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In almost every single cycle, it’s Victor who falls in love first.
Usually it’s Yuuri’s eyes that get him. The spark in them when he’s focused, the gleam when he’s happy, the glistening when he tears up. They are not like Victor’s, cold and quiet, like the surface of a frozen lake (though Yuuri always stubbornly disagrees with him in every lifetime he mentions it). Instead, to Victor, Yuuri’s eyes are full of life and warm, so warm. He can hardly ever resist them.
It’s a somewhat odd pattern. Yuuri typically notices Victor sooner than Victor does him, but it rarely starts with the kind of besotted infatuation Victor always finds himself tripping into very soon after he’s met Yuuri. For Yuuri, it begins more slowly, as a quiet adoration from a distance; hardly ever like the way it begins for Victor, quick and sudden and close and love.
Yuuri is never quite sure what that word really means, until he meets Victor.
Then he discovers that love is hot water he dips his toe in and quickly shrinks back from when it feels too real, until a hand grabs his and yanks him into the hot spring. That love builds with the slide of ice skates soaring up and twisting in the air, peaking when he lands and turns and he finds a bright smile waiting for him across the rink. That love is the warmth in greedy arms that slip around his waist, the heat of a breath that brushes against his ear, the glint of gold gleaming off his ring-finger.
In most of Yuuri’s cycles, love comes slowly.
Quicker with Victor, if he’s there.
He isn’t always.
There are cycles of a scholar smitten with the words of a poet who died three centuries ago, of a painter recreating strokes of two beautiful blue eyes he’s only ever seen in his dreams, of a nurse who always quietly replaces the flowers in the hospital room of a patient who will never wake up.
So mostly, whether they find each other or not largely depends on luck. But sometimes, it also depends on Yuuri, as sometimes, Yuuri turns Victor away.
Because Victor screws it up in some cycles, and in others it’s simply the circumstances that come between them.
He will ask, as he always does, again and again, “Come with me?”
“I shouldn’t,” Yuuri will sometimes say with a quiet sigh as he pulls his hand out of Victor’s, thinking of his wife and child.
“I can’t,” Yuuri will sometimes sob in Victor’s arms, terrified someone will find out.
“I refuse,” Yuuri will sometimes snap, the red mark of his hand glowing on Victor’s cheek.
Now and then Victor moves too quickly, too passionately, at the wrong time or the wrong place or both, but typically the first step and the first step only is his. The following steps are all Yuuri’s; Victor lets him decide, leaving his initial advance at Yuuri’s door like a polite invitation, happy to let Yuuri lead him through the rest.
But there are a few exceptions.
Lifetimes and universes where Victor isn’t quite right.
“Wait!” He grabs Yuuri’s wrist, too tightly, too close to desperate. “Where are you going?”
“I was…” Yuuri looks at him with wide, surprised eyes, glancing towards the door. “I was just…”
His smile borders on hysteric, voice trembling. “You’re not going to leave me, are you?”
“No.” Yuuri shakes his head wildly, Victor’s fingers on his wrist squeezing so harshly it makes him flinch. “Victor—”
“You’ll come with me?”
“Please let go,” he asks. “You’re hurting me.”
Victor doesn’t let go.
These little tragedies are uncommon in the grand scheme of things, however. Usually, they find each other just fine, and usually, it’s Yuuri who notices Victor first.
Usually.
“Playing hide-and-seek, your highness?”
Yuuri turns and finds the loveliest smile he’s ever seen in the middle of a filthy alleyway.
“How did you know?” Yuuri asks, cheeks red.
Victor grins, and tugs at the hood of Yuuri’s cloak that apparently slipped down without his notice. Yuuri blinks, then flushes brighter when he realizes it, quickly yanking the hood up and over his head again, hiding his face.
“Oh.” Victor frowns slightly, disappointed.
“What’s wrong?”
“You have very beautiful eyes, your highness,” Victor says earnestly. “May I look at them a while longer?”
“I,” Yuuri splutters, heart pounding. “I don’t… I…”
After watching him fumble with his words for a long, mortifying minute, Victor smiles fondly and asks, “Come with me?”
Yuuri rarely falls in love as quickly as he does during that cycle, but it still burns slow, because that’s simply one of the things that will never change about him. A little like how Victor always takes that first step. Endings, however, are an open question.
Usually they end it together, and they’re happy.
Sometimes they end it together, and it’s the worst kind of pain imaginable.
Pain that cuts out the light in Yuuri’s eyes when Victor dies in his arms. When he has to watch Victor breathe his last at his bedside. When he’s miles away and he gets a phone-call telling him Victor died in an accident. When he comes home one night after a fight earlier that day, holding a bouquet of flowers in his hand, only to find Victor’s blood on the carpet and a police officer telling him someone murdered his husband.
Yuuri is never quite the same in the cycles where that happens, but when his family is there, he tends to make it through despite everything.
Victor tends not to.
Victor falls apart.
Victor becomes a husk.
Whenever he finds happiness in cycles without Yuuri, it’s always a bit muted, dim. The only times he really comes to life is because of Yuuri, because living and loving for the sake of it don’t come naturally to Victor. He always has trouble seeing it on his own, until Yuuri helps him along.
“Yuuri, what are you doing?” Victor asks curiously, watching the small eight-year-old cling to the branch of a tall apple tree.
“Climbing!” Yuuri replies without looking, slowly pulling himself up.
They’re very close age this time, but it doesn’t make it any easier for Victor to understand.
“Why?”
Yuuri sits on the branch, giving him a thoughtful look. “Because I can,” he decides with a shrug. Victor approaches the tree hesitantly, peering up.
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
Yuuri shrugs again.
“Yuuri, I think you should come down,” Victor says with a worried furrow between his brows as he watches Yuuri look around the tree, then start pushing himself up to balance on the branch. “Yuuri!”
“Just wait, okay?” Yuuri calls back, not looking anywhere near as frightened of falling as Victor is, who is literal seconds away from personally climbing up the tree himself just to yank Yuuri out of it.
Yuuri, standing nearly on the tips of his toes, reaches for an apple.
“Be careful!” Victor calls anxiously, which is precisely the wrong moment to say it because Yuuri grows agitated and nervous, frowning and opening his mouth to tell him to stop when the hand balancing him slips off the trunk of the tree and he falls.
“Yuuri!”
Victor doesn’t even realize he’s moved until he suddenly feels Yuuri’s weight collide into him. Granted, Yuuri wasn’t that high up, but it still feels like he’s bruised at least a couple of his ribs as he lies on the grass with Yuuri on top of him.
“Ow.” He blinks up, Yuuri’s face coming into focus above him. “Yuuri, are you—”
“Look!”
Yuuri, with a huge smile, shoves the apple in his face.
Victor blinks. “What?”
“I got you an apple!’
Victor blinks again, still staring at Yuuri’s smile.
“You said apples were your favorite, remember? So, I got you one!” When Victor continues to stare, Yuuri’s smile falters, and he slowly lowers the apple. “Don’t you want—”
Victor pulls him into a hug, and his fingers clench into the back of his shirt.
“Thank you.”
“Oh, um, well,” Yuuri mutters into his shoulder, flustered, “you’re welcome.”
Victor sighs, and asks, “Come with me?”
“Where to?”
He pulls away slightly to look at Yuuri and smile. “Anywhere you want.”
Maybe, in a way, Yuuri does take the first step sometimes, without even knowing it.
Whichever way it happens, when they do find each other and everything is just right, the happiness and joy they find seems to make it worth all the cycles of pain and loneliness they experience—not that they know about those, but sometimes, they might catch glimpses.
Sometimes, faint dreams linger.
“Excuse me,” Yuuri says, puzzled, because he knows he’s seen those eyes before, feels like he’s painted them many times—but that’s absurd, because he has never even touched a paintbrush in his life. “Do I know you from somewhere?”
Victor slowly lowers his drink. Two strangers in a bar, and the start of some sort of pick-up line he’s heard about a hundred times before.
But something about that voice arrests him.
“We might have met,” Victor muses, a smile slipping into his lips as he turns to look at the man who addressed him, finding to his surprise that his face is—aside from being quite lovely—one that feels painfully familiar to him. “But on the unfortunate chance that we haven’t, let’s make sure. I’m Victor.”
“Yes,” Yuuri says, feeling as if he already knew, but didn’t, like a weird Schrödinger effect in his memory. He glances down at the hand extended to him, and takes it. “My name is Yuuri.”
Victor shakes his hand, glances down at a bony wrist, and there’s a flash of something that startles him into yanking his grip away. Purple bruises blooming underneath his fingertips.
“S-sorry.” Yuuri looks embarrassed, wiping down his hands on his jeans. “My palm was sweaty, wasn’t it?”
“No, that’s not…” Victor shakes his head, looking up at Yuuri’s eyes, a heavy stone sitting in the pit of his stomach. “I’m starting to think we really must have met before.”
“So it wasn’t just me,” Yuuri says, eyebrows arching in surprise, before he squints. “This might be a weird question, but um, do you… well, are you an ice skater?”
Victor tilts his head slightly. “No, I’ve never skated in my life, but…”
Hasn’t he?
He shakes his head, an ache starting to build in the back of it.
“Oh.” Yuuri stares down at his drink, letting out an awkward laugh. “I don’t even know why I asked that, anyway.”
“Are you married?”
There is an uncertain pause at the blunt question.
“No,” Yuuri replies eventually, shifting his weight nervously on the barstool. “Are… are you?”
“No, but I thought… for some reason I expected to see a ring on your finger,” Victor replies, and takes a sip of his drink. “A golden one. This is a very strange conversation.”
Yuuri makes a noise of agreement. “Do you like apples?”
“Yes.” Victor smiles. “They’re—”
“Your favorite?”
He blinks. “How did you know?”
Yuuri shakes his head, shrugs. The motion looks far too familiar on a man supposedly a stranger, like Victor has already seen him do it a thousand times before.
“We must have met before,” Victor decides. “I just can’t seem to place you.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a writer.”
“Do you write poetry?”
“Not well, I’m afraid,” Victor says cheerfully, “but I’ve tried my hand at it once or twice. It’s more likely you read one of my novels instead.”
“Yeah,” Yuuri says, squinting, and Victor can’t help but smile at how cute he looks. “Can you name some of the titles?”
“Well, you probably shouldn’t repeat this too loudly, but my most famous work is called King to Be.”
Yuuri’s mouth slackens and Victor grins boyishly.
“YOU’RE—ah, sorry,” Yuuri stammers, stopping himself from shouting when he startles the other customers sitting at the bar surrounding them. “You wrote King to Be?”
“Yes, I did,” Victor says, leaning in conspiratorially just to match the mood, and delights in watching Yuuri flush even deeper. “Did you read it?”
“Of course I read it, I love that book! It’s…” Yuuri averts his gaze, staring down into his drink again. “It’s amazing. I must have read it four times by now. I read all your other works too! They were great as well, Love Step is my second favorite, but King to Be…”
“I know,” Victor says fondly. “I don’t think I’ll ever write anything that’s going to be able to surpass it.”
“If you don’t mind, can I ask, um… what was your inspiration for it?” Yuuri glances up at him, shy and utterly adorable. “It’s just that you wrote the characters so well, especially—”
“You look a lot like him,” Victor suddenly realizes, wondering how he hasn’t seen it before. Yuuri looks bewildered.
“Huh?”
“The prince in my story,” Victor clarifies slowly, unable to tear his gaze away from Yuuri’s face. “You look a lot like the way I often imagine him in my head. If you combed your hair back…” He almost wants to reach out his hand to do just that, when he catches himself, and then starts laughing.
“Um, Victor?”
This is too bizarre.
“We probably met in a dream,” Victor decides, feeling rather dazed, much like the time Yuuri fell out of that tree and right on top of him when…
When, exactly?
When did that happen, and why is he remembering it so vividly?
“Victor?”
A sense of urgency—inexplicable, seizing his heart in a vice-like grip—takes a hold of him, and before he knows it both of Yuuri’s sweaty palms are in his own. They fit so nicely, just slightly smaller than his, and his fingers remember a touch that he shouldn’t, but he does.
“Wha-what, what are you,” Yuuri sputters, but then meets Victor’s gaze and his eyes stay there within his, connected.
They are earthy brown and full of life and warm, so warm.
“Will you come with me?”
In this cycle, Yuuri smiles back.
“Yes.”