Chapter Text
St. Petersburg was dazzling beneath them. The city lights were bright. Viktor’s eyes were bright. His hair was silver. His eyes were blue. His suit was aubergine.
“It’s beautiful,” Yuuri said, meaning Viktor and not the restaurant.
“I can’t believe it’s so empty tonight,” he added, meaning the restaurant and not Viktor.
“Oh, I didn’t tell you?” asked Viktor, gazing deeply into Yuuri’s eyes, which were brown, “I reserved the whole restaurant. I didn’t want anything to distract us from each other tonight.”
—My Heart of St. Petersburg, chapter 8, by nikiforovforever14. Published 2005.
The night after Yuuri fails Japanese Nationals, he gets drunk and maudlin and decided to look at old pictures of Vicchan. Not Kyushu Beast drunk, since he doesn’t want anyone to recognize Japan’s disappointment, Katsuki Yuuri, buying beer at the convenience store and is therefore limited by the hotel minibar, but just drunk enough for the part of his brain he usually reserves for common sense to cease all activity.
So here he is, scrolling through messages from his parents in the hopes of finding pictures of Vicchan he hadn’t cried over already, getting drunker and sadder with each one.
Here was Vicchan playing in the snow, Yuuri’s mom’s thumb blurring the edge of the photograph. Yuuri takes a deep breath, ready to let it out in a giant, hitching sob—
No, wait, he’s seen this one before. Yuuri scrolls up, but, disappointingly there’s no Vicchan, just “the weather report in Detroit is very cold today, please wear more clothes” and “Yuuko and Takeshi came to visit.”
He doesn’t want to see pictures of Yuuko and Takeshi. He wants to see pictures of his dog.
There’s nothing in his old messages, he’s gone through his entire photo gallery already, and he barely uses social media. There’s nothing new for Yuuri to see, and it’s almost like there’s nothing left of Vicchan at all.
Wait. Didn’t he use to have a different email account? Yuuri hasn’t used it since high school, but he used to send photos of Vicchan to Yuuko when she went off on vacation, and to Mari the one summer she went to Tokyo to find herself. He’d changed it once he started really seriously winning in Junior’s and realized it was embarrassing to tell people his email was “nikiforovforever14,” and it’s been long enough that he doesn’t remember his password at all.
When Yuuri tries to reset his password, the first security question asks him for the name of his best friend. He types “Yuuko,” but it doesn’t work, and Yuuri has no idea who else would count. He refreshes the page. Favorite teacher—how the hell is he supposed to remember this stuff? Refresh. Now he has “first pet,” and this he can’t get wrong. He types it carefully, V-i-c-c-h-a-n. He’s in.
His inbox is stuffed full of spam, promotions from the Nintendo listserv, coupons for electronics he’d never buy and a wall of emails from Fanfiction.net. Yuuri opens one at random, a comment from someone called victor_katsuki:
Wow! Their carriage ride is so romantic! Even though you can’t ride a horse in the street in Russia, maybe they’re on the sidewalk? I swooned when Yuuri told Victor he’d always be his prince!
Wait, what? Yuuri clicks the story link, navigates to the latest chapter, reads a couple lines:
Viktor’s heart was crying silently. His eyes were crying silently as he clasped the younger man to his chest.
“Oh, Yuuri,” he said, stroking Yuuri’s cheek with a hand, his arm around Yuuri’s waist, his hand running through Yuuri’s hair.
“Even though you’ve lost your memories of me,” Viktor whispered, a single tear falling from his cheek to land on Yuuri’s forehead, “Our hearts will always be entwined. Our fates will always be entwined.
“You see, Yuuri, you’re carrying my child.”
Yuuri grabs blindly for his last, precious, can of beer, and downs what’s left of it one large gulp. His face is flushing red, and it’s not just because of the alcohol. My Heart of St. Petersburg. He’d forgotten about My Heart of St. Petersburg.
He’d started writing as a way to improve his English. Even at twelve, he knew he’d have to go overseas someday if he wanted to compete at the highest level, so he’d paid extra attention in English class at school and started buying workbooks when he could spare the pocket money.
Except when it came to sentence practice, it was much easier to keep motivated with sentences like Viktor’s eyes are as blue as the ocean than it was with sentences like the paint on the car is as blue as the ocean.
And once he’d started, he couldn’t stop, filling workbooks and workbooks with:
“Yuuri,” Viktor said, holding a hand out to his competitor, “Although you only got silver this time, ultimately I was impressed by your skating.”
Viktor’s was not only Yuuri’s competitor, but also his friend.
“After the competition,” Viktor said, “We can eat either Chinese or Italian food.”
And suddenly he’d found he was writing paragraphs, then whole chapters of a fictional Victor who’d decided to become a fictional Yuuri’s friend.
Yuuri has no idea what possessed him into putting it online.
It’s his dark past. No, worse than his dark past, his eternal shame. He wants to go hide in a hole, he wants to blast the entire internet off the face of the earth, he wants to travel back in time and personally break every single pencil he’s ever owned.
He clicks another of the emails, victor_katsuki’s comment on chapter 78:
Sick Yuuri is so cute! I’m glad he has Victor to take care of him, do you have a recipe for the porridge? I wonder who takes care of Yuuri when he’s sick now, he has his coach but he’s so far away from his family and really there’s no substitute for something made with love.
Yuuri remembers writing that, kind of, fictional-Yuuri’s trembling, feverish mind, Victor’s hand cool on his forehead. Stupid, really, and embarrassing, like all his adolescent romantic fantasies, but that part was actually pretty good.
Another comment, chapter 56 this time:
I can’t believe Victor’s maid hid Yuuri’s letter to him! They better find each other again at World’s—Victor’s so nervous, I can’t wait till they see each other again! Actually, is there a way to see if someone’s letters are getting lost in the mail? Maybe the post office would know.
When he was a kid, Yuuri’d written eighty-four chapters of My Heart of St. Petersburg. victor_katsuki’s commented on every one.
Yuuri may have been the one who’d written it, but what kind of person likes this stuff, anyway? He’s pretty sure the plot is terrible, it’s full of the most self-indulgent, unrealistic scenarios ever possible, and he started it when he was fourteen, so his English couldn’t have been anywhere near fluent.
He reaches for his last beer, tries to pour it down his throat, drops it at the foot of his hotel bed once he realizes he’d already drained it earlier. Mouse shaking slightly, Yuuri opens the tab with his old fanfic back up again and navigates the chapter one. He’s going to read it. He’s going to read the whole thing.
Chapters one through seven he mostly skims. Victor doesn’t even show up till chapter two, and Yuuri waiting for his competition to start takes up five whole chapters. It’s all just longing glances and loving depictions of Victor’s hair until chapter eight, where Yuuri impresses Victor with his short program and they go to dinner together. Jackpot.
Most of the rest of it is—how’d he even write eighty-four chapters of this crap? Yuuri and Victor go to whatever landmarks his teenaged self had felt like Googling that weekend, hopping around Europe, blithely unconcerned with real-life travel time or weather conditions, to pick apples and sunbathe and ski. By chapter twenty, his younger self had finally run out of ideas and started making stuff up in earnest:
Elizabeth drew her hand back, fire in her eyes, her curls bouncing like bouncing balls.
“How dare you talk to me like that! I’m Viktor’s fiancée!”
SMACK!
The sound of her slap was loud. But Yuuri hadn’t felt anything. He opened his eyes, gasping. Viktor had blocked the slap at the last minute!
Viktor turned around nobly and gathered Yuuri into his arms. His whole cheek was read, but he still looked beautiful.
“Yuuri,” he said worriedly, “Are you okay?”
No, he isn’t. No, the real Yuuri’s not okay, because he’s so embarrassed he wants to die. It’s all coming back to him, now. Elizabeth—he remembers Elizabeth, he’d copied her from one of the old shoujo manga his mom had bought way back in the seventies. Victor’s hot older brother Dmitri, who Yuuri’d written in because he thought it’d be nice for Victor to have a rival, too, but then he’d gotten bored of him and killed him off in chapter fifty-four. The entire butler plotline, fuelled entirely by the sight of Matsuoka Satoshi from class 2 at the school festival.
It’s all too shameful to even think about, but… Yuuri clicks “Next Chapter.” It’s too late, now. He can’t look away.
The Dmitri arc doesn’t break him. Nor do any of the numerous scenes of Victor’s lips almost meeting his own, or the revelation that Victor is actually a member of the Russian aristocracy, descended directly from the lost princess Anastasia, whose movie Yuuri had watched that weekend. The pregnancy arc
(“But I’m a man!” Yuuri cried, staring at the silverette beside him in shock.
“We didn’t know it at the time, my constellation,” said Viktor, clutching Yuuri closer to him, a single tear escaping from his perfect azure eye, “But my ex-fiancee, Elizabeth, is also a member of the secret R&D branch of the KGB…. The last time she visited, she genetically modified you in your sleep!”)
Makes Yuuri roll over, his hands hiding his face, and scream silently into a pillow, but he keeps reading anyway.
What really breaks Yuuri is a competition scene, surprisingly realistic compared to the entire rest of the story. The fictional Yuuri skates to a program he choreographed himself, set to the last song Dmitri composed before his untimely death. Yuuri spins like a demon. He pours emotion into every moment of the program, not forgetting the story he wants to tell for even a single second. He skates clean, landing every jump perfectly, including two quad flips in the middle of the program.
Yuuri reads the chapter over twice, trying to remember how it felt to be able to hope he’d do so well, then closes out the tab and goes back to victor_katsuki, who only says nice things.
Yuuri never actually read any of the comments on My Heart of St. Petersburg when he was younger, but it’s nicer than he thought it would be, seeing victor_katsuki react to every ridiculous event, exclaiming on even the silliest romantic scenarios with delight. The longest comments are when victor_katsuki decides to go on tangents and speculate on Yuuri’s probably favorite food, or whether he’d look better in forest or hunter green, or if he’d be impressed by Victor’s nice apartment and collection of gold medals. After one spectacularly long comment analyzing Yuuri’s fashion sense (he always looks incredible in his skating costumes, but, really, that tie), victor_katsuki writes:
Of course in my fanfic Yuuri wears a tuxedo, but he hasn’t been photographed in one yet, which is really very disappointing.
Another shock It was surprising enough that someone that wasn’t himself at fourteen liked his awful Victor Nikiforov/Katsuki Yuuri fanfic. Yuuri is a nobody in terms of international skating, barely any online presence and only one spectacular failure of a Grand Prix Final under his belt. What could make anyone look at him and decide that he had any kind of romantic future with Victor Nikiforov?
victor_katsuki doesn’t have anything on his fanfiction.net account, but a quick search of the username reveals a first chapter on another website:
Beguiled by the Black-haired Beauty
Brilliant scientist Victor Nikiforov is missing something in his life, but then he meets a mysterious man! Who is Yuuri Katsuki, the enigmatic Agent 009?
The story opens with Victor Nikiforov staring at a tablet, thinking about contemporary geopolitics and some sort of doomsday advice—Yuuri scrolls past this, slowind down only when Victor steps into the shower to think about how lonely he is, water running in rivulets down his muscled spine. Victor thought about the cold liquid being replaced by a lover’s caress. He knew not how it felt to have a lover care for him, truly, and be cared for in return. All he had known was empty pleasure. Empty… like his life!
Now this is the good stuff. Yuuri settles further back into his bed, propping himself up with a pillow so he can squint at his laptop without actually having to raise his neck. Victor’s shower scene goes on for a little while, then he steps out with only a towel wrapped around his waist (promising) and looks out onto his balcony to see a man with hair like raven’s feathers, tousled over piercing eyes the color of old oak, made opaque by the sheen of glass.
Victor took a step back, shaken by the man’s beauty as much as he was by his sudden appearance. He had not lost all his faculties, however: he snatched his 9 x 18 mm Makarov from under his pillow, pointing it at the man with unerring aim.
“Who are you?”
“I suppose you deserve to know at least that much,” murmured the mysterious man, running his hand through his ebony locks, “My name’s Katsuki. Yuuri Katsuki.”
Yuuri Katsuki. Victor savored the name, the long, musical vowels, soft in the raven-haired man’s low voice, and the harsh staccato shock of the k.
“Victor Nikiforov,” Victor answered, stepping out into the cool night air, “But I think you know that already.”
“Who wouldn’t?” mused the smaller man. He was unconcerned by the gun pointed at his head, unintimidated by Victor’s steely gaze. His hands wandered over to his tuxedo shirt (Versace, Victor noted, the bow tie already half-undone, the jacket nowhere to be seen) and then popped open a button, then another, revealing the smooth plane of his chest, silvery in the moonlight. Victor watched avidly, his gun unconsciously following Yuuri’s fingers as they revealed first his collarbone, then nipples hardened into points by the cold, then the first hints of toned abdomen.
Victor collected himself with a start, swinging his gun back towards Yuuri’s head.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded, and, to that, Yuuri only smiled. He shrugged out of his shirt, easily, exposing a long swathe of golden-brown skin, then walked up to Victor, uncaring of the Makarov held by Victor’s trembling hand, and draped his shirt gently over Victor’s shoulders.
“You look so cold,” Yuuri breathed, “Standing there all by yourself.” Something flashed in his amber eyes—sympathy, or perhaps understanding—but it was gone too soon for Victor to see what it was. He raised a hand to cup Victor’s jaw, stroked a thumb across Victor’s cheekbone as if wiping away a tear that Victor hadn’t shed. Victor closed his eyes instinctively, leaning into Yuuri’s touch.
When the heat of Yuuri’s hand disappeared, Victor’s eyes slammed open, but he saw nothing except the moon shining bright above him.
It was only later that he discovered that the files were gone. Yuuri Katsuki had stolen Victor’s documents—and his heart.
Yuuri scrolls up just to make sure he hadn’t gotten the names wrong. What the hell did he just read? Stripping in public, flirting shamelessly with his idol—it all sounds a lot more like something Chris would do, not him! Seriously, this is why he doesn’t interact with his fans very much. They always get it completely wrong.
Though… the part where Victor was in the shower was pretty good. And even though he’d never be able to do it real life, Yuuri likes the idea of putting his shirt around Victor’s shoulders, stroking his thumb across Victor’s cheek.
He can’t use alcohol as an excuse. By now, he’s mostly sober, the haze of beer overtaken by the haze of sleep, so he only has himself to blame when he clicks the comment box on victor_katsuki’s fanfic and writes:
Thank you for your comments on my story. I liked yours, even though your Yuuri is a bit more bold than he might be in real life. Victor seems very lonely in this. I hope he and Yuuri can become friends.
Yuuri closes the window as soon as he comments, not quite daring to think about victor_katsuki’s possible reply. He hasn’t been nikiforovfan14 for almost a decade. He’s not quite sure how it feels.
Now the only tab left open is his own fanfic, still on the paragraph where he lands the quad flip.
Yuuri stares at it for a little too long, thinking about the Yuuri in victor_katsuki’s story and the Yuuri in his own. Someone out there thinks he’s the kind of person who could charm Victor Nikiforov with a glance. They’re wrong, obviously, an anonymous fan who doesn’t know Yuuri at all, but there once was a time when Yuuri thought the same way himself.
There once a was a time when Yuuri saw nothing but brightness in his future, programs skated clean, choreography beautiful, quad flips landed perfectly every single time.
Yuuri doesn’t remember what it’s like to believe that much in himself, but he’s going to try that quad flip tomorrow, and the day after, again and again until he finally gets it right. Just for the sake of the Yuuri who once wrote My Heart of St. Petersburg, he wants to see if it can be done.
Yuuri’s theme this season was, ‘Enchantment’, and he had no problem skating the emotion in his short program. He poured his feelings for Victor into the skate—every happy memory, every precious moment. Each stroke of his skates represented a kiss they had shared.
His costume was silver with blue rhinestone flowers on his side. Viktor had ordered it custom-made. The rhinestones were as blue as Viktor’s eyes. The silver fabric shone like Viktor’s hair.
Yuuri spun into a perfect quad salchow! Then, as the music rose, an Ina Bauer, and then, as the music came to a crescendo, he leapt into the air!
“A quad flip!” cried the announcer, “No—a combination! Two quad flips in a row! I can’t believe it! The skater who has done the impossible—Japan’s champion, the world’s champion, Katsuki Yuuri!”
—My Heart of St. Petersburg, chapter 64, by viktorfan43. Published 2008.