Chapter Text
PART ONE: BEFORE
There are certain moments in Yuri Plisetsky’s life that he likes to forget happened at all. The time they were chased from the flat, the landlord angrily spitting and waving threateningly at them when his mother couldn’t produce enough money for rent. Babushka’s funeral. The first time he fell in competition.
Those are things he can easily forget. If he looks at himself in the mirror and scowls hard enough, there is absolutely no trace of those memories on him. No one would be able to tell by a glance.
He cannot forget that, under the black band he wears around his wrist like a shield—black for mourning, black for death—his soulmark may as well be nonexistent.
He’s seen other people’s. They’re certainly no point of shame. Mama's was often an abstract swirl, painted angry red and purple like a bruise on her forearm. Dedushka’s had melted across the rainbow with emotion on the back of his hand until Babushka died; now he wears a glove over it to respectfully hide the black beneath. Yakov’s is dark green with bitterness, gold with determination.
Sometimes he catches Viktor Nikiforov gazing lovingly at the curlicues on the inside of his bicep, his sleeve pushed up to admire the ever-shifting colours. Yuri has seen it enough to know that Viktor’s soulmate is a very emotional person, shifting from childish, orange enthusiasm to greyish-blue anxiety in a flash. Yuri has seen every colour imaginable on Viktor’s arm. Angrily, he hits the boards to startle Viktor out of his reverie. ‘Disgusting,’ he snarls. ‘Get over yourself.’
He doesn’t mean it. He never means it. Viktor, long ago, learned when to take Yuri’s insults at face value and when to interpret them as what Yuri actually meant, which was stop doing that in front of me, there’s no need to rub it the fuck in. At least, that’s what Yuri hopes Viktor understands when he snaps at him. It gets him to stop, which he supposes is enough.
Viktor knows. Yuri, caught in a moment of vulnerability under his idol’s laughing eyes and insensitive criticism, still clinging to Viktor’s first words of encouragement, told him the truth when they were alone in the locker room and Yuri had yet to skate a practice run without wanting to turn his triples into quads. Viktor knows, which maybe makes the mooning about ten times worse when Yuri catches him at it. Yuri thinks it must be like a drug to him. Viktor is addicted to love, to a person he has never met before in his life. It’s pathetic, really. (It isn’t.) He’s trying, at least, and Yuri knows he should appreciate the effort, but he’s angry. He’s jealous.
It means that sometimes, when Yuri stays after Yakov has dismissed them for the day and everyone else has gotten off the ice, Viktor will hover by the boards and wordlessly take Yuri’s wristband from him so he can skate his frustration out on his own. The scars do not define him. This does.
‘Higher, Yuri,’ Viktor calls. Yuri swears at him but adjusts anyways, and his quad salchow is perfect.
Yuri finds Katsuki Yuuri sobbing in a bathroom stall and he is furious.
This idiot wants to waste all of his time crying instead of getting better? Screw him. Yuri had almost admired him, watching his determination as he had picked himself off of the ice and soldiered on. But now, hearing him weep about it? Fucking pathetic. (It’s not. Yuri has done it before over different things, but like hell he’s ever admitting it.)
Yuri kicks his door in frustration. They say that about heroes: Meeting them in real life and finding out they’re human? Worst thing in the world. He had a crisis when he got good enough to share a rink with Viktor Nikiforov and found out that his idol was literally the most annoying person in the world, curled up with that stupid soulmark. He bets Katsuki’s no different, looking at him now. Yuri glares. Does Katsuki wonder if his soulmate knows who he is? If he would be disappointed with all of his failures, or supportive all the way through?
Yuri jabs a finger into Katsuki’s face. His sleeve falls a little, baring the band. Yuri tells himself that he doesn't care that Katsuki’s eyes drift to it and linger as the young man trembles.
‘We don't need two Yuris in the same bracket,’ Yuri says, lacing his voice with enough venom that he hopes Katsuki will understand. Prove you’re not the kind of person I always beat. ‘Incompetents like you should just retire already.’ I know you can do better.
He doesn't think Katsuki understands. Not with that shocked look Yuri leaves on his face as he stalks off.
But no one really does, do they? ‘Your free program could use more-’
Yuri balls up his fists, tilts his head back in annoyance. ‘I won, so who cares?’
Yes. Who cares? Does Viktor think that all he cares about is the skating itself? Pah. And he thought that moron might actually get him. He tugs his sleeve down.
Katsuki Yuuri’s soulmark is on his chest, right above his heart, because of course it is. Yuri knows this because no one decided to stop the depressed skater from drinking after his fourth glass of champagne, let alone his sixteenth, how has he not died? And after that humiliating dance-off, Katsuki had started shedding clothing, and oh my god where did the stripper pole come from, oh my god is Christophe Giacometti naked too, oh my god he’s going to have to scrub his eyes out with bleach.
Yuri watches the oddly familiar mark on Katsuki’s chest shift in shades of yellow and silver and pink: Curiosity. Intrigue. Interest. Yuri may or may not have snapped a couple of pictures. For reasons. Then someone—the moron’s coach, probably—manages to get Katsuki back into a shirt before the Japanese skater squirms away, gets his tie around his head, and drunkenly begs Viktor for a dance-off.
Yuri is half outraged by the brazen request until he sees Viktor’s eyes have widened considerably. Then a slight blush spreads across his cheeks, like he doesn’t have a soulmate to think about, the ungrateful bastard, and Yuri’s fury consumes him completely in a wash of red. He wishes someone would give him a damned drink, who cares if he’s fourteen, because if not he might just throw up into a planter and then throw himself off of the building without a good excuse other than this is fucking disgusting, Jesus. Instead, at Yakov’s scandalised and angry expression, Yuri stays put, seething in the corner as he watches the pair dance.
Whatever. Whatever. It doesn't fucking matter.
Except it does, because he sees Viktor in a t-shirt when he shrugs off his runner to change into his Team Russia Olympic jacket, the cocky shit, and Yuri’s eyes skim over the mark on his arm and he knows.
‘I bet you’re ecstatic,’ Yuri says venomously. ‘I swear to god, if you get even grosser, I’ll kick you across the damned rink.’
Viktor blinks slowly at him before he smiles in comprehension. ‘I gave him my number, but he was rather drunk, wasn’t he? I can’t believe I didn’t recognise him earlier. He’s very hard to forget.’ Viktor sighs like a lovesick princess and Yuri gags pointedly.
‘Has he called you yet?’ Yuri asks in spite of himself. Viktor shakes his head and pulls his jacket on, sliding it over the mark painted dark blue with… what, disappointment? Yuri catches himself staring and looks away with a scowl.
‘No. But I’m not worried.’ Viktor smiles at nothing. ‘These kind of things tend to work out in the end.’
Yuri huffs and pushes off from the boards. ‘You can’t tell me that, old man.’
‘I mean it.’ Viktor gives him a pointed look and leans back to watch him skate. Yuri gets the feeling he isn’t talking about himself and Katsuki, anymore.
Sometimes, Yuri curls up on top of his sheets in the dark with the lights of cars in the street flashing through the slits in his blinds, dowsing the grey of his room in brief washes of colour. Sometimes Potya curls up on his chest or swipes his fluffy tail along Yuri's arm. Sometimes, the streets are completely dead, and sometimes the cat has amused himself with rolling around under the bed. Whatever. That’s not the point.
The point is that sometimes he finds himself on his back in the darkness, tracing over the places on the uneven surfaces where he thinks the edges of the mark should be. Everything looks the same when he can’t see anything at all, and this way, he can trick himself into seeing the curls and the squiggly edges, the shift of his forever unknown soulmate’s emotions lovingly traced over his wrist. When he can’t see the faded scars, he can easily ignore how they feel different from the rest of his skin. This is easy.
He wonders what they’re feeling. He can imagine their joy bursting across his skin in bright yellow, their pride blooming in streaks of silver. How often would they make the mark dip into sorrowful blue, to frustrated purple? Do they see the burning red of Yuri’s anger and think of him? Do they do what Viktor does and constantly sneak glances at it, like some precious gift? Do they wear it like a medal or a scar?
The fantasy drifts away eventually, the way the pain had slowly dulled to numbness after his father had fled with his bloodstained hands and they’d taken Yuri to the hospital. There’s nothing we can do, they’d told him as he’d stared at the bloody bandages. We’re terribly sorry.
On nights like these, he carries the last of the rainbow colours on the insides of his eyelids and allows the skating to come second to his bitterness. He wonders how dark and sickly the green looks in his soulmate’s mark.
Yuri watches Viktor’s eager smiles lose their genuine edge. The champion skater seems to forget a lot more these days, leaving things behind him for the rest of them to pick up like beggars or not showing up to lunches meant for the four of them––Viktor, Yuri, Mila, and Georgi––to trade gossip and stories beyond the rink. Yuri, who constantly chucks Viktor’s forgotten skate guards at the back of his aloof head, who has only been a welcome member of their little group for a few months, knows that something is wrong. It pisses him off. He tries to convey this to Viktor with carefully chosen jabs at his age, his perfectly full head of hair, and his rabid fanbase of women desperately hoping Russia’s most eligible bachelor has their adoration swirling in glittering fuchsia on his arm. They slide off of Viktor like oil. Everything does.
If anything, whatever’s bothering him (Whomever. Yuri knows. He wouldn't dare say it) has only made Viktor more focused on his skating. Gold medal easily secured in the junior division again, Yuri watches Viktor skate a technically perfect routine at Worlds. Viktor walks out with another gold, too, but though his smile is wide and grateful, his eyes are devoid of anything at all.
Mila hangs off of him to watch Viktor loop the rink in lazy circles once competition season has ended. There’s nothing there. Their eyes follow him around the perimeter until he scrapes to a stop at the gate and walks right past them without so much as a glance. He’s on another level, now. He has always been on another level. That's what he wants them to think.
Yuri shoves Mila off of him and narrowly dodges her attempt to lift him up in retaliation by gliding onto the ice, tracing Viktor’s steps until he’s zipping around the ice, gaining speed for his jump. Pathetic. Letting that stupid mark get to him? Dumping all of his hope into a soulmate so drunk he couldn't walk straight when the night finally ended? Has Viktor Nikiforov been reduced to his aching heart? That’s bull.
Yuri snarls and jumps. He trips on the landing of his quad Salchow and creates a magnificently large bruise all the way up his thigh when he crashes into the ice. Fuck it. He gets up and does it again, again and again and again until he gets the damned thing right. He’ll never let it weigh him down on the ice. He will be better than Viktor. He was always meant to be better than Viktor. Everything else is secondary.
He’ll ask Viktor for his short program in the morning.
Yuri wonders if Katsuki purposely wears his clothes zipped all the way up to his neck. Does he think if he does that, they won't remember what it looks like?
His version of Viktor’s free skate is a little rough around the edges, a little flawed in execution and finesse, but something about it makes Yuri watch it to the end. Katsuki’s clearly gained a little weight from not being in competition, but that doesn't stop him from skating Viktor’s routine with riveting emotion and technical ability. Yuri tries to reconcile this with the Katsuki Yuuri he watched flub all of his major jumps at the Grand Prix Final and cannot understand it, especially when Katsuki moves into Viktor’s step sequence and does it better.
‘Oi, Viktor, have you seen-’ Yuri turns to find Viktor on the rink, but he’s not there.
He reconciles himself with the fact that Viktor is gone by the fifth day of impatiently waiting for him to show up in a blaze of drama and glory. That sinking feeling in his stomach ratchets up in intensity until Yuri thinks he might burst from the disappointment and anger that courses through his veins like gasoline. His whole future hinges on his performance this year. Viktor knows that, so where the hell is he?
He has to find out about Katsuki through the damned media, not Viktor. That asshole.
The humiliation drives Yuri around in fierce bursts of emotion. Never mind that Viktor had probably interpreted that stupid routine as a mating ritual or what the fuck ever. Was the tentative trust Yuri had placed in Viktor pointless? Had he allowed Viktor to know about his injury, to let him in on that fiercely guarded secret, for no reason at all? Is Yuri worth so little in his eyes that Viktor would drop him, who would willingly carry his legacy above and beyond where Viktor left it, like a sack of moulding potatoes? That’s the worst sting of it: Viktor, who knows that Yuri will never find his soulmate, who knows that Yuri pours himself into his skating because he will never have that emotional connection, dropped him on the whim of colours on his arm and a man he met once—once!—and who never bothered to call.
It probably isn’t the most rational thing to do, booking a ticket to Japan without telling anyone where he’s going, but Yuri has never been one to think things through when he’s angry, and he’s always angry. Shit like this is why.
It very quickly becomes apparent that Katsudon really doesn't know that Viktor is his soulmate, and the other idiot is too obtuse to just fucking tell him, for god’s sake. That’s not the issue. They’re both the stupidest people Yuri has ever met, and while it may or may not be a little endearing, any thoughts of fondness are quickly overshadowed by the confirmation that yes, Viktor completely forgot about him after all of that, and yes, even after Yuri had begrudgingly allowed Viktor the most intimate secret of his life, Katsudon is worth much more.
Soulmates are garbage, he decides as he wheels his suitcase down the Ice Castle’s stairs, the wheels bouncing carelessly with each step.
Yuri knows what it means to love. Ironically, it was Viktor who forced him to see it, his agape, lurking beneath the whirling sandstorm of his fury. He loves Dedushka. He loves Mila and Georgi. He loves Yakov, Lilia, Mari, Yuuko, Potya, Makkachin… He can even begrudgingly offer some of his love to Viktor and Katsudon. But agape is not eros. It is certainly not the soulmates’ pragma, the kind that Katsudon and Viktor have found that makes eight months look like eight years from even the most unobservant passerby’s point of view.
He meets the Hero of Kazakhstan in the lobby of a hotel with a snarled insult. His Angels squeal at him as characteristic fury boils in his veins after that awful encounter with JJ and his insufferable fiancée.
(Don’t stare at me, Yuri means. Don’t turn out to be another one of them.)
He meets Otabek Altin on the colourful terrace of the Park Güell with a handshake. The sky wavers on the brink of a sunset and the breeze playfully punctuates every weighty word that falls from Otabek’s lips.
(Don’t let me go, Yuri means. Don’t forget me.)
For once, someone hears him.