Work Text:
It is at the short strange junction between sleep and non-sleep that it occurs to Yuri: it would be cool, he thinks, if after death came a scoreboard of sorts, a tally of all the things you've managed before kicking the bucket, as might be found in a video game. Total waking hours, total hours slept. Total kilometers traveled. Quads landed. Piroshki eaten. A final count to send off the dead, and then - whatever. The particulars past the scoreboard don't matter. It's about knowing what your life was made of. That's what makes the idea cool. Something like that, anyway.
His wakeful self has no such pointless curiosities. He only entertains the idea because he's tired - under a blanket, up in a plane, thinking, then dreaming.
Weeks fold into months, and eventually, he's not on planes as often anymore. The skating season concludes itself. He meets with Otabek again, and trades flight for ground travel.
This change of scenery brings with it a number of realizations: first, that he likes Otabek. Second, that Otabek likes him too. Third, that kissing is nice, not gross, and he might have some measure of forgiveness for Victor and Yuuri's behavior now that he's come to understand this. (He's sure he'll recant once he's forced to see them again.)
The fourth is that he's not as well-traveled as he thought he was. He has been to many countries and seen any number of things, and his Instagram is ever-updating proof - but it isn't until he and Otabek hop a bike and take a trip to nowhere that Yuri realizes how little he's truly experienced. His history is stadiums and monuments, airports and attractions. His present is harder to quantify. There are deserts, lakes, far-flung ribbons of empty, dead road. There is life in places where it hardly seems wanted. It persists in corners he never knew existed.
They carve out paths through no place special, he and Otabek. At a cliffside without a name, Yuri remembers his idea, the one that came together in his mind like a cloud all those months ago: the scoreboard. He's racking up kilometers. His tally is rising.
He feels small, sometimes.
They happen upon a settlement - a fucking cult, really. The people in it don't brand themselves anything catchy, but they explain their circumstances in a way makes it apparent what their little encampment is meant to be.
They are friendly folks, Yuri supposes, even if they consider themselves fallen angels or somesuch nonsense. They say they've left the world behind, and they have. No way does society remember people thrown out this far into the map - they're coins under the couch, socks lost to a dryer. They are generous, too, offering Yuri and Otabek a whole rainbow of things: bananas with peanut butter, turquoise jewelry, crude wood carvings, stories of nuclear testing and subsequent coverups, a lot of beer. Yuri hasn't had beer - not until now.
(They've left the world behind, so who cares? Yakov's not here to yell.)
Otabek is too careful in bringing him back to the tent they've been loaned for the night. Yuri complains of it. "I'm not that drunk, you know."
"These things can sneak up on you," Otabek tells him. He helps Yuri lay down when he doesn't have to. "Do you feel sick?"
"Beka," Yuri laughs. No, he doesn't feel sick. "It's just beer. What happened to me being strong, huh?"
"You are strong." He says it with a certainty that might be making Yuri blush, somewhere under the flush of alcohol. "Part of strength is knowing your limits."
The airs he puts on never last when Otabek says shit like this. He's too earnest, too sincere in every damned thing he does. He cares without a thought for how silly it might make him look. Yuri wants to tell him as much - maybe it'll fluster him, put them in the same bracket of embarrassment he's been landed in - but it comes out more like, "Whatever. C'mon, kiss me."
And so they kiss, and kiss some more, but nothing further. Further is what Yuri wants, warm and pliant as he feels under his boyfriend's touch - but in the end, Otabek holds out on him.
"We need to sleep," Otabek tells him. He's way too sweet about it, tucking Yuri's hair behind his ear with a touch for fragile things. "If you wake up needing to throw up, throw up. Don't hold it back. It's how your body gets rid of what it doesn't want."
Yuri won't argue, not when he's verging on sleep anyway, but he's curious. "How do you know this stuff?"
Otabek shrugs, his hand still in Yuri's hair, parting it between his fingers in straight blonde lines. "I've been around."
Between them is a silent understanding: Otabek will tell him later. His stories are a lot more interesting than tales of nuclear coverups, so it's good enough for now. They can save it for another point on the map. When Yuri drifts away, he dreams of numbers.