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He first meets Yuri when he is twelve, almost thirteen. He is hunched over, heaving from the strenuous exercise that Yakov made them do, and he looks up to try again when he sees him. He must be ten at the oldest, and is without a doubt the best student in that room. Otabek never pays much attention to the other students, but this time he looks at this boy, who manages to complete the exercise he’s been struggling with effortlessly.
And then the boy’s head turned to look at his direction, and he is captivated.
Perhaps at first glance his eyes are simply light green and… angry. Very angry. But he looks past that and sees pure determination and strength. Such a strong, hard gaze seems almost too old on someone so small, but it suits him somehow.
His eyes pierce Otabek’s soul. ‘A soldier’s eyes’ is the first thing to come to mind, and he finds that it isn’t completely wrong at all. The boy is a fighter, someone who will stop at nothing to get what he wants. And he finds that he wants to be exactly like that.
So, he stands up straight, goes into position, and tries the exercise again. Despite the bout of motivation that he got from the blonde boy, he still fails, but this time he doesn’t let it get to him. Surely, the boy has fought battles like this. He overcame seemingly impossible obstacles to get to where he is now. If that boy can do it, why can’t he?
His muscles are screaming in pain when they finish, but he feels a new kind of pride inside him. This is just an obstacle in his path, and he’s on his way to destroying it. He silently thanks the young soldier for inspiring him to keep moving, no matter how dire the situation seems.
He overhears the soldier’s name a few days later. Yuri Plisetsky. He doesn’t know his other classmates’ names, but he carves that name into his brain, not wanting to forget him no matter what.
More than once does he try talking to Yuri, but neither are very good with conversations, Yuri more so than him. The only person that they talk to in that room is Yakov, and it stays that way until he realizes that ballet isn’t good for him and they separate paths. Still, he could never forget that name. He refuses to forget.
He spends the next five years training, fighting like the soldier Yuri is, like the soldier he wishes to be. He is not naturally skilled, far from it, but he earns his skills with sheer determination, and that makes his victories seem even sweeter.
All the while he tries to keep up with Yuri’s skating career, watches as he earns medal after medal and rises as a skating prodigy. Try as he might, Otabek can never seem to catch up to him. He grows in those five years, but his eyes remain the same, and those eyes continue to give Otabek a reason to fight.
He thinks that he will spend the rest of his skating career trying to catch up to Yuri, but he is wrong. And it has never felt so good to be wrong before.
If you went to thirteen-year-old Otabek Altin and told him that five years from now he would be Yuri Plisetsky’s best friend, he wouldn’t have believed you no matter how hard you tried to convince him. Yuri is too far out of his league, he would insist. There’s no way they would become friends, let alone so much as talk.
As it turns out, his life is filled with pleasant surprises.
In a span of six months since their first meeting in Barcelona, he has become now sixteen-year-old Yuri Plisetsky’s closest friend. It honestly still feels like a dream, like one day he’ll wake up and find out that he never saved Yuri from those girls, never told him he has the eyes of a soldier.
Now his inspiration is just a Skype call away (Yuri insisted he get a Skype account before they separate after the Grand Prix, and he while he disliked social media, he could never say no to Yuri), and it’s much easier to get inspiration when Yuri insists on calling every night.
The first few calls are a little awkward, since he isn’t much of a conversationalist, but they fall into a routine soon enough. Yuri would call immediately after practice ends, where by that point Otabek would already be in bed, and Yuri would rant about something or other while he listened and occasionally throw in his opinion until past midnight in Almaty. It didn’t leave him with a lot of sleep, but it’s worth it.
Yuri, he soon figures out, is worth everything.
When he picks up the call, Yuri is seething. He’s quickly learned that when he’s angry, it’s never at him, but it does plant worry in his heart every time.
Usually, Yuri would immediately launch into a rant about Viktor or any of his other rinkmates, but tonight he’s drowning himself in a silent kind of anger. It must be important, then, so tentatively he asks him, “Is everything alright?”
“No, nothing is fucking alright,” he spits out, and the default tone of anger that he has is strangely comforting to hear. “I just – this is so fucking stupid. I’ve seen a lot of stupid shit before, but this is just… a new kind of stupid. I can’t fucking believe it.”
“What happened?”
“I overheard the old hag today,” he begins. Otabek has quickly figured out that ‘old hag’ means Mila, a skater his age. He still finds it strange that he can decipher Yuri’s way of speaking so quickly. “One of her neighbors’ siblings has severe Hanahaki, and she refused to get surgery. How fucking dumb can someone be?”
He’s heard of Hanahaki disease before, of course. Not a lot of people haven’t. He’s heard of how something as simple (or maybe not so simple) as unrequited love can either just be a minor inconvenience or a matter of life and death. Like how a crush is something as minor as a bad cold, with a few petals sprinkled in. A good prescription of medicine and they would be fine. But falling in love for someone, and falling hard, is said to be agonizing, not to mention life threatening.
“You have to think from their perspective, Yura,” he begins carefully. “Maybe she treasures her memories of the one she loves too much to let go of them.”
“How can memories be more important than your life?” Yuri counters, face red from anger. “Shitbag probably doesn’t deserve her love anyway, and she’s willing to die for it? Mila said she only has a year left! You’re choosing a year of knowing who broke your heart over decades of forgetting about them? It makes no sense!”
“You don’t know their story, though,” he replies, his voice quiet in contrast to Yuri’s near yelling. “The one she loves could be someone she’s known all her life. If she chooses to get the surgery, that’s a lot of memories to be forgetting, you know? Living with so many gaps in your mind could be difficult.”
“It still beats dying so early,” he lets out a frustrated sigh. “The hag said she’s only nineteen – just a year older than you, Beka! She’s dying at age twenty just because she’s refusing to go to a solution that’s already there. Fucking ridiculous.”
“Well, whatever her decision is, it’s not yours to judge. Just let go of it, okay? Getting mad at someone you don’t even know isn’t going to do anything for you.”
“Ugh… fine. Whatever.” Seeing Yuri listen to him is always kind of strange, considering he doesn’t listen to anyone else. It’s honestly kind of nice. “Just… god. I wish I’d never fall in love. I don’t wanna have to go through shit like that.”
“So, you’re saying if you ever fell in love and got Hanahaki, you’d choose to get surgery? No matter how important that person is to you?”
“Duh,” he replies easily, petting his cat beside him as he speaks. “It’s not like the bastard loves me back, so why bother? I don’t care who the asshole is, if the memory of them is threatening my life, then I’ll get rid of it.”
“I see,” he says, and ignores how his stomach suddenly starts hurting a bit at that moment. Maybe he pulled a muscle there during practice?
“What about you?” Yuri, inquires, looking back at the camera. Strangely, all of his anger has melted away from his face – now it just holds curiosity as he looks straight into Otabek’s eyes. “What if you fell in love with someone and got Hanahaki? Would you get the surgery or not? And don’t bullshit me with any lies.”
“…Well, I guess it depends,” he begins after a pause. “If they’re someone I just met, then maybe I’d get the surgery. But if it’s someone I’ve known for, say, years, and they’re connected to a lot of memories that are important to me, then I’d refuse.”
Yuri sits in silence at first, continuing to rub his cat’s ears as he thinks. Then, he says, “I hope you don’t fall in love with anyone who won’t love you back, Beka. It’d suck to lose you. You’re the only person I can tolerate at this point.”
He chuckles at that, ignoring the strange feeling in his chest. Maybe he’s coming down with something. “That’s surprisingly sweet of you, Yura. Are you sure you’re feeling well?”
“Wha- god, you’re such a fucking asshole sometimes,” he groans. “Never mind, I’ll probably just laugh at you will you’re in your death bed.”
His words hold no real bite to them – they never do, when it comes to Otabek. So he laughs, and after a moment Yuri starts laughing too.
“Go to sleep, loser,” Yuri says afterwards, and he’s smiling. “Thanks for listening to me.”
“Anytime, Yura. Good night.”
A year later, he wakes up and sees white specks of something on his pillow.
Upon closer inspection, they are small petals of a flower he’s unfamiliar with. He thinks it’s a little strange at first, but then he remembers he left his window open the night before. He dismisses it as petals that got into his room because of the wind while he slept, but it’s still a thought that bothers him at the back of his mind.
He’s also been coughing a lot, which he blames on the temperature change from the seasons, but he doesn’t remember coughing this much the last time he got sick. Still, he figures it’s no big deal.
“Hey, are you alright?” Yuri suddenly asks him in the middle of their call, his rant about Katsuki forgotten. All of his attention is on Otabek now, worry plain on his features, and he can’t say it didn’t make him feel a little nervous. “You’ve been coughing a lot and you’re paler than usual. Are you sick?”
“I think so,” he admits. “I’ve been getting coughing fits since this morning. It’s probably because of the climate, no big deal.”
“You should get it checked anyway,” Yuri suggests. “It could affect your practice, and kicking your ass in Skate Canada isn’t going to feel good if I win because you’re dying.”
Despite the pain in his chest, he smiles. “I’d probably be able to beat you while running a 40-degree fever.”
“Oh, you’re on, old man,” he laughs. “I’ll make you eat those words soon enough. Seriously though, you better get yourself checked, alright?”
“Alright, alright,” he concedes, and makes a mental note to make an appointment with his doctor. He has been feeling under the weather all day, and he doesn’t want Yuri to worry about him, no matter how roundabout he is at saying it.
He wakes up the next morning with more petals on his pillow, and he’s sure that he closed the windows this time. Something is wrong.
He reschedules his biannual checkup so he could have it sooner, after more petals appear on his pillow again and he finds that he’s starting to have trouble breathing. Something tells him he already knows what exactly is going on, but he needed confirmation. Even if he desperately doesn’t want it to be true.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor begins, as if saying that could possibly make things any better, “but the x-rays have come back in, and they’re confirmed our suspicions. You have Hanahaki.”
Everything feels like a blur after that. They show him the x-ray in question; small bundles of flowers are starting to grow in his lungs, but so far, they have not taken root. They assure him that this means it isn’t that serious yet. At the very least, they manage to identify exactly what kind of flowers they are – angelicas. Now that he thinks about it, he may have seen those in bloom a couple of times. The doctor says that the meaning of the flowers is important, and tells him that angelicas mean ‘inspiration.’
Of course that’s what it means. It only makes it harder to swallow.
They give him a prescription to help with the coughing and breathing issues, and tells him that the disease is still in its very early stages. As of now, it could go two routes; either he gets over his crush and lets the flowers die with it, or he falls in love and has to choose between life or death. He doesn’t have to have surgery now, but advises him that he should still think about it, just in case.
He picks up the medicine on his way home and takes the first dose. Thankfully, they work like a charm, and it no longer feels like something is blocking his lungs.
Okay, he thinks. He can make this work. With the medicine working as well as it is, he can still practice his skating with little problem. Hopefully he’ll be able to finish the season before it gets worse, if it gets worse.
In a twisted line of thought, he wishes it does get worse.
Yuri calls him late at night, as usual, and this time he freezes. He’s not sure if he wants to talk to him this time around, considering the circumstances. But they’ve never missed a call before, not since they started the tradition, and he’s sure that Yuri’s worried about his health, considering their last phone call. He’d want to know how he is. He toughens up and picks up the call.
“Well?” he demands immediately, staring at Otabek with intensity. “Are you dying or what? You did go to the doctor, did you?”
“I did, and…” and… what? ‘Hey, I have Hanahaki and it’s because I may have a bit of a crush on you. No big deal, unless I end up falling in love with you, because then I’m not certain I’d be willing to get surgery.’? There’s no way he can tell him. “it’s nothing. Just fatigue and a cough from the climate, like I said.”
Yuri stares at him, a little too hard for his liking, as if he knows that he’s lying to his face. Finally, he relaxes, going back to stroking the cat on his lap. “That’s good, I guess. Will you be alright for Skate Canada?”
“I’ll be fine. I got medicine on my way home. I’ll be okay in a week, no big deal.”
Yuri sighs in relief. “Okay. Now I can kick your ass without having to hold back.”
He laughs at this, which irritates his throat enough to make him want to go into another coughing fit. While he hasn’t coughed up any petals yet, he fears the day that he starts, and in case that day is today he doesn’t want Yuri to see. He manages to hold in any petals that might try to come out for the next few hours, though afterwards he realizes how painful that turns out to be for his chest and throat.
The next morning, he wakes up in a larger flurry of white petals, all over his pillow and a few spilling onto the floor. He knows it isn’t the wind this time.
Taking the medicine makes him feel like nothing is wrong with him at all. For the next week, he throws himself into his training with more vigor than usual, determined to forget about the petals and drown himself in his performance. After all, if it does get worse and he only has a few years left to live, he’s determined to go out with a bang.
When he opens Snapchat during his break and sees that Yuri sent him a selfie a few hours ago, that’s when it starts. He coughs into his hand and sees five little petals when he pulls away.
It is much harder to hide about his condition afterwards.
His coach confronts him after practice, after he sees all the petals scattering the ice. There’s no point lying to him, so when he asks if he has Hanahaki, all that he says is, “yes.”
“It’s not too bad,” he tries to reason when his coach suggests that he take a break. “I don’t even have to take surgery yet, and the medicine is working well enough for me. It won’t interfere with my skating, if you’re willing to continue coaching me.”
“Of course,” he assures him, patting him on the shoulder lightly. “I’m willing to continue teaching you for as long as you want me to stay. I’ll just edit your training regimen a bit, if you don’t mind – it’s going to be a lot harder to work when your lungs aren’t working the way they should be.”
“I understand.”
“I do have one question, though.” He looks reluctant as he speaks, avoiding Otabek’s eyes.
“Yes?”
“Who is it?”
Well, if that isn’t just the million-dollar question. His coach knows that his admiration for Yuri runs deep, but he doesn’t know how deep that really is. He isn’t very keen on the idea of telling him, so instead he answers, “A close friend. Someone very important to me.”
He pats Otabek’s shoulder again, sighing. “Let’s hope they’ll never have to have your life on their hands.”
Otabek has a feeling he already knows anyway.
Six months later he coughs out an entire flower. It’s a small thing, seeing as angelicas grow in bundles, but it’s enough to tell him that he’s far away from getting better. He’s falling for Yuri, and his life might be at stake because of it.
He is struck with the realization that he doesn’t mind. Doesn’t mind falling in love with Yuri, doesn’t mind suffering for it. It makes it both easier and harder to live with his worsening condition.
He keeps the little flower on his bedside table until it wilts.
A year after, he’s told by the doctor that the flowers have taken root in his lungs. He has a little more than a year left, two if he’s lucky. He should start thinking about getting the surgery soon.
If he loved anyone else, he would agree to it. If he fell for, say, Mila, he would agree to it. But Yuri – Yuri is special. He is the driving force behind everything he does. He’s given him reason to continue skating and sometimes to continue living. He’s admired him since he was the twelve-year-old who couldn’t even do an arabesque. Losing memories of Yuri would be losing a large part of himself.
He can’t do it. And he won’t.
Another year later, he ends up skipping practice a day before Trophée de France.
He didn’t mean to, honestly. It’s just incredibly hard to get out of the room, let alone out of the hotel, if he keeps coughing and wheezing out a mixture of blood and flowers. He’s just glad that his coach is one of the most understanding people he knows.
He’s not saying that Yuri isn’t understanding. He just… likes to know what’s going on. And he understands, really. He’s not the type to miss out on practice, especially when the competition is less than 24 hours away. He doesn’t usually worry about other people, but when he does, it’s usually him.
“Beka? Open up, it’s me.”
In any other circumstances, he’d let Yuri inside in a heartbeat. Today, however, would be a bad idea to do so. Especially when his room is covered in little flowers. And especially when his bathroom is covered in both flowers and his own blood.
He opens the door anyway.
“There you are, asshole,” Yuri spits out, but even though he knows he’s angry, he also knows he never means the words that he says. “What the fuck was that all about?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” Lying buys him time to think up of a good excuse.
“Don’t play dumb. I know you, you never skip practice. I remember when you sprained your ankle and you still tried to get on the ice. So, what gives?”
“It’s nothing,” he tries to assure him. “I wasn’t feeling too well, and I tried to go to practice anyway but my coach insisted I stay and rest.” It was the truth, sort of.
“Are you still dying, then?” he asks, but even through the Yuri-speak he can tell he isn’t as angry anymore. His worry always overrides his anger, when it comes to him.
“I’m fine now, really. I’ll be ready to skate tomorrow, so don’t count me out just yet.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he snorts. “C’mon, I haven’t seen you all day and Viktor and Katsudon have been driving me insane.”
That was the only warning he got before he pushed himself into his hotel room.
He didn’t get very far. When Otabek turns away from the door, he is only a few steps away, frozen in place, eyes fixated on the petals just in front of his feet.
He doesn’t have any bouquets in the room, and even then, there are too many petals to say that they’re from one anyway. It isn’t difficult to piece together what’s going on.
“Yura-”
“How long?” he interrupts, and the tone in his voice breaks his heart. It isn’t loud and angry like it was only a few minutes before. Now it is quiet, barely above a whisper, and it sounds… hurt.
There’s no use lying to him. “Couple of years.”
“A couple of -” he turns to face him now, and it shocks and pains Otabek to see his face, eyes shining with unshed tears. “You never told me that you’ve been dying for the past two years?!”
“It isn’t exactly something that’s easy to tell people,” he tries to explain, closing the door behind him before taking a step towards Yuri. “Only my coach knows, and it’s only so that he can change my regimen if I need it. I didn’t mean to keep it a secret from you, I just…”
He doesn’t know how to finish his sentence, and Yuri seems like he doesn’t know what to say, because he stays silent, staring at Otabek with those green eyes.
They stay frozen like that, only a few feet away from each other, staring. Finally, Yuri moves. He closes the distance between them and wraps his arms around Otabek tightly. Not even the tackle-hugs he gives him whenever they haven’t seen each other in months. The hug is warm, comforting, and Otabek thinks it’s just Yuri trying to tell him something, but not really knowing how to say it.
‘I’m sorry you have to go through with this,’ is his guess.
Whatever it is, he hugs him back, holding onto Yuri like a vice grip.
They stay that way for what seems like hours. And while neither of them cry a lot, neither can deny that they both shed a few tears in between the hug.
Finally, he separates his head from Yuri’s shoulder, trying to smile while looking right at his eyes. “C’mon, I’ll tell you everything. And then if you’re still up for it you can go rant about Katsuki and Nikiforov’s PDA.”
“As if I give a fuck about that right now,” he says shakily, but he still grabs Otabek’s hands and leads him to the floor beside the bed. They try their best to ignore the petals as they sit down.
“… I learned about my Hanahaki a little more than two years ago,” Otabek begins, and while just a few seconds ago he can look at Yuri’s eyes without a problem, now it feels as if he can’t even look at his face without something hurting. “You thought it was just a cough, and that I should get it checked. It was minor at first. I only had a little crush, I would guess. It didn’t even hurt if I took the medicine. But it just… grew worse over time.”
From the corner of his eye he can see Yuri staring at him, hanging onto his every word. Count on him to listen to everything he has to say whenever it’s his turn to speak.
“I wasn’t even going to tell my coach about it, but he noticed that I coughed up a few petals on the ice. He’s been trying his best to help me skate even with my condition, but I don’t know how long I’ll be able to continue skating. I have maybe a month or more left to live.”
He doesn’t bring up the surgery, and neither does Yuri. If he’s suffered for two long years without getting it, then it’s obvious that he’s made up his mind.
For a long moment, there is silence. Then Otabek raises his head up without meaning to when he starts to hear sniffling.
“I just – goddammit, I hate crying,” he complains, wiping away his tears angrily. It makes Otabek laugh, for some reason. “I don’t get it. Why do you, of all people, have to go through with this? You- you don’t deserve this.”
He opens his mouth to reply, but his body thinks that this is the perfect time to send him into another coughing fit. His upper body nearly falls, and he plants his arms on the floor so he doesn’t collapse. He hears an, “Ah, shit!” from Yuri before he scrambles to stand up and get him a glass of water to drink.
He accepts the water gratefully, gulping it all down in record time. When he regains his breath and sits back up, he sees Yuri with the most horrified look on his face, staring at the umbels of angelicas covered in blood.
“Yuri…”
Before he knows it, he’s wrapped in another hug again, tighter than before. As he moves to hug him back, he realizes that Yuri is shaking. Or maybe both of them are.
They don’t speak for the rest of the night. They’ve come to the unspoken agreement that Yuri would be staying the night, and refuse to let go of each other even after they move to the bed to sleep. Yuri clings to him until he falls asleep, the area around his eyes still red from being rubbed.
At the very least, he thinks as he drifts to sleep, he knows that Yuri loves him back. Just not in the way that he wants. Not in the way that he needs so he can keep living.
Despite the roots that placed themselves deep into his lungs and threatened to fill them with so many flowers that he might collapse, he manages to place second in Trophée de France, with Yuri claiming first as usual. This gets both of them a spot in the Grand Prix Final.
The Final is two months from now. He wonders if he’ll still be alive by then.
Yuri hugs Otabek again when they finally have to separate ways. He’s been glued to his side ever since he found out, though he certainly isn’t complaining. He’s practically counting the last of his days now, and if Yuri insists that he spend those last days with him, then he is happy to oblige.
“Call me,” he insists, still not letting go of him.
“Always.”
“And tell me when anything changes. If you stop coughing blood or you visit your doctor again or something.”
“Of course.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise, Yura. Really.”
“Okay,” he says, but he still doesn’t let go of Otabek until Mila and Georgi start calling for him.
“Go,” he tells him, letting fondness seep into his tone. Carefully, he grabs Yuri’s arms and pulls them away from him. “Your coach looks like he’s about to pop a blood vessel. Text me when you land.”
Yuri smiles weakly. It’s not much, but it’s a start. “I will.” And he hugs the life out of him again and runs back to his coach.
When he’s out of sight, he turns and runs to the nearest restroom and locks himself in, coughing and heaving out blood and angelicas for the next hour.
He knows he can’t hide it from his family forever.
Skyping his sister has become a regular occurrence, just like his calls with Yuri. The coughing fit that starts is relatively tame, and perhaps he could have passed it off as getting some dust stuck in his throat, or something, but then his sister sees a few petals fly out of his hand and she pales, before frantically calling for their parents.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” he says regretfully after he’s finished explaining, his eyes on his lap. He doesn’t want to see the pain in his parents’ eyes, or the tears that are silently rolling down her cheeks.
“How much longer do you have left?” he could barely hear the question that came from his mother’s lips; her voice was so weak that the mic struggled to pick it up.
“… a couple of months,” he breathes out. Suddenly he hears a cry, and he looks up. His sister has suddenly burst into tears, and he sees her standing up and running out of the living room. A few moments later he hears a door slam.
“Come home,” his father begs. “You’ve already won a silver in France and a gold in Canada this season. You can… spend th-the rest of your life here, with your family.”
The offer is tempting, and he would love to drop everything to be with them now, but he still shakes his head. “I’m sorry, but I’ve spent majority of my life chasing after this. I want one of my final moments to be me holding the gold medal and doing my country proud. Please understand.”
“Bek,” his mother says, her voice fond even through her tears. “You’re already making your country proud. You’re making us proud.”
“I know,” he says, putting on a small smile. “But I also… want to do this for myself. When all of this is over, I’ll come home. I promise.”
He doesn’t tell them that he thinks he won’t have enough time to even finish the Final, but he prays that his body will endure just a little bit longer.
When his sister returns to the living room, eyes red-rimmed, his parents excuse themselves, giving the siblings a moment to talk.
“Beks?” she asks. Her voice is quiet, which is a sharp contrast to her usual bubbly self.
“Yes?”
“Your-” her breath hitches, as if she’s about to cry again, but she persists. “Your flowers. What are they? What do they mean?”
And he smiles, because if there’s one person who knows exactly how much he admires Yuri, it’s her. “Angelicas. They mean ‘inspiration.’”
On the day of the Final, he is pleasantly surprised to find that he feels much stronger than usual. It’s still difficult to breathe, but he feels as if his old stamina and strength has returned to him.
He manages to narrowly beat Yuri’s score during the short program, pulling him to first place. When he looks at Yuri as they announce this, he’s expecting Yuri’s usual bitter face whenever someone else is on top. Instead, he is grinning at Otabek from ear to ear, eyes shining in a way that leaves him breathless.
“I am so proud of you,” he says to him when the interviews are said and done, his voiced muffled from his mouth pressing against Otabek’s shoulder as he hugs him. “You kicked my ass all while trying not to vomit flowers all over the rink. Not a lot of people can say that.”
“I was ahead of you by two points, Yura. That’s hardly ‘kicking ass,’” he chuckled, wrapping his arms around him as if it is the most natural movement he can do. He would gladly have Yuri in his arms for the rest of what little life he has left, if he ever got the chance to do so.
“Who gives a shit? You’re in first place and that’s what matters.” He pulls his face away from his shoulder, giving him another blinding smile. “I knew you could do it. I really, really am proud of you.”
His chest aches at his words, but not in the way he’s gotten used to the past couple years. It feels almost… pleasant, like it isn’t pain at all. He wishes that every moment he has left feels like this.
He wins.
Again, he only beats Yuri by a very small margin, but it’s enough. Finally, finally, he is standing at the top of the podium, Yuri on one side and JJ on the other. If he listens closely enough, he can hear Viktor and Yuuri with the other coaches, screaming his and Yuri’s name repeatedly.
If he thought Yuri’s smile from the short program left him breathless, the grin that he gives him as he receives his gold medal has pretty much left him for dead.
“You did it,” he whispers, taking his hand and squeezing it. “You know, when you said that you could beat me while running a 40-degree fever, it turns out you weren’t completely wrong, huh?”
He lets out a real laugh at that, squeezing his hand back. “It’s not every day I get to beat and prove you wrong at the same time. Someone immortalize this moment.”
“Dumbass, it already is.” He laughs, and Otabek finds himself thanking whichever god is up there for giving him the privilege of loving Yuri Plisetsky.
They skip the banquet, instead hopping on his rented bike and riding to wherever they want until Otabek gets too tired and ending up back in Yuri’s hotel room. Yuri is the perfect friend when Otabek’s illness starts to get the better of him, and instead of celebrating their medals with loud party music of their own and some alcohol, he makes Otabek tea and switches the TV channel to another cliché movie so they hang out and be together in peace and quiet.
It is after the movie has ended and they’re both half asleep when Otabek finally decides to speak. “Hey, Yura?”
“Yeah?”
“Did you ever want to know why I have Hanahaki in the first place?”
At this, Yuri turns so he can face him directly, but Otabek is staring right at the ceiling, his eyes starting to droop. “I mean, kind of,” he says slowly. “But I didn’t wanna push it, that’d be shitty of me as a friend.”
“Do you still want to know?” he asks, still not turning to look at Yuri. His eyelids are starting to feel heavy, but he’s determined to finish this conversation.
“Well… yeah, but only if you’re up for it.” His words are slow, as if unsure as to where this is going.
“Okay,” he sighs, closing his eyes but willing himself to stay awake. “I think it’s only fair that I tell you. Do you know what my flower is? And what it means?”
“They’re angelicas,” his reply is immediate, but there’s a pause before he continues talking. “I don’t know what they mean, though. I never looked it up.”
He suppresses a smile at that. “They mean ‘inspiration.’ Think about it. Who inspires me the most?”
It’s a long moment before Yuri’s eyes suddenly shoot open, all drowsiness gone. “Wait, it’s me?”
But when he turns to look at Otabek, he is already snoring.
When Yuri wakes up the next day, he doesn’t hear Otabek’s breathing. Slowly, he reaches out to touch his wrist (his skin is cold, why is it so cold?) and tries to feel for a pulse.
When he doesn’t feel anything under his fingertips and hears nothing when he presses his ears to his chest, he screams.
Otabek Altin is dead. And it’s all because he didn’t love him the way he should have.
It’s all his fault.