said, “Come here often?”

“Now and again,” Viktor said, with no idea whether it was a lie or not. “What about you?”

“Not often enough, if I haven’t seen you here before,” he said. His expression made Viktor a little bit nervous. It was a little too certain for a man flirting with a virtual stranger. He thought he knew what he was doing, which could have made him your garden-variety man who fancied himself a player, but could also make him very, very dangerous.

Viktor’s first guess based on his attire was street samurai, somebody’s gun for hire, and it wasn’t a good sign to attract someone like that at a bar.  Even if the man was hot as hell. He opted to play it safe. “Guess we’ve just missed each other,” Viktor said. “It’s a shame.”

“Truly,” the probable assassin said. “I have some business to take care of, but maybe after this we go somewhere quieter and make up for lost time?”

“Maybe,” Viktor said carefully. The bartender set the four glasses down on the counter with a click.

“Put it on my tab,” the man told her.

“That’s not necessary,” Viktor said flatly. The man opened his mouth, but they were interrupted by Yuri stomping over.

“Stop fucking with him, Katsudon,” Yuri said. “He doesn’t remember shit.”

The assured smile dropped off the assassin’s face. “What?”

“He doesn’t remember shit,” Yuri said. “He thought I was eleven.”

The penny dropped. “You’re Katsuki,” Viktor guessed.

“Yuuri,” he said, and he sat down on a bar stool with an expression like Viktor had shot his dog. “I’m Yuuri.”

“You’re both Yuuri?”

“Yes,” Yuri said. “Keep up. Katsudon, Viktor remembers being like, eighteen.”

“Sorry,” Viktor apologized. Yuuri looked stricken. “I’m told it was somewhat dire circumstances.”

“Yes,” Yuuri agreed. He picked up two of the glasses. “Let’s sit down.” He was suddenly all business, the third rapid shift in demeanor in less than a minute. It had Viktor’s head spinning, but he picked up another glass and followed.

Once they were all seated, Yuuri started talking immediately. “Mila, what do you have?”

Mila set a tablet in the center of the table. “Davacorp’s main servers are outside of Boston. Phichit managed to get old blueprints of the building for me. The whole town used to be mechanical, but when they switched to electric from steam they didn’t rip out all the old tech, they just leveled a lot of it and built over it. I think we can use the old ductwork to get into the building, if they aren’t looking for us. Yuuri can distract their security. Might be dicey.”

“Good,” Yuuri said. “More fun that way.” He raised a hand, and with a flick of his fingers a series of blades extended from under his nails.

“I can get us into the building,” Mila said. “You’ll go into the servers and wipe the data, and we’ll get out of there.”

“Just like that,” Viktor said.

“Are you a good hacker?” Mila asked.

“Yes,” Viktor answered, automatically.

“Assume you wouldn’t have worked with us if we weren’t as good,” Mila said. “We can do this.”

Viktor refrained from reminding her that he remembered the exact tone she would use giving herself a pep talk before a ballet performance, and it sounded scarily like this. It had the same air of trying to convince herself everything would be fine.

Instead, he asked, “How are we getting to Boston?”

---

They took the overnight shuttle. He twisted around to look out the window at the city blurring beneath them. There was something magical about watching the dressed-up grime and squalor lose its harsh edges with distance, giving way to a brilliant spread of lights and finally vanishing in favor of the darkness of ocean.

He slept, eventually, tipping his head back against the seat, Yuri dozed off against his shoulder. He woke once in the middle of the trip to find Yuuri watching him.

“Are you sleeping or staring at me?” Viktor asked quietly.

Yuuri flushed when he realized he’d been caught. “Sleeping,” he said. “Just, having trouble.”

“Is something wrong?” Viktor asked, automatically. There was something about the sadness in the samurai’s expression that made Viktor feel sad himself, that made him want to reach across the shuttle seats and wipe the distress from his features.

“No,” Yuuri lied. “Go back to sleep.”

Viktor did, and their next real conversation was in the bright light of morning, loitering together just out of reach of the building’s cameras. Through the glass windows, they could see visitors passing through the lobby with retinal scans and swiped badges, and dark-suited security lurking.

“There’s a lot of them,” Viktor said. What he wanted to say was there’s too many of them , but he couldn’t quite conjure the worry emotionally that his mental calculus was telling him to feel.

“I’m good at what I do,” Yuuri said. He did look good, as good as he’d looked in the bar the night before, although not in the same way. Less sexy and more dangerous, Viktor supposed. Although there was something attractive about the way his fingers looked with the knife-tips extended.

Viktor didn’t remember Yuuri, but he felt a sort of protectiveness anyway, deep in his gut. Whoever Viktor had become in the last ten years had to care about him on some level. “Is this a good idea? We don’t need to take on the guards to get in the lower levels.”

“Exactly,” Yuuri said. “No one needs two paths into a building. They won’t be looking for you when they’re watching me.”

“Time to go,” Mila said, coming up behind them. She got a look at his expression. “You’re not nervous, Vitya?” she teased.

“Never,” Viktor said. “ Ganba , Yuuri.”

The word came automatically; Yuuri froze and lit up all at once when he heard it. “Where did you learn that?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Viktor said. “Muscle memory, I think.”

Yuuri nodded, slowly. “ Davai , Viktor.”

And then he turned back and waltzed into the lion’s den.

They only stayed long enough to watch Yuuri take down the first two guards. He had the gun at his waist, another at his ankle, and more knives that Viktor had previously suspected could be concealed on a person of his size, but he didn’t need any of them for the first man. Like lightning, he kicked him to the ground, the heel of his boot at the small of his back. He swiped down as the man fell with an open hand, and the blades in his fingers opened his throat like livestock. The second guard didn’t even have time to react before Yuuri had pulled the gun from his hip and sunk a shot into his head and a second into his chest.

The flash of those blades and dark leather and the explosion of red was the last glimpse Viktor caught of him before he had to turn and follow Yuri and Mila down into the darkness. The night vision goggles Mila handed him gave the whole area an eerie green appearance as they traversed through the dark passages.

“Here,” Mila said. “There should be a door.”

Door was a generous word for the service hatch that loomed out of the darkness to the left, and long years of disuse had left it rusted shut, but the three of them managed to turn the handle and pry it open. It led into ductwork long abandoned, a relic of old technology in a city that had cannibalized itself in its race towards the future.

Mila scrambled in. Viktor followed, and Yuri took up the rear. At first they could almost have stood, but then the ducts narrowed and eventually they were crawling on hands and knees.

Viktor tried to remember if he had done this before, anything like this, but the memories simply weren’t there. Ten years of his life, gone in a second. He could feel that time had passed, physically—as they crept onward, his knees began to complain, joints he’d hardly thought about at eighteen protesting the harsh treatment. But all the memories of that time seemed to lie just beyond his reach.

Eventually Mila stopped—ahead of them, strips of bright light shone through the vent, indicating they had reached the interior of the building. Viktor took off his goggles to avoid being blinded in the new light as Mila took out the screws, and when she lifted the vent away they were able to drop down into the sterile hallway of a building.

Viktor barely had time to think that went smoothly while Mila was setting the vent back in place behind them when a woman rounded the corner. She caught sight of them and lunged for the alarm.

“I’ve got this,” Yuri said grimly, snatching the gun from his holster. “Go.”

Viktor’s memory and his common sense warred temporarily. His conscious thought argued that Yuri was twenty-one years old and well-trained; his memory found only an eleven-year-old with a bowl cut who needed to be protected. Luckily Mila was already moving, and momentum overrode his momentary crisis to propel him down the hall with her.

“This way,” she said, breathless. “Hopefully Yuuri catches up soon, or we won’t be able to handle more trouble.”

Viktor didn’t bother stating the obvious. They were headed for the server room, the beating heart of the building. Only the twin distractions of Yuuri and Yuri and judicious use of the building’s history were even letting them get close. If more trouble arrived, they were unlikely to be able to get out unscathed even with a street samurai at their side.

Luckily, the server room loomed ahead of them, and Mila swiped her borrowed pass at the door and watched the light click over to green. Then the screen flashed a message: High alert status. Password? Mila cursed.

“No one ever needs to know this password,” Viktor said. “Not unless the alarms are on.”

“Sure, but—“

Viktor unwound his own best weapon from his belt and snapped one end of the USB cable into the port at the back of his neck. “Plug it into the terminal,” Viktor said. “I guarantee some dumbass has it saved to their desktop.”

The mental plummet into digital space, at least, was just as Viktor remembered.  Data was abstract; walking through computer memory was all about building a mental user interface to make sense of the information. For a moment, it was merely a nauseating stream of bits and bytes, a torrent of information. Then Viktor settled it around himself as the tall stacks of a university library, narrow and teeming with information, and he took the corridor at a light jog until he found the files he was looking for. It felt almost like reality, pulling the sheaf of documents from the shelf and thumbing through until he found what he needed.

“Fuck, you’re fast,” Mila said when his eyes snapped back open and he ripped the cord out of the wall, plugging in the right string of digits. The panel had clicked green before the pain of the transfer even fully registered, a dull ache at the base of his skull. There were smoother ways to exit, but they weren’t as quick, and they were running out of time.

Inside the server room, Mila steered him towards the main terminal and left him to it. “All on you,” she said. “I’ll wait for the Yuris.”

The port was still warm from his last transfer; he gave himself the space of three breaths to clear his head and then plugged himself in. Unlike the initial dive into the computers, this one hurt; the system was designed both to dislike intruders and to process far more data than the human mind could handle. For a brief moment, it was overwhelming, and then Viktor let his training take over.

Viktor was better at walking through virtual space than he’d ever been at swimming, but the principal was the same as being caught in a riptide: swim parallel to the current and let it carry you until it weakens. He broke out of the transfer and started to visualize the mainframe around him. Free of the dizzying spiral of overstimulation and solidly in digital space, the pain vanished, but Viktor didn’t like to think of the migraine he’d have when it was all done.

The tricky part would be cutting through the security to get to the data. Even now, the world formed around him as a labyrinth rather than a library, stone and curling roots rather than easily accessible information. It wasn’t the first system that had built itself into obstacles around him, but it was one of the most foreboding.

There were brute-force ways to break into a system; Viktor knew hackers who would have reached for a jackhammer when confronted with stone, and he knew that he’d wielded weapons against more than a few monsters. But ultimately a mainframe was a safe, not a security team, and the fastest way in was the combination.

And the best way through a labyrinth was Ariadne’s way: a ball of string.

He wound his way through stone passages, dodging past barriers and hulking shadows, letting the string unfurl in his hands, deep into the darkness. Despite his worries, there was no minotaur at the heart, only a seemingly endless spiral of texts. Like any system, the data he wanted was easily called to hand. It was a moment’s work to find the right information: evidence that the data had been downloaded, files about their team, metadata from the earlier transfers.

The password file had been a sheaf of paper. The data they needed to wipe was closer to an entire library, terabytes of information from the surface of files reaching down into the roots of the system. It was the only way to make sure they were truly untraceable, that nothing remained with which to hunt them down.

Deleting it should have been the simple part. He reached out and seized it and issued the command to the system.

Nothing changed. It stayed, solid as ever.

He blinked at it and tried again. Delete. Nothing.

Viktor dropped it and let the space abstract around him, the labyrinthian library giving way to a void floating with glowing parameters like a terminal. More abstract still would be pure data in the language of computers, impossible to sort through, so he stopped in the middle ground before it could dissolve further and fumbled through it, trying to find the error.

Once he had, he spat, “Shit,” into the void, and his mouth was forming the word as he snapped back to awareness to find Yuuri standing over him.

“What is it?” The samurai had blood on his fingertips where the blades had been, but they were retracted beneath his skin again, and he looked uninjured otherwise. Viktor’s head swam as he looked at him, the usual confusion on top of the pounding headache. He reached back and unplugged the cable. Yuuri reached a hand down and helped him to his feet.

“We can’t delete it,” Viktor said.

“What?” Yuri and Mila were coming around the corner. “That’s the whole point!” Yuri snapped.

“System safeguard, externally imposed so I can’t disable it from here,” Viktor said. “You can’t delete data without transferring it. Security measure to prevent malicious wipes.”

“So transfer it to one of Phichit’s servers and he can wipe it from there,” Yuuri suggested.

Mila was making a face. “You can’t, right?”

Viktor shook his head. “Security. Has to be a local transfer.”

“That doesn’t do us any good,” Yuuri said. “We’d need to transfer onto a drive, here?  Like a flash drive?”

“It’s a lot of data,” said Viktor. “We’re not just wiping a couple files. We’re essentially scrubbing the institutional memory of a system designed for institutional memory. We’d need to essentially fill a computer’s worth of info, or—“

“Or what?” Yuri said.

“I could download it,” Viktor said. “If I can connect to the data, I can download it, you can wipe it.”

“How much data?” Yuuri said.

Viktor shook his head. “Seven terabytes?”

“You have maybe ten accessible at any time,” Mila said. “In your entire memory.”

“My entire memory is backed up,” Viktor said. “Remember?”

Yuuri looked pale. “You want to download the data into your brain—way more data than you can process, by the way—and then you want us to wipe your memory?”

“Yes,” Viktor said. “You can restore it. I’m already missing ten years.”

“That’s crazy,” said Yuri.

“It could work,” said Mila.

“And if it doesn’t?” Yuuri snapped.

Before anyone could answer, they were interrupted by the echo of more alarms from down the hall.

“We don’t have time to argue about this,” Viktor said. “If I thought my memory was safe enough to risk wiping last time, I can trust it again. And the alternative is we look over our shoulders for the rest of our lives—which will be very short, because Davacorp will track us down and kill us.” He glanced back and forth between them. None of them argued. “I’ll download it,” Viktor continued. “The computer will signal when the transfer is done. One of you must know how to do a wipe.”

“I do,” said Yuuri.

“Okay,” Viktor said. “Let’s go.” He bent and retrieved the cable. When he straightened back up, Yuuri was standing in front of him, taking it from him.

“Let me,” Yuuri said. “Please.”

Viktor inclined his head, and Yuuri reached gently around and lined it up with the socket. As though by instinct, his other hand reached up and cupped Viktor’s face.

It felt terribly familiar, and suddenly Viktor understood. “It’s you,” he said. “I left it with you.”

Yuuri’s eyes widened. “Yes,” he said. “Do you remember?”

He didn’t; he felt it, though, like the memory of it had left an imprint where it once was. “Not really,” he said. “But I will.”

“You will,” Yuuri said, like it was a promise, and he clicked the cable into place.

This time Viktor didn’t slip out of the riptide; he reached into it, back along his trail of string to the data he needed, and then he let it flood into him.

It felt like drowning, like being buried alive, like Atlas must have felt with the sky on his shoulders.

He held it there for a moment, feeling the weight of it collapse everything he was to dust.

He thought, I can’t do this much longer.

He thought, Yuuri.

And then he thought nothing at all.

---

He woke in an instant, with the force and suddenness of hitting the ground after a fall. He started violently, but his movements were restrained by the arms around him. He looked up into the face of a handsome man with large dark eyes. It felt familiar, but he couldn’t come up with a name to go with that face, morphed into an expression of worry.

“Hi, darling,” the man said softly. “Can you tell me what you remember?  Anything at all?”

He reached for it and nothing came.  Not the name of this man, not his own name, not the last five minutes or last ten years.  His head ached, and he couldn’t remember if this was new or if he had always felt like this.  He wanted so badly to close his eyes.

Emotion came more easily than concrete memory, though, and through the confusion, and frustration and fear he felt something warm and sure in his chest when he looked up at the man. He said, tentatively, “I think...I love you?”

The man’s eyes welled up with tears.  “Yes,” he said. ”Go to sleep, darling.”

He hurt all over, he knew nothing and no one, but looking into the man’s brown eyes he felt safe, so he closed his eyes and let sleep take him.

---

“He should have woken hours ago.”

“There’s not a protocol for this shit. Katsudon, calm down. Besides, what are you going to do about it? If we fucked up, we fucked up.”

“If you think he won’t remember anything, it might be safer to find someplace else for him. Where he’d be…”

"I’m not leaving him. I’m not leaving him no matter what.”

The argument broke into Viktor’s dreams and then into his awareness. The words bled into his next conscious thought, the memory of Yuuri’s hand cupping his face, and that bled into the next, which was that he opened his eyes to the worst migraine he could remember ever having.

He groaned, and sat up enough to vomit onto the floor instead of himself. Yuuri settled on the bed beside him as he threw up and wrapped an arm around his shoulders, holding him upright. He brushed Viktor’s hair back from his face.

“Hi, darling,” he said, quietly. “Can you tell me what you remember?” There was something resigned about the words, like a man awaiting execution.

“This is the worst headache I’ve ever had,” Viktor said. “Does Davacorp still want us dead?”

“No,” Yuuri said. A smile bright as the sun broke out across his face. “We’re safe. Mila and Yuri and Phichit too.”

“Good,” he said. “I love you, Yuuri.”

“I love you too,” Yuuri said, tightening his hold on Viktor. “Drink some water and you can go back to sleep.”

“Okay,” Viktor agreed, and let Yuuri curl his fingers around a glass and then help steady it at his lips.  After he set the glass aside, Yuuri combed Viktor’s hair back into place with his fingers, and then didn’t stop running his fingers through it, a slow soothing motion. Viktor let his eyes slip shut, leaning against his shoulder.

“Anything else you want to know?” Yuuri asked.

“Hmm,” Viktor said. “No, I don’t think so.”

“No?”

“That’s everything important, anyway,” he said, and without opening his eyes again he could remember what Yuuri’s smile looked like as he slipped back into sleep.