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It starts with a doodle in the margin of his art history notes that, when he looks at it from the right angle, looks like Otabek. Then there’s the midnight scrawls in his journals when he pours his heart out onto the page in smudgy ink, and when he rereads them the next day, it’s clear in his mind that the rambles that fill page after page are only about one person. Slowly, bits of Otabek start creeping into his art, snippets of things he’s written in journals, half remembered conversations immortalised in paint, some of the writing covered in angry strokes of red acrylic or made barely legible by the ink running down the page. He’s under his skin, and Yuri doesn’t really know why, or how to make it stop, how to make it go away, or anything that could possibly make the situation any better.
And whilst that might well be the start, it’s not technically the beginning.
“Yuri! You came!” Victor opens the door of his apartment with a smile on his face a mile wide, a drink in his hand and his boyfriend Yuuri clinging to his waist. “Did you bring vodka?”
“Duh,” he says, holding up the bottle. He can hear laughter and music coming from inside, some loud EDM that the neighbours are probably going to complaining about in a few hours’ time. “Who’s here?”
“Everyone,” Yuuri says, swaying slightly. The top few buttons of his shirt are undone and his eyes look kind of distant. He’s completely smashed, but Yuri’s not surprised. Yuuri’s got a bit of a reputation when it comes to parties. “Even Otabek came. He’s DJ-ing.”
“The mysterious music student?” Yuri asks, and Victor nods in confirmation. “Nice. You going to let me in now or what?”
The music seems to get louder the more Yuri drinks. Someone drags him into some stupid drinking game that ends with him doing far more shots that he usually would do, Victor orders pizza halfway through the night because “you should probably all eat something, Jesus”, and Phichit has brought his camera and keeps taking photos that Yuri’s probably going to have to systematically untag himself from in the morning.
The party is in full swing when Otabek, who’s spent the entire night mixing songs and matching the lights to the music, appears at Yuri’s side. Yuri looks at him, confused, because he’s meant to be at the decks, not here on the dancefloor, until he looks over to the other side of the room and sees that Leo has taken over. “Oh,” Yuri says.
“What?” Otabek asks, a frown settling across his brow. “Is something wrong?”
“No, but you were there, and now you’re not, and I was confused, because you were supposed to be over there and I –” Yuri stops himself from rambling on further and making even more of an embarrassment of himself. “Have you been drinking? I don’t think you’re drunk enough.” Yuri walks over to the drinks table, grabbing Otabek’s hand and dragging him across the room with him. “Shots,” Yuri states, grabbing the nearest bottle of vodka and starting to pour the liquid into the small glasses. “You’re doing two for every one I do.”
“Vodka’s not really my thing.”
“Tough shit.” Yuri pushes two thirds of the glasses in Otabek’s direction. “On my count. One – two – three!”
They do the shots, the disgust on Otabek’s face obvious the further down the line he gets. Once the last glass is back on the table, Yuri grabs his hand again and leads Otabek over to where Chris is sitting with a couple of other people. “Chris! Is it about time for another drinking game?”
“Yuri, you read my mind,” Chris says with a smirk. “Ring of Fire?”
“Perfect.”
The game gets underway quickly, with most people playing. There’s some argument about the rules at first, but it’s soon forgotten as soon as the game progresses. Otabek breaks the circle first, meaning that he has to do another shot, something which he complains about bitterly: “You didn’t tell me that was a rule!”
“I thought it was obvious!”
The game carries on, consisting of some dubious rhymes whenever a nine is pulled from the circle, and groans whenever more gets added to the cup in the middle. Otabek picks up the last king, and Yuri tries not to let the smile show on his face.
“Unlucky, my friend,” Chris says with a grin, passing Otabek the cup that was in the middle. “A delicate mix of vodka, orange juice, coke, wine, and possibly some whiskey as well. Good luck.”
Otabek sniffs the contents of the cup gingerly. “That smells fucking disgusting.”
“That’s kind of the point,” Yuri says. “We –” he starts to sing, and the others soon join in with:
“LIKE TO DRINK WITH BEKA, CAUSE BEKA IS OUR MATE, WE LIKE TO DRINK WITH BEKA, CAUSE HE GETS IT DOWN IN EIGHT, SEVEN, SIX, FIVE, FOUR, THREE, TWO – AYYYYY!”
The cup is empty and Otabek looks like he’s regretting every decision he’s ever made as he places the cup back on the table. Yuri counts this as a win, yells at Leo to turn the music up, then drags Beka onto the dance floor.
It’s a while later, when the alcohol has truly taken affect and all inhibitions have gone out of the window, that Yuri finds himself invading Beka’s space more, the thoughts of how Phichit definitely has this immortalised on his SD card far, far away.
“Do you, um,” Yuri stops himself for a moment, before thinking fuck it and carrying on, “Do you want to get out of here?”
Otabek looks mildly surprised for a brief moment, but he soon composes himself. “You sure?”
Yuri rolls his eyes and stands on his tiptoes where he pulls Otabek into a rough kiss. “Yes,” he snaps. “I’m sure.”
“Well, in that case,” Otabek says, pulling Yuri in for another kiss, “I’d love to.”
And so, that’s the beginning, where Yuri drunkenly hooks up with Otabek Altin at Victor’s party, where he’s 90% sure Phichit definitely got a shot of them stumbling into the spare room together and emerging a while later with untucked shirts and ruffled hair. It doesn’t really hit Yuri until the next morning when he wakes up with a hangover and a line of hickeys down his neck that he actually slept with the guy. He doesn’t regret it, per se, but he just feels a bit weird. He’s not used to casual sex. He doesn’t know the protocol. Is he just supposed to act like it never happened?
He decides that probably best, as he doesn’t see Otabek that much around campus anyway. For the moment, he groans, rolls over and does his best to ignore his headache as he tries to get back to sleep.
Because the universe hates him or something, Otabek seems to be around every corner when Yuri gets to university on Monday. After Yuri’s nearly bumped into him on the stairs, in the cafeteria and the library, he’s had enough. He walks into his Art History lecture after lunch and slams his notebook down on the desk with so much ferocity half the class turns around and stares at him.
Mila raises an eyebrow. “Something on your mind?” she asks from her seat next to Yuri. “Mysterious Kazakh music students, perhaps?”
“Can you not?” Yuri snaps.
“So you did sleep with him then? I thought Chris was just making shit up.”
Yuri lets that go unanswered as their professor walks into the lecture hall and starts setting up today’s power point. “So you did?” Mila says, her voice now lowered to a whisper. “Damn it, Yuri, you beat me into Altin’s pants. I’m so jealous. Was he good?”
“Seriously, shut up.”
“I’m taking that as a yes,” Mila says with a smirk that turns into a grin as she notices the smile on Yuri’s lips that he tries to hide. “Oh my god, you lucky bastard!”
Yuri tunes out the rest of Mila’s whispering, listening to the lecturer instead. He tries to focus on making notes, but his pen has other ideas, doodling random stuff in the margins of his notebook. There are musical notes, a pair of headphones, and the beginnings of a portrait that looks suspiciously like –
“Oh wow, you’ve got it bad,” Mila comments as she looks over his shoulder.
“I know,” Yuri mutters miserably. “I know.”
The parties that happen next follow a strikingly similar pattern. Otabek starts the night off DJ-ing, then gets drunk with Yuri before the two of them go off somewhere to have sex. Once, it’s in the bathroom at Mickey and Sara’s place. Another time, it’s on the sofa in Chris’ living room when everyone else in the kitchen. Then there’s the time at Emil’s on top of the washing machine, and the one where Otabek pulls Yuri into the hall at Seung-Gil’s to blow him. Yuri’s getting up from returning the favour when Phichit appears around the corner, camera in hand. There’s an awkward moment of silence because it’s painfully obvious what’s been going on before Phichit lifts his camera up, takes a photo, and says “I’m just gonna… go.”
As Phichit disappears back into the living room, Otabek and Yuri make a silent agreement to be a lot more careful next time.
Except next time never comes. Otabek stops showing up at parties and Yuri soon does too, because Victor keeps complaining about how miserable he looks and there’s no point being there if Otabek isn’t there anyway. Instead, Yuri stays at home, listening to depressing songs about unrequited love and broken hearts, scribbling his thoughts and half remembered conversations down in his notebook in smudgy ink.
…it’s not fair, all of this, because you were there and now you’re not and I don’t know what to do now that you’re not showing up any more…
…seriously, fuck it all. It’s all your fault anyway. I don’t care if I kissed you first, you were the one that kept coming back for more and that means IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT…
…I’m all fucked up because of you. What have you done to me?
He pretends he doesn’t cry and that Otabek isn’t under his skin in the way he so clearly is. He pretends he doesn’t care, pretends it all meant nothing, pretends that he’s dealing with it even though he’s clearly not.
He plays pretend, and hopes it’ll all go away.
It doesn’t.
It gets worse.
Yuri’s moved onto a new project in his practical art class, one that’s centred around letters and words and how they’re used in art. It seems the natural thing to do to use the three am ramblings from his journal as the start of his project, except he quickly realises it’s doing nothing for the healing process apart from picking away at an already barely formed scab.
He works on a big scale and with a limited colour palette, covering A1 sheets of paper in red and grey acrylic, letting black ink drip down the page after spending hours rewriting bits of his journal onto the page. He uses layers, cutting up newspapers and rearranging the words to represent his feelings, paints letters onto bits of paper like Scrabble tiles and pastes them on top of his work.
He wanders into the studio one afternoon after a lecture to find Victor staring intently at his work.
“Why are you even in here?” Yuri asks as he puts his bag down on his desk. “Aren’t you meant to be teaching a bunch of freshmen or something?”
“That’s on Tuesdays.” Victor turns round to look at Yuri, a serious look on his face. “It’s about Otabek, isn’t it? All of this?”
“Who?” Yuri feigns ignorance as he digs his brush roll out of his bag and goes to the sink to fill his water jars. He goes around the art studio collecting the tubes of paint, bottles of ink and scraps of paper that he needs, and by the time he gets back to his desk, Victor is still standing there looking slightly concerned. “What?”
“You’re in love with him.”
“I – what – excuse me, I am not!”
“Yes you are,” Victor says simply. “Just look at your own work. It’s obvious to anyone that was at any of the parties you not-so-secretly hooked up with him at. You’re in love with him, Yuri. You need to realise it.”
…I’m crying, because I realise it now. I’m in love with him.
“Can you help me with my photography project?”
Yuri’s sitting in the library working on an essay for his art history class when Phichit slides into the seat opposite him, camera bag over his shoulder and a mischievous grin on his face. Yuri stops typing and glares at Phichit over the top of his laptop. “Why me?”
“Because I need a guy with long hair? Also I’m asking you? Please?”
Yuri sighs. “Fine.”
“Great! Are you free now?”
Yuri considers snapping something along the lines of clearly not, can’t you see I’m working, but instead finds himself saving his essay and shutting the book he working from. “I need to go and check this book out, but yeah, I’m free now.”
…I was asked to think about a person I love today. And, even though I knew it was coming, I found myself surprised when I started thinking of the sound of your voice, and the feeling of my skin against yours, and all the stolen moments we had together. I thought about you kissing me and how our bodies moved in such perfect harmony together even though we were drunk at the time. I thought about how I liked the marks you left on me, how they made me smile when I saw them in the mirror, how they served as a reminder for a more exciting time. They asked me if I was thinking about you, and I – well.
I said yes.
“Talk to me about this,” Yuri’s art tutor Yakov says, waving a hand at the artwork spread across the table. “What’s it about?”
“Love,” Yuri replies simply. “It’s about love.”
There’s an exhibition at the end of term in which all the art and photography students showcase their work from the semester. Yuri’s work, which is now on huge canvases that take up most of one wall, is drawing a lot of attention, as is Phichit’s photography work. Yuri hasn’t gone into the photography section yet, he’s been too busy answering questions about his work, but he eventually manages to sneak away.
Phichit’s exhibition is titled Then & Now, and it makes Yuri stand stock still.
The photographs are of him and Otabek. The Then section shows shots from the parties, of them talking and laughing, of them kissing, of them leaving Victor and Yuuri’s spare bedroom with secretive smiles on their faces and fingers intertwined. They’re all in bright colours that stand out from the stark whiteness of the wall, and they’re all vastly different from the Now section of Phichit’s exhibition.
The Now section showcases candid photographs of him and Otabek in black and white, taken in various places around campus. There’s him in the art room working on his pieces, in the library, in a lecture theatre. Otabek is in the music rooms, in the recording studio, sitting on a park bench with his laptop on his knee, his headphones on and a look of intense concentration on his face. The separation between them is clear, and it makes Yuri’s mouth go dry as the message sinks in.
“Heard I was making quite the stir around here.”
Yuri looks to his left where the voice is coming from and feels a smile play at his lips when he sees who’s standing there. “I heard that too.”
“I saw your art,” Otabek says. “It was… something.”
“Is that a good something or a bad something?” Yuri asks with an eyebrow raised.
“A good something, definitely,” Otabek replies. “It’s powerful. Made me think. Are you really… are you really in love with me?”
“Yes,” Yuri says, because there’s no point in denying in, the words I’m in love with him are spray painted in two foot high letters across the canvases. It was obvious to anyone, even if they didn’t know who it was directed at.
Otabek smiles. “Well, then, do you want to get out of here?”
“I’d love to.”
…life has a cyclical nature to it. It’s clichéd, I know, but it’s true: everything from fashion trends to the rain falling from the sky happens in a cycle. And now I’m here, drinking with him again with the knowledge that we’re probably going to have sex again later, and although we’ve come back to the beginning, somehow, it’s an entirely new start.