Chapter Text
CHAPTER FIVE HUNDRED TEN
"Hee... I'm feeling tipsy already..." Victor laugh-whined, holding to his partner's shoulder for the stability, "...I shouldn't be drinking before eating..."
"That's some strong wine." Yuri agreed, face flushed from it all, "Maybe we should sit somewhere before we fall over."
"I thought we were sitting."
"You only have half a butt-cheek clinging to the edge of a high wooden stool." Yuri explained, reaching a wobbly hand towards the nearby doorframe, though he missed grabbing it the first time. Behind him, he could hear the hazy, immature laugh of his husband.
"Hehehe...you're talking about my butt."
"Only half of it." Yuri teasingly corrected, reaching one hand back towards the man, "Come along, husband, bring it this way."
Leaving the empty wine glasses on the table, Victor took the offered hand and went after his spouse, letting Yuri guide him into the next room and around the heavy wooden table in the middle of it. They passed Victoria in the single-person recliner, eyes on Yurio where he clung territorially to his corner of the couch.
"We're gonna sit." Yuri warned mischievously, "Better look out."
"Don't you even dare. I was here first."
"We're gonna sit..."
"Why don't you find another spot!?" The teen barked, clinging to the cushions.
"Victoria's spot is too small for us both and Nikki has sharp-pointy things. So...we're gonna sit...here."
"NRRRGGGGHHHH!!" Yurio protested, using both feet against Victor's arse to keep him from lowering down much further, "THIS IS...MY...SPO-hrk..."
Nikki couldn't help but chortle a laugh under her breath, pulling up the half-sewn pants to hide her face. All she could see under the pile of skaters was Yurio's twitching right hand and leg.
"It's a bit bumpy here, my love." Victor pouted comically, "I think I sat on something."
Yurio hollered and squirmed, but his voice was muffled by his older counterpart's bulky frame. Victor eventually leaned to one side and Yurio yanked himself free, but his spot was then gone, and he could only watch in annoyance as the older figure twisted in place to put his back into the corner, and Yuri came down to sit against him, both facing towards the flat-screen just past Nikki. Yurio could do little but sit indignantly, squished between the older skaters' upturned legs, and a perceived force-field around Nikki's workspace.
"I guess all that stuff you guys were talking about explains why I'd never heard of you until this year." The silver teen suddenly commented, trying to go back to her task, sewing zigzag patterns into the new, lower hem of the pant-legs, "All the big stuff happened before I was even born."
Victor and Yuri, despite their buzzed haze, both looked a bit surprised to hear those words. But, a few seconds later, they both relaxed.
"So since papa was never able to spring you from Russia, what did happen to you?" She wondered further, "...I thought I heard something about your dad burning yo-"
"He was never my dad." Victor corrected sharply, "That's a title he never earned."
"Oh...uhm..." Nikki stammered, still a bit surprised by the interruption, "...Your...father then?"
"Let's just stick with his name," Yuri suggested, "Call him Kon."
"...R-Right..."
Victor shook his head, pushing up against the couch's arm-rest to sit a bit higher against it, and returned his hands around his partner's skinny waist to clasp his fingers over it, "He made me burn my skates...the ones my old coach, Yakov, had gotten me earlier that winter." He explained, still feeling the sting of it, "He hated skating as much as a person could hate something, and it was pretty hard when he found out my mom was helping me do it in secret. Papa Mimi said my mom had called him soon after it happened, and then he came a few weeks later, apparently looking to take me away from that place. I wasn't there to see it, so I didn't believe it at first. I spent as much time as I could away from home after the incident, using my tank playground to keep me occupied in the woods."
"...Tank...playground?" Nikki echoed skeptically.
"We don't know how long they were there for," Yuri explained, "There were trees and roots growing through them...so maybe since World War 2. We were out there last winter for something, and I got to see the tanks myself... Victor actually found an old backpack in one, that he'd hidden away with his first skates as a kid. They turned out to be the ones Kon used when he was young. They were these bent old antiques that you tie to your shoes."
"Oh..."
"...We...actually also found the skates that Kon had forced Victor to burn." Yuri went on, clasping one hand over where his partner's were folded together against his side, "They were burnt beyond use, having been in that old wood-stove for some fifteen years. Kon said he didn't realize they were still in there, but I doubt that."
"Yeah..." Victor agreed, "There's no way he could've not known they were in there."
"Seriously..." Yuri nodded quietly.
"We tried to put the whole thing to rest by burying those old burnt blades in the woods by those tanks. To put them together, somewhere away from the hate and the bad memories.”
"You were twelve when Yakov got you onto the team." Yurio finally chimed in, trying to get a little comfortable in his small wedge of the couch, and leaned against the upturned knees Yuri had propped up near to him. Putting one elbow across them, he turned to look at Victor, "Right?"
"Yeah." He answered simply, "The skating season had already ended when my father made me burn those boots, and so when the next one rolled around, Yakov noticed I wasn't coming to the rink like before. He came to our house to find out what was going on...and the next thing he knew, he was my new guardian, and we were driving back to St. Petersburg. I didn't go back again until last year when my mom died."
"Oh... I'm sorry..." Nikki said quietly.
"So you lived with him back then?" Yurio wondered, "Does that mean you lived with Lilia, too?"
"Yakov had just finished his split from her, so his house was pretty empty. Might be the only reason he was able to take me in at the time." Victor explained, "I'm entirely not sure how things would've worked out if she'd still been there."
"If she was the same back then as she is now, probably the same, but with more arguing." The teen huffed, "She means well but she's pretty bossy; an absolute slave-driver. Living with her was like being in a military barracks, I swear."
"You wouldn't know a military barracks if one dropped from the sky and bit you in the butt." Mikhail teased, leaning against the doorframe, "Lilia was a Saint compared to the sergeants and drill-masters I dealt with."
"It was regimented as Hell!" Yurio protested.
"Oh no, structure!" The elder teased and laughed, lifting his half-drained wine glass to his lips, "How horrible!"
The Tiger was shrinking into a tiny kitten, and he sulked where he leaned against his friend's knees, laughter coming at him from most sides of the room.
"Hun, come back, something's weird." Minako's voice called, and the snickering elder Russian turned back find her. What he found was Minako standing over a pot of semi-boiling water with what looked like a big-holed cheese-grater across the top, and a square-shaped porcelain box on top, full of dough. She just gestured at it, "You said this stuff would go down and get cut into bits, but...it's not even doing it now. It'll just smear back and forth without making the little noodle-dumpling things."
Mikhail blinked at her, then at the pot and spӓtzle-maker above it, and with one finger, nudged the square holder forward. The dough lowered down by an inch in the dish by the time it slid to the other side of the grater, and Mikhail could almost hear the click in his partner's head.
"Okay you can go away now." She said instead, nudging him back, "Go, be gone. Nothing to see here."
He chortled quietly into his wine, and rubbed the ballerina's back before he returned to the doorway. Jade eyes went down to where it looked like Nikki had finished her work finally, as she held up the show-pants and shook them out.
"Here," She started, turning to hand them over to the kitten next to her, "See if these come down far enough."
Yurio perked up and looked the pants over, "...Why zigzags?"
"Zigzag stitches offer flexibility in material that stretches. If I did just a straight line across, the thread would either break or the cuff would have no give. Go, go! If I have to make adjustments, I don't have lots of time to do them!"
Yurio hopped off the couch and darted around the table as told, squeezing past Mikhail in the doorway to find the bathroom just around the corner. The light clicked on and the door closed behind him.
Once gone, Nikki stretched her legs out and yawned, then started putting her supplies onto the big wooden table in front of the couch. She leaned back against the couch and looked at the television briefly, watching a few seconds of some random program her sister had found, but then rolled her head back the other way to look at the duo in the opposite corner, "What if you were a girl instead?" She blurted unexpectedly, staring at her cousin.
Victor just gaped at her, "...If...I was a girl instead?" He repeated, "There were a lot of things that would've been different if I had been. Why?"
"Well..." Nikki looked up again, "When Kon came to Nationals with us, the way he acted towards Vicky and me was super different from how he treated papa or even Yuri. Right?" She looked towards her sister, who had been entirely silent to that point.
"Huh?"
"Kon, in Russia. He was really sweet and protective towards us."
"...I guess so."
"Yeah, he even picked us up and tried to shield us from the snowstorm." Nikki went on, "I was a bit nervous around him at first because of what I'd heard about him, but he was really nice."
"And serial killers always turn out to be the guy no one suspected." Mikhail huffed, "Never judge someone based solely on how they treat you when you're in public. Everyone has their dark side, that they only show to certain people or in certain places."
Nikki just gave that naïve young teenaged look, "What's your dark side?"
"Business Mode." Victoria answered for him, rising up from her chair as though impatient or frustrated, "But I don't think you've seen it."
"...Business Mode?" Nikki and Victor echoed in tandem, turning their eyes towards the nervous-looking figure in the doorway, "What's that?"
Mikhail coughed, "Erm...well. It's when I stop being fun?"
Victor deadpanned him, "Oh, like the time you argued with me about the car keys?"
The elder grumbled, "I wasn't arguing. You being difficult about something dumb and I was trying to get you to be reasonable."
"That's Business Mode for sure." Victoria clarified, breaking up the tension, "Be glad he didn't do the hair-thing, too, cuz then he's really insufferable."
"...Hair-thing?" Everyone echoed back at her.
Pale hands pressed against Mikhail's frame to push him back into the kitchen area, just as Yurio came back through with the new pants on. Victoria just kept moving until she was through as well and disappeared from sight, leaving the living-room in an awkward silence, save for the television.
Yurio blinked open doorway, pointing at it as he looked back at his friends.
They both shrugged in confusion, "The pants look good though."
He looked down towards his feet and examined how the hem went past his heel, bunching up just under it, "Yeah, this'll work. ...I guess I'll just...sit in them for a bit..." He said, ambling slowly towards the seat Victoria had abandoned.
"Does this TV get the channel showing the event?" Yuri wondered, leaning far aside for the remote control, "I wanna see how Mila and Sara do."
Within the kitchen, Victoria went up to the stove to see what the food-status was, and looked into the big pot to see Minako stirring the still-melting cheese shreds, "How long? I'm starving."
"Just a few more minutes. You wanna help?" Mikhail answered, setting his now-empty wine-glass down before reaching to open a nearby cabinet.
The teen glanced out past the door, hearing the sound of what could only be figure skating coming back through from the television, "...Yeah, may as well."
"You okay?" The elder wondered quietly, starting to pull small bowls down, "You did the thing again."
"What, walking?"
"...In so many words."
Victoria took the first stack of bowls and moved over to the kitchen table, reaching for one of the salad spoons that had been left next to the big bowl, "I guess I'm just curious."
"What about?"
"Why you skipped the whole section of your life about how you met mom and why you even married her." She answered, stirring the salad idly, pulling up the balsamic that had settled on the bottom, "It's important, isn't it?"
Mikhail got a nervous tingle in his gut, and he glanced over at Minako briefly before going back to the table with the last few bowls, "Of course it is...but it's not always the best idea to talk about old love in front of new love."
"So mom's just off limits now..."
"She's not. If you want to talk about her, we can."
Victoria was quiet for a moment, but unstacked the first bowl and fished out the first spoonful of the salad into it, "...I'm not even sure what to ask now. You skipped over her so fast that it's like you didn't want to bring it up anyway."
"If you're asking whether or not I'm bitter, then sure, I'm super bitter." He explained, "She kept you guys away from me, like she held you hostage. I missed out on some of the best years of your young lives, and the only reason I got you back was because she died. That's miserable."
"She told us that you didn't want to be there."
"...Well, that's a crock if I ever heard one." He huffed indignantly, "Did I ever give you the impression that what she said about me was true?"
The teen hesitated, but then went around her father's back to push the door closed to the living-room. With her hand still on the olive-green panel, she looked back, "I'm not sure what to believe from her. The stuff she said made sense, but...it was like finding two puzzle pieces that seem to fit together at first, but the further you go, you realize they don't fit at all and you have to reexamine everything."
"...You were really young. Not even ten yet. Your mom changed a lot, even to me, and I knew what was going on."
Victoria raised her right hand and pushed a few colored strands of her silver hair over her ear, "...It really sucked... Sergio was so attached to her, and mad at you for leaving. Nikki didn't know better; she was too young to understand. But there I was, in the middle...you were gone and mom was losing her mind... And all those years, I wished you were around, and then when you finally came, you brought other people with you." She said quietly, looking at the salad in that one little bowl that she'd put together, "...But now I hear all this stuff about how desperate you were to get Victor...how you lied to mom, went to Russia to get him...all these things you were ready to do to bring him back with you, and it doesn't seem like you fought even half that hard for us..."
"I can tell you everything you want to know." Mikhail said, pulling his daughter into a hug, "But there's a lot to say, and I wouldn't be doing you any favors to start now, only to stop in 30 seconds because dinner's ready and then we have to go. Can I get a rain-check until after Yuri's thing is done? Then we can talk until we're blue in the face."
"...Promise?"
"Yeah absolutely. We'll make it a date." He nodded eagerly, and pat the teen's shoulder, "Let's finish serving this stuff up then. It's best when it's fresh."