Chapter Text
It was an unusually cold April day on the Texas A&M Marine Biology grounds in Corpus Christi the first time Yuri saw him. Long, silver hair thrown effortlessly into a ponytail that swished with his every move, and blue, ocean eyes. Yuri had lived, grown and worked alongside humans the whole of his life, but he had never before seen a human like Victor Nikiforov.
It’s been a few of months since that first meeting where Yuri ogled his newly transferred coworker long enough to lose track of his footing and spill fish guts down his front, which, thanks to the cool weather, felt about twenty times more wet and slimy than it normally would have. Victor had been the perfect gentleman – he rushed over to make sure Yuri was okay and help pick him up off the ground. Yuri was glad he resisted smacking Victor’s hand away, as was his knee jerk reaction. He’d never forgive himself if he’d ruined a chance to touch Victor Nikiforov. Now if only he’d stayed still long enough to have an actual conversation with Victor; he kicked himself later that night when he realized how rude it must have looked to run off as soon as he was upright and leave a big mess of guts for the beautiful stranger or someone else to clean up. Phichit, his supposed best friend, was rolling in laughter to the dark of the morning.
It had taken a solid month before Yuri felt confident enough to look in Victor’s direction again. And even at that, it hadn’t been an intentional glance on his part.
“Oh! It’s fish gut boy!” were words Yuri never expected to be sung in his direction. He tried to duck away, but was too slow. Victor hopped right into Yuri’s space, their noses mere inches apart.
Yuri yelped and nearly fell again in his attempt to maintain some personal space. Victor frowned, “You’re a clumsy one, aren’t you?” Yuri noticed his accent for the first time. His cheeks colored a bit – he was a dancer in middle school, and a darn good one until he quit to focus on his studies his third year in high school. Clumsy was not a word often ascribed to him.
Victor leaned back to laugh, which was more than a little frustrating. He didn’t seem to notice Yuri’s agitation though, for a moment later he was throwing an arm around Yuri’s shoulder with mischief in his eyes. “I’m hungry. Where’s a good place to eat lunch around here?”
Yuri’s still not sure what possessed him to actually take Victor to his favorite, college student-free taco joint that day, what made him order two of his favorite shrimp taco platters when Victor looked lost at the menu items, and show him back to the table he usually sat at. But, despite the fact that Victor couldn’t seem to get enough of teasing him for his seemingly poor coordination, Yuri is infinitely glad he did.
Yuri can count the number of humans he talks to on a regular basis on one hand – half of one hand if he’s not counting his family. He likes it that way. He likes that his job as a marine biologist keeps him relatively isolated, likes that his research is so independent. Though the thought of moving halfway around the world for a resident research position at a beach town university had been relatively nerve wracking at first, especially since it would mean leaving his family and living among only humans for the first time in his life, he had settled into his new life almost seamlessly. He’d made one friend, Phichit, and Phichit was really the only friend he thought he needed. Until Victor, of course.
Now, Yuri has gotten pretty good at keeping himself upright and fish gut-free in his encounters with Victor, which happen to occur every Wednesday and Friday, not that he’s keeping track.
He’s always thrilled to have his little moments with Victor. Sometimes, late in the day, Victor offers for Yuri to help him feed their University’s permanent resident dolphin, whom Victor named Makkachin. The university had taken her in to recover from a predator injury and, once she had recovered, had been deemed too accustomed to human contact to be released back into the wild. She was the reason Victor transferred to their little university in the first place. The head of Yuri’s department had demanded a marine mammal specialist be brought on board if they were going to keep Makkachin and invest in a big tank for her, and Victor Nikiforov’s resume was at the top of the stack. He was at the top of everyone’s stack. His work with aquatic mammals was renowned in the academy and it was no secret he was looking to transfer out of his previous resident research position in California, though no one seemed to know why. None of Yuri’s coworkers had expected him to accept their offer, but no more than seven days after the department head had put in a call with a job offer, whispers were circulating the campus that a certain genius marine specialist had flown to for a tour of the university facilities. Victor swears he took one look at Makkachin’s picture and couldn’t refuse the offer. Yuri couldn’t be more grateful to the little dolphin, and to his own delight, she seems to like him back.
Yuri sometimes is stricken with the urge to jump in the water with her, let his demonic form take over for a little while and enjoy a good swim in undisturbed waters. This warm June evening is most definitely one of those occasions.
He’s never done it of course, swim in all his tentacled glory with Makkachin. The prospect of potentially disgusting Victor is objectively terrifying, and Yuri isn’t entirely sure Makkachin would even take well to swimming with a demon squid. Hell, Yuri finds his own tentacles annoying a good majority of the time, so how is he supposed to expect a normal - scratch that, beautiful, radiant, incandescent - human to react kindly to them?
While Victor has turned out to be far from the unapproachable beauty he’d originally thought him to be, Yuri still has that worry at the back of his mind. Victor can’t ever find out. The only person who knows outside of his own family is Phichit, and Phichit is… well, an exception to everything. Victor, silly, playful, wonderful Victor, would likely crinkle in horror if he ever saw Yuri’s actual form, just like those boys in middle school that had tried to torment his sister in front of him.
But that’s okay. He doesn’t need any more of Victor than he already has. Sometimes, in the late evenings, when Victor’s hair catches the light just right and casts him in a golden, glimmering halo, Yuri finds himself captivated, wonders what Victor’s response might be if he were to say he wanted more. More time, less space, more words. But this strange, nameless bond that brings them together every Wednesday and Friday night is already more than enough. More than fish gut Yuri could have ever hoped from the genius of the aquatic sciences. He won’t ever ask Victor to accept this side of him.
But Yuri’s nature, as has been the case the whole of his life, very seldom works to his favor. Once every month, the demon rustles inside him, claws at the emotions settled in his gut and cries, longing to be submerged in the water he pours himself over every day. It had started around the same time as his human puberty, equally as painful and confusing. His sister and mother could understand and help with the monthly pains of his human puberty, and his father had some answers to the pains of the squid demon playing with his emotions, but he’d had to figure out on his own how to handle the emotional turmoil of both rippling through him at the same time. He used to sometimes wonder if he’d angered some god, or perhaps even the squid demon that was his kin at some point in his life, for his body to betray him as it did.
While human medicine could subdue the troubles that came with his human puberty, there was nothing to be done about his monthly demonic problem, but to heed the wishes of the beast. It wasn’t usually too bad – he’s able to set up a schedule, plan for the days he needs to be close to salt water and away from people. He’s been able to set up most of his swimming days to weekends, so they don’t interfere too much with his work.
Yuri knows he’s been stubborn this month. He’s pushed and pushed at the demon for time, just a little more time with Victor. He’s already passed the weekend he was supposed to use for swimming, but Victor had asked for his help with some emergency adjustments to Makkachin’s tank, and really, what was one more week? The demon could wait a few more days. It pulled and pulled at his gut more with each passing day, but Yuri’d be damned if he missed his Friday with Victor.
As he stands over Makkachin’s very tempting salt-water tank with Victor across from him, contentedly patting the dolphin’s nose, Yuri feels his mistake, rippling like food poisoning through his belly. Just a little longer. He can hold out a few more hours.
“So, Yuri?” Victor’s gaze catches his own and he feels his gut sink. He hadn’t been listening.
Yuri makes a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat and lets his fingers dance across the surface of the water. His stomach churns painfully and he tries not to let it show on his face.
Victor’s eyebrows draw together in the most beautiful of pouts, “You weren’t even paying attention, were you?” If Yuri could melt into a puddle of shame in this moment, he would. Those damned puppy-eyes.
“I’m sorry, I’ve just… got some things on my mind right now.” Yuri said, not quite able to meet Victor’s eyes. Victor huffs quietly, as if to himself.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Victor’s voice is more quiet, even.
For a wild moment, Yuri considers. Considers telling him everything. His quiet desire for more of Victor, his time, his attention. The monthly demon that occasionally keeps him from coming into work for days on end, the eerie desire he has right now to wrap Victor up in the stickiest, most secure of hugs with every last one of his demonic and human limbs.
But he says none of that.
Instead, Yuri pulls his knees into his chest and murmurs, “another time.” Victor nods solemnly.
“Okay, well for now - want to help me get Makkachin settled for the night?”
Yuri answers in the affirmative and wobbles to his feet. He always feels a bit more clumsy on his human legs before his swim each month. He starts to shuffle around the border of the tank, ready to help Victor set up the appropriate gates when suddenly, he isn’t standing anymore. Some thick, muscled thing (Makkachin’s tail, he realizes belatedly) sweeps across the walkway around the tank. This isn’t the first time Makka had done this, usually in an attempt to convince Victor and Yuri to stay and play with her longer, but it is the first time in a long time he’s pushed his swim back so much. He should’ve listened to the demon.
Before he can even think to grab onto something, Yuri’s back hits the water, and as if on command, he sees and feels his tentacles emerge, bluish purple masses that rip a pain through his gut and back and sweep him with a simultaneous feeling of relief. Of freedom. The tendrils stretch and curl around him, trying to move him deeper into the water. He lets them. Maybe Victor will think he drowned. That would certainly be better than him actually finding out. There’s a chance he didn’t see this - right? He could’ve blinked at just the right time, maybe sneezed.
Makkachin circles around him, then breaks away to the other side of the tank. Dang it, “come back!” Yuri tries to yell but it all comes out bubbles. Well there goes his cover. Then a flash of silver hair and Yuri knows it’s all over. He readies himself with a deep gulp of saltwater and opens his eyes, finding Victor almost immediately.
He could never have prepared himself for the look on Victor’s face in that moment.
They take each other in for a span of heartbeats, eyes locked, mouths open. Any moment now. Victor’s face is going to fall. Twist. He’s going to curl away and never talk to Yuri again. Maybe he’ll even find a way to get Yuri fired. Or he’ll transfer back – but no, he loves Makkchin too much. Yuri will definitely have to be the one to leave. Except… Victor’s not moving.
Victor’s eyes are wide and – is he smiling? Victor is definitely smiling at Yuri’s gross tentacles. Is this some sort of fever dream? He really did put off the demon for too long, and now it’s getting its revenge in his mind. But Victor still looks so real, so… human. So very human. With human lungs that shouldn’t be under water this long.
Yuri’s across the tank in the blink of an eye, tentacles slicing through the water with precision. Careful to not let the tentacles touch him, Yuri wraps his human arms around Victor and propels them both up to the surface.
They emerge sputtering, Victor expelling the water from his lungs and Yuri attempting to keep from breathing air through his gills. Once he’s absolutely certain Victor is catching his breath, he ducks back under the water again, taking in deep gulps of salt water. He tries to move away, but the human’s got a death grip on Yuri’s wrists, so he stays put, making a great effort to keep his tentacles out of Victor’s space. It takes a moment for him to realize Victor’s trying to talk to him.
Carefully, a little apprehensively, Yuri pokes his head over the water, leaving his neck as submerged as possible to keep his gills full of water.
“Yuri! You’re amazing!” Victor’s voice is full of glee and far too loud. Yuri claps a hand over Victor’s mouth and puts a finger to his own lips. Victor’s eyes widen and he nods. Yuri lets his hand slip back into the water.
In a voice too loud to be considered a whisper, Victor continues, “I have so many questions! But how long will you stay like this? It seems inconvenient.”
Yuri has to agree. “It usually takes about twenty minutes until I can change back on my own.” His voice is less shaky than he thought it would be. Victor nods so assuredly, if Yuri didn’t know better, he’d say Victor had seen this a hundred times before.
Then Victor stares. Like a kid in a candy store, he watches as Yuri’s tentacles strain to keep themselves submerged and away from Victor, who’s still refusing to relinquish his wrist. Well, Yuri considers, Victor is a scientist. Perhaps he’s chosen to find Yuri fascinating rather than abjectly horrifying. Maybe he’ll ask to study Yuri’s nature, ask for blood samples or, god help him, a flesh sample. Maybe the Victor Yuri watched play with Makkachin every Wednesday and Friday night would fade away and he’d simply be a scientist, and Yuri would become his experiment. He could hardly blame Victor, since most humans are kept in the dark about demons and their kin. Yuri would be considered a scientific miracle. Maybe that’s the whole reason Victor came in the first place – maybe he’d heard rumors of a huge squid beast roaming the waters and came to be the one officially discover it. Maybe Yuri will be his next conquest.
He almost misses it when Victor’s grip loosens enough for his thumb to run gently over the skin of Yuri’s wrist, like an apology. “Does it hurt?” The words are so quiet, they’re almost garbled into the little waves lapping at Yuri’s ears.
Yuri backtracks. He’s not sure what Victor means – his wrist? His gut? The tentacles? His heart? He settles on, “A little.”
Victor frowns, “What would help?”
Yuri considers. “I think… I think I need to go under for a little while.”
Victor nods and let’s go of Yuri’s wrist, and swims himself backward to the edge of the tank. Makkachin nudges at his hand until he starts rubbing along her nose. Yuri hears her little clicks of appreciation before he ducks under the water again. He expects to full submersion to help calm him a little but as he heaves in a gulp of cool salt he realizes he’s already fairly calm. He should be more nervous than this. He can feel it – the seeping bundle of anxious nerves, looming along edges of his spine, prickly and ominous. But it doesn’t land. He’s left feeling suspended and floaty as he sinks further into the depths of Makka’s tank.
It’s such a strange feeling. Yuri watches Victor’s legs work to keep him comfortably above the water. Victor’s not disgusted by him. Not yanking him into a testing room. Not scrambling to take his picture. He’s worried. He’s worried about Yuri.
Purplish tentacles drift, some fold to hug around his middle. This feels so very different from when Phichit found out. For one, he doesn’t remember feeling so elated, so light. Almost as if all the nerves in his body had dissipated and left him to be carried in a gentle, cool stream. Phichit’s positive reaction had been a relief, but this… this is something else.
For a few more moments, Yuri lets himself bask in this feeling. Sooner than he expected, he feels the demon recede a bit, likely enough for him to take on a fully human form again for a little while. So he pushes himself upward again, tentacles shrinking into him not entirely comfortably as he approaches the surface. His gills are gone by the time he breaks the water, his lungs ready for a deep breath of air. The demon clearly isn’t satisfied yet, but it seems willing to wait for a bit now until Yuri can get to his usual swimming spot.
When he turns around, he finds Victor’s eyes glued to him, avid and patient all at once. Makkachin glides past Yuri’s legs and through the open gate to her resting area. Victor’s eyebrows rise as he watches her go. “I guess it’s been an exciting day for everyone.” He chuckles and Yuri can’t help but smile too.
Victor pulls himself up over the edge of the tank and walks around until he’s at an edge closer to Yuri. He offers his hand and a smile, “Are you ready to get out?”
“Yeah,” Yuri breathes and swims over to accept Victor’s hand. His skin is cool, but there’s an undercurrent of warmth. Red dusts his cheeks and the tip of his nose. Yuri nearly slips backward again and forces himself to look away from Victor’s face, at least until he’s on more secure footing.
While Victor’s wetsuit was perfectly acceptable for their impromptu dip in Makkachin’s tank, Yuri’s jeans and lose T-shirt are less so, and leave him feeling now a bit like a drowned rat. Victor chuckles as Yuri attempts to wring water out of his shirt. “Do you have another change of clothes?” He asks, passing Yuri a towel.
Yuri sighs, “no, I wasn’t really prepared for…” any of this.
Victor nods, pursing his lips, “I might have something you can use. Here, follow me.” And his hand is around Yuri’s wrist again, half dragging him to the locker rooms.
Fresh nerves carve a path through Yuri’s stomach and he tries half-heartedly to pull his hand away, but Victor doesn’t seem to notice. He is absolutely not ready to see Victor naked in a locker room. And he has a funny feeling about what Victor’s solution to his wet clothing problem might be which is equally overwhelming. But he can’t exactly go home like this either.
His suspicions are confirmed when they reach Victor’s locker. With a wide smile, Victor digs his outfit from earlier in that day and an extra fitted T-shirt and jeans out from his locker, passing the extra set to Yuri. He stares at the fabric in his hands as Victor unceremoniously strips off his wetsuit. These are Victor’s clothes, that smell him and have his warmth still on them. On the one hand he very much would like to accept the offer to wear them, but the idea is also… too much. He looks up, fully intending to thank Victor, but politely tell him he’d manage on his own, but he can’t get out more than a squeaky yelp when his mouth opens. Victor is naked. Very naked. He snaps his head to the left, locking his gaze pointedly on an abandoned gym bag in the corner of the locker room.
“Is something wrong?” Victor asks, not reaching to cover himself. Yuri stammers, not quite sure how to answer. His words are gone and now Victor won’t stop looking at him and suddenly he feels like one who’s naked.
Then Victor gasps, “Oh, Yuri, your glasses!” His glasses?
Yuri touches his face and finds it bare. Oh.
“They must have fallen off in the water,” Victor huffs out as he hops quickly into his pants. When did he put his underwear on? “I’ll go get them. You get dressed.” And he’s gone, silver hair trailing like a kite behind him.
At this point, Yuri would feel bad if he didn’t wear the clothes. Damn it all. Quickly, he strips off his water-heavy shirt and pants. He reddens as he realizes Victor’s left him an extra pair of his own bikini briefs and gently sets them aside – his wet boxers and binder will have to do.
He’s pulling on the fitted T-shirt (which hangs a little funny on his slightly smaller frame) when Victor rushes back in, familiar blue-framed glasses in hand.
“Makkachin must have brought them to the surface,” Victor laughs as he presses the glasses into Yuri’s hands. Yuri’s responding laugh is a little breathy to his own ears.
Victor’s quiet for a long moment, perhaps lost in thought, gazing endlessly at Yuri. He starts to feel a bit self conscious – he knows Victor’s clothes fit him a little funny, but do they look that bad? He shifts on his feet. The air feels thick between their bodies. When did they get so close? Yuri can count tiny blooms of freckles under the blush on Victor’s nose.
“It’s late,” Victor whispers as if someone might be listening.
“It is,” Yuri’s gaze flickers between Victor’s eyes, wonders if all those cheesy lines in romance novels about falling into a person’s eyes might actually be true.
Victor breaks the air first. He steps backward with a heavy exhale and Yuri thinks me too. They gather their things in relative quiet and leave together as they usually do. The walk to the edge of campus feels a bit surreal. They don’t say much of anything important, Victor doesn’t ask any of the questions Yuri thought he would. They laugh about nothing; Victor lightly bumps their shoulders together. At the parking garage, they pause a breath longer than normal. It doesn’t feel right somehow to leave now, as if there are still words hanging between them left unsaid. But the quiet is filled with normal questions: Victor offers to drive Yuri home as he always does, and Yuri declines. His apartment is very close to campus and he enjoys walking, at least under normal circumstances. Though today, as he bids Victor goodnight, he finds himself wishing he hadn’t responded so automatically. Quite frankly, walking isn’t very fun when his swimming time is upon him, and the ever-present knowledge that he is wearing Victor’s clothes makes him want to stay physically closer to Victor in ways he can’t quite explain.
Yuri curses the three story walk up to his apartment, the muscles in his thighs trembling slightly as he pushes his way up. It hasn’t been this bad in a long time, and Yuri wishes he hadn’t pushed himself so much. He and his demon are going to be in for a long weekend.