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Victor loved taking care of Yuuri.
He wasn’t exactly sure where the impulse came from. During his first few months in Hasetsu, Victor guiltily suspected that he only liked taking care of Yuuri because it gave him an excuse to get closer to him. Yuuri would shy away from Victor’s touch if it didn’t have a purpose behind it, but as long as there was a reason, Yuuri wouldn’t protest. So on those many, many occasions when Victor’s heart was full to bursting with love for Yuuri, instead of throwing his arms out for a hug and risking rejection, he channeled the feeling into smaller gestures instead. He would brush Yuuri’s hair out of his eyes, massage a kink out of his shoulders, unlace Yuuri’s skates for him at the end of a long practice. Every time Victor helped Yuuri into a deep stretch during warm-ups, it was a mixture of bliss and agony: their bodies pressed tightly together, Yuuri’s lean back straining against Victor’s chest, the exposed nape of his neck just begging for Victor to kiss it.
But then the time came when Victor didn’t have to channel away those feelings anymore. If his heart was full to bursting with love, he could wrap his arms around Yuuri and Yuuri would hug him back, would lift his head up so Victor could kiss him. Victor didn’t need to be sneaky anymore. He could fall asleep with Yuuri in his arms and wake up hours later to find him still there, the weave of his shirt faintly imprinted into Victor’s skin.
But the urge to take care of Yuuri didn’t fade away as their relationship deepened. If anything, the urge grew stronger. Now he could wash Yuuri’s hair when they showered together, or give him a full-body massage at the end of the evening in their bed. “You don’t have to,” Yuuri sometimes said, as if he couldn’t quite believe Victor enjoyed it as much as he said. But Victor did. It gave him a genuine thrill to kneel down at Yuuri’s feet and tie up the laces of his skates, gauging the tension and adjusting it as he went, until Yuuri’s expression told him he had gotten it exactly right.
But by the second trimester of Victor’s pregnancy, he was starting to have trouble taking care of Yuuri the way he wanted to. His growing belly meant he couldn’t help Yuuri with his stretches anymore, and kneeling down to tie up Yuuri’s skates became difficult enough that Yuuri made him stop trying. “You don’t have to do all those things for me,” Yuuri said as they walked home from the rink, his arm wrapped tight around Victor, who was very ostentatiously sulking. “I should be the one taking care of you right now.”
Even in the middle of his sulk, Victor couldn’t stop himself from pressing a kiss to the side of Yuuri’s head. “You are taking care of me,” he said grumpily. “I just miss all the things I can’t do anymore.”
After spending 30 years of his life assuming, quite reasonably, that he could never get pregnant, Victor hadn’t been mentally prepared for the lifestyle changes involved in carrying a baby. No more skating—or drinking—or raw foods—or being the big spoon when he and Yuuri were lying together in bed. His first-trimester nausea had switched to second-trimester heartburn, and his inability to skate meant Victor was exercising far less than he used to. It wasn’t just his belly that was getting rounder. “Damn, you’ve really let yourself go,” Yuri said at the rink one day, when Victor made the mistake of wearing a sweater that was a little too form-fitting. “You’ve only been retired for six months! What the fuck happened to you?”
Victor said, without guile, “I wished for a baby on a magic flower and now I’m pregnant.”
Yuri gave him an extremely stony look. “Sorry I fucking asked,” he said, and stormed off.
No one at the rink other than Yuuri knew the truth of the situation. Everyone else just assumed Victor was indulging himself after two decades of healthy diet plans. It made him feel a little lonely, because he wanted to shout the truth from the rooftops: that he was carrying an impossible life inside him, half Yuuri’s and half his, and even though she was currently only the size of a pear, Victor loved her so much that his feelings for her could fill up an Olympic ice rink. On the night of her conception, Victor had dreamed about her, and when he closed his eyes he could still picture her perfectly: her silvery-light hair, her chubby cheeks, her nose and chin matching Yuuri’s exactly. She was the most beautiful thing in the world. When Victor was by himself he would talk to her, endlessly, in Russian and English and his rudimentary Japanese, so she would be ready for all the languages spoken in the Katsuki-Nikiforov household. He even tried to teach her the language of figure skating; whenever Yuuri was out on the ice, Victor would stand by the boards and give her a running commentary. “Look at your papa,” he said to her one day, as he watched Yuuri run through that season’s short program. “That’s the sixth time in a row he’s fallen on that quad Lutz, and he still won’t take it out of his program. What are we supposed to do with such a stubborn papa?”
Even though he’d been talking to her constantly for weeks, Victor had never gotten any indication that she was listening. But just then, he felt something he’d never felt before: a tiny little flutter, deep inside him.
Victor’s hands flew to his belly in shock. “Bunny, was that you?” he asked, looking down.
He felt it again: the lightest, faintest little flicker of sensation. “Oh!” he said, and a lump started to rise up in his throat. She was listening. She was there. “Hi there, my darling!”
He heard the sharp slice of Yuuri’s skates on the ice, and looked up to see Yuuri coming towards him, drenched in sweat and rubbing his hip. “I know, I know, I fell on the quad Lutz again,” Yuuri panted. “But I know if I keep working at it, I can—”
“Yuuri!” Victor said, his voice shaky. “She moved!”
Yuuri’s eyes went wide. “She did?”
He leaned over the boards, and Victor took his hands and pressed them tight against his belly. “I don’t know if you’ll be able to feel it, it was so small,” Victor said. “Bunny, do it again!”
But the two little flutters seemed to be the extent of her calisthenics for the day. After a full minute of coaxing, the two of them gave up, a little crestfallen. “She’s being stubborn, like her papa,” Victor said. “Who doesn’t even need that quad Lutz to have a base value above Yurio’s in the short program.”
Yuuri leaned in and gave Victor a kiss. “You wouldn’t take it out if it were your program,” Yuuri said. “She has two stubborn papas, you know.”
He skated back out to center ice to run through his program again. Victor cupped his hands back over his belly with a sigh. “Oh, he’s right,” he told her. “If you take after both of us, you’re going to be the stubbornest little girl in the world.”
They hadn’t settled on a name for her yet, so they peppered her with Russian terms of endearment: bunny, kitten, my darling, my sunshine. On mornings when Yuuri got up early to go for a run, it filled Victor with indescribable delight to hear Yuuri whisper goodbyes to both of them: “Bye Vitya,” with a kiss pressed against Victor’s cheek, and “bye little mouse,” with a soft caress of his hand over Victor’s belly. The sweetness of it helped take the sting out of the fact that Victor could no longer pace Yuuri on his runs anymore—he got too breathless and tired to be of any help. In fact, the list of things Victor could do for Yuuri just kept dwindling as the weeks went on: Yuuri eventually put the kibosh on the after-practice massages Victor sometimes gave him, after Victor’s lower back started hurting from leaning over for too long. “Vitya, you should just focus on taking care of yourself,” Yuuri said, as Victor lay sulking on the couch with a heating pad under his back. “I’ll be fine.”
“But I like doing it,” Victor said. “Can I at least give you a foot massage?”
Yuuri hesitated. “Yuuri,” Victor said, letting his voice fill with tragedy. “You wouldn’t take foot massages away from me, would you?”
It was probably only the knowledge that Victor enjoyed giving them as much as Yuuri enjoyed receiving them that made Yuuri relent. The two of them settled down on the couch together with Yuuri’s sore feet in Victor’s lap, and Victor began to rub them. The angle was slightly more difficult to navigate with the growing swell of his belly getting in the way. It was tenting the front of his sweater more prominently than it had been just a few days ago. “I’m going to need to visit my tailor again,” Victor said. “My clothes aren’t doing much to hide things anymore. I keep catching people staring at me at the rink.”
Yuuri’s forehead creased with concern. “Oh, it’s all right,” Victor amended quickly. Staring didn’t really bother him; after two decades of media attention, he was inured to it. “It’s partly my fault. I’ve been running choreography ideas past our little kitten while you’re out on the ice, and it makes me look like I’m talking to myself.”
Yuuri’s look of concern turned slightly teasing. “So the two of you have been talking about me behind my back?”
“Oh, yes, we do that all the time,” Victor said. “I was just talking to her earlier about the color scheme for your free skate costume. I told her you were thinking it should be black and red, but she was arguing pretty strongly for burgundy and gold.”
Her preferences, by wild coincidence, happened to line up perfectly with Victor’s. Yuuri sighed, and his voice slipped into that cute cadence he always got when he talked to the baby. “Burgundy’s not my color, bunny,” he said.
For the last few weeks, Victor had periodically felt that tiny flutter in his belly, little movements and rearrangements. But when Yuuri said bunny, Victor felt something new: an honest-to-goodness thump, like she had just kicked him from the inside. He looked over at Yuuri, wide-eyed. “She’s kicking!” Victor said.
Immediately Yuuri reversed his position on the couch, crowding in close to Victor, and Victor took his hands and held them against his belly. They waited for half a minute in breathless suspense, but she didn’t kick again. “Come on, sweetheart,” Victor wheedled. “Your papa’s going to think I’m making it up.”
“How about this?” Yuuri said. “Bunny, if you kick again, I really will pick burgundy and gold for my free skate costume.”
There was a moment of stillness. Then, as clear as anything, Victor felt another tiny, distinct thump. “Oh!” Yuuri gasped. “I felt it!”
The look of excitement on his face sent a dizzying wave of happiness through Victor. He knew it was harder for Yuuri to conceptualize the reality of her: he hadn’t seen her in his dreams, or felt her flitting movements inside of him. But this was undeniably real. Yuuri wriggled down onto his stomach on the couch and pressed his cheek against Victor’s belly, saying something low and sweet in Japanese, and again Victor felt their perfect, beautiful daughter land a surprisingly aggressive little kick against the inside of his womb. “What did you say to her?” Victor asked.
“That I’m going to look hideous during my free skate this season,” Yuuri said, “but a promise is a promise.”
She kicked three more times over the next few minutes, as Yuuri pressed soft kisses against the taut skin of Victor’s belly and murmured to her in a sing-song jumble of English and Japanese. Victor was fluent in three different languages, but he didn’t have any words to express how he felt as he sat there, stroking Yuuri’s hair, watching as his husband and their daughter had their very first conversation together. It seemed impossible to think that Victor was sitting in the same quiet apartment he’d lived in for over a decade, alone, dully going through the motions of life in between his moments of glory on the ice. It seemed impossible to think that the universe had gifted Victor with not just one, but two people to take care of, with every ounce of strength and love in his heart.
When the little kicks finally subsided into stillness, Yuuri maneuvered himself back up on the couch and clung to Victor, burying his face in the curve of Victor’s neck. His eyes were wet. “Vitya,” he said, his voice shaky, bewildered, marveling.
Victor wrapped his arms around Yuuri and squeezed him tight. “Don’t cry, my Yuuri,” he said. “I swear you look wonderful in burgundy.”
Yuuri gave an unexpected snort of laughter, and then his hands were on Victor’s face, drawing their lips together in a deep, fervent, head-spinning kiss. "The two of you are a dangerous pair," Yuuri said. "You could convince me to do anything."
Victor dropped a hopeful kiss onto his cheek. "Let me give you a real massage now?"
"Well," Yuuri said dryly. "Almost anything."