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There's snow in Bulgaria. Of course there's snow in Bulgaria. A stupid thought to have, but stupid fragments of thoughts tend to abound while one is running for one's life.
The snow Yuri for some reason didn't picture in Bulgaria, squeaks and crunches under his rapidly flying feet, which is much better than if it slides and sloshes.
“Come back here, you little shit!”
Voices, harsh, deep voices bark in Russian from far too close behind him. Risking a look brings a host of fluttering black shapes into view. Like giant, angry ravens their beady eyes and hammer beaks are fixed on him. Turning back to his escape attempt, Yuri faces the peril of fording an urban river, not a real one but a mass of snow transformed into a wide ribbon of black sludge by muggle automobiles. His feet will only touch it two or three times in the crossing, but once is enough for them to traitorously slip and cast him face first into the muck. Across the road is another bank of pure white, extending into a field of deep snow bordered by the living skeletons of trees. The men chasing him have greater trouble with snow then he does. There's nothing for it but to cross the slushy road.
It's not the first step, but the second which trips him up, sludge concealing a patch of black ice, casting him off balance into a slow motion, windmilling stumble.
“Ah!” He shouts, even as he devises a way to keep going. A muggle car sits directly in front of him, hibernating under a blanket of snow, presenting its moulded plastic flank. Faking a brutal crash into it, he bounces off, turning to face his pursuers, their arms outstretched to grab and snatch, their eyes wide, lips thin or yellow teeth bared. They have yet to arrest their speed, and charge at full tilt across the road, seemingly heedless of the car, thinking only of their pay…
“Got ya!-”
A crack says that no, they do not have him, and where a young man stood, there is now nothing but the hard side of a car, which his pursuers crash into for real, colliding with each other and falling to the ground, getting tangled up and hurting each other in their fury. Breaking glass, the screech of a car alarm, and enraged shouting follows. Muggle voices join in the cacophony while Yuri reappears on the other side of the field, taking off towards a brutalist Socialist apartment slum as they exist in Russia, but even worse somehow, its asymmetrical dimensions setting the soul on edge.
Why don't they apparate? Or cast something to stop him in his tracks? Fear of the Bulgarian Ministry, that’s why. They're not here legally, unlike him, or else they would do whatever they wanted, as they do back home.
Wandering the slum and its insane architecture eventually obscures his trail enough for Yuri to return to the side of the city he actually stays in, a nice part, although not the nicest. That would be dangerous in itself. Dropping his guard does not occur even after apparating into an alley several streets down from the apartment he shares with his best friend of a decade. Muggles pass by as he stands invisible at the mouth of the alley checking for pursuit, checking for eyes and figures that linger slightly too long. Ideally he would not still be in Europe, not be so close to the ravenous Bear up north, but ideal reality is not a thing.
Viktor isn't home when he gets in, but Viktor is rarely home, either at his Sofia apartment or at his family's home far from the capital. A lack of freedom and free time - consequences of being wanted by the world and driven by an all-possessing genius. Hours of zeroing in on the tiniest noises await Yuri, this despite the fact that very few people are in on the secret of where the world's most valuable quidditch player makes his nest.
Early in the morning a key turns in the door, and Yuri's eyes unglaze. He'd been dozing, as he realises, horror making his bones tingle. But it is ‘only’ Viktor, arriving home from a long day of being talented and famous. In the hallway the exhausted pair hug like they're meeting up after surviving the Battle of the Somme. Yuri asks about his fellow Durmstrang alumni’s day, but carefully avoids mentioning his own. Pointlessly, as friendship comes with a sort of enhanced intuition generated by friends placing part of their hearts in another's body, and Viktor knows the jist without being told.
"They're going to beat me to within an inch of my life when they catch me.” Yuri says, after the superstar drags the whole story out of him.
Turning away towards a brass topped bar always kept fully stocked, Viktor play-acts a man much older than himself, mixing drinks with the ease of long practice. His murky reflection dances through the gold metal. “If. They won't. You're too quick and clever for them.”
Falling into a seat at the bar, Yuri rests his face in his hands, hands cut up from cold and close scrapes, unlike Viktor's. “Hmm. Your optimism is appreciated, Vitya. But you don't really know my father. Not like I do. You can't steal from him and expect to get away with it. He'll screw you over eventually. Now or twenty years from now.”
Viktor pushes a drink across the bar counter, a drink mixed stronger than usual. “We’ll make it, Yura. I swear. I need to become more valuable on the quidditch market, that's all. I must win the World Cup. Then no one will dare mess with me and mine ever again.”
You want to exchange a steel cage for a gold one, thinks Yuri. But he doesn't say so, picking up his drink with a shaking hand and trying to tip what is more or less pure vodka into his mouth without sloshing half of it across the bar.