Chapter Text
When Yuuri was nine years old, he was hit by a car so bad his head exploded. Lying on the cold concrete, spread-eagle, the sky so big he was afraid it would soar down to swallow him whole.
Two surgeries later—four screws in his head and too high to stop giggling—his dad was sprawled across his hospital bed, telling him he loved him so much his heart was the size of his stomach. And then he was crying because Yuuri's sister was crying, and that made his mom cry because she was always crying. (She sniffles during baby wipes commercials.) And his brother, cowering in the corner in his oversized soccer jersey, trying really hard not to cry because he was convinced big boys didn't do that, ever. (Even though he was shorter than a water dispenser and everyone at school called him Napoleon, which was kind of cool, but he didn’t think so). Koji did cry though, face scrunched up so bad he looked like a raisin. They all looked like raisins.
And maybe it was the meds, or maybe it was the way the world looks when you're still convinced the Boogeyman lives under your bed, because none of it—not the car or the crack in his head, not even his family of crying raisins—came close to that feeling bubbling up in his chest. He’d been ripped out of something, shaken awake and wide open. All of it so sudden he felt dazed in his own skin.
It’s almost funny how there was a time when he thought life was too small for that feeling to happen twice.
But then Koji brought over the new neighbor, and Yuuri tumbled out of his room having been stuck at home all week with a cold, giddy with that need for excitement. Wobbling at the top of the staircase, fever-flushed in Koji's giant hand-me-down pajamas, he stared at the boy standing in their hallway.
"Hi! You must be Yuuri." He smiled.
Yuuri wanted to touch all of his teeth.
"I'm Victor."
You're the Man in the Moon, Yuuri thought—at age nine, when the world was half its size and everything in it was magic.
And even eight years later, when he's been forced to change his mind about so much more than he would've liked, Victor Nikiforov stays the same.
Especially now, with his dumb Ford Mustang and his dumb letterman jacket, his not-dumb-at-all wrath on the field. Especially now, when he smiles at Yuuri like he doesn't know he's giving him more than he should, when he drives him home and buys him animal crackers on rainy days, when he sleeps over more than he doesn't, his things sprinkled around their house like good luck charms.
He's the Man in the Moon. Still. Always.
Sometimes Yuuri wants to climb onto the roof, yell it all at the top of his lungs until his ears pop. Just to make sure everyone knows they don't get to have Victor eat cereal on their kitchen counter. They don't get to see him in mismatched socks and sleep-disgruntled T-shirts, his hair clumped around one of Mari's forgotten scrunchies. They don't. None of them.
But then there are things he wouldn't tell a soul, things too special not to be secrets. Like the animal crackers, the secret smiles. Like those nights Victor sleeps over on Koji's couch and sneaks into Yuuri's room in the AM, flicks his forehead or pinches his cheeks, and Yuuri wakes up to him looming above, hair dusty with the moon.
'Are you hungry?' he'll say or, 'Let's watch a movie. I can't sleep.' And sometimes, just sometimes, he'll say nothing at all, and he'll stare at Yuuri until his chest starts to hum. And Yuuri, always so shameless, will want so much: all of it, everything, anything he can think of.
Like reaching for Victor and pulling him close, like doing all the things that come after that.
But it will never get that far. He'll be gone before Yuuri can wonder if his brain was playing tricks on him in the dark. And he'll curl into his sheets and roll against the wall, press his forehead against the coolness of it, and his hands will crawl between his thighs, and then, there, if he wants it bad enough, he can crack himself wide open. He can make the whole world shake.
Yuuri wonders if this will be one of those nights. He catches himself shamelessly hoping, a hot flush nibbling at his cheeks.
Victor whispers, "Are you hungry?"
"Starving..." Yuuri pinches his thighs to keep them from trembling.
✕✕✕
They try to make pancakes. They always try; it never works out. Sometimes Yuuri blames it on their brains trying to function when they should be sound asleep for safety purposes. His mom says humans are potential hazards past three in the morning. Then again, maybe Victor's love for winging things plays a part in their failed attempts at pancake-making. Maybe, definitely.
Last week they got into a fight so loud they shook the house awake. For once Yuuri forced him to stick to the measurements in his mom's only American cookbook (the one she probably bought out of frustration after Koji said he was sick of eating oyakodon for breakfast. She looked at him like she'd raised a fucking alien, flapping her hands at the kitchen floor, 'Everything under this roof is Japanese soil! We're not an IHOP!').
Koji walked in on them throwing batter and waving spoons around like they were trying to scoop each other's eyeballs out. And when Victor wouldn't stop screeching, Yuuri's dad stumbled down the stairs armed with a lamp, Mom cowering behind him in her hair rollers and her panda slippers, wondering who the hell was getting murdered on a Monday morning. Victor pointed at his batter-clumped hair. He refused to talk to Yuuri for three days straight.
"Yuuuri...Stop spacing out."
The flick of Victor's fingers on the back of his head. "Ow."
"Here." Victor hands him a bowl. "Start stirring."
Yuuri stares at the glob swimming at the bottom. How they ended up with something resembling cement mix more than pancake batter is beyond him.
Stirring the batter, he watches Victor rummage through the cabinets, the World's Greatest Mom apron dangling from his neck. You can't really look away when he's all comfy-drowsy at three in the morning, floating around the kitchen with that smile on his face. And when he lifts his hands to tie his hair, Yuuri swears his heart hiccups.
It's a whole thing every time, Victor's fingers weaving through all those strands, far too many for a single head. And it grips Yuuri a little, like when he used to watch Mari put on makeup (before she started to dress like Kurt Cobain and smoke on the roof at midnight), all those heavy wands and tubes of glitter, her fairy-faced magic. Or those times he caught a glimpse of Koji putting on his shin guards before soccer practice, snapping them into place with a graveness, a soldier gearing up.
With Victor, it's both: pretty but also not; brute but also not.
Yuuri likes that he can put a daisy in his hair and still throw something out the window just to hear it smash, that he can jump in as Juliet in their class play, because Sara Crispino caught the flu, and then pound across a soccer field two hours later.
It's never a girl thing with him. Or a boy thing. It's just a Victor thing, and every Victor thing might as well be out of this fucking world.
"I'm thinking about cutting my hair," he says. Yuuri almost lets the bowl slip through his fingers.
"What?" Nothing but a garble. He clears his throat. "Don't," he mumbles, shoving the bowl onto the kitchen counter.
"Why not?" Victor picks a stray piece of hair off the apron, staring at it with narrowed eyes. He scrunches it between his palms until it's a clump.
"Because..." Yuuri swallows. He wants to reach out and steal it, hide it under his pillow like a tooth. But Victor flicks it away before he can do anything stupid. He stares after it, shiny, a pearl rolling across the kitchen tiles.
"Because..." he tries again, but he doesn't know if his thoughts would sound right out in the open. Because, he thinks, your hair makes you look like you came all the way from space and getting rid
of it would be dangerously close to bloodshed.
Victor gives him the kind of look that nails Yuuri's head into place. He knows that look, and he knows Victor's about to get too close for comfort. Yuuri backs up against the counter. The glint of a challenge and Victor's on him, looming above, arms caging him in, hands gripping the counter on either side.
"Because?" Victor lifts an eyebrow, trying so hard to look like a menace. It makes Yuuri want to squish his cheeks. And then bite them. One by one. Tongue at the soft indents his teeth make.
He inches closer. Yuuri's brain fogs up.
"Because you look—Because it's nice like this." He looks up at him, craning his neck. He remembers a time when he didn't have to.
Victor lifts a hand. And Yuuri can't help himself. These thoughts just slip right through the cracks. Breath kicking in his throat, Yuuri wants to grab it, press that palm against his mouth, his teeth, his tongue. He catches himself wanting these things so much it's killing him. He's killing him. Him and his stupid, perfect, kissable hands.
Victor plucks Yuuri's glasses off his nose and rubs the lenses clean with the hem of his sweater. Yuuri never notices his smudged lenses. Victor does. Victor always does.
Yuuri's eyes snap down. He doesn't like looking at Victor when he's all blurry.
"Yuuri," he hums. It's nice when he hums it. It reaches places, like the bottom of his stomach, like that place between his thighs. "I could shave my head and still look terrific."
Yuuri tries really hard not to roll his eyes. And he tries even harder not to flinch when Victor slides his glasses back into place, fingers grazing Yuuri's temples. He shivers.
"Better?" Victor says. It's almost a whisper.
His fingers sliding under Yuuri's chin, chucking it, something so soft and silly, something that makes Yuuri feel like a child. And maybe it's enough to make him remember his place, a slap-to-the-wrist reminder he's not allowed to want more than this, not allowed to want anything at all.
"I guess," Yuuri says. It's almost a whisper too.
Their eyes stuck. Both so close. The small of Yuuri's back digs into the edge of the kitchen counter, Victor above, the kitchen lights behind him, a fuzzy halo. For a second he thinks Victor might just tip over, fall over him, into him—but he takes a breath and he steps away. The hem of his sweater close enough for Yuuri to tug on. But he doesn't. He never does.
They stay quiet, standing at the stove. Yuuri spreading the batter, Victor flipping the pancakes, their shoulders bumping every now and then. Victor's phone is on the kitchen island, broken speakers humming MGMT so quietly they can barely hear it. It's always been MGMT.
The only reason Yuuri hoarded every album he could get his hands on was because Victor said he liked "Kids" when it played on the radio that long-ago summer Yuuri's dad drove them to the water park.
Victor, squashed between Koji and him on the backseats, in his bloated flower-printed swim trunks, his hair floating when they hit the highway with the windows down. Every inch of him moon magic. All those strands getting caught in Yuuri's glasses and eyelashes and the corner of his mouth, and he blinked and smiled and whispered he liked the song too. Victor grinned at him so hard it made his head unfurl, that gap between his two front teeth so inviting Yuuri wanted to wedge his pinkie in it. Or a Slurpee straw. Or a Pocky. Yuuri was too busy giggling at the feeling of Victor's hair tickling his nose to pay any attention to Koji moan about how everything on the radio sucked except for Soulja Boy. Their dad spent the rest of the drive trying to explain misogyny using middle school vocabulary.
They sit on the counter chewing on their pancake abominations, feet kicking against the cabinets, fingers sticky with maple syrup. Yuuri catches himself staring at Victor's mouth. It's gone, that gap between his teeth, just like his gangly limbs and unmasked face, his whole awkward, boyish cluelessness. And now, his hair; it’ll be gone too.
In secret, hidden all the way in the back of Yuuri's head, he wishes he could stop it, Victor and his changing, his opening and closing, his whole growing up and moving on. Sometimes Yuri feels stuck, blaming himself for not being able to keep up. Maybe, even, for not wanting to.
Because Victor's off driving cars and sneaking out and kissing strangers, talking about the world like he can't wait to be a part of it, and Yuuri's still dreaming about that summer they drove to the water park: the wind and the radio, the prick of the sun streaming through the moonroof, the way
he giggled so hard his belly ached, the way it was all so good and so easy and nothing in the world could ever, for the life of him, rip him away.
Yuuri presses a hand to the corner of his mouth, the memory of Victor's hair burning there.
"Why?" Yuuri mumbles against his fingers.
"Why what?" Victor taps his fork against his plate to the guitar riff of "Electric Feel".
"Why do you want to get it cut?"
Victor looks at him, and there's something off about him now, the flare of the kitchen lights hitting him in all the wrong ways. It's like Yuuri is looking at him without his glasses on. None of him really there, slipping away.
"Because it's time," he whispers.
And maybe the Man in the Moon feels them too. These little panics. These growing pains.