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The snow arrived with Yuuri.
Where had this person been all Viktor’s life? He was new but already so talented, which was unusual. And he was maybe familiar - indeed, sitting here in the audience staring at the snow shadows flecked across his face, Viktor was sure he’d seen him before. Perhaps a passage on the street or in a cafe line.
Maybe Yuuri had been audience to one of his own acts.
The thought made Viktor’s heart wind around itself.
Yuuri was pulling the heat from the inside of the tent. Viktor felt the chill on his skin, the numbness starting at his fingertips. But there was a warmth in all their chests Yuuri let stay. Or maybe it was Viktor’s refusal to let his own flicker out.
Snow was topical in the fairy tale sort of way, in which they’d all heard of it because it once had been, somewhere in the world. But not here. Not in their memories.
Except Yuuri was changing that as snow drifted down from the tent ceiling. Soft and white like a cloud had broken apart and started to fall. When Yuuri gestured for them to stare up and not around, they did. The fall quickened until the showers were more akin to a hundred shooting stars.
The performance was beautiful.
Viktor found he could not help but stare at the beauty of the performer, too. Yuuri. He graced his arms through space with an air of mastery. He stood as far from the audience as he could like someone who wanted to hide, but his demeanor was stoic and tall as if he knew he must not.
Snowflakes gathered in his dark hair and he looked incandescent - and if Viktor were more a fool he would have thought Yuuri had fallen from the sky as well.
He stared for too long, likely burning the gaze of his eyes onto the performer’s skin, and suddenly Yuuri’s eyes glimpsed him.
A moment passed where the snow seemed to fizzle out. Viktor clenched his teeth and yet could not look away for fear of breaking the performance further. He had not meant to be a distraction, to rudely watch upon the performer and not his creation for which they were all present.
But Yuuri tightened his fists and pulled the snow back in. It came down even harder than before, collecting at their feet. Viktor sighed in heavy relief.
Yuuri guided them delicately through the tapering of the fall.
Viktor left the performance that night with the strange notion that Yuuri was holding back. There was more he could enchant them with, for sure.
Viktor would return.
~
In a field speckled with show tents at the edge of town, there was a balance to uphold to keep their world tethered and secure. The matter of merely existing was the responsibility of everyone - whether one harnessed a piece of the world or not, all must witness those who did so that they could believe in the world, and therefore it would exist.
There was Mila, was carried the sun like it was a toy ball, but then healed all with its light; Yuri, who beheld the core of creation through space’s infinite pathways; Otabek, who rose mountains and braided roots; Chris, who ensured the night fell; Phichit, who checked that the moon rose with it so that they might still have light.
There was so many, and they were to all be believed in, and so it was quite irresponsible that Viktor only wanted to see the winter tent every time Yuuri had a show.
But look at the magic here!
Yuuri whited out the walls of the tent until everyone was forced to blink against the brightness. And then they were standing in a forest. Bustling green was replaced with settling white. Trunks were burst from a frozen ground of discolored old leaves and snow weighed thick on trees over every branch.
And it was still, and silent, so much like the sharp quietness that came with the night, yet the sun glittered bright beyond the limbs.
Their breaths puffed visibly in front of them.
Winter was a dead thing, Viktor learned. But it was also beautiful.
~
Yuuri showed them how strong the cold was. How resilient ice could be in an arctic where the ground itself was ice. And mountains! Mountains made from ice plunged upward and moved slowly with creaking groans.
Here it wasn’t even snowing and the air was a dry, nose-biting cold.
Yuuri faced the ice mountain and the word ‘glacier’ filled their heads.
He flicked a wrist and a sheet broke free. It fell downward over what seemed like whole minutes, until finally it crushed into the the ground, busting through even more ice to be swallowed by seawater.
The audience gasped, blinked, and were back in the tent.
Yuuri was so powerful.
He bowed out without a word, though Viktor caught the barest hint of a grin on his face and knew that Yuuri was aware of the awe he struck.
That made him all the more alluring, of course.
~
Days later, as if it had always been threaded into the tilt of seasons, cooler days turned cold, and snow fell in the real world.
Viktor raised his head and closed his eyes against it.
When he only focused on the cold and the quiet, he felt Yuuri.
Never before had he traced something that existed back to the one who made them believe. But he felt the imprint of Yuuri on every flake.
Perhaps Yuuri was so central to their belief - they weren’t mesmerized by just the way the snow fell, the way the ice spoke, but how Yuuri commanded it.
Or maybe that was just Viktor.
~
They were fortunate that spotting Yuuri in the audience only aided Viktor’s performance.
If Viktor harnessed the wind or the sky or spacetime, he would surely flip the universe inside out.
Yuuri sat there with gently folded hands and pursed lips. He set his careful gaze about the room. The princely gestures sent Viktor’s heart pounding, and he remunerated that they were all quite lucky.
He twirled once for dazzling momentum and pushed everything he felt back onto the audience. He cast them all onto rose tints and warm gazes across candlelight. He beat their hearts with the thrum of his fingers through the air.
Then he pushed them deeper into vulnerable spaces that felt comfortable when not alone, and within seconds pressed upon them days of longing for another. Of watching someone magnificent weave dreams from afar.
He didn’t need to take them anywhere but the shadows of the tent, for this was internal and personal, and he felt everyone’s minds building upon memories pulled from the feelings he instilled.
Yuuri watched, mouth slightly agape. The steadiness of his easier gaze had been unraveled.
Viktor tried not to smile, tried not to be so thrown that he shoved the very thought of Yuuri himself inside the audience’s minds.
Indeed, they were lucky that Viktor’s magic was love.
Viktor thought Yuuri was hanging around at the end of the performance to say something. Perhaps introduce himself. But he pushed out before that last few stragglers.
~
In his next performance, Yuuri took his crowd to somewhere that didn’t look too unlike their town. They faced the horizon, where it snowed against the rosy sky of sunset. Viktor felt like a part of himself was in that setting light, a shimmery thread he could almost catch in its fade, tying him to the sinking colors.
Lovely, he sighed to himself, and then realized it was love embedded into skyline. That was something he was familiar with, and he felt it there: scant but tangible, like glimpsing the reflection of a spider’s single thread. How had Yuuri done that?
~
Viktor stretched his own abilities skyward with a love for not people, but creation. He gave each inanimate existence an essence and taught that it should be cherished, cared for, basked in.
This was new ground he was stepping on, and so he explored it with his audience. Yuuri was there too. He came to Viktor’s performances as often as Viktor attended his, though Viktor tried not to dwell on that too much. It meant nothing.
The audience and Viktor watched from a distance as Earth turned, and they loved it for all its curling lands and seas and clouds, from low sweeping desserts to high-rising glaciers...
~
The was a blizzard in Yuuri’s tent tonight.
It was fiercely passionate and wild, incredible - and despite the dangers it presented, Viktor was filled with the terrible need to hurl himself into its midst and experience that sort of natural wrath and energy.
He was blinded by the snow, his face hurt from the pelt of ice, his feet stumbled into the layers underfoot. Yet he laughed and wondered how he could compete.
~
Unfortunately shows were canceled the following night, for a very real storm had come down from the sky.
Snow struck the earth in a threatening sort of way, and it stayed there, freezing the ground and roads until passage outdoors was a risk.
And a strange thing was happening with that.
“Beautiful,” Yuri managed to mumble through his hard gaze out the cafe window.
The place was almost completely empty. There was a young man and woman talking in the corner, and - no, not talking, Viktor saw now. Their attention was lost out the window and into the storm.
“Beautiful, you think?” Viktor asked Yuri as he wiped down a table. There would likely be no more customers today. And if they got that last couple out, they could close up early.
“Mhm.”
Viktor stopped and rested a hand on his hip to watch out the window. Anyone risking the outdoors was going at a stroll, staring upward into the pelting sky. They were mesmerized by snow. Viktor understood that; it was technically still new. Yet something was odd about the way they seemed struck. He glanced nervously toward their two remaining patrons.
“Aren’t you worried about getting home?”
“Otabek is coming to get me.”
“... Aren’t you worried about him getting here?”
Yuri paused for a long few seconds. “Oh, yeah.” He casually walked to the back room, presumably to call Otabek.
Strange. It was not like Yuri to react to such an inconvenience so pleasantly. But he shook the thought off.
They closed up the cafe early. After practically pushing the dreamy couple out into the streets, Viktor waited until Otabek showed up, huddled down in heavy layers, to lead Yuri home. They both nearly forgot to say good-bye to Viktor as they took each other’s hand and became blurs in the streaks of white.
Viktor pulled his scarf up over his face and began the trek home.
The storm pushed on, and with it came the sense of Yuuri lurking around every drift. His touch was part of what kept the snow frozen, and Viktor loved it dearly. He only hoped the fall would melt just enough that the tent yard could be reopened.
He looked up to admire the snow puffed clouds and how they mirrored the covered ground, but noticed curtains were drawn apart in the apartments lining the streets and above shops. Faces were pressed against windows to stare out at the frozen world. Viktor nearly stopped dead at the sight.
No one noticed him watching. His mind called back to the dazed couple in the cafe and Yuri’s plaintive tone.
Something strange was certainly about.
He threw his eyes to the snow at his feet and crunched toward home.
~
The next morning saw the world much like some of the arctic worlds Yuuri had taken his performances to. Blankets of snow rose so high on the streets that them being streets was merely memory, and wind-blown snow drifts almost reached windows.
Viktor cringed when he noticed someone tromping through the snow, wild and clumsy as they tried to not fall or - more likely - get stuck. Their hood whipped back from their head, and then Viktor was looking down on dark hair flying through the snow.
Viktor’s heart did a thing akin to choking him while also dropping so far into his stomach he was lost for breath. He recognized that hair, and had just barely recognized the man with scarves wound high around him.
Distantly, through the window, he even heard as the man stopped and shouted to the falling snow, “Viktor!”
Viktor blinked, put a hand on his chest, and mouthed wordlessly, Me?
Yuuri was whirling round, looking for something - him? - and somehow his eyes landed right on his window. If Viktor weren’t so frozen in place, he’d stumble away, embarrassed to be caught staring. But Yuuri called his name again, then pointed toward the ground by the apartment, where the ground entrance was. Without another gesture or word, he moved and disappeared under the view of Viktor’s window.
“What?” Viktor whispered to himself, still confused and perhaps a tad starstruck.
Some inclination to move, even if it wasn’t from understanding, flooded into him. It let him lurch from the window and jog through his bedroom out into the hall. Makka yipped lightly behind him, startled now as well, but Viktor was already tearing from the front door and breaking for the stairs. The elevator would take too long and permit him time to think about… any of this.
Why was Yuuri here to see him? And how come he seemed in such a hurried fuss?
Viktor threw open the stairway door and nearly knocked straight into Yuuri.
“Oh!” Yuuri gasped. “Viktor!”
Once again Viktor found himself suspended in a delightful, albeit this time strange, amount of awe. Yuuri, the winter enchanter, was standing before him, out of breath with snow-flecked hair and crooked glasses currently being adjusted by gloved hands.
All the frost in the world couldn’t keep the heat from Viktor’s face.
“Viktor?” Yuuri prodded between catches of breath. His nose was red and his cheeks were tinged pink with both cold and probably exertion, if he actually ran here.
“Yuuri,” Viktor finally managed. “What’s - what are you doing?”
Yuuri shifted between feet and hopped on his toes as he spoke. “You don’t… you know, right? You know?” He threw a glance back toward the door of the apartment.
“Know what? What’s going on?”
“Come on! You need to see -” He stopped and shook head, looking Viktor up and down. “I mean no, you can’t go out there like that. Um.” His eyes darted around as if he’d find answers in the dim, dusty lobby of the apartment building.
“Let’s go to my apartment,” Viktor suggested. His heart would maybe flutter at the fact that he was inviting Yuuri Katsuki - again, enchanter of winter, the best magician he’d ever seen - into his place, except any fluttery feelings were being weighed down with a concerned anxiety. Something was wrong, and unless Yuuri was actually delusional, Viktor had missed something key.
At his suggestion, Yuuri stood a little straighter; he nodded stiffly. “Yes, that’d be good. You need to dress for the storm.”
~
It was clear Yuuri was impatient for them to tear out into the wild snow like mad men, but Viktor was stubborn in understanding why Yuuri was here first. So he showed Yuuri the living room, then disappeared into the kitchen to make tea.
When he emerged holding two steaming mugs, Yuuri was gently laying his coat and scarves onto the back of the sofa. He seemed caught in the act of doing something wrong and quickly stuttered to his explanation of, “I know we have to go - I just, well, it’s hot.” His eyes landed on the mugs. “Oh.”
Viktor was caught askance again. Yuuri was still dressed so lovely underneath all those winter clothes. He was disheveled with ruffled hair and twisting hands, yet still quite an enchanter. A lovely, lovely one, indeed.
He yanked his consciousness back to reality. “Of course!” he said. “Have some tea, if you’re not too hot.” He smiled like nothing was wrong as he set their mugs on the coffee table.
“Sit,” he gestured at the couch across from the seat he was sitting back in. “And when you’re ready, tell me what’s going on.”
Yuuri seemed regretful to do so, but he sat.
“We need to hurry, Viktor. It’ll be easier to show you.”
“Show me what?”
He glanced down at their mugs; he was realizing it was silly to make it. They were both far too anxious about one thing or another.
Yuuri raised from the chair again. “Considering that it’s a little embarrassing, I don’t know…” He was starting to pace between the couch and table. Viktor’s eyes followed him, wanting to understand.
“Did you do something?” he asked.
“ We did something, Viktor.” That startled him. What could they have done together, especially when this was the first time they were actually addressing one another directly?
Directly…
“Oh, wait.”
Yuuri turned to him, hand covering half his face to cover the rising blush. He was nodding.
But Viktor’s heart was sinking. They’d been foolish.
It had been lovely and romantic and exciting - Viktor was never more passionate about performing magic than when he and Yuuri were communicating in the fall of the snow or the colors behind eyelids. Viktor could show the way the winter loves the earth still, despite its harshness. Yuuri could knit love into snowflakes and send them off fast - or slow, gently, like cold little kisses to the nose and cheeks.
… And so all the town was witness to this weaving together of magics, too.
In his mind, Viktor saw that entranced couple at the cafe, heard Yuri’s detached voice.
They’d all fallen in love with the snow.
Viktor jumped to his feat. “I’ll just be a few minutes,” he declared, and tore for his room. He plowed through his closet for heavier clothes, those which he didn’t need merely weeks ago. He dug boots out from the shoe pile in his closet, gloves from a drawer. He stuffed two pairs of socks onto each foot.
He raced, because despite understanding a thread of the situation, there was more he could not imagine. Like what exactly happens to a town in love with the snow.
By Yuuri’s desperation, Viktor suspected it was more than a dreamy and cool disposition.
Nearly tripping on the weight of his boots, Viktor stumbled back into the living room. He felt like an inflated fool, except Yuuri had also wound his attire about himself again. With one look at Viktor, Yuuri buried his face into his scarves more.
With a heavily gloved hand, he gestured at Viktor to follow him from the apartment.
~
They trudged down the street. Shops were closed. The roads and sidewalks were nearly impassable, and Viktor felt like they were swimming through frigid, rough waters.
Ice beat down and bit his cheeks, and he kept his hat held down over skin as best he could. Yuuri led the way, a little better at skipping over snow mounds and ice patches. He seemed to be taking Viktor nowhere particular at all; he kept stopping every so often to look around them in a frenzy. He kept having to rub the snow from his glasses. Soon, Yuuri yelled, “Look, Viktor!” into the storm and pointed up toward an apartment.
There someone had their window wide open. A woman was leaning out, staring up at the sky, a gleeful smile on her face. She looked about to leap out and try to fly, maybe to reach the source of snow itself. It was spooky.
“And there!” Yuuri said again, changing their direction.
Someone was standing outside watching around themself with an idle smile. The person was loosely dressed, with pajama pants and a loose jacket over a shirt. Their feet were buried in the snow, but Viktor questioned whether or not they wore shoes.
“They’re in a daze,” Yuuri explained. “They’re in, well -” he started to struggle for words, but Viktor filled them in.
“They’re enchanted by the snow.” He watched Yuuri’s reaction carefully.
He only nodded, a reservedness that had been slipping away in his panic returning now. “They are. They can’t do a thing about the snow beyond watch it fall.”
“ Admire it fall.” It was a needless correction, but it was out before he could stop himself. He hurried on. “What do we do?”
“Let’s head to the tentyard.” He was already about to bolt in that direction.
“Why?”
“Just come on, Viktor!”
Viktor felt a daze fall onto him; it was partially because of the situation, but also how Yuuri spoke to him like they knew one another. They may truly have let a little more of themselves slip into their performances than they’d intended.
Wreckless fool, Viktor thought of himself again as they hurried through the town. He stayed at Yuuri’s side, sometimes trailing a tad behind. The walking kept him warm against the winter. The snow was falling in smaller flakes, but they came down still with ferocity. It was hard to see and it kept them from talking much as they went.
The tentyard was the hardest to wade through. Snow blanketed in billows that piled against tents. Some tents had completely collapsed and become covered, leaving rolling hills of white.
They searched for an accessible tent until they found one with an entrance facing away from the wind. They needed a plain space to work.
Viktor was beginning to understand what they were here to do; however he wasn’t sure how it might work or function, and thought matters best not to be voiced, but felt for when the time came. Until then, he would follow Yuuri’s lead.
They collectively sighed upon breaking past the storm. Inside the tent it was calm, and a unique silence permeated the space. Viktor recalled this quietness to be like water trapped under ice. Dark, stormy, roiling, yet still.
Without an audience to fill it, the tent was a haunted place, where the ghosts of magic tinged the air and the cycle of beliefs wound and unwound left an energy weakly churning.
Yuuri was a fuzzy shape moving through the dark. “This will do fine,” he said. He removed his jacket and gloves and, though resentful, so did Viktor. But he understood it’d be easier to work without the buffer.
“I’m not sure how to do this, Yuuri.”
And to that, Yuuri gave Viktor a long and incredulous stare that was evident even in the dimness. Viktor scrambled under the notion of what he might have done wrong, or if he’d said something offensive.
When it became apparent he was not going to understand, Yuuri said, “We’ve been doing this, Viktor. You knew that, right?”
He blinked. No, they hadn’t been. They’d been adapting their magic to the experiences they underwent in each other’s tent. Just enough that it embodied the sort of silly connections children found when passing notes to their school crush.
“Viktor, you can’t conjure someone else’s magic by pure admiration,” Yuuri exasperated. “Were you not aware of your own magic at work during my performances?”
“I - No. ” His mind was whirling, picking back through the performances of the past few weeks. Had that been him pushing his magic into Yuuri’s performances? Was he that lost to their enchantment?
He couldn’t deny that sounded quite like him.
However -
“You too, then?”
“Intentionally, Viktor.” A moment of silence passed heavy in the dark. He could feel it press down with the snow draped over the tent. Then Yuuri’s composure slipped to the shadows, and he stammered, “Wait, if you didn’t know -”
His hand flew to his mouth. Through it, he said, “If you didn’t know, and it was an accident, then all of this was just me thinking I understood what was going on.” He shook his head. “Oh, this is embarrassing. All of this.”
Viktor was processing the shock that he’d pried his way into Yuuri’s magic - his clandestine, icy, incredible enchantments - all without his own knowledge. When he’d noticed the love embedded in that skyline many dreams ago, he hadn’t really thought about it. He’d gushed to himself over the idea that Yuuri had learned to show everyone the love in snow, the gentle cold.
He knew they were communicating in the tiny spaces of tents, throwing their worlds out into wordless scenes of glaciers and the warm press of someone familiar into your side. But Viktor hadn’t known exactly how they’d intertwined their space.
No wonder the world was fooled into a hallucination by snowfall.
Yuuri was still floundering before him, pallor pink despite the cold.
Viktor found his voice, then his feet; he stepped forward to breach the cavern he felt opening between them, threatening to drag all their efforts into a frozen place. “Wait, Yuuri! No, no, that’s not what’s happened.”
He resisted grabbing his wrists to keep Yuuri from stepping away from him, despite how he feared Yuuri might disappear. But then Yuuri didn’t step back. And he stayed, present, staring at Viktor with eyes wide. Waiting for Viktor to continue, he supposed. Right.
“It’s stupid in retrospect,” he started. Yuuri’s gaze felt like a million cold fractals on his skin. He tried not to think about their burn. “I knew what was happening. I just had the wrong idea about how it was happening… But I wanted it, too.” He didn’t want to finish explaining, and hoped Yuuri would understand his hesitance.
After a moment, Yuuri relaxed. He said, “Oh,” and another tiny silence rang out, full of processing and understanding. Then Yuuri smiled. It wasn’t much, but it beamed straight into Viktor’s heart and thawed the lamenting there. “We’re fools, the both of us,” Yuuri laughed. A light voice, carefree. Love and snow and gentle white sky. Viktor’s heart knocked against his chest.
“We have work to do, don’t we, Yuuri?” Viktor declared, to which Yuuri nodded once with a cute, determined sort of affirmation. He shook out his shoulders and raised his hands.
Viktor brought his own in.
For a moment there was the chill of the tent and nothing else. No snow or winter storm outside its fabrics - just the dark space inside. And then there wasn’t even that.
Viktor felt a chill not born of the storm begin to descend from the air. And then he was pulling love up from the ground.
~
They stood in a field of frosted grass and snowflakes frozen in the air all around them. It was a storm suspended in a single second. A moment that Viktor and Yuuri were trapped in.
The field was edged by trees barely visible through the stilled white flecks.
The entire world felt made of glass. If Viktor so much as breathed, it might shatter, and so he held his breath. He could feel the pieces of Yuuri’s magic now: they were interwoven with his, twined delicately as ice crystals creeping along a window pane. It was easy, like hands interlocking and falling at one’s side on a stroll. No wonder he’d never noticed before.
Yuuri created the winterscape, the ice, the crystalline beauty; Viktor grabbed the single second from the day and pushed their world inside it, creating a literal single, defining moment. The one of fairy tales and fantasies, where two characters mention being caught and wonderfully stuck and transformed.
~
It wasn’t much because it was just the two of them. But it broke a few people from their stupor, and that was enough. Viktor and Yuuri began bringing people to the tent - their joint tent, a space just for them - and showing them the field and the moment.
Then more people woke up and came, and more, and by the set of the sun, the town was awake and the storm had settled. But there was still plenty to thaw.
“We have to put our magic toward something specific,” Yuuri suggested. His voice was a sigh. They were exhausted and cold from the day. “Because as long as this is just pushing the idea of a world submersed in snow, the winter will stay.”
Viktor thought about those words while he walked Yuuri home. What could they put their magic toward?
He thought through the worlds Yuuri had taken his audiences through, and Viktor sifted through them all for his favorite parts. The moments that’d chilled him most, that’d caught his eyes with their crystal beauty.
He thought of glaciers crushing into the sea and tree branches heavy with snow.
They walked in silence through the streets. Viktor watched his boots crunch into the snow underfoot. The sound was strangely pleasing - a soft, harsh crunch, over and over. When he listened to Yuuri’s crunch across it too, he imagined a song being struck.
And then he had an idea.
~
That was how the ice lake came to be.
When Yuuri and Viktor performed, they created a space borne of both their talents. A place that only required the softer side of winter. And the audience believed in the ice lake instead of snowstorms that rendered the whole world immobile.
When the ice lake comes, people take the bladed shoes Viktor and Yuuri showed them and try to run across. Some spin, many fall.
But they love it. They love the ice.
Yuri skated up to Viktor and Yuuri on wobbly knees, hands outstretched in a desperate cling to balance. He glared. “I’ll be as good at this as you two one day,” he said. “You both just have an unfair advantage.”
Yuuri laughed. “Advantage? What might that be?” He kicked backward into a casual spin before returning to Viktor’s side. With his gloved hand, he reached out for Viktor’s. Yuri rolled his eyes at all of it and skated off.
Viktor pulled Yuuri along until they were skating lazy circles around the perimeter of the lake. Many people had turned out today. Some were getting quite good. It filled Viktor with a proud warmth to see the love shared for the ice.
Yuuri spoke staring at his feet. “I’m glad we were reckless,” he said.
“We almost froze the town to death,” Viktor said. They both laughed. But really - how had two crushing magicians managed such a mess?
Viktor stopped skating when Yuuri did. Yuuri moved to face him, grabbing his other hand. His face was pink. It reminded Viktor of when he’d run madly through the snow storm to find and drag him into saving their town.
Still so lovely. Viktor’s heart beat fast.
Yuuri managed to look him in the eyes and his heart only quickened. The cold suddenly seemed a faraway concept.
“There’s no one I would rather have almost destroyed the world, or saved it, with.” His face went a little pinker.
Viktor pulled Yuuri to him, and Viktor felt a flutter of affection in his chest as delicate and lovely as a first snow. They embraced in that place they created together: a space where love and ice meet.