Chapter Text
When Phichit lost his job, it was a surprise to absolutely no one. His life was focused on what he loved, which is ice skating and making friends, but the rent in Detroit was expensive and Phichit had yet to make rich friends. For now he was only blessed with an amazing roommate who agreed to lend him money.
But a long-term solution was necessary, and mooching of his best friend who had similar problems as himself was not an option. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and if he was being honest to everyone, this was something he wanted to try for a while. But not alone.
“Yuuuuri, c’mon! You just have to sign up with meee!”
“Phichit, no.”
“You don't even have to talk to anyone!”
“I'm not going to sign up on a website to search for Sugar Daddies.”
“Just for me? So we can make fun of desperate people messaging us!”
“I'm not going to sign up to humiliate people.”
“Aww, you're no fun.”
“Phichit.”
“I should have known that you wouldn't do it, guess your maiden heart does belong to Nikiforov.”
“Keep Victor out of this.”
“Oooh, you're on first name basis with him?”
Yuuri gritted his teeth.
“Okay, okay. I'll sign up, but I won't talk to any of them.”
“You’re the best!”, Phichit tackled his friend into a hug while Yuuri just sighed. He shouldn't be so easy to manipulate as soon as someone mentioned Victor.
“You owe me one.”
“Of course! I'll pay you the rent money back as soon as I got myself a daddy! Or a mommy, I guess.”
“No, as soon as you get money you will go grocery shopping, then you will put aside money for next rent and then you can slowly pay me back. No need to pay me back if you will just ask for the money again in a week.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever you say. Now c’mon you need to sign up! I already have some pics you can use!”
Yuuri resigned to his fate and opened the website Phichit picked. The front page showed an older man and a very beautiful young woman in expensive clothing enjoying their evening. Yuuri didn’t look at it any further and clicked the “Sign Up” button. The first question asked him about his gender, he clicked on the male option. The next one gave him a choice between him being a Sugar Daddy or a Sugar Baby, Yuuri relucantly clicked on the Baby option. He still felt weird doing this.
The next question asked which gender he was attracted to, this one was a bit trickier. There was no way he would want to talk to a woman on such a dating site, calling a stranger mommy would make him delete his account. Men were fine, but what about non-binary people? Wait a moment.
“Hey, Phichit?”
“Yeah?”
“What is the gender neutral term for sugar daddy?”
Both of them just stared at each other for a moment, before Phichit cautiously replied with, “Glucose guardian?”
Yuuri clicked on the “male only” option.
“Ugh, it asks me to fill out my profile.”
“Let me help! Interests? Victor Nikiforov. Hobbies? Victor Nikiforov. Favourite food? Victor Ni-”
“Phichit!”
“Haha, sorry!” he wasn’t sorry at all, “It’s just some basic things and a short About Me thing, just talk about how much you love figure skating, ballet and pole dancing and you should get enough guys interested. Oh, and don’t forget to add that you don’t want to meet them in person.”
“That’s an option?”
Phichit shrugged.
“Sure, some people I talked to got money just for talking to them and sending pictures. How else did you expect me to lure anyone in? I’m asexual, there’s no way in hell I’d be sleeping with any of them.”
“Well, I mean, you could just meet them to a dinner or something?”
“Yuuri, you’re too innocent for this world.”
Yuuri ducked his head to hide the embarrassment and finished his profile. He ended up adding pole dancing to his interests, it was one of his pastimes after all and otherwise his profile was so empty. Yep, that was totally the reason.
A glance at the time told him that he had to get ready for his job.
“Anyway, gotta go to work. See you later!”
“Yeah, just rub it in that I was fired.”
“That’s not what I-”
“I’m just joking, Yuuri! C’mon get going!”
When Yuuri came back, Phichit was sitting on his own bed with a box of pizza next to him.
“Yuuri! Welcome back! Dude, this is amazing, I mentioned to two of them that I didn’t have dinner yet and three people gave me money to order something!”
“Three?”
“Yeah, the last one didn’t even ask before sending the money.”
Yuuri was impressed, he knew his friend was very good at sweet-talking people and making flattering pictures, which were basically the most important skills if you weren’t going to meet up with them, but not that good. Phichit has found his calling and by the way he grinned he was well aware of it.
“You should check out if you got messages, too! Some of them send money pretty early.”
Yuuri went to grab his laptop and sat down next to his roommate. Phichit offered him a slice of pizza while they waited for the computer to boot up. Yuuri looked at his friend’s screen to remember the name of the website, went to LoveLikeSugar.com and logged into his account.
Eight new messages. That were about eight more messages than he expected.
“Open theeeeem.”
Half of them were a simple “hi” or a “how are you?”, one message just flat-out asked for nudes (“Wow, just one? I’ve got so many of them by now.”) and the rest simply ignored what he stated on his profile and asked to meet him. Yuuri didn’t reply to any of them.
Phichit didn’t bother him about it, he did say that he only wanted Yuuri to sign up with him, not that Yuuri was required to participate. He just leaned on Yuuri while chatting with some people on the website.
Yuuri spent some time reading the papers assigned for class until a reminder went off. He went to a fanpage for Victor and clicked on the livestream link posted there.
“Oh, is the exhibition skating today?”
Yuuri nodded while looking intensely at the stream, another figure skater was skating right now. Yuuri didn’t recognize him, but he had to be good to skate that late during the event. Victor was the last one for the evening and he set the reminder to go off a few minutes before he started.
“Dude, that’s so close! You could have gone there!”
“Mhm,” Yuuri just made an affirmative sound while still watching the man skate. His jumps were good, Yuuri needed to pay more attention to those.
“Didn’t you plan on going there? You even saved money- oh.”
“It’s okay, Phichit.”
“That’s why you had money that you could lend to me.”
“Phichit, really, it’s fine.”
“You should have told me! You talked about this for months and I forgot!”
“And what? Watch you get thrown out because you can’t pay rent? There will be other chances to see Victor, it’s okay.”
Phichit knew that Yuuri was sad about not being able to see his idol skate in person, but there was nothing he could do about it now. He hugged his friend tightly and made sure to pay close attention to Victor’s routine. Yuuri would talk about it for days and Phichit wanted to make sure that he would be able to keep up.