Work Text:
❝ one day i'll stand with
a crown on my head ❞
-
Every now and then Yuuri remembered that quote he'd heard in school; "Two things in this life are certain; death and taxes." Back when he was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, he'd thought it was funny. Now he thought it was a lie.
Three things in this life are certain: death, taxes, and fucking shitty bosses.
"Katsuki! Do you have my damn papers yet?" Yuuri jumped when a large man slammed his hands down on Yuuri's desk, scattering his neatly arranged piles of documents and nearly spilling his coffee all over his work.
"S-sorry Mr. Harding! I'll bring them to you right away!" Yuuri stuttered out, fixing his glasses with a finger anxiously.
"It's been hours, Katsuki. How long does it take?" Harding stood up and crossed his arms. At five eleven, he was only three inches taller than Yuuri, but he seemed miles and miles and miles taller. Maybe he was standing on his wallet.
"Sorry! It's just I still have yesterday's paperwork and Rachael is sick today so I'm doing hers and-"
"I didn't ask for excuses, I asked for results. Do you even want this job?" Harding snapped. "Get it to me in the next half hour."
"What? I-"
"The next half hour, Katsuki."
The second Harding disappeared into his massive probably-cost-more-than-Yuuri-makes-in-twenty-years office, Yuuri slammed his head down on his desk. When he'd been called and told he'd gotten the job as secretary to Lance Harding, one of the richest and most powerful CEO's in the country, he couldn't believe his luck. Now he still couldn't believe his luck, but it was on the opposite end of the scale.
+++
Yuuri groaned, rubbing his neck as he tried to work out the kinks in the sore flesh and overworked muscles. He stood up from his uncomfortable desk and packed his few things into his bag, slinging it over his shoulder and waving goodbye to Yuuko, the only kind person in his workplace. She waved back at him sweetly, making him feel slightly less shitty. Slightly.
"Katsuki, there you are," he heard a familiar voice say. He stopped in his tracks, screaming internally.
"Mr. Harding, I was just going home-"
"Do me a favor and finish these for tomorrow, okay?" Harding plowed right over his words, dumping a stack of papers in Yuuri's arms the size of a New York phone book.
"Sir? I just clocked out, really, I can't-"
"Just finish them at home, easy stuff; I'll pay you overtime or whatever," Harding said, waving one hand and checking his watch on the other.
"Sir, you said that last time and I still haven't been paid-"
"Honestly, Katsuki, all you do is complain, jeez, do you even want this job?" Harding said, cocking an eyebrow.
Yuuri swallowed thickly, tossed around a few choice words he'd like to say to his boss, and swallowed again, this time crushing his pride down his throat to sit uncomfortably in his stomach. "I'll have them for tomorrow, sir."
"There's a good man," Harding said with a poster-boy smile, patting Yuuri's shoulder roughly, almost knocking the lad over.
Yuuri bit the inside of his cheek bloody.
+++
phichit☼: are u coming out for drinks tonight????
phichit☼: yuuriiiiiii u promised
phichit☼: yuuri i will cry
phichit☼: it wont b pretty
phichit☼: yuuri im warning u
phichit☼: yuuuuuuuuuuuriiiiiiiiiii where are u
yuuri♚: sorry phicit, boss gave me extra paperwork
yuuri♚: i can't make it
phichit☼: yuuri this is the 12th time u have done this to me
phichit☼: im sorry its come to this
phichit☼: but i guess i have to physically fight ur boss
phichit☼: pls be sure to come cheer me on!!
yuuri♚: phichit you're like 1/4th his size he would snap you
like a tiny, sad little twig
yuuri♚: and then i would get fired
phichit☼: Unfortunate™
yuuri♚: ahh im almost home, ill text you later
yuuri♚: probably
yuuri♚: maybe
phichit☼: ...
yuuri♚: ill text you tomorrow
phichit☼: yuuri i swear to god
phichit☼: if u blow me off again im going to fight ur boss
bc i am that amazing of a person
phichit☼: i clearly have zero (0) sense of self preservation
phichit☼: but im tiny and full of rage so i will win
yuuri♚: please dont omg goodbye phichit
phichit☼: ill win!!!
+++
Yuuri smiled to himself as he slipped his phone into his pocket, Phichit had always stuck with him through thick and thin, the short boy offering nothing but smiles and sunshine, even though Yuuri had really been blowing him off lately.
A raindrop hit Yuuri on the nose and he looked up. Raindrops started splattering against his glasses and he rolled his eyes. "Just great. Just great!" He snapped, throwing his hands up. "How many puppies did I kill in a past life?"
The sky didn't answer his question so he awkwardly pressed himself to the side of a building as the rain started pouring down in sheets of icy water. "Come on, it wasn't even cloudy this morning!" he grumbled.
He stood there for another five minutes before he realized it wasn't going to be letting up anytime soon and started concocting a plan to sprint the rest of the way home while getting the least wet possible because this was his one good suit and he really couldn't afford dry cleaning. For a couple seconds he just contemplated using his stupid boss's paperwork for an umbrella because yes, Yuuri was that petty, but decided he did, in fact, need his job, so he just sighed for what seemed like the three hundred and fifty-sixth time that day and jumped out into the rain.
"Cold, cold, cold, cold," he squealed as he ran through the rain, avoiding the puddles.
(He almost made it home without anything going wrong.)
Yuuri ducked into an alleyway for a second, plastering himself against the wall and wringing the water from his hair. He pulled his glasses off and wiped them as best as he could on his damp shirt when he heard a rustling noise and froze. "What was that," he asked himself before he remembered talking to one's self is, in fact, weird, and frowned upon in most societies. He shoved his glasses on his face and squinted in the general direction of the noise. "Hello?" he called. Fuck, I'm about to be murdered.
There was a crash as a trash can lid rolled into view and toppled over on its side. "Oh God, please be a raccoon and not a psychopathic murderer," Yuuri muttered, "I don't want to die a twenty-two-year-old virgin, that would just be lame."
He carefully picked his way over a couple trash bags and bits of cardboard and gasped. Instead of a small animal or crazy ax-murderer, there were two small boys tucked against the dirty wall. One of them, a tiny boy with what must have been beautiful blond hair when it was clean and not so dirty it was almost brown, glared at him suspiciously and placed himself directly in front of the other boy. Yuuri instantly realized that the other boy was sick; his eyes were mostly closed and his face was flushed unhealthily.
"Do you need help?" Yuuri blurted out before he could stop himself. Shut up, shut up, shut up, what are you doing?
The blond boy looked extremely confused and snapped something in an entirely different language, still hovering protectively over the other.
"Of course you don't speak English," Yuuri said, mostly to himself. "Uh, あなたは日本語を話せますか?" he said hopefully, reverting to his mother tongue. The boy looked even more confused and said something else that Yuuri understood exactly zero percent of. "Fantastic. Uh, Spanish? German? French? Russian?" At the last world the boy's eyebrows went up a hair and he started speaking even faster. Yuuri groaned. "Fuck, of course you're Russian. Okay, okay."
Yuuri fumbled with his phone for a second before awkwardly reading directly off of Google translate, "Привет, как тебя зовут?"
The boy looked so insanely unimpressed with Yuuri's horrifying attempt at speaking Russian Yuuri almost wanted to leave just to avoid the embarrassment. He said something else way too quickly for Yuuri to even dream of typing it into a translator, but his body language made it crystal clear: he wanted Yuuri to leave.
"Sorry, not happening," Yuuri said, "Uh, ваш друг нуждается медик."
The boy relaxed exactly negative two percent. Yuuri sighed.
+++
With the help of Google's less-than-perfect translator, Yuuri slowly managed to convince the boy to let him take his friend to his house, unable to call a taxi from wherever the fuck they currently were. The boy kept repeating the word "Beka," so Yuuri assumed that was the sick boy's name. That or an incredibly insulting term he was using to refer to Yuuri.
Yuuri leaned down and picked the sick boy's limp body up, noting with concern how light he was. He wasn't a tall boy, but he had broad shoulders and definitely should have weighed more than a medium sized bag of rice. "How long have you been on your own?" he asked the boy clinging onto his friend's clammy hand before mentally smacking himself. "Good job Yuuri fucking Katsuki. Pick the two kids who don't speak a scrap of English, why don't you."
The second he stepped out of the alleyway, things went from "pretty bad," to "I knew I should have stayed home today."
"Is this... hail?" he muttered, blinking against the icy pellets raining down on him. "Is it that cold?" A gust of wind cutting him straight to the bone assured him that it was indeed that cold. He looked down at the boy still holding his friend's hand. His lips were slowly turning blue. "I'm going to end up carrying them both home," Yuuri said forlornly, cursing himself for all those times he stayed home and ate katsudon instead of going to the gym like a responsible adult.
Luckily for Yuuri, he didn't end up having to carry both children at once, but it was a close call. The second he slammed the door to his ratty two-bedroom apartment shut, the boy sat down on the ground, shivering violently and spitting out words in Russian. This time Yuuri was fairly certain they were not kind words of thanks and praise. "I'm bringing him to my guest bedroom," Yuuri called out, ignoring the fact the boy couldn't understand him. He lugged the boy to his spare bedroom and laid him down on the bed. "Okay Google, what do I do for a fever?" he asked his phone sitting on the bedside table.
He was well aware of the blond's giant blue-green eyes watching his every move as he propped the boy up and forced fluids down his throat along with cold medicine, but pretended like he wasn't to try and put him at ease. It was trying to make friends with a kitten, he decided, watching the boy out of the corner of his eye as he crept slowly closer and closer, first to the door frame, then slightly inside, then a couple steps further until finally he was right beside Yuuri with his grimy sweater bunched in his small hands and his lip between his teeth.
"Would you like to shower?" Yuuri asked. Well, Yuuri's phone asked. Yuuri had taken one look at the word for 'shower' and just had the app read it aloud in its creepy robotic voice.
"Да," the boy muttered. Yuuri almost fist pumped when he recognized the word. Not that he would tell anyone that it was from an anime he watched.
Instead of replying, he pointed to his bathroom. The boy followed his gaze before awkwardly jerking downwards in a sort of bow and sprinting into the bathroom. Yuuri heard the water turn on and smiled. See? I got this. He rifled through his dresser for a t-shirt and some shorts you could tighten up really far. Most of Yuuri's shorts and jeans were able to be tightened. Losing and gaining weight easily was sort of a blessing, but mostly a curse.
The boy in his bed (Yikes that sounded wrong.) moved slightly, blearily opening his eyes. He seemed to take about four seconds to process before he jerked up so suddenly Yuuri got whiplash. He started speaking rapidly in Yuuri was assuming Russian, making Yuuri sigh. "Please tell me you speak English," he said wearily, not bothering to get his hopes up.
"Where?" the boy asked and Yuuri's heart jumped. The word was spoken very hesitantly, but it was English.
"Um, you're in my house. I'm Yuuri Katsuki. What's your name?" he said slowly.
The boy squinted at him suspiciously. "Otabek. Where... are Yuri?"
"Is that your friend?" Yuuri guessed. "Shower." He followed his statement with a gesture towards the closed door. As if on cue, the water cut off. Yuri shouted something in Russian and Otabek turned to Yuuri.
"He wants..." Otabek frowned and grabbed at his shirt. "This."
"Oh!" Yuuri grabbed the shirt and shorts (He wasn't about to offer a ten-year-old a pair of his own boxers.) and placed them outside the door. A pale hand shot out and grabbed the clothes and a couple seconds later a wet Yuri opened the door. The shirt was large enough to go down to his knees, and Yuuri almost smiled fondly before shaking his head. These were strangers, not his own damn kids.
Yuri brightened visibly when he noticed Otabek was awake. He bounced to his side and the two started conversing quickly back and forth in Russian, making Yuuri's head spin.
"Are you feeling better? I'll get you to a proper doctor tomorrow, but the roads are iced over so it's dangerous to drive," Yuuri explained from a respectful distance.
"No!" Otabek said with more emotion than he'd expressed since he'd woken up a half hour ago. "They will..." he visibly struggled to find the words before he put his hands together and yanked them apart, pointing to himself and Yuri.
"Separate you two?" Yuuri said. The two obviously didn't have parents or close relatives if they were living on the streets, so all they really had was each other.
At that moment, Yuuri made an incredibly stupid, rash decision that he was probably going to regret, but he didn't care.
"It's okay, I won't let them."
Otabek looked at him with bewilderment in his eyes. "Why?"
If only I knew, Yuuri thought dryly to himself.
And then Yuuri realized he'd left his important paperwork out in the rain. Ah, fuck.
+++
It took exactly one day for Yuuri to become attached. The next morning he called in sick, dragged the two to the nearest doctor's office that wouldn't ask too many questions and had the both of them checked out thoroughly. Otabek went home with antibiotics, Yuri with a sticker and a lollipop.
A day later Yuuri had to return to work. He didn't really expect the children to be there when he came home but was almost irrationally delighted when he came back to both children curled up on his couch napping. He'd warned Yuri not to get too close to Otabek or he would get sick too, but Yuri apparently had the immunity system of a horse, even after living on the streets.
A week later he had transformed his guest room into a room for Otabek and Yuri. Otabek finally recovered from his illness and Yuri was starting to gain weight slowly.
Two weeks later, he was forced to introduce his kids to Phichit when the man broke into his apartment to yell at him for not going out with him and came face to face with Yuri who flipped his shit. Phichit fell in love immediately, Yuri and Otabek... less so.
Two months later, Yuuri was starting to feel the pressure of being a twenty-two-year-old supporting three people, two of them still growing.
Two and a half months later, Yuuri witnessed Yuri pickpocket someone effortlessly. He was horrified, making the boy turn the wallet into the police.
[ "I was just trying to help," Yuri had grumbled.
"Crime doesn't pay," Yuri had insisted. ]
Four months later, Yuri was behind on bills, his job as a secretary to one of the richest men in the country not paying enough to support three people in a dinky apartment.
Six months after Yuuri found two dirty, underfed boys in an alleyway he broke the law for the first time.