Archive of Our Own ^beta

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. 

Chapter Text

Because it's time. 

The words spiral through Yuuri's head, the image of Victor in their kitchen at three AM, blurry and blue in his checkered pajama pants. 

None of it's left on him today. He's in battle-cry red, surging across the field with a meanness, plowing past players, dirt flying. When Victor's out there, he's something holy, invincible, the ball soaring around his feet. 

Half the team is scattered with their arms up, some of them shouting, kicking the grass, grunting like wild hogs. 

"What the fuck, man? We’re all open." Koji spreads his arms wide. He looks like he's about to implode. 

Victor, a sharp flash, cleats digging into the ground, ponytail slicing. He's fucking ruthless. Yuuri can't look away, can't blink. He's afraid to. 

And those feet dribble, leg cocked back. All of him flashing forward, and the ball—boom—like a bomb, blazing past those flailing goalie hands. Yuuri swears the net starts to steam. 

A whistle. A shout. Coach Tammy yells.

"Jesus Christ! Bleachers, Victor! Come back once you've calmed down!" Her throat swells so bad Yuuri can see the veins throb. 

No one moves, field caught in a blackout. And Victor, standing in the middle of it all, chest heaving, hair slipping out of his ponytail, spilling over his shoulders, his back. There's something outlandish about him now. Like those feral children found living in the woods. 

Because it's time. 

Yuuri can still hear him in his head. Time for what, Victor? Time for what? 

Yuuri's so close to running across the field to cradle that pretty, stubborn head in his hands. He wishes he could tell Victor whatever's going on, no matter how ridiculous, it's going to be okay. Even if he can't promise it, he will. Because he's stupid like that. Because Victor like this makes him want to steal him away to a place where nothing can hurt him, ever. 

But before Yuuri can even think about making a move, his brother storms towards Victor, shoving him by his shoulders so hard he almost hits the ground. 

Phichit gives a sharp whistle from where he's sprawled across the tracks, stretching his calves every time Coach Douglas gives them a dirty look. The two of them have been doing stretches for over half an hour. Coach is getting suspicious. Yuuri's just glad he's too preoccupied slave-driving some poor freshman over the hurdles. 

The only reason they haven't been kicked off the track team for slacking is because of Phichit. He’s one of the fastest runners they have, and while Yuuri definitely isn't, he's the only reason Phichit shows up for practice in the first place. The guy needs someone to dump his gossip on. They're a package deal. 

"Trouble in paradise," Phichit mumbles, eyes glue-gunned to Victor and Koji shouting at each other, shoving and stomping like two angry kids in a sandbox. His fingers jerk like he wants to grab his phone and snap a picture. Phichit, always looking out for the juicy trash. No one is safe. He's got more dirt on you than the NSA and God combined. 

"Yeah," Yuri breathes, trying so hard to ignore the way his legs ache with the need to run over and break those two apart—the way he used to when they were kids, his tiny hands digging into their bloated big boy chests, trying to keep them from knocking their heads together. It's almost funny how there was a time when all they ever fought about was who got to have the last popsicle, who had reign over the remote control, who got to bring Mila Babicheva to the middle school dance even though she said she was going alone. (Which she did, because boys are dumb.) 

Sometimes Yuuri wishes it could go back to being so simple. 

"Anyways..." Phichit shrugs, flopping onto the side of the tracks like he's about to make snow angels. "You going to JJ's party tomorrow?" 

He juts his chin towards the bleachers: Jean-Jacques Leroy, all muscle-bloated, bleached teeth, doing yoga stretches in the shortest shorts in existence. Whoever thought it was a good idea to make him captain of the soccer team, needs to fall into a meat grinder. The guy’s already student body president. Now his ego's bigger than the Milky Way Galaxy, and just last week he got his name tattooed above his ass crack. 

"Why?" Yuuri feels his stomach crunch into itself just watching JJ rip his shirt off, flashing his stock-photo smile at the girls huddled on the bleachers. They follow him around like eager puppies, his fan club, his posse of freshman girls, tufts of perfume and frilly skirts trailing after him anywhere he goes. 

"Because Leo's there, and he invited us," Phichit says.  

Yuuri cocks an eyebrow. "You mean he invited Guang-Hong." 

Ever since Guang-Hong started dating the guy, the only time Yuuri gets to see him is in class. He hangs out with them now, sits at their ego-swollen cafeteria table, between letterman jackets and Amino Energy powder, listening to them talk about how perfect their pecks are. 

Leo's a good guy though. He makes Guang-Hong mixtapes every Sunday and drives him home on the back of his bike. Guang-Hong calls him his hot lobster because he says lobsters mate for life (they don’t—but Yuuri hasn't had the heart to tell him), and he thinks Leo looks like sex on a stick (he does). And it's only a little gross because Yuuri's only a little bit jealous. 

"And Guang-Hong invited us, so what's the problem?" Phichit waves a flimsy hand. 

Another shout surges across the field. Koji digs his finger into Victor's chest. Yuuri swears he can feel it. 

Phichit flinches, mumbling, "They'll be okay tomorrow." 

"Yeah…"

Because they always are. Because why wouldn't they? It's Koji and Victor, the inseparable duo, the golden boys, and whatever happens, being okay tomorrow is the foundation of their whole friendship. They punched each other straight into the emergency room last year and slept in the same hospital bed one day later. Koji with his broken nose, Victor with his fractured ribs, the two of them too big to fit under the blankets together. They're okay. They're stupid together, but they're always, always okay. 

And yet, Yuuri feels guilty for thinking things could be different this time around, where everything feels bigger, where a shout turns into a fist turns into a war turns into the end of the world. 

They're not thirteen anymore. The days of popsicles and Mila Babichevas are long over. 

"Yuuri?" Phichit snaps his fingers at his face. "So, you coming?" 

Yuuri swallows. He looks at his feet. He looks back up at Phichit, all his eagerness. It can get exhausting if you look at him for too long. 

"No." 

"Yuuri." 

"Phichit." 

"I'll think about it." 

And he knows Phichit knows he won't. 

"Hey! You two are as useless as limp dicks in an orgy!" Coach Douglas can yell so loud his voice gets stuck in your head for days. "Start running or get off my tracks!" 

Phichit grins and throws him the kind of 'Yes, Daddy!' Yuuri's only ever heard in cheap porn. 

"Chulanont!" Coach jabs his meaty finger into the air, his cap caught by the September wind and skipping down the tracks like a tumbleweed. "If you don't shut that goddamned pie-hole of yours, I won't let you stop running until you throw up," he shouts, stumbling down the tracks to catch his cap, hands slapped over his bald spot. 

"Okay, but why is he kind of hot when he’s pissed?" Phichit grins before clicking his toes into the ground and bolting down the tracks. 

Yuuri stares after him, knowing he wouldn't catch up even if he tried. His eyes dart across the field, spotting his brother in a cluster of players panting after the ball. No sign of Victor. 

When Phichit zooms towards him after his round, Yuuri lets him pull him into a jog. Running lazy circles and ignoring Coach's drill-sergeant yells, Yuuri listens to Phichit ramble about Sara Crispino getting caught making out with Mila during last week's pep rally—which Phichit thinks is hilarious because Sara's brother spent all of junior year making sure no guy looked in her general direction.

Yuuri finally spots Victor after a couple of rounds, sitting in the grass next to the table with the coolers, his shin guards off, soiled socks shoved down to his ankles. Picking at his hair.

The second Victor starts picking at his hair, nothing’s right with the world. 

When they were kids, he'd always have this tiny comb in his pocket, and he'd start combing his hair whenever he got anxious. Flowery and pink, rhinestone-studded, the kind you can fold in half and stow away like a secret. He stole it from his mom. 

Yuuri remembers that summer they played hide-and-seek in their houses while their parents were off getting drunk at that year's block party. And they ran back and forth across their yards in the late afternoon haze, climbing through windows, slipping through backdoors, their naked feet pressing dirt into the carpets, their sweaty hands slapping against the walls. 

Grabbing Yuuri by his arm, Victor dragged him to his parents' bedroom while Koji sat on the front porch cheating his way to one-hundred. Yuuri remembers the thrill of being in a parents' room, all those strange, sacred grown-up things sprinkled across the cabinets and the bedside tables, crowding around the marble sinks in the bathroom. And Victor skidded across the bathroom mat and ripped open the drawers on his mother's side, showing Yuuri the perfume bottles, the flower-dabbed blush, the cotton balls like clouds, all that pretty, womanly cleanness. And Victor plucked the comb out of a corner, wedged between nail polish and foot scrubs, fingers trailing the soft curve of the handle. He brushed it through his hair, his eyes heavy with things Yuuri didn't understand.  'Just like her,' Victor whispered, wonder-struck, combing and combing, his cheeks the color of the lipstick left uncapped by the sink, the color of a heartbeat, the color of a kiss. Yuuri swore he was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen in his life. 

They sat in the dip of the bathtub, skin sticky against the pink shower curtains. Listening to Koji stumble through the house, looking under beds, rummaging through closets. Watching Victor comb his hair, Yuuri wondered how much moon dust was stuck between the bristles. 

Victor stopped bringing the comb to school when the kids started calling him names. One of the teachers told him that maybe it was best if he just left it at home. 'So you don't get hurt,' he said, the way adults do when they think they know more than you, when they think they know what's best. 

On their final round, Phichit’s voice is nothing but a distant garble. From the fringes of the field, Yuuri watches Victor flip his hair into a ponytail. And he keeps watching even when Victor looks over his shoulder, their eyes meeting once and quick. 

Yuuri’s breath kicks in his throat, knees wobbling, world wobbling too. He barely manages to catch himself, stumbling over his own feet. 

And when he looks back up, Victor’s walking towards the locker rooms, his long hair swaying from side to side. 

✕✕✕ 

The buzz of his phone jerks him awake. Shooting up in bed, Yuuri digs his hands into his eyes before patting down the comforter, fishing his phone out from under a mountain of notebooks and highlighters (Mrs. Parvati's math tests are the worst things to exist since Clippy...and Nintendo's Virtual Boy...and Koji's love affair with grandma's karaoke machine). He groans when he spots his brother's name flash on the display. 

The only reason Koji would call him at two in the morning would be to either ask him to open the door because he forgot his keys—or to pick him up from some random street curb because he's shit-faced. And Yuuri will have to sneak out in whatever weather, at whatever time—because 'This is the last time,Yuuri, I swear, dude! I'm never drinking again! I’m a changed man! Fuck all that devil juice!’— and he’ll pick up said changed man on the only bike in their family that has a carrier. Koji calls mom’s bike the Toot Mobile because she decided to attach three bike horns to the handlebars. Three actual horns. She says she feels safer that way. Yuuri thinks it gives her too much power; one honk, and she can give a whole neighborhood a heart attack. 

Last time Koji insisted on squeezing himself into the basket in the front, and Yuuri had these bizarre E.T. flashbacks while they swiveled and swerved down the fuzzy-lit streets of Linhedge. It could've been magical if Koji hadn’t decided to throw up every five minutes. Yuuri's a sympathetic vomiter. It was a long ride home. 

Yuuri stares at his phone buzzing in his palm, slowly realizing that the rush in the background isn't the air conditioner but rain hitting their house with a vengeance. 

Koji's going to owe Yuuri big time if he's expecting him to come save him with the Toot Mobile at two in the morning—in the pouring rain. 

He puts him on speaker. 

"Is Victor with you?" Koji shouts. 

"What? No. Why? What’s—" 

"He just bolted." The distant muffle of music and voices, a girl giggling. Koji's panting. "His—his…fuck, his—his car's gone." His voice chipping off. Yuuri's stomach twists. "He—I mean, he's wasted, and his car, man! His car, it's gone and—" More music, more voices. And Yuuri's stomach keeps twisting and twisting. 

✕✕✕ 

The red of Victor's Ford Mustang sparks all by its lonesome in the empty parking lot by the lake. Yuuri's scared it's his imagination. 

He's been driving through town on his mom's tiny bike for the past hour, drenched and shivering, his legs aching and his head a jumble of street names and carbon copy houses. He can still see them when he closes his eyes, a never-ending cycle like he's trying to run in a dream. 

Yuuri skitters to a stop, wheels fumbling to stay steady on the slippery concrete. Dropping the bike, he bolts towards the parking lot. 

The lake's a weird place to be, especially for someone like Victor who's so superstitious he had a panic attack when Mrs. Abbott's black cat showed up on his lawn. 

Yuuri thinks of that long-ago Halloween, the three of them cowering on the bumpy sofa in the basement, feet sore from hours of trick-or-treating, Koji hushing ghost stories on a Reese's Pieces sugar high. Yuuri couldn't keep his eyes off that smudged pirate beard their mom had drawn with eyeliner, the way it danced over Koji's twitching mouth. 

'Some sad kid tied a brick to his leg and walked right into it. He's in there now. He's sad forever,' 

he said, eyes like saucers, and then Victor's little gasp, his hands tight around Yuuri's arm. 

It's a stupid urban legend. The curse of Lake Linhedge. Koji said if you dip your toes in, something might just grab you, pull you down into the murky depths, that algae-gunked belly. 

There's something disquieting about it all, the way it's round and scooped like a moon crater, the way the trees crowd around it, so eager to dive right in. Yuuri imagines it from space. A black hole. An evil eye. 

His heart a hammer as he picks up the pace, stumbling over his loose shoelaces, the rain flicking his glasses. He didn't bother putting on proper clothes. He's bolting through the night in his PJs, naked legs shivering in the cold. It feels like that car might just disappear if he doesn't run fast enough. 

For the past hour, his head has been flooded with images of red Ford Mustangs crushed against trees, bright hair spilling out of busted windshields. Expecting the worst is what he does best. 

And maybe Yuuri hates himself for not going to JJ's house party. Phichit wouldn't stop snapchatting videos of random kids making out and someone getting head behind the bushes. ('Katsuuuki why u missin out on this freaky orgy action??') 

But what would he have done? Stopped Victor from having one too many jello shots? Stopped him from driving off into the night? Yuuri fucking Katsuki? Five foot eight and muscle-mass deficient? 

Victor already thinks Yuuri's the biggest buzzkill of all time. He would've probably talked him into chugging a bottle of anything that burns bad enough. Victor can make you walk through fire with the snap of his fingers. He's the devil—and he knows it. 

Yuuri keeps rubbing his glasses every few steps, the world blobby, bruised, and that car like a bonfire in the dark. 

These sudden thoughts creep up on him, almost knocking him off his feet. 

What if Victor's here for a reason? What if he's not alone? It would make so much more sense, wouldn't it? 

Victor's the type to refuse to get behind the wheel after one beer. Koji's wrong. Victor wouldn't be this stupid. He wouldn't be this selfish. 

Yuuri stumbles, his pace slowing. 

What if there's someone in there with him? 

His eyes stay nailed to that car, maroon and marooned. 

Like hands might slap against the foggy windows, like the metal might rock back and forth, soft sounds spilling into the night. 

And Yuuri hates remembering it, that last summer he let Phichit talk him into having some fun for once, stumbling through Christophe Giacometti's impromptu after-pep-rally party, a bottle of Captain Morgan dangling from his fingers, the world twinkling, his gut sloshy-warm. And of course it had to get to the point where his stomach started to retaliate, and he stumbled through the hallways trying to find the nearest bathroom. His hands ripping open door after door, and then suddenly: Victor, shirtless, sprawled across a bed with a pretty girl on his lap, the flush on her face like love potion. 

The universe took enough pity on Yuuri to ensure the next room he tumbled into had a toilet. 

Yuuri finally reaches the car. His heart back in his throat. The windows dark and rain-streaked. Silence. 

Maybe he's not even in there, Yuuri thinks, and the panic starts to rise all over again, making his skin itch, his fingers numb. 

"Victor?" Yuuri fumbles with the car doors. He presses his nose against the window. "Victor!" 

A face pops up so fast he barely catches himself from toppling backwards. The door bursts open, Victor leaking out onto the concrete. Yuuri stumbles to the side, peering into the rest of the car. But there's no one in there. It's just him. 

Because Koji was right. Because Victor is that stupid. Because Victor is that selfish. "Yuuri..." Nothing but a slur. 

And the first thing Yuuri should say is 'What the hell were you thinking?', but the only thing that comes out of his mouth is: "Your hair." 

Yuuri tumbles towards him, and he can't help himself from smacking his hands against Victor's cheeks, pulling him up, the rain splashing across his face. His hair, it's gone. All that's left is a modest sweep, nothing but a thumbprint. Yuuri's hands brush the fringe to the side, Victor's eyes, weary and bloodshot, staring right through him. 

He's so hot beneath his fingers. And Yuuri's touching him and touching him, his cheeks and neck, grabbing his hands, his shoulders, making sure he's all right, making sure he's all there. But he doesn't feel like Victor at all, this drunk stranger with that little shock of moonbeam hair. 

Gibberish gushes out of Victor's mouth before he yanks Yuuri by the collar of his T-shirt and drags him onto the backseats, the door slamming closed behind them, catching Yuuri's boxers. 

"What the fu—Wait, my—" Yuuri reaches for the door. It takes him a couple of tries to yank himself free. 

Victor's sprawled across the seats, his head knocking against the window. 

"Hi." A sloppy smile on his face. He's too pretty for his own damned good. Even like this, wasted and as high as the Starship Enterprise. Even like this, he glows in the dark. 

"What happened?" Yuuri can barely hear himself through the bullet-hail rain. 

Victor's head lolls to the side, and Yuuri almost surges forward to keep it from falling off his shoulders. He looks like he can't keep any part of himself upright. 

"What happened, Victor?" Less tentative this time, the heat of the question makes his skin tingle. 

"Everything," Victor slurs. "Everything, everything, everything..." His fringe hiding half of his face. Victor doesn't have the kind of face you should hide. 

"Everything?" Yuuri whispers. 

"Everything," he whispers back, and it's the way he says it that sounds so familiar. Like that night in the kitchen. Like the voice he used when he said, 'Because it's time', the way it sounded like the last thing he would ever say. Ever, ever. 

He looks so much older like this, so much bluer. And Yuuri doesn't know if it's the night or the lake or the rain tumbling down, but Victor's never looked less like the Man in the Moon. 

"Koji called." Yuuri swallows. "He's looking for you. He’s—He's really worried. He's really fucking worried. I’m—I was—I mean, me too. I—" He wedges his tongue between his teeth, all these things bubbling up in his throat, knocking against the back of his teeth. 

This isn't like you. This isn't like you at all. But I don't know what's 'like you' anymore. When did we stop telling each other things? When did you stop trusting me, us, all of us? 

When the hell did we start changing so much? 

Yuuri waits for Victor to say something, to explain himself, to do something, anything. But he's just looking at Yuuri in the dark. Or maybe he's looking right through him. It makes Yuuri feel invisible, unnecessary. Victor's the best at making you feel like less. Even when he doesn't mean to. 

Yuuri's fingers curl into fists, the heat in his palms, his body shaking. He can't keep himself from punching the back of the driver's seat. Victor flinches, head hitting the window. 

"You idiot," Yuuri says, and he hates himself for it, but at the same time, it sounds so good it makes him feel guilty. "You giant fucking idiot. I was worried, and you can't just—Something could've happened!" His voice a loud punch. "You could've hit something or—or someone! You could've died!" Because if he's going to blow this out of proportion, he might as well do it right. 

"You're right...I'm sorry...really, really sorry, Yuuri." Victor fumbles with the hem of his sweater, twisting it around his hands like some flustered child. 

Yuuri doesn't know if he really means it. Victor says the things you want him to say, the things you need to hear, and he'll keep saying them and saying them until he's got you tangled around his fingers and you're down on your knees for every lie. Yuuri never knows what to believe, if it's the real Victor or if it's the carefully crafted Victor meant for your eyes only. 

Yuuri swallows. He looks at Victor's hands twisted into his sweater, looks back up, at all that hair in his face. It's a terrible thing. 

"Just…please—" Yuuri tries to swallow the chunk stuck in his throat. It stays. He swallows again. It's still there. "Don't ever do this again." 

Don't do this to me again. Because I'm selfish too, and I care, and I hate you, and I don't, because I can't, because it's you, because you've got me, you bigheaded beautiful fuck. 

Victor nods, all of him so careful and quiet he's barely here. Yuuri imagines him fading, the window behind him shining right through, the roiling rain, the nighttime blue. 

Yuuri feels like reaching out to keep him here. 

And just when he thinks he's not able to keep his hands to himself, Victor tumbles towards him, his arms around Yuuri, strong, aching, his face buried in the crook of his neck. Yuuri's head hits the window, teeth clacking, glasses askew. Victor's breath spilling across his skin. He trembles. 

It would be so easy to say no, to push him away and scramble out of the car, to call Koji, to put an end to all of this. 

But it's Victor. It's Victor, and Yuuri has no say in any of it. He's done for. 

"I'm drenched." Yuuri blurts. 

"Don't care," Victor mumbles against his neck, his mouth there, twitching against his skin. Yuuri's heart starts to blister. 

Victor's all damp warmth and alcohol, smoke rising off him in tufts. And his hands fist Yuuri's wet T-shirt, his stomach pressed against Yuuri's hips and the things in between. All this heat leaking low. Yuuri goes lightheaded so fast the world starts to blur. 

He doesn't remember the last time he touched more than Victor's hands. 

Victor, who can get too close to you but doesn't like it the other way around. Victor, who always makes sure there's a careful distance when it comes to his soft-spoken charm, when he's trying to get a rise out of you, his fingers trailing the inside of your wrist, his mouth so close to your ear you swear his breath crawls in and twirls through your head, and you, so shameless, getting drunk on it, letting him make your head heavy with the thought of him. The way he can look at you from the other end of the school hallway, the way he lets his stare linger, the way he catches you so effortlessly, all of you floating towards him without him having to raise a finger. He can make you fall for the promise of him. He can make you crazy for it.

This is more than just a slip-up or an accident. This is a secret, the biggest secret Victor's ever let him in on. 

His arms tighten around Yuuri's waist, his face dug into his skin, all of him holding on like something might rip them apart. And Yuuri can't help it. He's letting himself get carried away, his hands gripping that gentle dip in Victor's spine, all that smooth skin under his nails. 

"Why do you do this to me?" Victor breathes, words so quiet Yuuri almost thinks they were in his head. 

Yuuri shifts beneath him, but Victor's so big and so heavy, and he doesn't stand a chance. 

"Do what?" Yuuri feels his face scrunch, his hand leaving the dip in Victor's back, fingers curling into fists as he presses them into the leather of the backseats. 

"All of it. Everything," Victor mumbles into his neck. 

It seems to be his answer for a lot of things. 

Everything.

Yuuri feels the weight of the word just thinking about it. Everything, everything, everything. 

A pressure on his chest, a flood in his brain. "What does that mean?" Yuuri asks. 

He pinches his eyes closed. He can't handle the way Victor's lips keep brushing his neck. He doesn't know if it's on purpose. But Victor's drunk and drowsy, and none of this would happen in the real world. 

The real world, Yuuri thinks. Like this is a dream. Like this is already fading away, Victor and his hands on him, Victor and this strange, big secret. 

"You're so—God, you’re—you—you, Yuuri, you're so unfair," Victor says. "You're so...unfair... 

acting like, you're always acting like—you don't know. Always acting like you don't know, like you don't...remember." He's babbling now, his tongue lolling. Yuuri can barely keep up. 

"What does that even—" Yuuri shakes his head. "I don't know what that means." Victor's not making any sense. He's all jumbled up. 

Victor pulls back, and Yuuri hates how horrible it feels, the lack of him, the lonely feeling of being untouched again. He's above him, his sweater damp from where it was pressed against Yuuri's drenched T-shirt. His fingers gliding down, grazing Yuuri's jaw, the curve of his chin. 

Yuuri's chest kicks like someone shocked him with a defibrillator. All of him rattled awake. 

This is not the way it's supposed to go, he thinks. 

This is what he's dreamt about since he was thirteen, since all this undefined wanting turned into something that made his hands crawl between his thighs and his back arch and his tongue numb. This is what he thinks about when he can't fall asleep at night. 

"Sometimes...God, Yuuri, sometimes..." Victor's thumb brushing over Yuuri's bottom lip, his nail grazing his teeth. "Sometimes I dream about your mouth." 

And it would be so easy to let him pry his teeth apart, let his thumb touch his tongue and then deeper, deeper. Victor's skin in his mouth. 

"You—" Yuuri clamps his mouth shut, and Victor's fingers snap away to trail down his neck. Yuuri swallows, feels those nails press against the bob in his throat. "You don't even know what you're saying. You—" 

"No, no, no. No, fuck, no, Yuuri, I do. I do. I do so much it—it…it drives me insane. You. You do. Yuuri. You do, always." 

When Victor says his name like that, when it's all heat and breath, like a panting in his ear, it makes Yuuri want to do everything Victor needs him to. He's down on his knees for him. 

Victor's face so close, their foreheads touching, and if Yuuri wanted it bad enough, with the tiniest quirk of his neck—he could have everything he'd wanted for so, so long. It's all right there, his for the taking, open and willing. 

But he doesn't want it like this. 

"Yuuri..." And the way he says his name. It makes Yuuri sink, eyes blurred like he's sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool. 

Yuuri swallows, and he opens his mouth, not sure what might come out, the promise of everything he ever wanted quivering on the tip of his tongue. 

But it's not right. None of this. 

Yuuri snaps his mouth closed, and his hands do the one thing he never thought they'd do, the one thing they can't bear to. 

And Victor's face like the night, the darkest shade of blue he's ever seen. 

Chapter Text

Sometimes Yuuri thinks the universe has it out for him. 

It's not hard to guess when it won't stop hurling shit at his face. Maybe he's just perfectly in line with its cosmic-shit-hurling trajectory. He's probably an easy target too. He's the second slowest kid on his track and field team. He can't outrun the shits. He never could. 

He was always the kid who fell off the jungle gyms, who stapled his thumbs and ran against doors, got hit by cars, slipped on icy streets, broke his skull and his knee and both of his thumbs by the time he turned fourteen. His grandpa used to call him Veteran Marshmallow. Which was kind of horrible now that Yuuri thinks about it (he was a fat kid, the mushy, constantly sweaty kind), but he guesses old people get a free pass when it comes to saying kind of horrible things. 

There comes a point in being constantly shit on where you give up and get used to it. It's gotten so bad Yuuri already expects to hit the floor at any given moment. Staying calm during the fall might be the only positive side effect to this whole cosmic-shit debacle. It's routine. He's built up a tolerance. 

Maybe that's the only way he can explain how he managed to call Koji and stumble into the driver's seat in the first place. His steady breathing, his hand on the gearshift, never killing the engine, not once (something his driving instructor would be proud of—if she could ever look past him driving a car without a license at three in the morning). 

Yuuri's on autopilot, eyes zeroed into tunnel vision, the streetlights zooming by, the rain and the night, Victor's speck of hair in the rearview mirror glowing brighter than the headlights. 

Yuuri looks at his hands around the steering wheel, crunching them so tight his wrists start to shake. He can still feel Victor's chest beating against his palms, the crunch it made when he pushed Victor away. And then that blueness on him, settling like a second skin. 

Yuuri tries to keep his eyes from flicking to the rearview mirror. He can't stand the look on Victor's face. It's everything that makes him hate himself. 

It takes a while to park the Mustang (because screw parallel parking). It takes even longer to drag Victor towards the house. 

He throws up on the porch. Yuuri tries really, really hard not to. He's just happy his parents are in L.A. over the weekend visiting Mari. This is the kind of funky fiasco his dad says he's too old for. 

Because when that man rolls into bed at nine PM on the dot, nothing will get him out of it, not an earthquake, not the end of the world and especially not drunk teenagers. He's been done with their shit for a long time. 

Yuuri blames it on Koji—because before he started calling Yuuri to pick him up when things spiraled out of control during his late-night escapades, he called their parents. And then two years ago, on Christmas eve, drunk on too much eggnog, their dad lied down in front of the dying fireplace slurring that as long as the police didn't come knocking on their door past his bedtime, they could go ahead and do whatever their barely post-pubescent hearts desired. ('Be teenagers. Especially you, Yuuri. Go be seventeen. Live a little.') 

He took it all back the next day, sprawled across the kitchen island with a headache, telling them he loved them so much it was ridiculous and that he'd always pick up the phone, but Koji pretended he didn't hear it, humming and twirling through the kitchen, basking in the glow of this newly authorized freedom. 

Go be seventeen... 

Is this it? Riding your bike through the rain worried out of your mind because the one person you've ever dared to care about this much, this fucking much, decided to get behind the wheel shitfaced? Because they're horrible? And beautiful and magic and full of good, good things? Even when you're angry at them? Even though you could never be angry at them because their wonderfulness overtrumps every bad thing in the whole wide world? And just—fuck? Almost kissing them? Kissing the one person you've dreamt of kissing since you were nine? And then not doing it? Because they're so done they can't tell their hands apart? Let alone know what they were doing in the first place? Like lying between your goddamned legs? 

If this is what seventeen is all about, the universe can have it back. 

Yuuri manages to get Victor up half the flight of stairs before he waits for Koji to get home and help him with the rest. 

He remembers all those times Victor carried him to the nurse's office after he fell from the jungle gyms or the top of the slide, tumbled downstairs, hit his head on the tetherball, all those times Victor ruffled Yuuri's hair and called him a trooper. And now Victor's right here, his head on Koji's shoulder, his body limp and helpless. He's never looked so small. 

Yuuri stands in the bathroom door. He watches his brother haul Victor into the bathtub, peeling off his stained sweater, water spitting out of the showerhead and splashing over the both of them. 

"You don't have to see this," Koji says, surprisingly sober, severe. He gives Yuuri the kind of look that reminds him that he's the big brother and he knows what to do. 

And normally, Yuuri would be thankful for it, but he hates how much he wants to be the one to move the showerhead over Victor's face, to let him lean against his chest and tell him everything's going to be alright. 

Yuuri catches a glimpse of Victor curling his hair behind his ear, even though there's no hair left to curl behind it. He wonders how long it will take him to get used to not having to do that anymore. 

Koji kicks the door closed. Yuuri doesn't even have it in him to flinch. 

He doesn't know how long he stands there, swallowed by the dark hallway, waiting, listening, but all he can hear is the shower trickling and the thunder rolling over the house. 

He looks at his hands. He can still feel Victor's chest beating beneath them, like he was holding a life. 

✕✕✕ 

When Yuuri opens his eyes, he doesn't know if he actually slept through the rest of the night or just tossed and turned his way through it. He wonders if he could get away with pulling the blankets over his head and staying under there for the rest of the weekend. His brain feels sore. "Fuck." 

He wonders if Victor's awake. He wonders if he's thinking about Yuuri being awake, if he's thinking about last night, about Yuuri's hands on his chest. 

Yuuri shakes his head so much he goes dizzy, and he drags himself into the bathroom before he has time to think about the weight of Victor between his legs. 

The tiles are still a little wet. Victor's clothes dangling from the edge of the laundry basket, that acrid smell of smoke and alcohol hanging from the ceiling. 

There's a pink sticky note on the mirror, Koji's chicken scratch sprawled across it: 

Picking up the toot mobile Seltzer in the second drawer 

(Vic if you're reading this you're a giant dickhead and I'm hauling your ass to jesus camp. You need the lord) 

Yuuri hangs his head over the sink, splashing cold water over his face, his fingers rubbing and rubbing until his skin feels raw. And he looks at himself in the mirror, thinking he should look different, thinking something must've changed in the time between Victor's hands on him and off him. 

But it's just him. That same old weary face. 

His eyes crawl down his cheeks, his chin. And then there, right under the nick of his jaw, to the left—a kiss. Fingers trailing his skin, he swears that spot is a little warmer than the rest of him. Like his heart rose to it, beating and glowing on the side of his neck. 

"Fuck." Yuuri tips over, forehead against the mirror, breath fogging up the glass. 

He wraps his hand around his throat. It's right there. A hum beneath his fingers. Victor's terrible, beautiful mouth. 

Could anyone blame Yuuri for it? For being hopeful? For wishing? For thinking last night felt like too much of everything not to have meant something? For standing in front of Koji's room five seconds later with a glass of water like some fucking idiot? 

Yuuri feels his stomach twist all over again. He shuffles from one leg to the other, feeling stupid for knocking and waiting and knocking again. He holds his breath. He waits. Nothing. 

He's about to bolt back down the hallway when a grumbled "Yuuri?" makes his feet stop. "Is that you?" 

"Uh—" He swallows. "Yeah." He cracks the door open. "Brought you some...this to drink." Shoving the glass through the gap, Yuuri doesn't know if he expects Victor to get up and grab it like he's some inmate in a cell. 

"Just come in," Victor says, and Yuuri doesn't. "You can come in." He can't. "Yuuri, come in. Please." And he does. Hands damp. Cheeks hot. 

Yuuri stands there, in Koji's dim-lit room, in the middle of clothes sprawled across the floor, stacks of video games and action figures fixed with duct tape, and he can't stop thinking about how he doesn't know how to do any of this. He doesn't know what to do, where to start. That spot on his neck throbbing like a bruise. 

Victor's sprawled across the couch by the window, his head peeking out of the blankets, that little swoop of hair catching the light through the slice in the curtains. 

"Hi," Victor croaks. He looks terrible. Not that Victor could actually look terrible. But like this, he's Victor with the lights out, Victor after a mighty fall. 

Yuuri wants to stumble right into him, press his hands against those cheeks until he's whole again. But he doesn't think Victor will let him get as close as he did last night, that strange blip in time, that place where things were so out of order—inside out, upside down—it felt like anything in the world could've happened for them. 

Yuuri stares at his feet. He clears his throat, thrusting the glass towards Victor, water gushing over his fingers and dripping across the floor. Victor grabs it, his hand shaking. Yuuri tries not to touch him. 

"Thanks." Victor presses the glass against his lips. Yuuri nods, watching Victor's throat bob in the low lights. He swallows. His cheeks prickle. He looks away. 

Victor nudges the curtains open and slides the empty glass onto the window ledge, his eyes squinting when a shard of sun cuts his face. He slinks back into the blankets, pulling them over his head until he's all swallowed up. 

"Yuuri." Muffled. "About last night—" 

"It's okay." Yuuri cuts him off. "Already forgotten." Acrid and awful in his mouth. He wants to slam his head onto Koji's desk until his head cracks. Because he's stupid. He's so fucking stupid, stupid, stupid. 

And he wants Victor to be Victor, the Victor who says the things Yuuri doesn't, who's smart when Yuuri's being stupid, who does all the things Yuuri won't, can't, shouldn't. 

The Victor who doesn't care about an 'Already forgotten', who'll just say it, whatever it is. Something more than 'I dream about your mouth'. Something more than 'You drive me insane'. 

But Victor says nothing. Because maybe there's nothing to say. 

Victor's face peeks out from under the blankets. Yuuri doesn't know how to read it. It's another one of his default expressions, something more empty than blank. And, god, Yuuri hates it, and he wishes he could scrape it all off and just...see him. 

Like last night, Victor's forehead warm against his, his face full and fully unfurled. It reminded Yuuri of a time when Victor had no idea how to cover up yet. When he didn't have a reason to. 

Everything inside of his head would spark across his face, and it was like watching fireworks on the Fourth of July, and you realized how big the sky was, how infinite and menacing, and how you'd never be able to imagine how much could possibly fit into it, how everything in the world meant nothing in the face of it. 

It made Yuuri want to be just as honest. 

Every time they looked at each other, they knew they couldn't hide a single thing, they wouldn't, never. The two of them, they were inside out. 

Yuuri doesn't remember when those things started to change. When he was a kid, he used to think the older you got, the more everything would fall into place—when in reality everything just falls right out of it. And never in his little ten-year-old brain would he have thought that one day something this stupidly simple would be so stupidly scary. 

Yuuri stutters a breath, his fingers clenching, unclenching, and he looks at Victor and that empty face of his, and he wonders about all the things shaking beneath it. 

Yuuri swallows, his feet twitching forward and hitting a stack of empty CD cases. He flinches as they clatter across the floor. And his hands, his stupid, greedy, never-know-what-they-want hands, ache to hold everything they pushed away last night. Because screw this, screw all of this. Because he can't breathe, and it's just—

"Victor, I—" Yuuri swallows. His head trembling with all the things he doesn't how to say. "I—" He tries. "I..." And it won't come out. None of it. "I just, I—" Fuckfuckfuckfuck. 

Victor's face cracks, something dreadful sparking there, but it's gone before Yuuri has a chance to catch it. 

"Can you leave the door open?" he asks, too calm and too quiet, before he rolls over and pulls the blankets over his head. 

Yuuri slams his teeth onto his tongue so hard his eyes go fuzzy. He doesn't know how long he stands there, still trying to find the right things to say. But his head's scooped clean. He's empty. 

"I'm sorry," Yuuri says, even though he shouldn't be. 

He hates how it's the only thing he can ever come up with when there's nothing left to do. It makes him feel like a coward. It makes him feel like less. But it's always there, waiting in the back of his mouth aching for a chance to climb out. 

Maybe that's his thing: the guy who's sorry for anything. 

✕✕✕ 

Their parents come back on Sunday morning. The second Yuuri's mom sees Victor, her face scrunches up until she looks like a raisin. And she says, "Vic-chan, your hair." And he says nothing. And she looks at Koji waiting for him to say something, but he doesn't. She looks at Yuuri, but there's nothing left in his head. 

Her face goes dark, and she says, "What happened?" 

Yuuri doesn't know how long Victor and his parents talk in the kitchen. His dad just flashed Koji and him the go-to-your-room look, his face strangely grave. It doesn't look right on him, not on the kind of dad who cheats at UNO and sings "Take On Me" in the shower, who wears pineapple-printed ties to work and never gets tired of jump-scaring Koji at least once a week by hiding in the coat closet. 

The only time Yuuri saw him like that was at his grandpa's funeral, standing under an oak tree with the October wind in his gray hair. Yuuri realized how tired he was, how spent, and how pain could age you in an instant. 

Yuuri ends up with his ear pressed against his door, while his brother walks back and forth in the hallway outside. Koji won't tell him what's going on. 

Is this because of everything that happened on Friday night? Or is this something different entirely? Something bigger? Something worse? 

Yuuri feels ten again, being left out because he couldn't catch up with Victor and Koji riding their bikes down to the playground, always the one who had to run after them while they whispered into each other's ears, all their secrets, all the things they shared, buzzing with it. It pissed him off, being treated like he was a toddler when they're only a year apart. And maybe the worst part was that his parents treated him the same, letting Koji and Victor do all the responsible big boy things while Yuuri stumbled after them being spoon-fed and cooed at. 

Like he can't handle a single thing. Like they don't trust him with it. 

Hours go by, and Yuuri's still pacing around in his room waiting for something to happen. 

Then the front door shudders. He stumbles to the window, watching Victor and his dad walk across the street and disappear into Victor's house. They come back out a few minutes later, Victor with a duffle bag hanging from his shoulder, Yuuri's dad with Makkachin on a leash. 

And there, on the other side of the street. In that house across from theirs. Behind those big windows on the second floor, dusty pink curtains swept aside—Victor’s mother, Dina, wrapped in a bathrobe. Her hands pressed against the glass. 

✕✕✕ 

Yuuri never asks about what goes on in the Nikiforov household. That family like a secret circle, that pretty white house harboring things Yuuri can only wonder about when Victor changes the topic every time Yuuri's parents ask him how things are at home. 

When Yuuri thinks about their childhood, when their heads were too small for the world to have ever fit, Victor's parents were like those kings and queens in picture books, lighting up every room they drifted into. It seemed like the only thing they ever did, drift and float, like they were hanging from the sky. And their smiles were so bright they made you squint, their gentle hands, their soft, warm words. 

Every time they came over for dinner, Yuuri wanted their palms on his cheeks and their mouths on his forehead, their smiles glinting down at him. 

Mr. Nikiforov with his shiny teeth and expensive watches, and Dina in her long summer dresses, her hair gleaming like she twirled out of those black-and-white movies Yuuri's mom watched every Friday night. And Victor between them, their little moon. 

They looked like they'd fallen to earth from somewhere far, far away. 

But then Victor's father started going on trips, disappearing for weeks, months at a time, until it felt like he was just visiting whenever he came back. Victor started coming over so much he practically lived on Koji's couch, while Dina stopped coming over altogether, stopped coming out of her house at all. 

Yuuri imagined her drifting alone, reigning over their empty hallways. 

The last time he saw her was in January. Woken up by his grumbling midnight stomach, he padded down the hallway on his way to the kitchen, stopping in his tracks when his eyes peered out the windows: Dina, a snow angel, a sleeping queen, poured across her front lawn in a bathrobe, a bottle of wine on her chest. 

And with the moon above and that nighttime quiet, all of her spilled open, Yuuri swore she was the saddest, loneliest thing on earth. 

✕✕✕ 

Yuuri feels like a burglar in his own home, rushing down hallways, dodging squeaky floorboards, always waking up before the sun comes up to get to the bathroom first and leaving the house before his mom yells 'Breakfast!' so loud the earth cracks in half. 

Victor's been living with them for a week. It's not something unusual—he’s spent whole summers sleeping on Koji's couch while his mom was in some yoga retreat in Alaska and his dad was…wherever the hell he was—but this feels different, like he's a stray they took in or some castaway they fished out of the sea. 

Yuuri's mom won't stop cooking him food, and his dad won't stop offering him help in that awkward Dad Way where he just ends up calling him 'kiddo' or 'bud' a lot, and Koji, patting his back whenever he gets the chance. It's like they're all in on something Yuuri doesn't understand. 

This is the worst time to have a fight. Yuuri doesn't know what else to call it, this radio silence, this void of nothing. 

It's not like they haven't had fights before, loud, angry ones where they were this close to raising their fists. But it was never their thing, rolling around in the dirt until someone cracked a rib. And maybe for the first time Yuuri wishes it was—because at least then they'd have to face each other. At least then he'd get to see him and hear him and feel him. 

It's messed up; Yuuri would rather have Victor punch him in the face than do nothing at all. 

He isn't used to not seeing him every day. The lack of him thick in the air, heavy in his head. And he keeps spiraling back to when he was a kid and all these kid questions still buzzed through his brain, jumpstarting his little body every second of every day. 

Why is the sky blue? How deep is the ocean? What's at the end of a rainbow? 

And he remembers Mari taking him to the playground on a hot summer morning, and Yuuri looked at her, the pink lipstick she stole from Mom smudged across her mouth, and she looked so 

grown and full of the world, and he loved to wonder about all the things she knew. 

Sitting on the rusty swings, he asked her what would happen if the moon disappeared. Looking back at it now, she should've said earthquakes and tidal waves, complete climatic chaos. 

But she was so pretty on that playground swing, hair flying, that summer flush on her cheeks. She said if the moon disappeared, it would ruin lives, music, poetry. Love. 

'We'd go extinct out of sheer heartache, Yuuri.' 

✕✕✕ 

It takes Yuuri a questionable amount of time to find Phichit in the sea of kids flooding the cafeteria. He hasn't slept in days. It feels like he's floating, dizzy every time he turns his head too fast. 

"Yuuri!" Phichit flicks a pea at him. "Finally! I was about to actually eat the pudding out of boredom." He lifts it up, twirling it in the flash of fluorescent lights. 

It's supposed to be red velvet, but Yuuri's pretty sure it's satan's gelatinous urine in a cup. Three spoons of it and explosive diarrhea will be the least of your worries. 

"Uh—hi." Yuuri squeezes past a group of rowdy freshman before stumbling into the free spot across from Phichit. 

Yuuri tries not to look at him too long. He's buzzing. A human power plant. Sometimes Yuuri's afraid of touching him, like he might get zapped. 

Phichit snorts. "You look terrible." 

"Thanks." Yuuri gives him a pointed look. It's enough for Phichit to bite into his leftover muffin before giving it to Yuuri and watching him stuff the whole thing into his mouth. 

At least that way Yuuri won't have to talk about how he bombed Mrs. Parvati's math test because all he could think about were Victor's hands on him and his blue face and Dina lying on her front lawn. 

It didn't help that last night he caught his parents whispering in the kitchen with a bottle of whiskey twirling between them. Yuuri slipped around the corner, feeling guilty for eavesdropping. The words 'Child Protective Services' fell at least twice. 

They never drink. And they never dare care about other people's problems. His mom says it gets in the way of dealing with your own. 

A big bubble of laughter bursts behind them. Yuuri peers over his shoulder: red jackets, number-badged, the soccer team roaring in the corner next to the vending machines, and Jean-Jacques Leroy standing on the table with his hands flapping through the air like some raving monkey. 

Yuuri spots Koji sitting next to Leo and Guang-Hong, one end of Leo's earphones in his ear, his head bobbing. Koji looks up, and his eyes meet Yuuri's for a split-second before he looks away like he's been caught. He's been avoiding Yuuri too, slinking around him like some big cat afraid of falling into a bathtub. 

No sign of Victor. 

Yuuri's chest crunches, and his hand crawls up to press against it. His heart stuck in a fist-grip. 

"God," Phichit says. 

Yuuri snaps out of it, shoving his glasses up into his hair to wipe his hands across his face. "What?" 

"Look at him." Phichit nudges his chin towards the soccer team. "Thinking he can get away with monopolizing Nugget." 

It takes a while for Yuuri to realize he's talking about Leo and Guang-Hong. 

He doesn't know when everyone started calling Guang-Hong Nugget. It probably started with JJ because everything does. And Guang-Hong just said okay because that's what he always says. 

He can stand in the rain for five hours straight and still give you the thumbs up. Yuuri thinks he's the kind of good that's so good the world can't help but stomp on him for good measure. It sucks. 

But he says it's okay because that's what he always says. 

"I could only talk to him for, like, five minutes before Mr. I-Only-Listen-To-Vinyl-Because-I'm-Fucking-Pretentious started shoving his tongue down his throat." 

Yuuri drops his glasses back onto his nose and stares at his wobbly lasagna, a few lonely peas rolling across the plate. He grabs his fork, trying to impale them all on one prong. "I thought you were happy for him," he mumbles. 

It's funny how three weeks ago, Phichit wouldn't stop parading his phone around like some proud mom, Guang-Hong's Facebook profile flashing across it, stamped with the heart icon for 'In a Relationship'. ('It's a match made in heaven! They need to have a million children! I volunteer as the doula!’) 

But if there's one thing Phichit can't handle for the life of him, it's the fear of slipping into insignificance. It makes him salty. 

"When did you start being this bitter?" 

"Uh...since that dishrag of a person possessed Guang-Hong's pure Virgin Mary soul? And then kidnapped him?" Phichit stabs his fork into his lasagna so hard Yuuri's afraid the plate cracked. "Now he won't even have lunch with us. I thought he'd at least have lunch with us. It's lunch. Half an hour of this." He flaps his hands down at their trays. "That's all I'm asking for. Then he can go back to tongue-banging his lobster husband." 

Yuuri tries not to smile at that. It's not like he doesn't get it. The three of them have known each other since kindergarten. And because they were the only Asian kids in the sunshine group, they kind of just clumped together. When school rolled around the corner, they ended up squashed at the small table by the garbage cans, trading Jell-O and chocolate pudding with their heads bumping. The three of them, self-proclaimed misfits stuck in some platonic circumstantial love triangle. 

That's what Mari called it. She thought it was adorable. Then again, that was preschool, a time where the thought of lobster husbands splitting them apart never even crossed their minds. 

"He canceled on shitty horror movie night. Again." Phichit sighs. "But you're still coming, right?" 

Yuuri feels his face scrunch up. "Um, look, I just don't feel like—" 

"Do you know how hard it was to find Troll 2 in my mom's VHS collection?" 

"I—" 

"One and a half hours of carnivorous goblins. Come on. Slime? Murder?" He goes all jazz-hands-y, stars in his eyes. "Slime and murder?" 

"Next week, okay? I promise." 

"Right." Phichit tries to blow his fringe out of his eyes. "That's what you say now. Next thing you know, you'll leave me for the lunch lady—because don't think I don't notice the way you smile at her. And I'll be here, all alone, talking to a volleyball," he says, whispering "Wilsoooon..." at his lasagna. 

Yuuri snorts, craning his neck to look at the counters and spotting Edith readjusting her hairnet. She smiles at him, her thick cheeks bunching. Yuuri smiles back. He swears she's secretly Mrs. Claus. "Yeah, well, she's more fun than your dusty ass."

"She's, like, eighty," Phichit scoffs. 

"She's magnificent." 

"True, but—" 

"She gives me extra food." 

"She gives everyone extra food. That's what adds to her lunch lady magnificence. She's been playing you this whole damn time. That woman will never love you the way you deserve to be loved, Yuuri Katsuki." 

"This is exactly why I don't sit with you guys." Mila squeezes onto the bench next to Phichit, forcing the group of freshmen to scoot over, not letting their dirty looks faze her. 

"We didn't invite you." Phichit shoves her tray away from his. "Leave." 

Mila whistles. "Okay, wow, who pissed in your Cheerios?" 

"Separation anxiety," Yuuri mumbles, nudging his head towards Guang-Hong feeding Leo his muffin. 

Mila looks over his shoulder—a little too obviously because JJ shouts for her to just come over and sit on his lap. She flips him off. He dry-humps the table. 

"Nothing you can't get over..." Mila says under her breath. 

Yuuri pretends like he doesn't notice her peering at the table next to theirs. Sara, glowing in a pretty cloud of cheerleader girls, their ponytails bobbing in unison. She looks up at Mila. Mila looks away, a deep crease between her eyebrows. 

"So," Phichit points his fork at her, "could I interest you in a magical evening full of carnivorous slime goblins and my parents' liquor cabinet?" 

"Sounds wild. I'm in." She grins. And Phichit grins. And Yuuri tries to grin, but the bottom half of his face feels numb like he just got back from the dentist. 

He tries to listen to them talk about Mrs. Parvati's Math Test of Doom and how everyone's calling JJ's new tattoo a work of art instead of a tramp stamp, but he feels himself drift away. His hand on his chest again. Everything inside beating like a kick drum. 

Is Victor eating lunch somewhere else? Alone? Outside in the cold? The locker rooms? His car? 

"Yuuri." 

What's going on? 

"Yuuri?" 

Is he okay? 

"Yuuri!" 

"Hm?" Yuuri whips his head back into place. He blinks. 

"How's he doing?" Mila bites around a plastic spoon, waving satan's urine pudding at his face. She's the only kid in school who actually eats that stuff. She's still not dead. She's a walking miracle. 

"Who?" Yuuri's eyebrows scrunch. 

"Vic." 

"Oh..." Yuuri swallows. "I don't really—" 

"You know, with everything going on," Mila cuts him off, scraping the last bits of pudding out of the cup. 

"What?" 

"Is it true?" Phichit leans over the table, the strings of his hoodie landing in his lasagna. 

Yuuri shakes his head. "Is what true?" 

Mila gives Phichit a side glance. And, yeah, leave it up to Yuuri Katsuki to be the last person in the whole universe to know what's going on. 

"Is what true?" Yuuri asks again. 

"You know..." Phichit leans even farther towards him, bobbing his head from side to side, the way he does when he gets impatient. Sometimes it can look like he's having a seizure. 

Mila wedges her bottom lip between her teeth, a red speck of pudding stuck in the corner of her mouth. She looks nervous. She never looks nervous. 

And all Yuuri can hear is the soccer team's laughter booming in the back, all the bustling, clatters and clanks. 

"Victor's mom," Phichit whispers, his eyes so big they swallow his face whole. 

✕✕✕ 

When Yuuri hears the roar of the Mustang's engine, he picks up the pace, panting, stumbling over his loose socks. He didn't even have time to put his shoes on, chasing after Victor the second he rushed out of the locker room after practice. Yuuri hates Coach Douglas for making them hit the hurdles today. His legs are mush, and his sides are burning, and he's pretty sure he'll end up vomiting all over himself if he keeps this pace up. 

Yuuri tumbles out onto the parking lot, weaving his way through groups of kids and cars, the red of Victor's Mustang flaring in the back. He barely dodges a rusty Jeep. The horn booms, and some kid hangs out of the driver's seat window, yelling for him to get out of the way. 

Yuuri tumbles past it, his breath in his throat. He curses when he sees Victor's car turn around the corner. Yuuri kicks his legs into a sprint, cuts through a hedge and stumbles onto the lot, his hands reaching out, slamming onto the hood. The tires bite into the gravel. But before Victor can even think about getting out of the car, Yuuri flounders into the passenger seat. 

Victor turns towards him. Something flashes across his face so quickly Yuuri barely catches it. Hopeful, he thinks. Hopeful, hopeful, hopeful. 

Victor's mouth cracking open: "Yuuri." Like he's never said it before. Like he doesn't know how to. 

He shakes his fringe into his face. But Yuuri already caught a glimpse of the dark pouches under his eyes, the patchy shadow around his jaw. He's still wearing the same Linhedge High sweater he's been wearing for the past week. 

The second Victor stops caring about the way he looks, you should be worried. 

It stings to think about her now, Dina, the way she would always fix Victor's crooked collars when they came over for dinner, always telling him to smile, to sit straight, to look nice, fishing a comb out of her pocket to tame the few stray hairs sticking up at the back of his head. 

Dina. 

It's all upside down now. It's all messed up, and Victor never said a word. How could he have never said a word? 

Yuuri bites the inside of his cheek so hard his eyes well up. 

"Where the hell have you been ?" Victor asks. Yuuri has never heard his voice sound so small. A quiver. It could fit right into his palm. 

Where the hell have you been? 

Like Yuuri turned his back on him and left him behind. 

Yuuri shakes his head. He can't find anything good enough to say. He doesn't know what to do. He didn't think this far ahead. 

I don't know. 

Car horns start blaring behind them. 

Victor's eyes snap to the rearview mirror. He swallows. Yuuri stares at him, hopes he can feel it, his eyes digging into his cheek. 

Just drive, Yuuri thinks. Just fucking drive. Anywhere. Please. 

Victor wedges his lips between his teeth, fingers curling into the steering wheel. Inhaling. Exhaling. The cars honking in the back, someone yelling, the wind whipping through the open driver's seat window. 

"Buckle up," he says, nudging Yuuri with his elbow. Electric zap. Yuuri stutters a breath. "Come on," he says, softer this time. 

The second Yuuri's buckle clicks into place, Victor slams the accelerator so hard Yuuri jerks against his seat belt, coughing, his hands slapping onto the dashboard. 

They're off with the engine screaming. 

Yuuri's eyes snap to Victor's ruthless hand on the gearshift, and he thinks about reaching for it, his fingers throbbing, aching to calm Victor down. It's the helplessness of it all that makes Yuuri want to give up, give in. But he balls his hands into fists, digs them into his lap and forces himself to look out the window. 

He doesn't know where Victor's taking him. Maybe he's not taking him anywhere at all. 

The lake flashes by, the blue-green woods, and then the 'You Are Now Leaving Linhedge' sign waving at them in the rearview mirror. And all this violent silence blaring in Yuuri's ears. The air hot with it. But every time he tries to open his mouth, he convinces himself nothing in his head is good enough to be said out loud. Not even unnecessary apologies. 

It feels like forever goes by until Victor pulls into some sad little truck stop dozing off on the side of the road. 

"Wait here," Victor says before getting out. Yuuri swears his heart leaps out of his chest to run right after him. 

He comes back a few minutes later and throws at least a dozen packs of animal crackers into Yuuri's lap. Victor gives him a little smile, and, god, if that doesn't punch Yuuri square in the jaw. 

Seven days without you. Just seven stupid days, Yuuri thinks. And I fucking missed you. 

"Thanks," Yuuri says. He tries to smile back. He wishes his smiles were half as nice as Victor's. 

"I know you want to talk about it," Victor mumbles once they're back on the road, trading animal crackers because Yuuri can't eat the sheep without feeling bad—it just seems unfair, stuffing them into a pack full of lions and bears—and Victor doesn't eat the elephants out of principle. He says they remember everything, and if he ate a member of their herd, they'd never forget, plagued by their loss till the end of days. 

"Talk about what?" Yuuri says, feeling stupid for even trying to pretend like he doesn't have a clue, like it doesn't make him sick to his stomach just thinking about it. Her. 

Victor still looks like her even with his long hair gone. Yuuri wonders if that can count as a curse. 

Victor's grip tightens around the steering wheel. 

"What everyone else is talking about," he says, rubbing a hand across his face. "I'm sick of it. It's the only thing anyone wants to talk about, and I just can’t—" A shaky breath. "Nothing ever happens around here, and then when something actually does, it just—everything, everyone—spontaneously combusts!" It's almost a shout. 

Yuuri flinches. 

Victor shakes his head. "Did you check Facebook?" His mouth scrunching like the words have a bitter aftertaste. 

"No," Yuuri says. 

"Good. Don't." 

It's quiet again, nothing but the engine rumbling beneath them. Yuuri lost track of where they are, the scenery changing from blurry woods to open fields, the road twisting, turning, the dark rolling in so quietly. 

"Look," Victor taps his fingers across the steering wheel, "can we just...Not today. Not now. I don't want to. Not with you too. Can we just—just…" he trails off, his eyes roaming the road ahead. 

It's so hard to think about how just a week ago, Victor's lips were on his neck. He was lying between his legs. He was drunk. It was dark. And his breath poured heavy when he told Yuuri he dreams about his mouth. 

How is that Victor the same Victor who's sitting right next to him now, a little jittery, a little awkward and helpless. 

And how is it that in the flurry of it all, it was so easy for Yuuri to forget that this is just Victor. That it has always been Victor. 

Victor, who played hide-and-seek with him when it rained outside, who dressed up as the Luigi to his Mario on Halloween and punched Takeshi Nishigori in the face when he called Yuuri a poof in fourth grade, who laughs at his terrible fart jokes and who's the only person dorky enough to sit through a whole Star Wars marathon with him. 

This is the Victor Yuuri has known since he was nine. The kid he grew up with from across the street. The one with the beat-up red Chucks and the taffy-pull hair. And Yuuri cares about that kid. He cares about him so much it cracks him wide open. 

"Okay," Yuuri says. He nods, stuffing a handful of mutilated animal crackers into his mouth. "Okay," he mumbles, chews, swallows. 

"Okay," Victor says. 

"We could talk about the weather?" 

Victor laughs, and it's short and loud, and his face glitches like it caught him by surprise, like he hasn't heard that sound come out of his mouth in the longest time. 

"Okay, sure, the weather," he says, shaking his head. "Yeah. It's cold." 

"So cold," he says. 

"The coldest." Yuuri smiles. 

"Cool." He smiles back. "I'm glad we established that." 

"Cool." 

Victor snorts. It's adorable. Yuuri wishes you could eat snorts. 

He fishes all the sheep out of the packet and gestures for Victor to take them. He tosses them into his mouth without flinching. The maniac. 

"Next topic," Victor mumbles around a mouth full of poor innocent sheep crackers. "JJ's new tattoo. Why is everyone bashing him for it?" 

"It's a tramp stamp," Yuuri says. 

Victor deadpans. "It's a work of art." 

"Not you too! What fucking planet are you from? It's his name. On his butt." 

"It's above his butt." 

"But it's, like, close to his butt." Yuuri flings his hands into the air. "So close it's practically on his butt." 

"Please stop saying butt, it's freaking me out." 

"Fine." Yuuri hands him another sheep cracker. "His derrière." 

"His derrière?" 

"His derrière." 

Victor snorts. Again. It's magical. "Say it again." 

"Derrière." 

"Ew." 

"Are we not going to talk about how it's his name, though? Why is no one talking about it? It's his name!" 

"So?" 

"So? Are you kidding?" Yuuri flings the next sheep cracker at his face. And Victor laughs, finally, fully, and he glows, and he fills the car to the brim. He doesn't fit. He's larger than life. 

For a moment, Yuuri doesn't even feel guilty about letting himself slip away. He forgets he wants more. And it feels so good to forget to want more, to think this is enough, and this is it, and this is good. 

They're talking and talking, about everything, anything, and nothing makes sense, and neither of them cares because they don't have to. 

Yuuri lets a laugh bubble up his throat, warm enough to make his toes tingle. Victor looks at him, his face blooming, unfurling. 

Yuuri wonders if someone can be so pretty they give you a heart attack. 

He doesn't know how long they drive. He doesn't care. The night swoops in, and it's all headlights, streetlights, the glow of the dashboard. It reminds Yuuri of all those times Victor drove him home from school. He'd drive past their street, and they'd just leave town, just drive and talk and drive until they couldn't talk anymore and all that was left was that warm quiet and the rambling radio. 

Yuuri would watch Victor out of the corner of his eye, and he'd hate and love how much he'd want to touch his mouth, graze all those sacred, secret things hiding the corner of his smile. And the way his lips would part, a gentle rupture, the way you were on the edge of your seat, aching to witness whatever might come out. 

"Yuuri?" 

Yuuri blinks. He snaps his eyes away from Victor's mouth. He clears his throat. "Yeah?" He can feel Victor staring. 

"That night," he whispers like he's telling Yuuri a secret. Yuuri leans in a little closer, just enough to catch it all. "That night." All warm breath. "I meant it. I meant everything." 

Yuuri feels his eyelids flutter, like he might just drop them and stay still, just breathe a little too fast and shallow, just listen to the world roll by. 

But he's afraid of all the things he might miss if he did. He looks at Victor, his face glowing in the red-blue lights of the dashboard. 

Yuuri never knew you could want something so much it made everything else disappear. 

"When you said it," Victor says, eyes flicking to Yuuri's mouth, throat, chest, back to the road. Yuuri swallows. "That it’s already forgotten," he says. "Did you mean it?" 

Yuuri opens his mouth. Nothing comes out. And he can see Victor's face wavering like it did that day, the morning after, the both of them not knowing what to do next, all those things they couldn't say, all that awful, awful quiet. 

"Do you still mean it?" Victor breathes. 

Yuuri keeps trying, but nothing comes out of his mouth. Nothing. Until something does. He can't hear himself, all of him softly numb, numbly soft. And Victor's face. Victor's beautiful fucking face. It's doing something that makes Yuuri want to fall to his knees. 

I said no, didn't I? Yuuri thinks. I said no. 

He stares at Victor's hand around the gearshift. He reaches out. He takes it. And just like that, 

Victor's hand in his. 

Yuuri wonders how you can touch something you've touched countless times before and have it feel like nothing you've ever touched in your whole life. All these smooth hollows, these soft dips, everything warm and trembling like he's holding a heart. 

Chapter Text

They stay in the car after Victor pulls into their driveway. Yuuri feels himself ache, hard and quiet, the hum of it sitting in his stomach. 

It's just their breathing, their tangled hands on the gearshift. He kind of likes it. He kind of more than likes it, more and more, enough mores for him to wonder if it's admirable to let yourself want something so much you'd let it end you. 

Victor's fingers tighten against his until it stings. Lifting their hands, twisting them until they're palm to palm, Yuuri swears they're beating there. 

And as nice as it is—so nice, hurl-me-into-the-fucking-sky nice—Yuuri can't stop himself from thinking about his knobby knuckles, his sweatiness, palm a little too squishy in that way only floundering hands can be, hands that bat milk cartons off tables and drop vases and accidentally smack Koji in the face while aiming for mosquitos. 

He thinks about the crooked curve of his thumb, broken in a jammed car door six years ago. He wonders if Victor can feel those three indents between the knuckles, leftovers of the screws that had been bolted into the bone to keep it together. He can't bend it. His left hand condemned to a perpetual thumbs-up existence. Yuuri's not even a thumbs-up kind of person. 

He wonders if Victor feels it too, his stomach flipping, that buzz at the nape of his neck, the way the air feels thick enough to swallow. 

Can you feel it, all of it, Yuuri thinks, staring at the smooth sweep of Victor's fingers, like someone flicked them on with a paintbrush. Do you like this? Is this good? 

The seconds crawl by so slowly Yuuri doesn't know what to do with all this time, all this new, strange skin in his hand. 

He looks up at Victor staring at him in the dark. Something twitches in the corner of that mouth, something quietly fizzing. Yuuri wants to reach out and touch it, maybe even tug at it, stretch it up into Victor's cheek until it's a smile. It would light up the night. 

Victor's phone buzzes. A picture of Koji's giant face-devouring grin flashes across the screen. They both stare at it burring in the cupholder between them. The phone goes silent. They wait, weirdly shellshocked, but it doesn't take long until Yuuri's phone goes off in his pocket. He tries a laugh, 

careful, short. He's too dazed to make a sound. He can't feel his cheeks. 

"He's probably getting worried," Victor says. He doesn't sound like himself. But nothing in this car seems the way it should be. 

Victor turns to look at him. It's awful. He's all there, he's alive, he's awake, and he's looking at Yuuri with a face so open you could crawl right in. Yuuri can't stop himself from leaning towards him. And it's just a little, he swears, just a little—until it feels like an inch too far. 

Victor opens his mouth. Yuuri can't look away. He waits for him to say something, anything, everything in the whole wide world. He's here for it all. Yuuri would empty every inch of his head to fill it with Victor's somethings, anythings, everythings. 

But Victor snaps his mouth shut and looks at their hands as he detangles them. Yuuri realizes he's been holding him in a death-grip, skin tingling when the blood bursts back. He almost apologizes. But he doesn't. He's scared of what his voice might sound like. A windstorm, maybe. A heartshake. 

Victor presses his hand into his lap, then grips his knees, his thighs, back to his knees, the steering wheel. All Yuuri can think is that those hands are too far away for him to reach. Victor dribbles his fingers across the steering wheel before unbuckling himself. He unbuckles Yuuri too. A sign to get out. But Yuuri doesn't want to get out. He doesn't want this to end. He feels drunk, everything fuzzy like he's underwater with his eyes open, wallowing. And his head, it's full. It's so, so full. 

Yuuri takes a breath. He moves before his thoughts can catch up, hands reaching for his duffel bag between his legs. The door isn't even half-open when the night air slaps him in the face. It's too cold and too real, and it reminds him of everything he's been trying to ignore these past few hours. 

But just when he has his foot rooted on the pavement, ready to face whatever the hell he's supposed to face, Victor grabs his arm. He slides his fingers down to Yuuri's wrist until they're wrapped around his palm. 

Fuck.

Yuuri swallows, turns to look at him, slowly, afraid the dizziness might make him topple over. He doesn't remember what their hands looked like without each other. 

"This happened," Victor says. And then he says it again. And then he smiles, his whole face shifting around it, the whole world shifting around it too. It's the center of everything. It's terrible. It's perfect. It stays there for a minute, a handful of years, and then it's gone, that smile that makes the world orbit. 

Victor tightens his grip. "I'm not letting you pretend it didn't." 

The words spiral and spiral and spiral until Yuuri feels his mouth fall open. 

"Okay," he says. He sounds like a windstorm. A heartshake. "Me neither." 

Scrunching his eyebrows, Victor shakes his head. He looks at Yuuri like he couldn't possibly understand, not for the life of him. 

✕✕✕ 

This happened. 

Yuuri doesn't realize his eyes were closed until he opens them. He spreads his hand, flexing it towards the ceiling, pale against the backdrop of his wilting band posters. Short, knobby fingers and bulging tendons. He wonders what all of that feels like when it's not yours. 

This happened. 

The way Victor said it. A revelation. 

And Yuuri wonders if 'this' means more than just their hands twisted on the gearshift. He wonders if it means the smile in the corner of Victor's mouth, the relief in the fall of his brow, his heavy, loud breathing, Yuuri's heavy, loud breathing, and the warm quiet on the road, the engine, their hearts. The blue of the night wrapping them up so tightly they felt tucked away. 

Yuuri stares at his door. He hopes Victor can't sleep either. And he imagines him hushing into his room, flicking Yuuri's forehead or pinching his cheeks, whispering for him to follow him to the moon. 

Yuuri wants that so much he's full with it. 

'This happened', Victor said. Yuuri doesn't know why there was something heartsick about it too. 

'This happened.' 

Because so did a lot of other things. Things bigger than hand-holding two hours out of town. 

Things so big they crowd it right out of the frame. 

He thinks of Victor's quiet pain on the road, his parents and that late-night whiskey talk in the kitchen, and then yesterday, Phichit looking at him from across the cafeteria table, all that worry rooted between his eyebrows. 

'There's a video', Mila said, looking at her hands like she was looking right through them. 'Juniors, I think. They just filmed her, just lying there on the ground outside of some bar. She was drunk... throwing up...They left her there. They just left. And now it's like this avalanche, you know, like everyone was just waiting for a reason to finally talk about her. That she's crazy. An alcoholic. They're saying some sick shit. Especially about her and Victor. I don't know, it's just...that's someone's family.' 

She looked up then, and Yuuri never knew Mila could care about something so much she let it make her curl into herself: that droop in her mouth, her trembling chin. Mila Babicheva, always warrior-sharp like you expect her to lift her fingers and streak her cheeks with war paint. But she was so soft like that, so soft she almost looked afraid. 

Yuuri still hasn't seen the video. Victor told him not to check so Yuuri hasn't. It's probably been removed by now anyways, but in a place so tinker-town small—everyone breathing down each other's necks, shoulders rubbing—rumors have a way of spreading like a bushfire, hot and hungry, eager mouths feeding it between cupped hands. 

Sick shit. 

For all anyone knew, it could've just been a slap on a wrist, and someone said it was his cheek, his stomach, that it wasn't her hand but a belt, a meat pounder, a baseball bat. 

Yuuri thinks about her daintiness, those sweet, soft hands. Dina used them to wipe marmalade off Victor's chin at brunch, smooth back his hair, brush his cheek, pluck daisies to tuck them behind his ear. She touched Yuuri's nose once, made a honking sound like it was a car horn. Hands like those...don't do things that hurt. 

There's a reason why rumors are rumors, but they have to come from somewhere and that's the part that keeps Yuuri wondering, worrying. That's the part that keeps everyone's heart drilling. 

It's this place, its ingrained meanness, its people living in a nowhere with a zip code. It does stuff to you. 

When Mari still lived here, she used to say people get bored in a Bermuda Triangle, that boredom feeds the crazy as much as it feeds the sad. 

Yuuri can still see her that day, burning behind his lids like a comet. Diploma in her hand, she jumped off the stage, soared through the sky to never return. Her graduation cap flung onto the fading grass of the sports field was the only evidence of her having been here at all. 

'This is the kind of place you leave', she said, her eyes blazing, her mouth too. She set his soul on fire. 'Promise me you'll remember that. Promise me.' 

Yuuri thinks about Victor, about how he and Mari are so alike. There were days where Victor would get into his car, and Yuuri wasn't sure if he'd ever come back. 

He looks at his hand in the dark, the feeling of Victor still hot in his palm, all that beating and burning. And Yuuri wonders if this is good enough. Is this worth anything in the face of everything else, all those bigger, ominous, mean, mean things? 

This happened. Today this happened. But will it fit into tomorrow, the day after? Next week? Will this fit anywhere else than in that car and this night and these hands? 

✕✕✕ 

Yuuri stares down at his cereal so he doesn't have to look at Victor. 

Victor who's sitting right in front of him. Victor who's bolting his eyes into Yuuri's head so hard he can feel his brain shake. Victor who held his hand. Yesterday. It was yesterday. 

And now they're sitting in front of each other with Yuuri's dad reading the newspaper one seat away and Makkachin snoring under the table, and Yuuri doesn't know if he should say something or not. If anyone should say something. He hates himself for thinking he should've just skipped breakfast. 

"Nice of you to join us again," his dad mumbles, shooting Yuuri a glance over the corner of his newspaper. 

Victor shifts at that, wiping a hand through his hair until his forehead's stretched across his whole head. Yuuri swallows. 

"Yeah..." He taps his spoon against the edge of his bowl. His stomach does that twisty thing it does whenever he lies. "Coach finally laid off the morning practice thing." Which is probably the shittiest thing he could've come up with because everyone knows Douglas would rather shoot himself in the face than wake up at five AM. 

Living off of Phichit's fitness granola bars for breakfast was punishment enough. (They taste like abs and self-esteem, and all they do is make Yuuri feel worse about looking like a donut.) 

Yuuri can't help himself from glancing at Victor. He's been staring at Yuuri since he sat down, surprised almost, like Yuuri sitting across from him was the last thing he expected. 

The newspaper ruffles as his dad turns another page. "When's the big game, Vic?" 

Yuuri steers his attention back to his cereal, thankful for no one wanting to dig any further. He counts the spongy Cheerios bobbing in his bowl. He can't sit still, knees jumping, his fingers flimsy around the spoon. He's not sure if he's about to blast off or crash through the floor. 

"Victor?" His dad lowers the newspaper. 

Victor doesn't answer. Looking up, Yuuri catches Victor's eyes latched onto his mouth. He blinks. Yuuri feels milk dribble down his chin. He wipes it off with a sleeve, cheeks burning. He swears his heart floats all the way up to his brain. 

"Victor?" His dad's voice coming from far, far away. 

"Yeah..." Soft and puffy, like a dream tripping out of Victor's mouth. Yuuri wants him to say his name like that. 

Yuuuuuuri. "Victor." 

"Hm?" Victor blinks, snapping his head towards Yuuri's dad. He curls his hair behind his ear but it's too short to stay put. Yuuri watches the strands fall down his cheek. And if Yuuri wanted to, he could reach out and tug at them without having to leave his seat. It would be so easy. Victor is so close Yuuri spots the fading freckles bunched in the corner of his cheek. He wants to count them one day. He'll wait for summer when they're freshly dusted over his nose and shoulders like funfetti. 

Yuuri should start a list in his head. Victor-things he wishes were edible: his snorts, his freckles, the way his accent slips when he says arugula like arrrugula (which has only happened once and Yuuri swore he'd take the memory of it to the grave), his earlobes for some reason (because Yuuri's deranged). 

Victor absentmindedly reaches up to pinch one, small as a gumdrop, until it's all ruddy. Yeah, Yuuri thinks. His earlobes. I'm a lunatic. 

Yuuri's dad clears his throat. "The game." 

"Oh—uh…" Victor swallows. It's a showy thing. No hair to hide it anymore. That throat long and bare, and Yuuri keeps thinking he could touch him, he could, he could, he could. "Yeah, it's...uh—" 

"Friday," Koji yells, crashing down the stairs like a cyclone, hair shower-damp, a towel dangling from his neck. He grins, wolfish, all big teeth. 

"We're gonna make them eat ass." Ripping the towel from his neck and snapping it through the air like a whip. 

"Koji." Their dad jerks to the side and gives him a pointed look over the edge of his newspaper. If their mom were here, he wouldn't even have twitched at that. But Tuesday is her designated sleep-in day, and in her absence Dad tries his best to shove away his I'm-the-fun-parent persona. Then again, there are some Tuesdays where they eat leftover Halloween candy and spray Reddi-wip into their mouths. Like real men. 

Yuuri catches the crooked smile as his dad buries his face back into the pages. 

"After we win against Rodham, we'll be legends." Koji dumps his towel on Yuuri's head, grinding it into his face until he gets Yuuri to try and bash his way out of his grip. Yuuri flings the towel back at his brother, knowing he probably rubbed his balls all over it. Koji whips it over his shoulder before grabbing Yuuri's cereal. He doesn't even have enough time to tell him to get his own before Koji chugs it down like a neanderthal. 

Yuuri imagines himself kicking his brother in the ballsack until one of them dies. Just because. 

Koji's ten times more unbearable before a game. Mom says it's the nerves. Yuuri thinks it's the only time he gets away with being a douche canoe. 

"You coming to the game?" Victor asks. 

It takes Yuuri a while to snap out of it. There's something careful there, Victor's eyes wide, hands tucked under the table. 

Yuuri shifts. "I don't really—" 

"'Course he's not." Koji slams the empty bowl onto the table with a triumphant bang. Their dad drops the newspaper. Koji lifts his hands and looks around like it wasn't him, waiting for the newspaper to crawl back up before mumbling, "What's it going to be this time...Homework? History test?" He leans against the kitchen island, cocking a brow. "Furry porn convention?" 

"What?" Yuuri feels his face crunch. 

Victor gets up to fix himself a cup of coffee, smacking the back of Koji's head on his way back. 

"Ow. Dude." 

Victor points his mug at him. "Don't ever call me that." 

Yuuri's never been the one to go to games. Too many people, too much noise. He hated being dragged along to Koji's and Victor's Little League games, sitting smack in the sun listening to angry soccer moms shout at their equally angry kids from across the field. 

He's been successful at coming up with valid enough excuses to get away with sidestepping games, but something in the way Victor is looking at him makes his hand tingle. Yuuri can feel him there, the memory of his fingers trailing along his skin like they'd been there all night. 

Victor takes a sip of his coffee, his eyes on Yuuri over the edge of his mug. It's the same look he gave Yuuri yesterday, that moment Yuuri climbed into the passenger seat. A flash of something hopeful. 

Yuuri looks at his lap. Makkachin is still sprawled under the table, a fluffy blob spilled across their feet. Yuuri flexes his toes against his tummy. The poodle gives a little grumble, turning to look at him, all button-eyed, tongue out. 

"I'll think about it," he says before he looks back up. 

Victor's mouth twitches. He nods. "Okay." And then he smiles. It's not big enough to make the universe tilt, but it's more than enough to make Yuuri float right off his seat. It's all so strange. 

Strange because everything seems so normal. Their dad behind the newspaper, Makkachin's grumbles, Koji cussing at a stain a splash of milk had left on his letterman jacket. The sun in the windows, the song on the radio, something about highways and backseat kisses, the host wishing everyone a 'Funky mornin', y'all!'. 

And Yuuri doesn't understand how big things can happen—beautiful things, horrible things—and how everyone keeps moving. How someone can hold your hand or hurt you with all their might, and you expect the world to stop, the universe, your brain, but it all keeps going. No breaks. You don't get to catch your breath. 

Yuuri can't help it. His mind tugs him towards the white house on the other side of the road, that pretty picket fence. He thinks about that time Dina kissed his forehead and called him sunshine during a summer night barbecue, her breath sour-sweet with alcohol, the way she started to cry when Yuuri said she was so beautiful she made the world sing. ('No, I don't, Yuuri, darling. No, I don't. I make it scream, Yuuri. I think I make it scream.') 

And now Victor's things are stuffed into a single duffel bag in Koji's room. 

You don't get to choose the right time for things to happen. In the grand scheme of it all, you only get to choose so little, left to live with the coincidental rest of everything else. 

Yuuri's chest crumples. It's not fair. 

When he looks up, Victor already has his eyes on him. Pensive, maybe. Cautious. Yuuri wonders if he's thinking about the same things, if he's thinking about anything at all. 

✕✕✕ 

"Holy shit, you're actually here!" Phichit shoots up on the bleachers, cupping his hands like he's about to yodel. "Ladies and gentleman, Yuuri Katsuki is getting his cherry popped tonight!" Before hastily adding, "His game cherry!" 

He stretches his arms out like he's expecting Yuuri to take off and soar right into them. Yuuri shrinks into his jacket. "Phichit..." He tries to keep his head low, dodging looks as the heat shoots up his cheeks. 

Phichit grins so wide his teeth zip his face apart. He reminds Yuuri of that crocodile toy from Crocodile Dentist. They used to play it all the time in kindergarten. Phichit was obsessed with it because he said it's like Russian Roulette except you lose your fingers instead of your life—like he genuinely wanted to play Russian Roulette but Crocodile Dentist was the only PG option available. Phichit Chulanont has always been the maddest man in the room. 

As Yuuri's eyes drift over the bleachers, he wonders if the whole town is here, the whole continent, crowded across the edge of the field and huddled on the stands, steam coiling off a sea of heads under the floodlights. 

He stumbles up the steps, shimmying through the rows of people already seated. Flags and banners wave through the air, the letter L everywhere in big blocky white, crafted megaphones sprinkled with glitter, cheeks slathered in school colors. Team spirit like a contagion. 

Reaching Phichit, Yuuri squeezes himself into the space between Mila and Guang-Hong. 

Mila rolls her eyes when Phichit starts whooping at the school mascot doing cartwheels in front of the cheer squad. Mad Rocco, the Linhedge Leopard, in his red jersey. When he starts hip-thrusting the air after a backflip, the crowd goes ballistic. 

"This one's already downed four beers and a Red Bull," Mila mumbles, nudging her head towards Phichit and tugging at the hem of his coat to make him calm down. He looks like he's about to tap dance (which he can—exquisitely—and Yuuri's yet to find something the guy can't do). 

Mila slumps back and curls around a thermos. Judging by the flush on her cheeks, there's no tea in it. She offers Yuuri a sip but he shakes his head. 

Guang-Hong gives him a little smile over the edge of his scarf, all of him swallowed by a ginormous jacket that makes him look like the Michelin Man. Yuuri doubts it's his. Guang-Hong opens his mouth as if to say something, but he shrinks into himself and stares at his feet, toes tapping against each other. 

Yuuri bumps his shoulder with his. 

How've you been? 

Guang-Hong bumps back. Good. You? 

Yuuri smiles at him. Great. 

Guang-Hong grins. 

Fantastic. 

There's a fuzzy warmth in his gut, and he's thankful for some things staying the same amid lobster husbands and moon boys. When they were kids, Guang-Hong said they had telepathic superpowers and they couldn't tell anyone or they'd end up in a secret government lab at the bottom of the ocean. Guang-Hong might be the only person who enjoys comfortable silence as much as Yuuri does. 

After another exchange of dopey smiles, Guang-Hong yanks his attention towards the field, his eyes searching. Yuuri catches himself doing the same. 

There's something different about it at night, a shock of green under the floodlights, stirring, electric, the dread of it leaking up into the stands. 

The cheer squad starts hurtling girls into the air, bodies pounding to the drums playing near the bleachers. Their ponytails whip, lids caked with glitter, and their cheeks glow, legs split open, bodies twisting, flipping, flying until the crowd erupts. The force of it all sweeps Yuuri right off his feet, and he lets it carry him until he's buzzing along with everyone else. 

Little League was never like this. 

Yuuri catches himself glancing at Mila. Her hands tighten around her thermos when her eyes stay nailed to the flier in the first pyramid, Sara Crispino ripping through the air like a stick of dynamite, a midnight rocket. Mila snaps her eyes to her hands. Yuuri nudges her knee. She shakes her head before she pops the thermos open and guzzles down so much it makes her cough. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she keeps shaking her head until Yuuri nudges her knee again. She stops. There's lipstick on her knuckles. 

"Not tonight," she says so quietly Yuuri barely hears her. "She doesn't exist tonight." Her eyes on Sara again. She's still flying like she never left the air, like she never does. Even during cheer practice, she's forever airborne. 

He wonders how hard it is to love someone like that if you're forever earthbound. 

When Mila takes another long swig, Yuuri knows better than to ask her what's going on. There's always something going on. Sara and Mila, off and on and off again. But there's something about the way Mila is staring at her that makes this feel like their worst blow yet. 

Yuuri opens his mouth, but before he can get a word out, a smile stretches across Mila's face, all lips no eyes, all pride no heart. It makes Yuuri's cheeks ache just looking at it. 

"Game's about to start." Mila grabs his chin and twists his head towards the field. He doesn't retaliate. When Mila says not tonight, she means not tonight. 

Yuuri tries to shake it off when the stands finally tremble as the players pour in. There's something brutal about their red jerseys bleeding in the floodlights. Rodham High isn't far behind, jogging in a clean formation, soldiers in jet-black. No wonder Koji's been an asshole all week. 

Yuuri spots his brother in a cluster of red, his face cold sober and merciless. He's probably imagining his opponents' scalps jangling around his neck. Just this morning, he held an incredibly informative speech about post-battle trophies in the old world, necklaces made out of teeth and ears, shrunken heads worn on belts. His wild reenactments made Makkachin panic-pee on the carpet. 

Yuuri's eyes narrow as he scans the field. He can't help himself. There's a frenzy swelling in him the longer it takes him to find Victor, and he doesn't understand why it just gets worse when he finally does. 

Victor looks up at the bleachers, eyes rushing over the stands until they find Yuuri. That's all it takes. Just one look and Yuuri feels himself shudder open, every inch of him, from his toes to the top of his head, undone. He's never been so aware of all the skin under his clothes, all those untouched, secret places. 

Victor waves. Yuuri goes dizzy so fast he grips into his stomach. He wants to wave back, wants to jump to his feet and blast off into the sky, write Victor's name across the hemisphere, arrange the stars into the shape of his smile. But before he gets a chance to do any of it, Koji grabs Victor and kicks him into the huddle of players crowded around Couch Tammy. Yuuri wonders what she's saying. By the looks of her bulging neck, probably something ethically questionable. 

Eat them alive. Make them bleed. 

(If Douglas were her, he'd opt for telling them not to lose. And if he were feeling especially desperate, he'd promise them IHOP coupons if they managed not to embarrass themselves. Or die.) 

When the game breaks out with a bang, Yuuri thinks he might understand why the Romans pit lions against each other for fun. The air full and boiling, the fever of the crowd, the cheers and the breath-holding, the pounding of feet on metal. It's the heaviest tide, all this pushing and pulling. 

You can't stop. You're mad with it. 

Yuuri jerks when he feels Mila's hands shake his shoulders. She's yelling. The crowd is yelling. And at first it sounds like a blob of syllables—until it's a word, a number. 

Eleven. 

Burnished on Victor's back like the North Star. 

Yuuri feels his body coil. He can barely hear himself over the roar. But he's saying it too. Eleven. Like a prayer. 

Victor throttles across the field so fast it looks like he's flying. He's savage, untouchable, full of a kind of violence Yuuri has never seen before, not during practice, not during hot summer games on their street with the neighborhood kids. 

He's a war drum, an outcry. He's the end of the world. 

Bare in the scrutiny of the floodlights, it's something Yuuri doesn't get to see, ever. And maybe, just maybe, it's the most honest he's ever seen Victor before. 

Yuuri doesn't realize the game is long over until Mila grabs his shoulders again, twisting him towards her, mouth ripped open in a triumphant roar. Guang-Hong leaps down the bleachers, his short legs dribbling across the field towards Leo's open arms. They topple over, rolling around the grass like caterpillars. 

"We won!" Mila and Phichit shout in unison, crowding around Yuuri, yelling until his ears blow off. He can't feel his feet. His eyes won't stop searching. It's that frenzy again, swollen and heavy in his chest, weighing him down. And he can't see him. He can't find him. 

The crowd spills down the stands, and Yuuri's eyes jump from hair to face to shoulder, hoping. 

He hears his own gasp spiral through his head when he spots him at the edge of the field. There's something dazed in the way Victor stares into the distance, chest caught in a flutter. He looks too small for his own body. 

Yuuri feels himself go still when their eyes lock. Victor almost looks scared. Almost. And then barely. And then not at all. Slowly, slowly Yuuri watches him melt back into shape, filling his limbs, spine clicking into place until his head bumps against the sky. And when Victor finally musters a smile, he's the Victor who wiped away an eyelash on Yuuri's cheek this morning, the Victor who looked at his mouth and whispered for him to make a wish when they were alone, his breath on Yuuri's face, his heart there, thumping on his tongue. 

He's not a war drum. He's not the end of the world. 

Except he is. He's all of these things Yuuri doesn't know about. He's this and that and more when he's not looking. 

Yuuri imagines himself unbuttoning Victor, unfolding him to watch all of him spill out, enough to fill an ocean, a pocket of the universe. 

✕✕✕ 

The crowd rips Yuuri off his feet before he can even think about chasing Victor after the teams disperse into the locker rooms. 

Six to one for the Linhedge Leopards. Mila keeps calling it a massacre on their way to JJ's victory party. He told half the school about it three months ago, gloating like it was written in the stars. Yuuri tried to worm his way out, but Mila pulled him so close her hair got stuck in his glasses, slurring on her words when she said something about Victor being there. 

Coach Tammy has been drilling the soccer team every night in preparation for the big game, and the only time Yuuri has seen him was at breakfast, staring at him. That's all they've been doing. Staring and gazing and gazing and staring. 

And it's not like it's a bad thing. It's just a not-enough-at-all thing, an I-need-so-much-more thing. They haven't really talked since that drive, and Yuuri keeps catching himself digging his fingers into his hand trying to numb the feeling Victor had left there, that gut-deep ache. He hasn't slept in days, eyes stuck to his door, hoping Victor might slip in to say his name, to touch his hand, to look at Yuuri like he might just fall into him and never leave. 

Yuuri thinks about this morning, the way Victor crowded him against the kitchen island and brushed his cheek, that eyelash balanced on the tip of his finger. 

'Make a wish, Yuuuuri.' 

And Yuuri couldn't, hadn't. There was nothing there. Never has his head been so blissfully quiet. He presses his hand against his cheek, the linger of Victor's finger on him like a kiss. 

✕✕✕ 

Five minutes in, and Yuuri has already lost Phichit and Mila in the growing crowd. He tried to keep up, but JJ's place is bigger than an aircraft hanger, hallway after hallway, door after door. It reminds him of those Hollywood Hills homes in the movies, far too monumental for a place like Linhedge where everything reminds you of moldy cupboards. And old people. And crochet pillows, for some reason. 

Yuuri weaves his way through chunks of kids, shiny furniture littered with abandoned solo cups and cigarette stubs. After another one of his calls goes straight to voicemail, he steers towards the nearest corner and spends the next twenty minutes contemplating whether the scooped out block beside him is a sculpture or a trash can. Everything in here looks like an art installation, like a house from the future, the bridge of a Starfleet vessel. 

Yuuri shrinks into his sweater until his cheeks rub against the collar. Moments like these make him wish he could gather himself and hide in his clothes like some giant mutant armadillo. 

Right after third base and pep rallies, this is the final installment of the holy trinity of high school: music pounding through the walls, smoke lodged between ribs, all these people moving, sweat-soaked and noxious and swollen and sloppy. 

Sometimes he thinks the only reason he can't stand it is because maybe he wishes he could. He's 

cowering in a corner staring at a sculpture of a trash can when he's supposed to be raving on the roof, getting fucked on a pool table, blacking out, smoking a bong in a bathtub, falling in love one minute at a time. 

Yuuri's busy wondering how hard it is to get spunk off pool tables when a jolt surges through the crowd. 

Victor and Koji, princes of war, striding through the room with a kind of composure that makes you doubt they just scalped a whole soccer team. His brother lifts his arms, splitting the crowd like he thinks he's Moses. 

That's all it takes for it to start, that rumor bushfire sparking, flaring up the furniture. Looks thrown over shoulders, mouths pressed to ears, a knowing carved into all of their slander-brimmed faces. The whole room, it's burning with things everyone's too afraid to say out loud. 

Yuuri wants to throw one of those fire blankets over Victor's head. He didn't know it was like this. He didn't know it was this bad. And he hates it. He hates this town and everyone in it, and for a full horrible minute, he wishes someone or something—God or the cosmos or the fucking Gingerbread Man—would nuke this place and all its nasty, whispered bullshit. 

If Victor notices the walls going up in flames, he doesn't show it, shuffling after Koji's Moses trail, his head held high with a victorious smile. 

It doesn't light up the night. It doesn't make the world shift. 

Yuuri takes a shaky breath before he pushes his way through the crowd. He feels himself go under, bodies pressed against his back, his chest, legs, hands grazing. He can't feel his feet. But he's almost there, almost. 

Yuuri only gets halfway when someone crowds up against his side so hard it knocks the air out of his chest. 

"Yuuuri." Like a phone sex operator. Eyes hooded, Chris leans into him, face so close Yuuri goes crosseyed. "I heard you were here. Couldn't believe it. What a lovely surprise." A bleached curl bobbing above his brow. Yuuri tries to worm his way out of his grip, but Chris tugs him closer, making Yuuri flinch when he squashes his mouth against his ear. "It's a shame it's getting too cold for you to wear those track shorts." 

Yuuri's stomach flips when Chris pulls back to look at him. He catches himself thinking about pool tables. Just for a second. Not even a second. He hates himself. 

Bumping against dancing bodies, he stumbles back, cornered, Chris on him like a bloodhound. "I’m—I was—" Yuuri chokes on his saliva. "Victor." 

Chris clucks his tongue. One of those corkscrew curls tumbles down to scrape Yuuri's nose. 

"Victor who?" He grins. It's all sludgy. "You look like you could use a drink...or a back rub?" Yuuri shies away from those giant goalkeeper hands. "These little shoulders are always so tense," he hums. 

"Jesus, Christophe, back off!" Mila tears through the crowd, flapping her hands at him like she's not sure where to smack him first. Yuuri wants to kiss her. 

"Come on, a guy can't offer his services?" 

Mila's face cracks. "If by services, you mean your dick, try somewhere else." 

Chris narrows his eyes at her but lifts his hands when she cocks a brow. Mila cocks eyebrows the way people cock guns. He huffs. "Fine." To Yuuri, "See you around." He winks. With both eyes. Yuuri's stomach churns. He wants to shake his body like a wet dog, hurl off the Creepy-Chris tingles. 

"Thanks," he mumbles, watching Chris go under in a puffy cloud of sophomore girls, all flashing bra straps and worn out stilettos. 

Mila flicks his forehead. "He's the second horniest drunk I know." 

"Who's the first?" he asks, eyes scanning the crowd for Victor. 

Mila's giggle tugs him back towards her. She stares at him like he's a pod person. "You're funny." Yuuri's eyebrows scrunch at that, but before he can ask, she pulls him towards the kitchen. 

"Where's Phichit?" 

"Dunno. Probably snapchatting. Or making out. Or both." She hands him a granola bar. "Want one?" 

"Where'd you even—" 

"Looted JJ's kitchen. They have like three refrigerators. It's ridiculous. Some kid found a lobster and threw it in the pool." 

"There's a pool?" 

"More like an artificial ocean. I swear his parents—" Mila freezes like she's been punched, "—shit money..." Eyes nailed to something behind Yuuri's shoulders. He whips around so fast he goes dizzy. 

Even here, even now, her feet don't touch the ground. 

It's Midnight Rocket Sara, all cheerleader ponytail and tiptoes, standing by the trash can with a boy, his hands on her waist, her hands in his hair. 

Kissing. They're kissing. They're floating. 

Mila looks like someone scooped her chest clean. 

Yuuri slides in front of her. He wants to smack his hands over her eyes, whip her over his shoulder and run until they hit the ocean. "Mila—" 

"I said not tonight." A violent shudder. "Not tonight, okay? Not tonight." And that smile is back, dreadful and throbbing, stapled across her face. 

Yuuri wants to tell her he knows. He knows it in ways he shouldn't. He knows it feels like someone dropped you into the sea wrapped around a boulder, like you're sinking faster and harder, and you feel the pressure clog your ears, your brain, body swollen with all that water and all that ache, so much of it you think you might burst open. 

You can't breathe even though you're breathing. You can't feel the ground even though you're standing. 

He wants to tell her he knows, but he can't get himself to slip a word in when Mila yanks him into the kitchen, filling them both up with whatever she finds scattered across the counters. Beer, wine, liquor. Down the hatch until the world glows, glows away the ache and the sad, glows away every bad thing left in this town. 

Because not tonight, okay? Not tonight. 

Yuuri feels his body unlock, loosening with every drink. He doesn't realize he's been babbling until Mila blasts open, the most amazing sound tumbling out of her mouth. Mila's laugh sounds like someone flung a metric ton of bouncy balls into the air. 

Is he making her laugh? Is Yuuri Katsuki making someone laugh? 

He doesn't care if she's laughing at him or with him. He feels a strain in his cheeks, and he knows he's laughing too. He keeps laughing and laughing, hoping it's enough to wash away every one of Mila's Midnight Rocket Sara memories. He'll keep laughing until she's squeaky clean. 

Mila pulls him towards her, wild-eyed, her mouth so beautifully open. Before he can stop it, he's being yanked towards the living room, past the now empty spot at the trash can, past the pile of rocket powder on the floor, and right into the middle of it all. They're dancing. With everyone else, they're dancing. Yuuri doesn't know what he's doing, his two left feet stumbling across the polished floor. 

Mila tugs at his sweater, the fuzzy material tickling his nose when she yanks it over his head and helicopters it through the air. Yuuri tries to reach for it, but she flings it across the living room. 

"What the hell was that for?" He can barely hear himself over the beat of the bass. Mila's mouth explodes, her bouncy-ball laugh ricocheting off the walls. 

"I've wanted to do that all night," she yells. "That thing is an abomination." 

Yuuri tugs at his T-Shirt. He hates the tightness of it, the way there's no space left for him to hide. Mila slaps her hands against his cheeks. She shakes his head so hard he can't feel his face. 

"No one cares, Yuuri! Look around. No one cares. No one." Her mouth so close, a scrape of lipstick on her teeth. She's laughing. She's beautiful. Yuuri doesn't understand how someone could look at Mila fucking Babicheva and decide to steal the life right out of her. 

She deserves more than lovesick-making midnight rockets with ponytails. She deserves more than the world has to offer. 

"Come on." Mila takes Yuuri's hand and twirls him around until his head goes cloudy, dreamy, until he's laughing again, laughing the way he's always so afraid to. Unhinged. Screwed open. 

"Fuck midnight rockets!" he shouts before realizing Mila has no idea what he's talking about. But she scrunches her nose, shakes her head before she shouts back, "Fuck midnight rockets!" 

The warmth in his belly leaks down his toes, floats up his head, hits his eyes. Every person in the room is the prettiest thing he's ever seen. He's dancing. It's horrible. It's fantastic. Mila jumps along to the beat, her hair crackling, a bonfire. She's so close, so nice to look at. The way her cheeks swell when she smiles—really, really smiles—skin like a coral cloud, puffy-lipped, her tongue there, lashes coated and beating. She's an eruption, from bottom to top, and he likes the way she feels between his hands, her mighty warm force. 

Mila twirls him around, laughing when she flings him into a dip like he weighs nothing. His head whips back, a flash of moon caught in the corner of his eye. 

Eleven. 

Victor's standing with a group of guys by the staircase. He's staring right at him, face flushed the way it gets when he drinks, his eyebrows knitted. 

Yuuri swallows. He tumbles back, stomping over Mila's feet in the process. "Watch it." She's still laughing. 

"Shit, I—Sorry." Yuuri lost his legs, his arms. His head, too. God, fuck, he lost his head. He can't see. 

Yuuri presses his glasses up the bridge of his nose and worms his way out of Mila's grip. She turns to look at what caught his attention. Yuuri watches her soften, hears the knowing lilt in her voice when she says, "Oh." 

There's something endearing about her now, a careful smile fanning her face. It makes his chest fill up. 

His eyes snap to the staircase just in time to catch Victor slip out the room. 

Mila pokes his cheek. "Go." 

"What?" 

"I have eyes, Yuuri. So does everyone else in school. You stare at him like you either want to burst into tears or bang him like a screen door in a hurricane." 

His cheeks feel like heat bulbs. "Okay, wow, no—" 

"I mean, I don't blame you. Look at him. Who the hell looks like that? That's some deals with the devil shit." 

"It's just hair gel." The only explanation that doesn't make his head spiral. Wondering about Victor's face is like wondering how big the universe is or how many places you've visited for the last time. 

Mila's laugh bursts out of her mouth so suddenly Yuuri almost ducks out of the way. She shakes her head, grabbing Yuuri's head and shaking it too. "Just go, you idiot." 

"But, I—" 

"It's about time I looked for Phichit, anyways." She maneuvers him through the crowd and pulls him towards the edge of the living room. 

Yuuri feels the space between his eyebrows tense. He still wants to whip her over his shoulder and run until they hit the ocean. And then he wants to swim them through it until they hit land. And then more running. And more swimming. 

Might as well just blast off into space, he thinks. They could set up camp on whatever planet they like. 

"Oh my god, Yuuri, stop! I'll be fine." Her hands fly up to grab his cheeks. "You're worrying. Stop worrying. It makes your eyebrows do this weird thing..." He flinches when she digs her thumb into the space between his eyebrows, smoothing it out until his skin tingles. 

She's trying so hard not to look so sad. 

Yuuri swallows. "Are you sure...not tonight?" He thinks about every girl drama he's ever watched with Mari when it was her turn to hog the TV remote. Scenes filled with empty ice cream tubs, tears, tissues, heartbroken girls dancing around a tiny fire in the driveway, ripped polaroids of heartbreaker boys feeding the flames. 

They could use his driveway. They could burn pom-poms or shove needles through a cheer-skirt-wearing voodoo doll. 

Mila snorts like she can see right into his head. "I'm sure. Not tonight." 

Yuuri nods. He watches her hands fiddle with his belt loops. They're not these kinds of friends, friends who poke each other's cheeks and care too much and laugh too loud. But tonight they are. Tonight, Yuuri lets Mila fiddle with his belt loops, and Mila lets Yuuri say, "Text me when you find Phichit." 

"Yes." 

"Promise?" 

She bonks their heads together. "Yes, Mom." 

She's laughing again, all those bouncy balls hitting him smack in the face. Wiping his fringe out of his eyes, she grazes her fingers across his cheeks, his chin, the quirk of her knuckles tilting his head up until he's looking right into her. 

"Now, go." Her face in full bloom. "Go be crazy in love, Yuuri Katsuki." 

✕✕✕ 

Yuuri finds him by the pool lying on a deck chair, a pink bottle balanced on his stomach. 

It reminds him so much of her. She's right there, like a blueprint, Dina, lying on her front lawn in the dark, their hair the same shade, their faces carrying that same loneliness only the last person left on earth should bear. 

Yuuri's glad it's too cold to swim. The area isn't as crammed-full as the house, clots of kids smoking in deck chairs, touching each other in the gazebo, two girls kissing with their feet dipped into the jacuzzi. 

Yuuri lifts a hand to wipe the stickiness from his forehead. "Where's the lobster?" He hears himself say from far away, all cottony. His whole body feels numb, leftover beats still kicking in his legs. 

Victor shoots up, staring at him for a moment before shaking his fringe out of his face. He cocks his head towards the pool. "Deep end." 

Yuuri doesn't look. He crashes into the deck chair beside Victor's, still so wonderfully buzzed, swimming through the air, unsinkable. And Victor's right here, finally, a few inches away, and Yuuri wants to tackle him to the ground and never ever stop, ever. He wants to touch him and touch him, touch him all over. 

Yuuri's hands start to tingle. He wedges them beneath his thighs before they do anything stupid. 

Victor's still staring. It's off. There's a hardness there that makes Yuuri feel sick to his stomach. He wants to grab Victor's cheeks and tug him so close their noses bump. He wants that face to burst open. He wants the Victor from this morning, all sweet and sleepy-soft in mismatched socks, his finger on Yuuri's cheek, the way he looked at him like he was doing the rest in his head...touching him silly, kissing him stupid. 

Yuuri's chest starts to sear at the thought of it. He falls forward, just a little bit. But he can't stop. Victor's face coming closer and closer. Yuuri's eyes on his mouth. 

"Where's your sweater?" 

Yuuri stops, blinks. He's all scrambled up. He stares down at his naked arms, his blob of a stomach jutting out of his tight T-Shirt. 

Shrugging his arms around himself, Yuuri blurts, "Lost it." 

Victor hums at that. "Good. Ugliest sweater you own." Yuuri forgot how brutally honest he can be, especially when it comes to clothing. Yuuri still wonders about what happened to his polka-dotted pajama pants. They're probably in space somewhere, floating around with all the other ugly clothes Victor strapped to rockets and hurled into the sky (because there's no way in hell he'd think throwing them into a garbage can would suffice). 

Yuuri catches himself looking up, narrowing his eyes like he expects to see it bobbing through the exosphere, between space debris and satellites, his ugly polka-dot pants. 

There are spots in his eyes when he looks back at Victor. He blinks. He reaches out to peel the label off the champagne bottle. Victor lets him. He sticks it to Victor's forehead. Victor lets him do that too. Yuuri's fingers stray, brushing Victor's fringe behind his ear, a tremble there that makes him wonder if it's Victor or him or the two of them shaking together, wanting. 

Good, Yuuri thinks. Good. More of that. More and more and more and more and more of that. 

And when Yuuri pulls back to rub his arms warm, Victor peels the label off his head and shrugs out of his letterman jacket so fast his elbows get stuck in the sleeves. He comes closer, clumsily laying it over Yuuri's shoulders. 

Movie-like. That big screen chest-flutter, brain-burst moment. 

"Thanks." It's a croak. Yuuri clears his throat. "Thank you." It doesn't sound any better. 

He lets himself plunge into the sleeves. He wishes he were shameless enough to bury his face into it and breathe, wrap it around himself like a snail shell. 

He's thirteen again, sneaking into Koji's room to steal Victor's sweaters out of the laundry hamper, nosediving into the big, big softness of them, sinking, lying in bed drowning in the smell and the thought of him, his linger-heat, inside, outside, everywhere. He was everywhere. And when Yuuri woke up, he carried him under his skin. 

Yuuri crunches the hem of Victor's jacket, a puff of cologne tickling his nose. It's so good it makes his head fog up. He can taste it. 

Victor leans in closer, and before Yuuri can brace for it, he tugs at the collar, once, sharp enough to make them jerk into each other. Their foreheads touch. 

Cologne. Eyes. The sound of a swallow. 

The way Victor's staring at him. Possessive, flashes through his head and his stomach, that greedy place between his thighs. It's a rush all over. He's swerving on the highway. He's falling into a dried-out pool. 

Victor pulls back. Yuuri has trouble finding his body. He has even more trouble climbing back into it. 

"You were terrifying out there." Dazed. He can't feel his legs yet. "You were unbelievable." Yuuri stares down at the way the sleeves of Victor's jacket are so long they gobble his fingers whole. 

And he wants to say more. He wants to say he's never seen him play like that, that it was heart-wrenching, horrible, marvelous, menacing, that Yuuri would want Victor at his side if the end of everything knocked at their door, but Victor cuts him off after a swig of champagne, "She's pretty." His eyes strain against something in the sky. It's too cloudy to see a thing. 

Yuuri blinks. He still can't feel his legs. "What?" 

"Mila. I mean, I get it, she's...Well, she's...She makes you laugh. She makes you look so—" He whirls his hands through the air but gives up the longer Yuuri stares at him. He takes another swig. 

Oh. 

Yuuri wants to smack Victor's head so hard his brain blows out the other side. He watches the hardness return, taking over Victor's face until he's impenetrable. 

Yuuri can't stop thinking of Mila. Mila thinking of Sara. 

Sara thinking of someone else. 

He doesn't want Victor to ever see him kissing someone next to an ugly trash can sculpture. He doesn't want Victor to feel like he can't breathe even though he's breathing, can't feel the ground even though he's standing. He doesn't want Victor to stare at the filthy gossip scribbled across the bathroom stalls at school, wondering and worrying, filling in the blanks in his head. Letting it kill him a little every time. 

Yuuri used to arm himself with Sharpies before heading to the bathroom in the middle of math class, spending at least twenty minutes blacking out the bullshit sprawled over the urinals. Victor everywhere, on every tile, every mirror, slathered across the walls next to anatomically incorrect penises and random phone numbers. One of them was his actual number ('4 some faggot fucking call BIG DICK VIC - Corey can confirm '). Yuuri drew over it for so long he ran out of ink. 

He doesn't want Victor to know what it's like, to want something so badly and have someone else take it away when the wanting is at its worst. Because it was always Victor. Victor with those girls and those boys, setting the school hallways on fire, something new and nasty scribbled across the bathroom stalls every time he kissed them against his Mustang. 

Yuuri doesn't give himself time to think twice before he reaches out to wipe a stray hair out of Victor's face. He can feel the pulse of his eyelashes, the short, sharp bursts of his breath. 

"She's gay," he finally says, and he almost laughs at the way Victor's eyes blow up. "She's so gay. The gayest. The gayest of the gay. Like, beyond gay, Victor. So, so, super gay." Victor scrunches his eyebrows, his face regrouping before everything shatters apart. 

He's laughing. Finally, Victor's laughing, and it's the kind of laugh that makes his mouth look like a heart. And Yuuri knows it's the alcohol and the relief and the way the night is so inviting when you have someone to share it with, but he likes to think it's happening. Whatever it is. It's happening, and it's for them to have. 

Yuuri traces the shape of Victor's mouth in his head, over and over again, from corner to corner, the stretch of his lips, his teeth, tongue fluttering, the dive of his Cupid's bow. He can see it with his eyes closed. 

It's happening, he thinks. I'm happening. You're happening. We are.

Yuuri doesn't want this to stop, ever. Because he's stupid like that. He's hopeless and gullible and 

senseless like that. 

He doesn't realize he's smiling until Victor's chest stutters to a stop. He's so still. Yuuri feels his smile retreat, mouth dipping open. Just because. Just because Victor's eyes latch onto the bottom of his face, and Yuuri can't stand the thought of him ever looking away. He can't stop himself from imagining it: fingers pulling at his bottom lip, thumb against his teeth, the inside of his cheek, the taste of him blowing Yuuri's brain to bits. 

Victor swallows. "Fuck." Voice like the roof caving in. "Let's get out of here." 

✕✕✕ 

They're running and running, and Yuuri thinks if they run any more, they'll hit the next time zone, stumble straight into the sun. He's laughing. He doesn't remember when it started, somewhere between Victor grabbing his hand and tipping his head back to smile at the night. Yuuri can't catch his breath. He swallowed firecrackers. Full belly-ache hysteria. 

Victor can't run a straight line, and Yuuri can't really run, period. They're probably not even running. He imagines them dramatically half-jogging down the empty streets, zigzagging, floundering over the cracks in the pavement, like those times they pretended to be airplanes when their knees were covered in Looney Tunes band-aids, ramble-mouthed, victorious, their arms stretched out, ready to take off and never look back. 

In this moment and under this sky, he swears they could do anything in the world and get away with it. This is their happening. Their beginning. They're larger than life. 

Victor skips ahead, bottle in hand as he twirls across the white lines on the road, shooting Yuuri these grins over his shoulder like a bride about to throw the bouquet. 

And Yuuri can't stop himself. He's tipping over, slipping in, because Victor's right there, beaming away the dark, and all he can think is, holy shit, you. You. All of you. Every awful, perfect, stupid, fantastic inch of you. Youyouyouyou. It's you. Only you. Always you. 

Yuuri wants to pick up the pace, crash into him so hard their hearts knock against each other. 

Victor whirls down the empty streets, champagne gushing out of the bottle every time he stumbles over his bumbling feet. Laughing, mouth popped open with the night in his eyes, he's everything he wasn't back on that field. He's everything Yuuri hasn't seen in the longest time. Maybe for a dreadful moment, he thought he'd lost this Victor, this kid with the beat-up Chucks and a laugh that shakes the life right into you, this kid that stood in their doorway seven years ago, and Yuuri 

thought, this is it, the way people climb mountains and monuments just to reach the top and scrape the sky. 

Yuuri hasn't seen this much of Victor in years, unfurling and closing and twisting and turning. These past few weeks, he's been an outbreak. He's been everything. Or maybe he always is, and Yuuri just never bothered to pay enough attention when Victor let his guard down. 

He thought he knew him. Because he does, of course, he does. Yuuri knows his favorite band, color, brand of cologne, least favorite pattern (polka dots, anything polka-dotted—obliterate it), that he'd eat Lucky Charms marshmallows for the rest of his life if he'd get away with it, that he loves Jane Austen the way people love Jesus or pizza, that he hates the way his ears stand off the slightest bit enough to cry when Justin Ramirez called him Dumbo in seventh grade, that he secretly saves his favorite E.E. Cummings lines on his phone before dates ('And eyes big love-crumbs'), that he hates the dark when he's alone and sleeps with the door cracked open. 

Yuuri knows about the planet Victor made up when he was ten, crouching in the corner of Koji's closet after he had a fight so big with Dina he cried his eyeballs out of his head. It took Yuuri hours to find him, the two of them finally crouched under dangling sweaters and soccer jerseys, Victor's hair shooing away the dark. 

Nereus. That's what he named it, like the Titan god of the sea before Poseidon. Covered in ocean, bluer than Neptune, bigger than the sun. ('I'll build a floating house and swim every day and catch fish, and you can live there, too, Yuuri. Even though you don't like to swim. You can live there, too. And Koji. Nothing hurts there, I promise. Nothing hurts.') 

But then there's this Victor, the older one, with the weekend scruff on Sunday evenings and the lighter in his pocket, the one who has plans every Friday night, the one who's blank and blue and mean and sometimes everything but, sometimes this, beautifully hysteric, dancing and laughing with a bottle in his hands, the one who can undo you with a look, the one who drives off to places Yuuri sometimes dreams about: one town over, two towns over, the city, the coast, the ends of the earth. 

This Victor goes to places that are anywhere but here. And maybe that's the Victor who's slipping right through his fingers, the Victor he has yet to keep up with. Yuuri's always miles behind, stuck and never fast enough—maybe because he never bothers to try and run any faster. 

Sometimes he forgets Victor is going through the same things as he is, the same things as everyone else. They're all changing in a town where nothing ever does. He knows Victor feels it too, like an uproar, these things inside of him shifting too fast for him to remember what he felt like a day ago, a week, a year. 

He knows Victor wakes up in the morning and feels like he doesn't fit into his skin. 

Yuuri watches him stumble onto someone's front lawn, picking up a garden gnome and hurling it into a bush. "Be free, you tiny bearded man!" Throwing the bottle right after it. 

Yuuri picks up the pace. He's laughing again. He can't help it. Because he's got him. He's got Victor, all of him for a night, and there's so much of him to have he doesn't know where to put it all. He wonders if this is what it's supposed to feel like, like you're so full of someone you wish you could fold your arms in front of your chest to keep them from pouring out. 

Victor taps his feet across the pavement as he waits for Yuuri to catch up. He's smiling. He's giddy. They both are. And there's something in the way Victor looks at him that makes him feel like he forgot to put pants on this morning or there's toothpaste on his face or no hair on his head. 

Victor leans in close once they're stumbling down the street side by side, cupping his hand around his mouth like he's about to tell him a secret. 

"I like you in my jacket." His lips on the shell of Yuuri's ear, kissing the words into him. It hits Yuuri so hard he can't feel his feet. "You should keep it." Victor tugs at the collar, holding on. "I'll get a new one." 

"But your name's on the back." Yuuri's voice cracks. 

It's quiet for a while. Yuuri feels Victor tense against his side before he presses his mouth against his ear again. "Exactly." 

Victor reaches out to chuck his chin, and when he smiles, the whole world tips upside down. They're walking on the sky, the sleeping neighborhood dangling above their heads, chunks of yards and stringy telephone lines, the Milky Way paved across the roads, streetlights like suns lightyears away. 

They walk, and it's quiet, their shoulders rubbing every few steps. Yuuri feels a boldness in him. It's the drinking, the laughing, the way the night makes him see so little, tricking him into thinking the world is reduced to this winding street and the fog of his breath. Yuuri's hand bumps against Victor's, a tremor in him when he feels those fingers twist into his. 

He doesn't know how long they walk. He lost track of everything when Victor's mouth touched his ear. His feet sting in his sneakers, and it's cold enough to make his nose feel numb. 

Yuuri recognizes the splintered car park peeking out between a crowd of pine trees on the side of the road, the sparse glow of the streetlights, temperature dropping. He always wondered how this is the only place in town where you can't hear a thing, no birds, crickets, no branches cracking, the wind sneaking by so quietly you get spooked by its sudden touches. 

Yuuri snaps his head towards Victor, searching for something unnerved there, but he's so calm and so still, and Yuuri's too afraid to disrupt it. 

They cross the cracked gravel of the parking lot, jump over the hedges out back, the low dangling branches yanking at their hair once they duck down into the woods. The dark swallows them and swallows them until the ground goes rocky, the sound of water softening the night. 

Like a flooded moon crater, the lake opens up at their feet. 

"I thought this place freaked you out?" Yuuri doesn't know why he's whispering. It feels like he could shake something awake. He shuffles back a little, scared his feet might get too close to the water, scared something might just reach out and grab him and never let go. 

"It does," Victor says after a while, solemn in the way his eyes trail the black surface. 

He shuffles to the side, maneuvering his way across the slimy stones. Yuuri follows. He almost reaches out to take hold of Victor's sweater like a child afraid of losing their parent in a crowd. They reach the other side, water lapping at the now sandy shore. Victor makes his way towards a little dock jutting into the lake. 

And in the dark and in this quiet, Victor's walking on water, floating, the sky cracked open above so mightily it might just take him. 

There's a shaking in Yuuri, the kind that hurts the longer he watches. He stumbles down the shore towards the dock, across the wobbly wood creaking under his steps. Yuuri imagines it crashing beneath him. 

He has these dreams sometimes, nightmares of Victor and him falling into opposite directions, Yuuri crashing through the floor and Victor up above, hurtling into the sky so fast his hair looks like a comet tail. It's the distance and the time nibbling away at the two of them until they're all withered and weathered, skin falling off like clothing. They're nothing but thoughts floating in the dark, lifetimes apart. 

Sometimes Yuuri wakes up and he's a million years old. He doesn't remember what Victor sounds like, what he looks like, the color of his eyes, his smile when he means it. 

Moments like those scare him so much they strip him bare. 

"I swim here at night," Victor says once Yuuri is in hearing distance. "In summer." 

He looks at Victor's feet once he reaches his side, toes wiggling in those bruised Converse. They'd both fall in if someone so much as tapped them on the back. 

"In there?" Yuuri shivers at the thought. He thinks about Koji telling them that ghost story on Halloween, a boy walking through the murky depths, ball and chain, the Linhedge Lake prisoner. 

He wonders how sad you must be to jump in, sink off the face of the world and out of your life. 

"The first time I was terrified." Victor takes a ragged breath. "Wanted to prove something to myself, I guess. It was dumb...until it wasn't." He turns to look at Yuuri, and it only lasts a second, but Yuuri catches the blue flashing across his face. "When I'm in there, when I walk right in, I can't feel a thing. Like there's no harm on me." He's whispering now. "I don't know how to explain it. It's just—There’s no harm. And nothing hurts. And it's so cold it's warm. It's," he stops, shakes his head, "good. It's good. I don't know. You're closer to the sky here or maybe there's more of it. I don't know." 

Victor's not to the type to say 'I don't know', but hearing him say it makes him sound more fascinated by it than lost. 

"I wish I could feel like that for the rest of my life." 

Yuuri closes his eyes. There's something biblical about it, holy enough to set it into stained glass in a cathedral: Victor walking into the lake, all warm breath and motion, the water, the night curling around him to take him to a place where nothing hurts, ever, and no one hurts, either. 

Victor stays so quiet he's throbbing with it. Yuuri won't ask. He knows everyone is, and he wonders how much it must hurt for Victor to answer. He won't ask, but he'll wait, he'll listen, he'll be there for it all. 

When Victor grabs Yuuri's hand, Yuuri grips him so hard he wishes he could squeeze the ache right out of him. Whatever hurts so much, Yuuri will take it and hurl it into the depths for him. He'll stand between him and everything in the world. He'll keep him tucked away even though they won't have each other long enough for Yuuri to ever keep that promise. 

Victor plops down to let his legs curl over the docks, feet dangling above the water. Yuuri sits down facing him. He pulls his knees up to his chin, shameless enough to wedge the tips of his shoes under Victor's thigh. 

Everything feels too easy and too hard at the same time. Vision blurred around the edges, head lolling, he wants to cry and laugh and kiss and yell. He doesn't know where to start. All he knows is that Victor is the finish line. 

Yuuri catches himself staring at the swoop of Victor's hair, the loose bounce of those curls. They get like that when they're wet, when he sweats, when it rains, the tips curving like garden vines. 

Victor turns his head towards him, eyebrows scrunched in a silent question. Yuuri shifts, tightens his arms around his legs before he finally presses out, "Still not used to it like that." 

"Used to what?" 

"Your hair." 

Victor huffs a little laugh. It doesn't sound like one. "Me neither. It's a little easier, though. Less conditioner." 

Yuuri tries a smile. It doesn't feel like one. 

He thinks of how Victor could finish a whole bottle in two days or how he'd gallivant around the house with hair masks soaking under swim caps, the way they made him look like a Martian. 

"I kind of like it," Yuuri presses into the gap between his kneecaps. 

"Kind of?" Victor's eyebrows shoot up. He laughs. This time it doesn't just sound like one, it feels like one, too. "It looks fantastic. I expect you to be obsessed with it." He raises an eyebrow, expectantly nudging his head to the side. 

Yuuri rolls his eyes. "I am." 

"Yeah, you are." 

They laugh at that, the quiet mood from earlier so hard to shake off. Yuuri wiggles his toes against Victor's thigh, eyes trailing the tiny curl at the nape of his neck. He wants to touch it, wrap it around a finger and tug hard enough to make Victor's throat tip back, put his mouth there, take a bite. 

Yuuri's so lost in the thought of it, he doesn't notice the way Victor's fingers sneak up to fiddle with the hole in Yuuri's jeans stretched across his knee. Big enough to be noticeable, small enough to look like an accident. Yuuri's lost count of how many times he's torn his knees open after tripping on air. He's a hazard. 

Victor touches the star-shaped scar there, brushing his thumb over the soft ridges, tracing the zig-zags back and forth. Yuuri imagines his kneecap blooms under the touch, opening and opening, budding, blinking up at the moon. 

"Aaron Palmer," Victor says, the meanness on his face so similar to the one he wore on the soccer field. 

Aaron Palmer, notorious neighborhood sadist, big and bulky with a head like a pencil eraser. First kid on the block with a flip phone and first creep to climb a tree and snap pictures of Mrs. Crispino swaying around her pool in nothing but bikini bottoms. 

He'd stolen Victor's comb after school—the Comb—and thundered down the streets with Yuuri hot on his heels. He ran until his heart popped and his feet burned holes into the ground, until he reached the edge of town and watched Aaron throw the Comb into the sinkhole. Gaping like a throat near the woods, it was the result of a collapsed coal mine. Half the town used it as a landfill, clogged it with old dishwashers, mattresses, lawn chairs and so many shameful grown-up secrets you could pave a street with them. 

Yuuri remembers the anger in him, the way it made him grow a hundred, a million feet tall, and all he wanted was to ram his fist into Aaron's face so hard it reached the back of his head. And then he'd have to walk around looking like a bowl for the rest of his life. Or an ugly almost-bagel. 

Yuuri charged. He was fuming, roaring. He was a million feet tall, but Aaron was ten million feet taller, and his fist cracked through Yuuri's spine. He went tumbling down, hitting dishwashers, lawn chairs, his elbows and knees bursting open. Aaron's laughter above, piercing him, rapid-fire. But at the bottom, jutting out of a clumpy mattress, there it was. Victor's comb. Yuuri had it, and he held it so tight the sting of the bristles hurt more than the gashes soaking his clothes. 

The sky cracked open for the first time that summer, an ocean's worth of rain. It took him ages to crawl back out, everything too slippery for him to hold onto. But he had the Comb. He had it. He did. And he'd never let it go, ever. 

Drenched in mud and bruised to a pulp, Yuuri finally made it back home. Victor scrambled down the stairs, lanky limbs getting tangled in all that hair, and Yuuri smiled his biggest smile, thrusting the Comb into the air like he'd won a war. 

Victor held him for so long he thought they'd be stuck like that forever, a tangled clump till the end of their days. He imagined them going to the toilet like that, the convenience store. Could they walk all blobbed together? Would they have to roll around town? 

It took the whole world to pull them apart. Victor didn't want to leave, holding Yuuri's hand all the way to the hospital, distracting Yuuri with wild stories while the doctor stitched up his wounds, following Yuuri to the bathroom to watch him brush his teeth, to his bedroom to tuck him in before his mom even got the chance. He kept telling him he was so sorry even though he shouldn't have been. Yuuri fell asleep to the soft sounds of those unwanted apologies. 

"I wanted him to apologize. I don't know how often we ended up fighting each other after school." Victor snorts, shrugging. "Okay, he did all the fighting because I was...tiny, but I kept trying and trying, and then one day his elbow just—" He blows up his cheeks and makes a popping sound. Yuuri flinches at the memory, Koji slamming open his bedroom door one afternoon, wide-eyed, babbling something about Victor getting suspended for sending Aaron to the ER. 

"But he still wouldn't do it, so I ended up outside his bedroom window with my dad's tire wrench," Victor says, staring at his fingers flexing and unflexing in his lap. "I kept smashing it every time they got it replaced. For, like, five months. I was dedicated. Aaron never said a word. Never. I mean, I was eleven, but I was psychotic." He looks up. "I think I was a part of the reason why they moved." 

"Wait, that was you?" Yuuri stares at him for so long his eyes tear up. 

The whole town flared up with it, rumors about serial killers, escaped inmates, a haunting, some saying it was Aaron himself trying to hog more attention. Yuuri was convinced it was the universe, that for once in his life it was on his side, some cosmic force working its karma magic. 

"Just because of a comb?" He laughs. Victor doesn't. 

"No," he says. "Because of this." He presses his thumb against the scar on Yuuri's knee, hard enough to make him feel undone all over again. 

"You broke his arm." Yuuri's eyes trail the careful movements of Victor's thumb on his skin. "And then you broke his window. Windows. A lot of his windows." 

"Should've set him on fire." Victor smiles that big hearty smile of his, and it makes Yuuri question whether he said those words at all. 

He flexes his toes against Victor's thigh. "You're terrifying." And he's about to blurt out another laugh when Victor grabs his chin to keep him still. It's that look again, mean and unyielding, wild, the kind that makes your brain bleed. 

"Yuuri." Like a downbeat. "Anyone who tries to hurt you has to go through me." 

Yuuri swallows. He feels his breath clump in his chest when Victor's eyes soften. And just like that, it's seven AM in his kitchen again, Yuuri pressed against the counter, Victor leaning into him, finger on his cheek, breath all toothpaste minty. 

'Make a wish.' 

I don't have to, Yuuri thinks. This is more than enough. This is the most he's ever had in a night. 

They've been looking at each other for so long Yuuri forgot they've been looking at each other in the first place. He wonders if there can be something as strange as comfortable staring, something a little more daunting than comfortable silence but just as soothing. 

Yuuri likes it. He likes the way Victor doesn't look at him or through him—but right into him. Yuuri lets him take whatever he needs, scoop it straight out of his soul. 

"I like this..." Dazed as he tucks Victor's fringe behind his ear. He swears a face like that could unravel the world. 

"Me too." Victor reaches out to nudge Yuuri's glasses up his nose. His hand drifts, fingers trailing Yuuri's skull, the back of his ear, his thumb sliding against his jaw. "Me too." 

He leans in closer, so close Yuuri braces for it, for falling, for flatlining right here under this blown open sky. 

His lips heavy as they part. Heart like a thunderclap. 

But just when his eyes dip, Victor stutters a breath and rests his head on Yuuri's knees. Yuuri swallows. Hand shaking, he grabs the back of Victor's neck, feels his pulse against his fingertips. He doesn't know why he holds his breath when he buries his face into Victor's hair, diving in, sinking. His lungs clench, and he hears the blood burst through his head when he breathes in, the smell of shampoo softening his thoughts. 

Yuuri wants to hold him until it feels like they'd be stuck like this forever—until it would take the whole world to pull them apart. 

"This happened." Yuuri sounds like someone he never thought he could be, bold and unafraid, someone who laughs like he's screwed open, who dances horribly, fantastically, who feels and feels, and runs after boys he cares about in unreasonable amounts. 

"This happened." Victor smiles against his scar. 

Chapter Text

Curled into Victor's jacket, Yuuri traces patterns around the scar on his knee. He feels it still. 

The weight of Victor's head on his knees. The sky smashed open. All that heady heat of each other in the dark. 

Yuuri swears he'll never leave his bed. 

Victorvictorvictorvictorvictorvictor... 

So, so full of him. 

He's anywhere Yuuri looks, everywhere: a stray hair tie on his cluttered desk, a pen he lent, a washed-out Linhedge Leopard hoodie jutting out of his closet, a deflated soccer ball peeking out of a box full of things Yuuri hasn't had the nerve to throw away. (Wanting to show off when a bunch of girls fluttered by, Victor accidentally kicked the ball into Mrs. Abbott's backyard. She brought it out just to stab it with a hedge shear). 

There, the lonesome golden leg of one of Victor's Little League soccer trophies, chipped off and slipped into Yuuri's pocket with a small smile on the drive home, the way Victor pressed his mouth to Yuuri's ear, telling him they'd only won because Yuuri cheered the crap out of his Go Bullfrogs!!! banner. 

A washed-out polaroid of Victor's and Koji's nostrils taped to the bookshelf, Danny's Ice Cream Parlor beaming in the background, that day the boys stole the polaroid camera Mari had bought at the flea market. 

The indent in the armchair by the window, those lazy moments of Victor curled into it when he’s all bored and pouty-mouthed because Koji's tired of spoon-feeding him attention. 

And then, there, the crumpled origami crane on the window ledge, wings caked in dust. Victor's name at the bottom in his pretty loopy scrawl. 

Yuuri tried to teach him how to make them years ago, that summer Victor sprained his ankle on the field. The two of them sat in the backyard going through Yuuri's mom's craft supplies while Koji was left kicking a ball alone in the driveway. 

Mari was never good at listening to their mom, always puffing her chest like she had something to prove, and Koji, always fidgeting, didn't have the patience, so Yuuri was the only one left. Strolling along to the supermarket with her, eating half-frozen apple pies at the sketchy diner down the road, dozing on picnic blankets during the boys' soccer practice. 

And her, always so calm and earnest, teaching him origami and card tricks and cloud formations, showing him how to make things out of thin air, frogs out of napkins, towers out of toothpicks. 

Yuuri was just glad he could show Victor something Koji couldn't. Something that was just his. Something to keep him there. 

And he remembers the labored sounds Victor made trying to fold that smooth blue paper, fumbling and shaking his head, letting Yuuri show him again and again but never quite getting it right and being okay with it, laughing about it rather than getting frustrated. Yuuri didn't understand how someone who seemed to be able to do everything in the world—and do it right every time—didn’t mind getting something wrong at all. Maybe he was a little jealous of it, the way Victor took it all so easily. He shrugged it off and tried again and never minded, when all Yuuri did was try and mind and hate himself when things didn't work out because things never did. But Victor was so gentle and so bearing, and Yuuri wanted that too, that untroubledness. 

He fell a little in love with everything that day, Victor and the patience and the crooked paper crane sitting in his un-crooked palm, all that lazy summer heat coaxing them into the grass, bugs buzzing, the brush of the breeze. 

Yuuri misses that the most, a time where he never questioned a thing or thought a hundred steps ahead, never worried about anything changing because he blindly trusted nothing ever would. 

And maybe it's only lately that he understands what Mari was always talking about, back when he never thought he'd have a piece of this. Her, in her stitched bomber jackets, hair bleached to a crisp, telling him he'd understand one day like she was Master Hora from Momo. 

Yuuri unwraps himself out of Victor's jacket. Rubbing his hands across his face, he peeks up at David Bowie through his fingers, the Sex Pistols leaning against the New York Dolls, Kurt Cobain brooding in the back. These bundles of faces and splattered fonts, crinkled, fading. A duct-taped, donkey-eared Sistine Chapel ceiling. 

He remembers coming home from summer camp, his bedroom ceiling covered shut and Mari's uncovered. He didn't ask her how long it took to transfer every poster she owned to Yuuri's bedroom, balancing on a ladder and puzzling posters together like she was building him the sky. 

'I want you to remember I was here,' she said during her last summer at home, lying on Yuuri's carpet with him later that evening, pointing at faces and whispering band names like she was casting spells. It was weird doing it in his room instead of hers. Her carpet was fuzzier, the tinkers of her dream catchers, the smell of incense cloaking any leftover cigarette smoke. 

He misses her the most on days like these. He needs her to tell him it's all going to make sense. He needs her to lie with him on his bedroom floor, point at bands and describe their songs like she's describing a flavor, tell him about all the weird love in this weird world the way she used to. Yuuri never cared if what she thought she knew was true. He loved how she could turn anything into something he wanted to feel like a fist to the face. 

The way she'd whisper her musings, press them into his ear while they lied on her fuzzy carpet, during night walks to the playground, scribble them on napkins at family dinners in the city and sneak them into his palm on the way home. 

When he was a kid, he swore the sky whispered those things to her while she sat on the roof at night. 

He used to sneak into the backyard to take a peek. Up there, the tip of her cigarette like a signal flare for the stars. He imagined she was letting them know she was down here, still. Alive. Waiting. Listening, maybe. Sometimes she moved her mouth and all he heard was the night. 

She made being seventeen look so dreamy and so complicated, like life was happening harder than it ever did. All those big, brutal feelings. 

And he's here now, and it's untangling in a pace too fast for him to hold onto anything. Something's starting and something's ending, and it makes sense until it doesn't, and he's stuck somewhere in the middle thinking it won't ever stop feeling like this. All this opening and closing and making way and leaving behind. Yuuri wants to tell her he's doing it, he's in, and it's okay and sometimes not, sometimes lonely, sometimes brimming. All these things that are happening and happening too fast, people and revelations and letterman jackets with beautiful names on them. 

Yuuri rolls into his sheets. He holds his breath. 

'It finally happened,' she said once. Those freshly pierced ears. Her big soft heart. 'After seventeen years of staying dry, someone threw me overboard.' 

✕✕✕ 

"Hey." Yuuri leans into the open car window just in time to catch Victor flick the key into the ignition. He likes watching him do it, that quick choreography, fingers nimble as they dribble against the gear shift, smooth over the steering wheel. The way his watch makes his hand look bigger. Veins roped beneath that fading tan. 

Yuuri swallows. 

"Hi," Victor says. He smiles. 

"You smell nice." Because he does. Jesus Christ, he does. And because Yuuri was too busy staring at that ridiculous face to be bothered with the ridiculous things tumbling out of his mouth. 

Victor snorts at that. Edible-y. "You too." And then he snorts again, and it's sensational, and Yuuri feels so, so stupid, and he wonders if Victor feels so, so stupid too. Because this whole weekend has been so, so stupid. 

The way Yuuri's heart kicked every time he left his room, and then Victor, there, at the other end of the hallway, the two of them stumbling past each other, too busy smiling and staring and wondering about what they should say, if they should say anything at all. Victor fumbling to grab the sleeve of Yuuri's sweater before anyone saw, knotting their fingers into each other for a second, and then another, and then a second too long. Bumping his feet against Yuuri's under the table and accidentally kicking Makkachin. The way they volunteered to do the dishes four times in a row just to lean against each other a little longer than necessary, smiling a little too much, saying a little too little. 

All this big dumb headlessness. 

Victor reaches out to tug at the sleeve of Yuuri's jacket, fingers crawling closer. There. Right there. Hand sliding up Yuuri's arm, his shoulder, the quake of it when it ghosts across his cheek. Yuuri's breath stumbles when Victor's eyes dip. His mouth too. The smooth line of his teeth. Yuuri wonders what his tongue tastes like. 

And when he lets himself drop into Victor's palm so readily, he's sure he'd let him catch him from space. Because it feels like this is what they do. This is what they've always done. 

Yuuri's cheek in Victor's palm. Yuuri's heart on the floor. 

"Shotgun!" The front door opens, the wack of it followed by the sound of Koji tumbling down the porch. 

Yuuri rips himself away. He swears half his cheek is stuck to Victor's palm. He smacks a hand to his face, feels it prickle like soda fizz. 

Koji’s a blur as he blasts past, yanking Yuuri's hoodie into his face before ripping the door open. The car rocks when he leaps into the passenger seat. Yuuri's eyes drop to his feet. He forgot what they felt like, his legs too, his fingers. Snapping his head back up, he catches the weird smile on Victor’s face. 

It feels like they almost got caught with their hands down each other's pants. 

Yuuri's body roils, that itchy-achy heat sliding from his chest down to his stomach, ribboning there, knotted tight. 

He swallows, pushes his glasses up his nose to have something to do before he folds himself into the backseat. He crunches his backpack against his stomach. 

Backing up into the street, Koji zaps through radio stations, smacking the dashboard when the speakers hiss. "Thought you were gonna get this junk fixed." Victor doesn't answer. Which is crazy considering he doesn't let anyone call anything in his cherry-red baby 'junk'. Even Koji. Especially not Koji. 

And Koji knows. Having caught himself, he tugs his shoulders tight, stares at Victor with his lips wedged between his teeth, probably waiting to get kicked into the sun. But Victor's eyes are on Yuuri in the rearview mirror, half-lidded, cloudy like he's about to doze off behind the wheel. He would've missed two red lights if Koji hadn't pointed it out. "Didn't sleep, or what?" he mumbles, yanking the Little Tree off the rearview mirror and flicking it at Victor's head. 

But Victor doesn't react to that either, borderline comatose as he grabs the Little Tree and throws it into the cupholder. 

Koji looks like he just got away with murder. Twice. 

Safe for the song coming out of the speakers in crackly bursts, it's quiet for a while. Yuuri tries to keep his eyes strained on his sneakers until his brother finally manages to shake off the weirdness. Koji rambles about the next soccer season, shouting over the fizzy speakers instead of just turning them off. 

Yuuri forces himself to look out the window. He presses his head against the glass. The cool gifts him a short moment of relief. Breath fogging, he doesn't trust himself to take another look. But he imagines it, those eyes on him every once in a while, staring so hard Yuuri's head wells up. 

The screech of the brakes hurls him out of his thoughts. Yuuri lurches against the seat belt, backpack flying. 

They missed the school parking lot. 

"What the hell is up with you today?" Koji slaps his hands onto the dashboard when they a stop at a red light. 

Victor blinks. "Sorry." Yuuri's eyes hit his in the mirror. Something inside of him makes a spectacular thump. 

"Want me to drive?" Koji says. Yuuri can't hear a thing. He's planets away. "Earth to dude?" Koji snaps his fingers hard enough to jerk Victor out of it. 

Victor clears his throat. "Uh—Yeah, yeah, I'm good." Smoothing a hand through his hair, the other tap-tapping against the steering wheel. "I'm just—Yeah, I'm okay." Victor shakes his head. Yuuri smiles. 

Stupid. 

And when Victor finally pulls into the brimming parking lot, navigating through the maze of kids 

and cars, Yuuri catches it there, the tug of a smile on that mouth. 

So, so stupid. 

His ears feel clogged when Victor blurts out a laugh, too breathy to make a sound, and his hand—his big, big hand—fluttering aimlessly between gearshift and steering wheel, scratching the back of his head, the little curl of hair at the nape of his neck. Yuuri wants to pet it. Put it in his mouth. 

The stupidest. 

Koji slumps into his seat when they pull into a free spot. He turns off the radio. "Okay, what's up with you guys? Did you just wake up today and forget how to fucking drive?" Victor tries to duck away when Koji reaches out to whack the back of his head. 

"And you—" Twisting in his seat and staring at Yuuri like he's contemplating on whether they actually came out of the same human woman. "You just, you look crazy. I mean, like, meth-crazy. Are you taking meth? Is that your thing now? Meth? Where do you even get meth in this town, Yuuri?" 

Victor barks out another laugh. It splatters across the windshield. "Meth?" 

Yuuri bites into his cheek so hard his eyes sting. Koji opens his mouth like he's about to say 

something—but slams it shut when a bright pink skirt flutters past. 

Never has Yuuri been more thankful for his brother being a huge sad horndog. 

"Come on!" Koji slaps the dashboard again. "Is she trying to kill me?" 

June Kunda, all summer-lit in late September, pink-cottoned, turtle-necked, books against her chest like she sashayed out of an eighties soap opera. 

Koji bolts out of the car. 

Shaking his head, Yuuri rips his glasses from his face, wedging the bridge of his nose between his fingers. Victor slumps his forehead against the steering wheel. And then he's laughing. Laughing until he gulps for air so loud Yuuri barely catches Koji's awful attempts at getting laid. 

It ends the second it begins, June flipping her hair over her shoulder and stomping down the parking lot with her finger in the air. "You're brain-dead," she shouts. 

"You're beautiful." Koji tumbles after her but stops when a flock of cheerleaders flounces past, their hairspray like fog. 

Koji Katsuki, like some indecisive puppy, stumbling after anything pretty enough to make you look twice. It's either June or Chloe or Sana from Physics, Imani with the bangs, Riko the cheerleader, Jordan every Wednesdays and Thursdays when he works at the gas station and gets to gawk at her ass while she restocks candy bars. 

It's ridiculous that Yuuri knows all of their names. Koji won't ever shut up. He’s perpetually lovesick. 

"You think he's ever gonna catch a break?" Victor pushes his head off the steering wheel, eyes still crinkled. 

"I want him to die alone." 

"Yuuri..." He starts laughing again. Yuuri doesn't want him to stop, ever. 

"I'm kidding." 

"Sure." 

Yuuri shrugs at that, hand absentmindedly traveling down to his knee, the edges of his scar poking through his jeans. 

Victor clears his throat. He smiles, all-knowing and boyish, and Yuuri wants to kiss it off his mouth. Kiss him. Kiss him until his head combusts. Kiss every place he can reach, touch him, god, touch him everywhere, all the time. 

Sometimes Yuuri stares at him and thinks about every step he'd take, every detail, the nip of his teeth on his bottom lip, the way he'd cradle Victor's jaw in his hands, press his fingers into the soft tufts of hair that meet his neck. 

And then sometimes he imagines Victor leaning in for a kiss and Yuuri accidentally eating him. "You're horrible." That mouth moving. That mouth. 

Yuuri forgot what they were talking about. Clenching his hands into fists, he tries to concentrate, but his head keeps yanking him back to the fantasy of the two of them tasting each other while the school bell rings. 

Victor's teeth worry into his bottom lip, pressure pricking it pale, something Yuuri hasn't seen him do since he was twelve. All that careful nibbling. The way he used to bite his nails and scratch his neck, gap-toothed, stuttering, his long lanky limbs sprawled under tables. This dazedness about him like he didn't know where to put all of himself. 

"So..." Victor's hand snaps up to scratch his neck. Yuuri leans in a little closer. And then he does it again. Again. Those big blue eyes. "You're full of meth, huh?" 

"So full of meth." Yuuri laughs. "The meths. All of them." He likes the color on Victor's cheeks. His eyes won't stop flicking to Yuuri's mouth. He's got him for this. "And you forgot how to drive." 

Victor blinks, eyes crawling back up. "Got a lot on my mind," he whispers. He shifts closer. "This Friday..." The words on Yuuri's face. "I was wondering if you...if, like, maybe you'd...you know—" Stumbling over his words the way he never does. Yuuri perks up in his seat. Victor clears his throat, tries to continue but his voice sounds even raspier than before. He clears his throat again. He sounds the same. "If maybe," yesyesyes, "you'd want to—" 

The car shudders when something catapults across the hood. A flash of teeth, that big, ripped grin. 

Yuuri knows who it is before Victor jumps out of the car to shout, "The paint, Phichit!" Like some grouchy grandpa wanting the kids to get off his lawn. 

"Last time, I swear." Phichit lifts his hands, skipping towards the side of the car Yuuri's curled into. His Crocodile-Dentist smile blinks as he whips the door open. 

He’s going to kill him. Yuuri Katsuki is going to kill Phichit Chulanont in the Linhedge High parking lot. Twice. Ten times. He's going to kill him ten times. 

Victor waves his arms through the air. "That's what you always say." 

Shooting him another grin, Phichit grabs Yuuri’s shoulder and drags him out the car, down the sidewalk. "Wait, I—" Yuuri stumbles over his feet, arms reeling. 

But the second Victor steps onto school grounds, he’s something else, a monument, the world swooping in just to pivot around him. Letterman jackets sprout behind cars, Chris jogging towards him from across the parking lot, Leo skidding his bike to a stop, skull wedged between headphones the size of industrial earmuffs. 

Two seconds and Victor's already going under in a pack of people, his face flashing over JJ's shoulder. 

He smiles. Yuuri smiles back. And all he can think of is how much he hopes that Victor feels so, so stupid too. The stupidest. 

✕✕✕ 

Yuuri wastes his time in Spanish drawing swirls over the scar on his knee. Mrs. Alvarez has to ask him to go get the overhead projector three times because he was busy thinking about that summer Victor learned how to knot cherry stems in his mouth. How his cheeks puffed and squeezed, jaw rolling. Then, crinkle-eyed, the way he plucked the stems out of his mouth, ribboned in his palm. Yuuri stared at his lap during dinners because he didn't trust himself to keep his eyes off Victor's mouth. Puffed red like a Juju Coin. 

In between classes Phichit tries to fill him in on what happened at JJ's party. (Yuuri stopped listening when he said some kid high on molly jumped into the pool to get the lobster and tried to cook it in the fireplace.) They shuffle down the hallways, migrating from room to room, and Yuuri can't stop hoping Victor might just pop out behind a corner, hair beaming, face beaming too, and that mouth. That mouth. 

Yuuri walks into a door frame. 

"You okay?" Phichit nudges his head to the side, watching Yuuri try to rub away the bump on his forehead. "Hm?" 

"Pretty sure you've spaced out since chem. And that was, like, three hours ago." He perks an eyebrow. And then the other. And Yuuri catches himself again, peering over Phichit's shoulder, scanning the bursting hallway, thinking of Victor, out there, somewhere. 

"Okay. Hello?" Phichit waves a hand. 

"Sorry, I'm just—" Yuuri bores his fingers under his glasses, rubs his eyes until he feels dizzy. "I don't know." 

Something in Phichit's face twitches. "Did anything weird happen at the party?" 

Victor's forehead against Yuuri’s, the beat of his breath. The phantom weight of his jacket curled over his shoulders. 

Yuuri absentmindedly reaches up, the bite of his hand on the back of his neck. "Nothing,” he says. “Nothing happened.” His chest tightens. There used to be a time where they told each other everything. 

Phichit stays quiet for a moment, hands jerking like he’s about to grab Yuuri’s head and rattle the truth out of him. But he blinks, grabs his phone, shakes it off. 

"Did you hear?" Phichit mumbles. 

"Hear what?" Hair crackling brighter than her lipstick, Mila pops up behind Phichit's shoulder. She grins. 

Phichit’s eyes stay stuck to his phone. "Victor," he says. Because of course. 

Yuuri barely stops himself from groaning out loud. One party and the whole school blows up. Especially when it's about Victor. It's only ever about Victor. 

Grabbing Phichit's arm, Yuuri steers him towards their lockers. Mila shuffles after them, her eyelids twitching like crazy. "What about Victor?" 

Phichit almost looks excited, humming with it the way he does when the dirt he's got sparks anyone's genuine interest. He licks his lips. "He made out with some guy at the pool." 

Yuuri hears the ugly splat of his own stomach hitting the ground. 

"Someone saw them run away together or something. And he hasn't been with anyone in a while, which is weird. Am I the only one who thinks it's weird? It's weird. It's weird, right? Super weird?" Phichit whips his head towards Mila leaning against the lockers, her mouth scrunched so hard Yuuri's not sure if she's about to laugh hysterically or smash her face into the nearest wall. 

"So everyone's trying to figure out who it is," Phichit continues. "And they keep saying it's Lennard, but, like—uh, hello? He's the half-zip-pullover-wearing mayor of Hetero Town." 

Yuuri's eyes scan the halls, keeping a lookout for Lennard's unruly mop of hair, that obnoxious tilt to his nose, the kind only those kids have that get giddy before the teacher even finishes asking a question, those kids who raise their hands like popping corks. 

Yuuri hates him. And then he hates himself for hating him, because he's getting furious at someone who has nothing to do with this. He’s pretty sure Lennard would rather skin himself alive than step foot into JJ's house. 

Last year, the guy dubbed the 'All American House Party' the breeding ground for pompous hedonism in a presentation about ‘The Destructive Micro-Hierarchy of High School’. At a school assembly. In a half-zip pullover. 

And while he's definitely not wrong, Yuuri secretly agrees when Koji calls him the turd snob who pops everyone's fun-bubble. 

If anything, Yuuri should feel sorry for him. The second Victor looks at you too long, you're the talk of the world until someone spots him smiling at someone else. It's something Yuuri won’t ever get used to, people running their mouths about Victor making out with anyone at a party, going down on someone in the locker rooms, the back of a classroom, screwing the school nurse, driving away with ten guys stacked in the passenger side. 

They're all talking and talking and talking, lunging for him, brawling to have his name in their mouths just to have a piece of him at all. 

"Who do you think it was?" Phichit says, thumbs dribbling away on his phone, probably scanning through Snapchat stories sniffing for clues. Yuuri takes a breath. "I really don't care." 

"The guy's literally Koji's conjoined twin. How do you not know?" 

Heat bubbling up his throat. "I just don't, Phichit, okay?" It comes out a snap. Yuuri feels Mila's eyes sear into him. He looks at his feet. "Sick of talking about this stuff." 

Phichit sighs, turning towards Mila. "And you say I'm the only one whose Cheerios get pissed on." 

Yuuri rolls his eyes, backpack slipping down his shoulder as he slumps against the lockers. It's not long until Phichit starts talking again. Silence makes him anxious, and an anxious Phichit shoots words out of his mouth so fast you barely have time to process them before he zaps to the next topic. It's like trying to concentrate on an active pinball machine. 

Yuuri tries to listen for a moment, but his attention wavers when the back of the hallway shudders. Groups buzzing, kids scuttling against the lockers. 

Yuuri's palms go clammy. All weekend long he imagined what it would be like, the two of them catching sight of each other in the hallways, the cafeteria, the sports field, stopping just to stare, the sneaky flicker in the corner of their mouths. Imagining their hands on each other. 

That dizzy thrill of hiding in plain sight. 

Yuuri snaps his attention back to the twitch of Phichit's mouth. He catches it, Victor perking up in the corner of his eye. He knows he's staring, feels it. His stomach flips. And Phichit's lips keep smacking around words, the clack of his teeth. And Mila's laugh. Loud and sloshy. Everything sounds like Yuuri dunked his head into a fishbowl. 

Victor makes his way towards them. Yuuri's almost ashamed of how much he wants to run away but also run right into him. Being out here where everyone can see makes it almost unbearable. 

Yuuri’s shaky, steadfast, hot and cold. Like when Mrs. Alvarez whips out a surprise vocab test that counts more than it should. Like in third grade when he played one of the mice in their middle school adaption of Cinderella and threw up on stage. 

But the blur of Victor in his periphery screeches to a halt when someone swoops him aside. The kids in the hallway crane their necks to take a peek, hushing things, always hushing things. Yuuri angles his head to steal a glance. 

The school psychologist, Linda, looms over him, all willowy, her long windblown limbs. Something in Victor changes. His shoulders click. He straightens his back. That distant stare. 

She leans in closer, mouth fluttering. There's something insistent in the way her arms gust around her. Nudging her to the side, she gestures for him to follow, her long skirt brushing down the linoleum floor. Victor doesn't move. He turns his head. And then, there, for the beat of a moment 

Yuuri's got him, and they're looking at each other, and Yuuri wants a wave, a smile, an anything from Victor, anything at all. 

But it's gone. All that dumbness, that I-might-just-let-myself clumsiness from this morning replaced with something that makes Yuuri feel like he just got shuttled back down to earth. 

Victor looks at him like that and he's unknowable. 

✕✕✕ 

Victor's painfully quiet during dinner, head dangling over his bowl of katsudon like Koji and him didn't call Radio Go last year just to scream how much they loved it on the air. Because they're idiots. And also because Yuuri's mom makes the best katsudon in the world, and it deserves to be idiotically adored. 

But Victor barely touches it. Yuuri's mom keeps flashing him worried looks, and he's pretty sure the only reason she slaved in the kitchen making everyone's favorite idiotically adored meal was because Victor and Koji stumbled into the house with rainclouds rumbling over their heads. 

They haven't said a single word to each other for hours. 

Victor plowed the field apart today. He blew up, atomic, never letting the ball stray from his feet, leaving Koji on the sidelines shouting his throat raw. Coach Tammy ended up hurling her whistle into the grass, marching off the field and not coming back out for twenty minutes straight. And because Douglas is a grade-A asshole, he said he was glad he was in charge of a bunch of dipshits and not dipshits with egos—before running after Tammy. Everyone knows they have this weird thing going on where they yell at each other from across the field but then do it in the sports utility closet. 

It hasn't really been the greatest day. Which is insane considering it started out so great Yuuri's been wondering if he made it all up, the whole hazy warm weekend, the big looks and the small smiles, the lingering prickle-fizz of Victor's hand on Yuuri's face, his breath hot when he said, 'This Friday...' 

This Friday...let's make out in the back of my car until we forget our names. This Friday...I want to know what your clothes look like on my bedroom floor. This Friday...let's run away and get married on the moon. 

"Wow." Yuuri's dad rips through the silence, slumping in his chair and letting his chopsticks clatter to the table. "Everyone's so talkative today." 

Koji glares at him before stuffing so much rice into his mouth Yuuri thinks it's a miracle it's not oozing out of his nostrils. 

Shifting in his seat, Yuuri taps his feet across the floor. Victor's head jerks up when their toes touch. Yuuri gives him a little smile, feels the tingles shoot up his legs when he presses his foot against Victor's ankle. And Victor almost smiles. And he actually eats. And he looks okay for a moment. 

It's quiet for the rest of the dinner, safe from his mom and dad trying to lighten up the mood by trying to balance peas on Makkachin's nose. 

Yuuri volunteers to do the dishes. Victor doesn't. Yuuri tries to convince himself he's okay with that, taking his time standing at the sink, scrubbing one plate at a time in hopes of Victor coming downstairs to talk. 

Of all the things he wishes they could do more of—kissing and touching and touching and kissing—talking might be at the top of the list. Really talking. The way they used to, back when they never thought of keeping a secret because the universe was so crazy full of things that were too spectacular, too terrifying not to share. Because it felt like they were unearthing parts of the planet one day at a time, helping each other puzzle the pieces together, making sense of it all and realizing it was only half as terrifying when you had someone to share the answers with. 

Yuuri dangles his head over the sink. Watching his reflection swim across the bubbles of grease, he wonders when everyone decided they had to face the world on their own. 

✕✕✕ 

The front door shudders. Yuuri pushes himself away from his desk, chair reeling when the wheels get caught in the carpet. He stumbles to his feet. 

Peeking through the curtains, he catches a bright blob flash across the road. Victor's hair like a glowworm in the dark as he slinks towards his house, cuts through his front lawn and scales the fence to get into the backyard. 

A light in the house turns on, warm rays leaking out of the second-story window. 

Standing there, holding his breath, waiting, Yuuri remembers a time where he wasn't this concerned, where he'd lean against his window at night watching things move behind those curtains like a shadow play. The marvel of it all. That yearning sitting in his chest while he wondered about all the magic things that happened behind closed doors. Dina and Mr. Nikiforov slow-dancing in the kitchen, Victor sitting on the counter memorizing the steps. Mr. Nikiforov telling big stories during dinner the way he did at barbecues, weaving tales like he'd seen it all, like he'd lived a trillion years, and Dina, glowing, her eyes fine-china blue. How much she loved him. And then Victor, the way he'd open his window at night and climb onto the ledge. The way he'd float off into the sky. 

Everything about that house—from the clipped lawn to the white curtains, the beam of the paint, the way the satellite on the roof curls open like a magnolia—used to be a dream. 

Yuuri looks at it now and there's this Nikiforov-house-shaped trench in his head, all the wonders gouged out. He looks at it now and he feels nothing but worry. 

Yuuri holds his breath. He waits. The light in the window turns off. His eyes dart through the dark, searching, only allowing himself to breathe again when he spots a shadow glide over the fence and across the road. 

He hears the click of the front door, the shuffle of Victor’s feet on the creaky floorboards, another door opening, closing. 

Yuuri chews on his cheek, wondering if he should wait another moment, but he's downstairs before he finishes that thought, following the muffled sounds spilling out of the laundry room. He cracks the door open. 

Hunched over a pile of clothing, Victor sorts through it like he's gutting an animal. "Victor?" 

"What." A bite. Yuuri takes a step back. Victor wipes a hand across his face. His shoulders coil as he turns his head, face softening when he spots Yuuri leaning against the door frame. "Sorry. I didn’t—" He shakes his head. "Sorry." He does it again. "Hi." 

Yuuri bites into his cheek, buries his teeth into the indent they made before. He stumbles into the cramped room and leans against the door until it shuts. 

"Hi," Yuuri says. He waits, expecting Victor to say something but he doesn't. Instead, he steers his attention back to his pile of laundry. 

Yuuri's mom loves to tell them they should follow Victor's example. He cooks (kind of), he cleans after himself (like crazy), he always takes out the trash and carries the groceries (without complaining), and he's a fully functioning almost-man while Yuuri's left staring at a washing machine like he's faced with a Rubik's Cube. 

Yuuri tiptoes across scattered socks and T-shirts. Leaning against the dryer, it takes him two tries to push himself onto the worktop. He drums his feet against the hatch. 

One of the fluorescent tubes hisses above his head, a lonely fly skipping along the glass. Yuuri closes his eyes for a second. And then another. He opens them, colors throbbing. "You went back to your house," he says. 

Victor stiffens. He lifts a stained soccer jersey and flings it onto a second pile. "I check on her every night." 

"Why?" It's more of a blurt than an actual question, and Yuuri wishes he could attach strings to the things he says just to yank them back when he regrets letting them out at all. 

Victor lifts his head. His face shifts so violently Yuuri hears the crunch. "She's my mother." 

"Is she okay?" 

Victor doesn't answer. He nudges his head towards a spray bottle next to Yuuri, neon orange, Oxi Clean. Yuuri throws it towards him, watches as Victor sits down and sprays that stuff onto the stains littered across his jersey. The smell of chemicals thickens the air. 

"Is Linda helping?" Yuuri says, scrunching his nose. The smell stings. 

"What?" Victor looks up. "I saw her talk to you in the hallway today, and I just thought that maybe—" 

"It's just about school stuff." 

Yuuri shifts. "School...stuff?" 

"Yes, Yuuri. School stuff." Like he's talking to a toddler. 

Yuuri knows that tone. He knows this Victor. And he knows he always leaves before he can figure this Victor out. 

This is the moment where he thinks of an excuse, unfinished homework, an upcoming test, and he blurts out one too many apologies before he stumbles out of the room. Because that's the one thing he's exceptional at. 

Yuuri stops kicking the hatch. He clenches his eyes closed, hears the fly zap against the tube above his head, the hum of it like static. "You don't have to to keep doing this." He opens his eyes to Victor fisting the jersey in his lap. 

"What am I doing?" Victory says 

"I don't know. That's the thing, I don't know. But whatever this is, you don't have to keep doing it alone." 

"It doesn't work like that." 

"Then tell me how it works. Tell me. We never talk about these things." Yuuri swallows. "I want to talk about these things." His voice rings in his ears. "I want to be there. I just...I want to help." 

He finches when Victor slams the spray bottle onto the ground before he wipes a hand across his face so hard his skin goes blotchy. 

Just a few moments ago Yuuri thought about how Victor knows how to use washing machines, how to take out the trash without saying he already did it yesterday. Victor, who marches down school hallways like he's ready to take on the world, something grave, untouchable in the tilt of his chin. But Yuuri looks at him now, like this, here, and he's a child hunched over his dirty laundry. A clip in his hair to keep his fringe out of his eyes, his different colored socks, the bored-in-class scribbles on his left wrist. He's just a kid. 

Yuuri grips into the edge of the worktop, room spinning when he looks down at his feet, the weirdness of them like they're miles below his body. He's dizzy. He closes his eyes. It makes it worse. The buzz of that stupid fly above his head. Loud. So loud Yuuri considers going after it with that bottle of Oxi Clean. He blinks. 

Victor's knees crack when he stands up, wavering there like he doesn't know if he wants to leave or stay. Yuuri fumbles to get down from the dryer, shirt caught on the edge. The cool air on his skin. Victor shifts, his hair slipping out from under the clip and falling into his face, hiding the way it stirs and grinds. Yuuri wants to smooth him out with his hands, right everything with a few tugs, make it stop to make him okay. 

He takes a breath, and Victor shuffles towards him, grabbing him by the jaw to pull him close. Their foreheads touch. Victor's face a blur. Pulling him closer, Yuuri slides his hands up Victor's back, feels the tides of his breath shake through him, shake him apart. "You can talk to me," he presses into the side of Victor's neck. The throb of his pulse against his mouth. 

Victor like this, as close as he was that night in his car, curled over Yuuri in the backseats. He says, "Talk to me." 

Victor says nothing. 

✕✕✕ 

Herb pouches, lanterns, the ceiling draped in scarves like the insides of parasols. Yuuri likes Mila's place, the mysticalness of it like a fortune teller's tent. 

He doesn't really know what Mila's mom does for a living. Sometimes Mila will talk about Helen teaching Pilates classes in the pretty houses down JJ's road or going on trips to New Mexico for herbology courses (like that's a thing people do). Last year, Yuuri's parents spotted her at the Winter Showcase. They came home gushing about someone who looked like a one-woman gypsy trailer, all scarves and jangly hoops, the smell of a whole spice cabinet powdering every hallway she whisked through. 

And while Phichit's one of her biggest fans, Guang-Hong's not really sure how he feels about her, mostly because his mom doesn't really get along with Helen's 'ways'. He used to tell Yuuri stories about clashes in the grocery isles and unwanted debates during parent-teacher conferences, Meili and Helen yelling at each other about peace and the world. 

Yuuri only witnessed it once when Meili picked them up from school, catching fire-ball-headed Helen burst out of the principle's office, still shouting something about pottery classes and the spiritual advantages of having gurus instead of school psychologists. Meili said Linhedge High wasn't going to turn into some Yoga Ashram cult because a hippie lady high on patchouli saw it in her mood ring. And then Helen said that wasn't how mood rings worked and proceeded to go through her extensive collection of blessed gems, and then Meili told Helen to shove her blessed gems up her blessed asshole. 

But Yuuri likes Helen. She's just on the right side of crazy, and in a place like Linhedge where people still buy TV dinners and think Bingo's a party, she's a breath of fresh hippie lady air. 

Mila tugs him up the stairs, probably trying to hide him in her room before her mom catches a whiff of their energy. 

"Mila, is that you?" Her muffled voice coming from the kitchen. 

"Hey, Helen," Yuuri shouts, almost tumbling down the stairs when Mila's eyebrows hold him at gunpoint. 

"Yuuri!" He likes the way Helen says his name, stringing it out like a Laffy Taffy bar. 

Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuri. 

Mila yanks him up the rest of the stairs. "Talk to you later, Helen!" he manages to press out, smiling when he hears her laugh bounce down the herb pouch infested hallway. 

"I still think it's weird you don't let me say hi to your mom," Yuuri mumbles once Mila kicks him into her room. 

"You said hi." She peels her jacket off, flinging it onto a chair cracking under the weight of what looks like a year's worth of clothing. "I had to shout it at her," Yuuri says. "Through the house. It's a big house." 

Rolling her eyes, Mila flops onto her bed. "She's doing this weird TCM pulse checking thing lately. To check, like, if your body's okay or something. She literally grabbed some cashier's hand yesterday and checked his pulse for three minutes straight. Didn't even ask. And he let her because—you know how some kids get that insane look when they go through their Halloween candy? It was kind of like that. Like, she was looking at his hand like that. I don't know. She's crazy." 

"Cool-crazy," Yuuri says, grabbing his wrist. He's going to ask Helen to check his pulse later. 

Mila tugs a long pillow against her stomach, neon pink like a glow stick. 

It's funny how hard she tries to be the exact opposite of her mother but lives in a room that looks just like her, all bead curtains and tie-dye tapestry. Maybe if Linhedge stopped calling Helen the town loony, Mila would stop dressing like she popped out of some military academy. 

Yuuri stares at the spill of Mila's hair drip down the corner of her mattress. 

For someone who acts like she doesn't care at all, she cares an awful lot. 

"Let's get high." Mila rolls onto her back. 

Yuuri laughs. "I thought we were here to finish our bio project." 

"I forgot about the stick up your rectum." 

"It's Wednesday," he mumbles. 

She lets her head fall from the edge of her bed. Her hair tickles the floor. "Exactly," she says, swaying her head from side to side, biting her lip, grinning. "What happened to party monster Yuuri Katsuki?" 

Yuuri groans. "He was conceived in Jean-Jacques Leroy's living room. And he died in Jean-Jacques Leroy's living room. And we do not talk about him." 

"He was crazy beautiful." 

Yuuri tries to hold her stare. He blinks. She doesn't. Blowing up his cheeks, he presses out a bubble of breath. "Okay, fine, but we’re finishing bio." Mila rolls her eyes into the back of her head. 

It's not really something they do. The only times Mila stole some of her mom's medicinal pot and mushed it into brownie batter was when Phichit's parents got a divorce. And then when he caught them doing it in the garage on the hood of their Ford Transit. And then when Guang-Hong's dog died (Cookie, the human-adult-sized Great Dane). 

They all kind of just stared at the ceiling, haze-headed, talking past each other. Guang-Hong cried both times, sitting in the bathtub because he was afraid of flooding Mila's bedroom, and then the town, and then earth. 

Mila hasn't really gotten better at baking this stuff. Yuuri hasn't really gotten better at enjoying it. But it gets them high, and quality is a faraway concept when you're seventeen and your mom buys your underwear and all wine tastes the same. 

"I can't believe Lennard's getting credit for smooching your husband," Mila says, still hunched over her open book. 

It didn’t take long for them to crawl from her desk to her bed, flipping through notes, chewing, waiting. Mila looks up from where she was in the process of giving an amoeba a mustache. 

"He's not my husband," Yuuri mumbles, reaching over and scribbling two eyes over the squiggly folds. Mila adds a nose. "So did you?" 

"Did I what?" 

She cocks a brow. "Smooch him?" 

"Stop calling it that." 

"So you did." 

Yuuri pushes his glasses into his hair and wipes a hand across his face. "I didn't," he muffles into his palm. Mila flings a pen at his face. "You've known this guy for what? Four years?" 

"Seven," he says, rubbing his cheek. 

Mila blinks. "Seven years?" She sits up. "What are you doing." 

"I don't know." Yuuri rolls into the sheets, pulling them with him until he's wrapped tight. He hears the clatters of their pens hit the floor, the rustle of Mila crawling closer. "It's just..." 

He thinks of yesterday, the hum of the laundry room, Victor's chest so big Yuuri was sure it could cradle a whole continent. How much Yuuri wanted Victor to say. How little he did. How little he did at all, and how much Yuuri tried to be okay with that. 

He takes a breath. "It's..." 

"If you say complicated, I'll tell my mom to put a hex on you." 

"She can do that?" 

"Yeah. Like, real bad ones," Mila whispers. "Gastric pain. Explosive diarrhea for days." Yuuri peeks out from under the sheets. "That just sounds like food poisoning." 

"Exactly. It's the perfect cover-up." 

He giggles, lets it rattle him, through and through. He doesn't stop. And when Mila starts laughing, it just gets worse. They let it kick in for a while, savoring that woozy-good feeling of their skullcaps popped open, brains floating up to bob against the ceiling. 

"Lennard," Yuuri finally says. The weird taste it leaves in his mouth. "How do people even come up with this kind of stuff?" 

"At least you know it didn't happen." She sounds different. Quieter. Yuuri yanks the sheets from his face, watching Mila stretch out across the bed. "Found out his name today." She pushes away the last few pens and notebooks, pillows tumbling to the floor. "Duncan. Her and Duncan... Duncan..." His name pivots through the room. Yuuri watches it get stuck in the fairy lights, the bead curtains, letters shattering apart like dandelion seeds. "Duncan Smith." 

"He sounds like a stock photo," Yuuri mumbles. 

"There she goes dating the straightest, whitest boy in existence. I mean, the godfather of all of the homie-bros in his fucking checkered Vans and snapbacks and his salmon-colored….pantaloons." 

Yuuri feels his laugh leave his mouth before he hears it. He's ten steps behind himself. "Panta-fucking-loons," Mila says. She smiles, wobbly, like her lips are swimming on her face. 

Yuuri shifts. "That's a different white guy, by the way." 

"What?" 

"The pantaloons." 

"Yuuri." Mila reaches out to grab his glasses and mushes them onto her face. He doesn't have the heart to tell her she's wearing them upside down. 

Pan-ta-loons. Pan-ta-fuck-ing-loons. 

"Bet he doesn't know what a clitoris is." Mila kicks her bio book closed, squashing the mustachioed amoeba between the pages and pushing it off the edge of her mattress. "Bet he says b-ball," Yuuri mumbles, staring at the pictures littering the walls, sketches and family photos, collages made out of ripped magazine pages where bouquets sprout out of thighs and faces are replaced with tongues and disco balls. 

Yuuri stares at a particularly cool one, Kate Moss with the cosmos spilling out of her snipped stomach, the moon between her legs. 

And for a moment he swears he sees her, Midnight-Rocket Sara, hurtling out of Kate Moss' gut and shooting through the walls, the pictures, the sketches, her ponytail slicing the paper, fire blowing out of her bleached rocket sneakers. The sting of fuel in the air. 

He still sees her standing by that stupid trash can sculpture, lifting stupid Duncan Smith into space. 

"Bet he bleeds protein shake," Yuuri continues. They've been going on for hours or a minute. He can't feel his toes. "Heard he was conceived at a kickback." 

Mila laughs at that. Just once. And then it's quiet. And Yuuri's head spins every time he closes his eyes, colors, shapes splashing into and out of each other, this quick whorl of wildness. 

"I hate him," Mila says, and her voice so small, a handbell in a throat. "I hate him. I just—I hate him." Again and again. Ring, ring, ring. "And her too." Barely a breath. Yuuri wonders if she meant to say that out loud at all. 

He rolls towards her, feels the mattress rock when their feet touch. He doesn't know when he'll finally stop trying to tell himself that they're not these kinds of friends. 

Wiping a cluster of curls out of Mila's eyes, he remembers seeing her after that summer, barefaced, hair cut short, no more cheerleader ponytail whipping the kids against their lockers when she dashed down the hallways. How weirdly ordinary she looked without being flocked by a bunch of girls with bleached sneakers and bruised knees, their forever-wind-billowing cheer skirts, that glitter soldier tribe. 

Back then he thought girls like Mila don't let anything get close enough to leave a stain, girls like Mila never ask for forgiveness. 

Except maybe they do more than anyone else. 

"How are you supposed to just un-know someone?" she says. 

Yuuri clenches his eyes closed, feels the world bob back and forth, and his hands look for her, find her, press against her spine. He wishes he could unzip her, reach in to dig out the pieces that keep taking too much. 

"How are you supposed to treat someone who had you like someone who never had you at all?" Her hair tumbles into her face again. Yuuri lets it be. "Someone you had too. How are you supposed to just...un-have?" 

Victor's face wrecks through his thoughts like an arrowhead. 

Un-know the only person worth knowing. Un-have the only person worth having. 

Mila wipes her hair out of her face, cheeks flushed, eyes hooded and bloodshot. Yuuri swears he can hear her smile, the flex of every fiber, the squeak of teeth against flesh. "Fuck, sometimes I'm relieved, and I'm okay. I mean, I think I'm okay. And then sometimes I wish she'd get hit by a bus. And then sometimes, sometimes..." She laughs. She stops. She laughs again, full-fledged, her rubber-ball guffaw hopping through the room. Yuuri swears he could reach out and touch it if he wanted to, hold it in his hands, stuff it into his mouth like pop rocks. 

"Sometimes," she heaves, clenching her eyes closed. "Sometimes I wish I could just slam her against her locker and Clark-Gable the shit out of her, you know? I wish I could tell her she needs to be kissed and often. Because she does, Yuuri. She does." She shakes her head. "Oh my god, she does." 

Yuuri watches that smile fade, face falling one inch at a time. 

"I don't know if I'll ever stop caring," she says. "And I'm still not sure if that's a bad thing or a good thing or anything at all. But I just—Like, I don't think we're just supposed to forget the people who gave us so much to remember. Right? That's the way it has to go." She makes it sound like a question. "That's the way I want it to go." 

Yuuri thinks he might have blinked too long, missed a bundle of moments, because now they're awkwardly, awfully squashed together, high and weird, rocking until it feels like it's not them, but the house, the whole town swaying like a seesaw. 

"That's the way I want it to go," she breathes into his face. She's so close she's just a feeling. "That's the way I want it to go," 

✕✕✕

The creak of the door jerks Yuuri out of his sleep. Even with the lights out, he knows who it is. That hair glows in the dark. 

Sitting up, Yuuri reaches for the nightstand. He turns on the lamp. He blinks. 

Victor shuts the door and shuffles towards him until his knees bump against the bed frame. How the light moves across his face, those dark moats wallowing under his eyes, deep enough for Yuuri to wonder if he could dip his fingers in. 

They stare at each other for a moment. It’s quiet. It’s not. It’s still there, this unfinishedness looming over them, the leftovers of the laundry room like background noise. It feels okay, and then it doesn't. And then sometimes Yuuri catches the way Victor's head drops when he thinks no one's paying attention. 

Yuuri shifts. He finally opens his mouth, but Victor cuts him off. "Can I sleep here tonight?" 

Yuuri tries to swallow away the chunk clumping up his throat. He stares at Victor's darkened face, the weird droop to him, all this smallness that only makes Yuuri worry too much. 

Managing a nod, he pulls back the blankets. He hates how his mind hurls him back to a time where all he ever fantasized about was what the soft lurch of the mattress would feel like, Victor's weight shifting, the tilt of the bed. 

Yuuri tries to steady his breathing as he scoots against the wall, wanting to create as much space between them as he can. Which is borderline impossible when he's had this bed since middle school. It's a glorified baby crib. 

Victor rolls onto the bed, mattress floundering while he squirms around. Lifting the blanket, he tries to stuff it under and around their feet until it feels like they're wedged in a Hot Pocket. "You used to be afraid of something grabbing you," Victor says, and it takes Yuuri an embarrassingly long time to put those words together. 

He remembers the nights they camped out in the backyard, Koji and Victor and him squashed into that tiny tent his mom and dad used when they camped in Glacier Bay, back when kids hadn't even been on their mind, back when his big-city-boy dad wanted to show the love of his life he knew how to survive in the wild. ('Your father was helpless...Didn't know how to start a fire. Or read a map. Didn't even know how to set up a tent. And then two days in, he goes out and eats ivy berries. We end up in the ER, and he looks like a balloon, and I'm crying, and he proposes right then and there.') 

Yuuri remembers the way the sleeping bag tucked him so tight he was sure nothing could grab him, ever. Especially after Koji told him stories about some boogey monster that collects people's toes while they sleep and carries them around in a trunk. Yuuri ended up jammed in a sleeping bag for the rest of the year, haunted by thoughts of big toes and small toes rotting away in some demon's bottomless Mary Poppins sack. 

Yuuri's eyebrows scrunch when he says, "That was back then." 

The glint of a grin on Victor's lips. "Right," he says, lifting a brow and yanking the blanket back so hard a whip of cold hits their feet. Yuuri blurts out a laugh as he jerks his knees up to his chest. That smile on Victor's face. Yuuri wishes he could reach out and smooth his fingers across his teeth, splay his hands over his mouth, feel every throb, every jitter. 

Giving in, Victor tugs the blanket back down. Their knees bump. He’s close enough for Yuuri to make out the lines of his face, the soft dips, all its hollows and curves, the way every shape slots into another so carefully. The feebleness of him up close. Yuuri's afraid of breathing too hard, afraid he might breathe everything apart. Mold him into different shapes by accident. 

Victor reaches out. His fingers trail down the edge of Yuuri's face, hand splayed across his cheek, the soft pad of his thumb roaming. Breath going heavy, heady. Yuuri closes his eyes when Victor leans in, feels himself fall open when that mouth touches his forehead. 

Victor's lips on Yuuri's ski: a coin in a fountain, an eyelash on a fingertip. 

Make a wish. 

"Yuuri," he says and says again. The stutter of his chest as he breathes in, the way his hand anchors the back of Yuuri's head. 

Just a little longer, he thinks. Just a little. Please, just a little. Please, please, please. 

A quiet, frantic takeover. Victor leaning closer, tightening and tightening his grip. Yuuri rocks through the whiplash as every feeling of this hurls him back to that night. To Victor and that parking lot. To Yuuri beneath him, rain-soaked sweater hitched, skin squeaking against the leather seats. 

Yuuri opens his mouth. He's about to say it, spill every inch of him into Victor's open hands. Because all he can think of is how much—how fucking much—he wants him. There's not a minute that goes by where he forgets to want him. He wants him. He wants him so much he feels the words screwed into the back of his throat, awful, unfathomable, choking him. 

Towing Yuuri towards him, Victor's hands slide up his sides. T-shirt hitching. Yuuri's mouth falls open. He's too dizzy to make another sound. 

Their noses bump. It's careful, timid, Victor inching closer like he's giving Yuuri a chance to back out. 

Never, Yuuri thinks, never, remembering every late-night drive, Victor's hand on the gearshift, Yuuri's eyes on his mouth. Never, he thinks, remembering Victor's face, chubby-cheeked and freckled, that gap between his two front teeth, the pink rubbers on his braces. Never, never, never. The two of them tumbling through the backyard, the sound of the sprinklers, those summer-soaked days they spent barefoot and howling. Never. Sitting in the backseats with the windows down, sun streaming in through the moonroof. The highway. The radio. Victor's hair floating in the wind. The prettiest thing in the whole wide world. 

Yuuri's eyes flutter closed. And he breathes. And he forgets to. 

His mouth opens against Victor's, shuddering apart. His tongue, the smooth swell of his lips. Their teeth clack. It makes Yuuri smile, makes Victor hiccup a laugh. He can taste it. Finally. 

And it's this quiet understanding, the certainty that this is how it's supposed to feel. Like they've done this a million times over and never, not once at all. Messy and careful and new and familiar. And Yuuri's hands grip into the hem of Victor's sweater, creep up, feel the heat of skin against his knuckles, muscles coiled tight-taught under his touch. The trembles. The sweetest sounds. 

He wants to take Victor apart and run away with the pieces. 

Yuuri buries a smile into that mouth when Victor rolls on top, the weight of him between his legs, hands gripping into Yuuri's thighs to press them against him. The flutter of his ribcage against Yuuri's knees. And he can't help but laugh when Victor smacks his lips against his nose, cheeks, one eyelid at a time, forehead to jaw and back. That hungry, hungry, perfect mouth. 

The way Victor moves like he knows what to do, where to prick and press, how to undo, how to ruin you just the littlest bit. And Yuuri wants more. Because he's insatiable. Because he feels himself drool into the bed, and it's this blinding, deafening feeling of need with nowhere to put it. 

Yuuri's chest lurches when Victor's hands start to roam, digging into his thighs, playing with the waistband of his boxers. Nails on skin. A sound spills out of Yuuri's mouth, Victor's tongue there to take it. 

And this is it. 

This is him being thrown overboard. This is him forgetting what it ever felt like to be dry. 

Chapter Text

Having him like this, so completely. Yuuri feels explosive. He’s one big cobalt bomb, and one wrong move or one right move, one move too many, and he’ll wreak havoc. Maybe it’s the weird terror of it, the even weirder anticipation that keeps every beating thing in his body on edge. He’s a hazard. He’s a hazard and he’s got him for this. 

Yuuri’s gasping, fumbling to say the words doesn’t know how to. These things he’s dreamt of saying, things he’s breathed into his pillow on those nights he swore he was open like a feeling, a dug up treasure. 

The two of them ravaging, awkward and desperate and good. The kind of good that makes up for all the bumbling and the not-knowing and the can-Is and the is-it-okay-if-Is and the did-that-hurts and the harders and the stops and the wait-a-secs and the ouches and the more-lubes and the keep-goings. 

The weirdness of wanting your body to work with another when you barely know how it works on its own. 

Sheets damp. Someone’s sticky sweater strewn across the floor. It’s too dark to know whose it is. It’s too dark to know whose anything is, arms and legs and hair and thoughts twisted tight. 

Victor falls asleep once. And when he wakes up, he asks Yuuri who he’s done this with before, like he cares, like it matters—when all Yuuri can think of is how much he doesn’t want to know who Victor has done this with. Where he learned how to kiss like that and touch like that, and maybe Yuuri wishes he could’ve known the Victor who didn’t know where to put his hands at all. 

"Tell me," Victor whispers, drags his tongue along the cup of Yuuri’s ear. "Tell me. Tell me, Yuuri. I want to know." 

Yuuri swallows, and he stays quiet until he can’t, and he tells Victor about summer camp, about Kevin Chen who had to wear orthodontic headgear to bed and didn’t know what smores were. Tells him about the things that happen when you share a cabin with someone every summer and want to know what it feels like to be had by them because at least you’re being had by anyone at all. Because you’re dumb and lovesick and dying. Dying, because the person you’ve stuffed into your chest is too busy stuffing someone else into theirs. 

Yuuri doesn’t tell Victor about that part. He doesn’t tell him how it felt seeing him—fresh-freckled at fifteen—standing in their driveway on the first day of summer with his new boyfriend. Andrew or Alex. Everyone called him Puff because his parents owned the bakery on Main street, and he was sweet and small, and his teeth were so big he replaced the sun when he smiled. Yuuri wanted to hurl him into a dumpster fire, him and his dumb floral camp shirts and his bowl cut (that should’ve looked dumb but didn’t because Jesus dropped him into a pot of super-fucking-good-looking before dropping him into Victor’s arms). 

Yuuri doesn’t tell him that either. He doesn’t tell him how he kissed Kevin Chen in the middle of the woods during a nighttime scavenger hunt, wanting to feel nothing but his damp mouth and his damp hands, wanting to forget the boy back at home and the person in this body, wanting nothing but the feeling of being set on fire with his clothes in the dirt. Kevin, with his sweatiness and his floundering. The way he pinned Yuuri to a bed of moss, the cold wetness kicking him awake in the dark. 

Yuuri wondered if Victor did this with Andrew-Alex. He wondered if it felt like this, like a marathon, like all they wanted was to reach the end and shrug each other off once it was over. 

Kevin promised him he’d text him once they were back home. He didn’t. Kevin promised him he’d come to camp the year after. He didn’t. 

And Yuuri doesn’t tell Victor how he stood in the bathroom back at home, staring at his glaring nakedness in the mirror, this new kind of shame, thinking of all the things a body could feel, could give and take. And how in the end it could mean nothing. You could be left with less than you started with. 

Yuuri doesn’t tell him that. He won’t. Ever. Because he doesn’t want him to know how much he needs this to mean something in a place, or maybe a time, where nothing ever does. 

Victor has to go to the bathroom twice. Both times Yuuri lies there, splayed across the sticky mattress with his eyes closed, paralyzed. Both times Victor comes back, and both times Yuuri feels stupid for telling him he wasn’t sure if he would, and both times Victor grabs him by the jaw and kisses him so hard his head blows open to let the world dive in. 

Maybe Yuuri nods off too, even though he can’t remember the last time he’s ever wanted to fend off sleep so desperately, so insanely because he can’t miss a thing, even if it’s just Victor’s eyelashes twitching in his sleep. But then that face shudders open and that mouth falls to Yuuri’s neck, slow and hazy, those hands in his hair. 

It’s a dream. It’s not. It’s all skin. It’s all them. 

"Old man," Victor mumbles when Yuuri tells him his back hurts a little. And he muffles his laugh into the pillow when Victor flips him over. He likes this, loves this, the way Victor moves like he knows what to do with him, because maybe, just maybe, he’s thought about this one too many times not to know. The way he grabs Yuuri’s legs to yank him closer, onto his lap, rolls him into the sheets, flips him, twists him, turns him inside-out and upside-down. 

Yuuri would let him drag him to the edges of the earth, fling him into the stars. 

Victor mouthes a trail down Yuuri’s spine, tries to breathe away the ache. And all the while, Yuuri isn’t sure if he has enough shame left in him to tell him to stop. Because there’s no time, there’s no space left for him to think about the weirdness of this body, his crooked thumb, the chubbiness of his waist, the scar on his knee, his wonky elbow, his knobby toes, because someone’s kissing him, kissing him all over and putting his tongue on places Yuuri’s too ashamed of ever looking at up close. Because someone’s kissing him, and someone wants him, and it’s someone who makes everything else fall away. 

"I don’t ever want you to leave this bed," Yuuri mumbles against Victor’s naked shoulder blade, burnished and smooth, solid, and running your hand over it is knowing every other part of him is built the same way. 

Victor smiles. Sleepy, woozy. Someone who just spent hours dozing at the pool under the sun. Yuuri can almost smell it on him. Sunscreen and chlorine. 

He’s his patch of mid-July at the end of September. 

Yuuri blurts out another laugh when Victor tips over to kiss Yuuri’s eyelids, the tip of his nose. 

There’s not a single spot on Yuuri’s face that hasn’t been ravaged by that mouth. His head feels swollen with it. And Yuuri wants Victor to kiss those spots over and over again, litter his skin, layers upon layers of haunts and memories of the only mouth on earth that says his name the right way. 

Yuuri. 

Yuuri. 

Yuuri. 

"Yuuri." The only way. 

Victor lets his name play across his tongue, his fingers tracing patterns onto Yuuri’s cheek, the side of his neck, down his chest, his stomach, and then there, down there. Yuuri gasps. "I want you." He barely says it, closes the distance. Their lips gliding against each other, that tangy aftertaste sticking their tongues together. "I want you." Yuuri kisses him and kisses him. "I want you." Kisses him again. "Want you." 

I want you. I want you. Even while I’m wanting you, I wish I could want you more. I want you and want you. I want you. 

I wanted you before I knew I could want anything. 

And Victor kisses him back, his mouth open, pulsing wet. He’ll never stop. They’re gone, and this is it, and they’ve outrun time and space and they’re never-never-ending. 

"I want you," Victor whispers. The way it sounds. Yuuri’s done for. 

He’ll never sleep in this bed without thinking about him, sleep in it without dying to touch him, be with him, feel the weight of his chest against his face. The way it bloats and bubbles like a tide. 

Yuuri knew people could ruin you for other people. But what about things? What about the sound of the wind hissing through the crack in his windowpane? Will Yuuri be able to hear it without thinking of Victor’s sleek, soft head between his legs, hair poured over the grooves of his thighs. And will he be able to look up at David Bowie and the Sex Pistols without thinking about the way the bed rocked, screws clinched, the way his heart leapt off a cliff every time Victor slowed down and told him to open his eyes. Victor’s shoulders coiling above him, one arm stretched towards the headboard, tendons arched, bow-like, Yuuri’s fingers trailing along it, digging his nails into it, that selfishness of wanting to stay in his skin forever. The chirr of the bed frame when Victor clenched his fingers around the wood. 

Maybe Victor didn’t just ruin Yuuri for anyone else. Maybe Victor ruined him for anything at all. 

✕✕✕ 

It’s almost light out. Yuuri can hear it. He knows Victor can hear it too, the tick of time rattling the 

walls, the foggy windowpanes. 

All Yuuri can think of is how he should’ve spent more time weaving his fingers through Victor’s hair, kissing his eyelids, telling him he wants him and wants him just a little more, diving into him and out of him and taking his earlobes into his mouth one at a time. 

Yuuri blinks. He does it again. Bites them, tilting Victor’s head so he can reach the left one, the right one. They’re better than gumdrops. Victor snorts. "Weirdo." 

Yuuri licks his nose. And Victor laughs, and it’s mid-July, and Yuuri wants him. "Get to do this now," Victor says as he smooths his thumb over Yuuri’s left eyebrow. 

"My eyebrow?" He smacks Victor’s head between his hands, shaking him. "That’s it?" Yuuri thinks of all the times he’s thought about eating Victor’s hair like it’s spaghetti. 

Victor peels Yuuri’s hands off his cheeks, kissing his palms one by one, tongue darting out to touch his wrist. Yuuri’s eyes flutter closed. "No," Victor says, slurs almost, dreamy, drunk. "God, no." The bed wallows as he leans into him, burying his face into Yuuri’s neck, breathing him in for a moment. Yuuri feels it, all his thoughts twirling into Victor like water down the drain. Victor comes back up for air. Takes his tongue. "You have no idea about all the things I want to do to you." Right into Yuuri’s pliant, open mouth. 

Throwing his leg over Victor’s hip, Yuuri hums at the way he reaches under the blanket to rake his hand across Yuuri’s naked thigh. 

The nakedness. All the glorious, unbearable nakedness. 

Yuuri closes his eyes for a moment. "There’s not a thing I wouldn’t let you do to me," he whispers. 

Break my chest just to know what it sounds like. Break the rest of me just to find out how far I’ll bend. He means it. And he’s crazy to mean it. And he thinks he understands why people say things that are too crazy for them to ever mean. Because it feels so good to stop being careful and mindful and rational for the things that matter the most. Because it feels so good to say things you shouldn’t mean, unbelievable, outrageous things. Because it feels so good to be unbelievable and outrageous, to succumb to it, let yourself, so completely, feel and feel all these enormous feelings and lay your life down for them. 

And looking at Victor’s blown open face—Yuuri wonders why anyone in the world would stop at careful when they could have this. 

✕✕✕ 

Yuuri isn’t sure if he feels the same as he did yesterday, a minute ago, three seconds. And he doesn’t know how much or how little he looks like himself, face warped and flushed when he stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. 

Or maybe when you feel so much like yourself, you mistake it for feeling like a stranger. 

"Someone looks happy," his mom says from where she leans against the stove, smiling as she waves her spatula through the air like a baton. 

Yuuri smiles back. But it feels like more. He’s on overload, left ajar, Yuuri through a megaphone, jolting the cabinets, the drawers, the clink of porcelain piercing through the early morning quiet. He makes the walls tumble down. 

He’s smiling. He’s devastating. 

Shuffling into the kitchen, his dad smacks his hands against his eyes, holding onto the nearest kitchen counter like he’s being hit by a wind tunnel. "Jesus! Stop, you’ll blind me!" 

Yuuri wipes a hand across his face, feels his smile sear his skin. 

"Let me guess." His dad flicks his glasses up his nose. "Crack?" 

"Meth," Koji shouts from upstairs. Yuuri rolls his eyes when his dad lifts a brow. 

"Looks good on you, Yuuri-kun." His mom shoots him a wink as she whirls and whacks her spatula across the sizzling pan like she’s trying to win a war. 

And Yuuri loves her. He loves all of them. And he wants to yank them close to kiss the top of their heads, wants to fall to the ground, splatter across the floorboards, the fuzzy carpet. And if he could sing, he’d sing, dance if he could, on the table, the kitchen island, the top of the roof. 

He wants to rip his mouth open and eat the whole wide world. "Morning." 

Yuuri didn’t realize his eyes were closed. He blinks away the blotches as his head supercuts through every eighties movie moment he watched with Mari on those Friday nights they couldn’t sleep: the girl floating down the stairs in her glitter-sprinkled prom dress, the boy in the doorway, lovestruck, gasping like someone whacked him on the back of the head so hard he forgot about the ground beneath his feet. 

Victor hovers at the top of the staircase. "Morning," he says again, fiddling with his hair, smoothing it to the side. Yuuri can smell him from here, the bite of his cologne, the tanginess of his mousse or spray or pomade or St. Clair’s Animal Farm butter, whatever the hell he dumps onto his hair to make it look like the snip of a comet tail. And Yuuri wants to run his hands through all the shiny waxiness, make Victor groan and slap his wrist—because 'Don’t touch the hair, you heathen.'—and he wants to keep doing it until it’s all fuzzy again, wavy, soft like the sea. He wants to so bad. He wants him. He wants him always. I want you. 

Victor catches Yuuri staring. He smiles, and it’s so hazy, and he looks drunk with every marvelous thing that happened before the sun blinked them awake. 

He smoothes his hand through his hair one last time before he makes his way down the rest of the stairs. He stumbles, face swollen red as he tries to play it off. 

"Just one," Yuuri’s dad says back on earth, where real things happen and never stop happening, and Yuuri waits a few moments, revels in the feeling of his stare making Victor forget how to walk a straight line, before he forces himself to join everyone back in reality, where his mom slaps his dad with a dishcloth after he tries to steal another chunk of meat out of the pan. "Ow." She giggles, pinches the round jut of his stomach. He tries to pinch her back, but she’s already whirling through the kitchen, glasses askew as she gestures for everyone to take a seat. 

Yuuri watches Victor lean over his bowl of oyakodon, fumbling with his chopsticks, his spoon, rearranging the bloated egg around his chicken. That one rebellious strand of hair loosening from behind his ear, the silent swoosh it makes as it dives into his face. 

Victor presses his foot against Yuuri’s. He feels the zing of it, the soft arch of Victor’s heel against his toes. He’s all soft arches. From the curve of his foot, to his calf, to the grooves of his thigh and his stomach, the valleys of his chest, from the swoop of his neck to his ear. And Yuuri wants to do it again, all of it, run a finger from the bottom to the top of him and back. 

How are you supposed to act in front of someone who was so gloriously naked and on top of you just an hour ago? How are you supposed to not grab their hands and smack them against every aching part of your body? Because you might die otherwise? Because the memory of having had them on you is more suffocating than soothing? 

Yuuri can’t eat. 

Victor leans his head on a hand, palm bunching his cheek, his crinkled eye. He smiles. And it’s the crazy good thrill of realizing no one else in the room knows what it tastes like. 

Breakfast goes on at a torturous pace. Koji babbles about how Southampton are officially the most boring Premier League team since 2015 like everyone at the table knows who the hell Southampton are and what the hell the Premier League is. And all the while, Yuuri’s too busy knotting his feet into Victor’s under the table, toes wiggling, the breathy laugh spilling out of Victor’s mouth, the way his eyes spark at the edges. He’s got Yuuri so fucking completely, because the next thing Yuuri knows he’s upstairs brushing his teeth between Koji and Victor with no recollection of how he got between them in the first place. 

Staring at Victor in the mirror, he watches toothpaste dribble out the corner of his mouth, down his chin. Koji’s nothing but background noise, spitting and flailing while Yuuri’s too busy thinking about the sound Victor made when Yuuri took him in his mouth. 

They’re huddled in the hallway when he finally snaps out of it. He’s never been so thankful for his brother having been born with blinders attached to the sides of his head. Yuuri’s lost count of how many times Victor and him shuffled close, brushing arms, fingers on hips, feet bumping, hands resting on each other’s shoulders a little too long to seem friendly. 

And Koji’s still raving about how June Kunda has been wearing the same pink tights for a week, trying to stuff his arms into his jacket, when Victor hooks his finger into Yuuri’s belt loop from behind and yanks him closer. 

Yuuri wants to slam him into the nearest wall and spell his name into his mouth. 

"It’s a sign," Koji says, thrashing as he throws his backpack over a shoulder. "She wants a piece of the Koji-Cake." 

Victor clears his throat. "I really don’t think—" 

"Just let me live in denial, man." Koji’s half-way out the door already. "Driving today," he shouts over his shoulder, letting Victor’s keys jangle from his fingers, the Swiss Army chain blinking bright red in the sun, before the door bounces back and hides him from view. 

Victor pats down his jacket. "Wait, how’d he—" 

"You’ve been super distracted all morning," Yuuri says as he fumbles to find the sleeve of his jacket, blurting out a laugh when Victor helps him, patting his hands over his shoulders, smoothing out the crinkles. "Thanks." Yuuri grabs his backpack and heads towards the door. He doesn’t get far. Victor yanks at his collar. He stumbles over the doormat, his back hitting Victor’s chest. The thump of it.
"Distracted?" Victor’s mouth to his ear. "Whose fault is that?" 

Eyes shuddering closed, he says, "I like it." He turns around. Eyes open. "Don’t ever stop thinking of me." Because he’s crazy to mean this too. 

Victor’s face lurches into something that makes Yuuri hold his breath, makes his chest pinch, his head hum. And before he can say another word, Victor shoves his glasses up his face, his mouth dipping open, his minty breath. Hands grabbing Yuuri’s waist, Victor guides him towards the nearest wall. The corners of picture frames poking his spine. The clatter-crack of a family portrait as it slides to the ground. 

It feels like they never left his bed, never stopped to take a breath, never wanted to, never needed to. 

Victor’s mouth against his, and they’re back where they started. Mid-July at the end of September. 

"This Friday," Victor squeezes into his mouth. Yuuri hums at the sound of it. "This Friday. I wanted to—Maybe, if you want—" 

"Yes, yes, yes, yes, okay, yes, okay. Okay." Yuuri sprinkles his mouth across Victor’s face. "God, yes. Yes to whatever. Yes to all of it." 

Victor snorts. Yuuri dies. "You didn’t even let me finish," he whispers, quirking down to bite Yuuri’s nose. Yuuri laughs, bites him back. "Let me take you out." 

The Mustang’s horn blares the block apart. Victor snorts, smack against Yuuri’s tongue. It tastes better every time. 

"Get in, dipshits, or I’m leaving without you," Koji yells. 

Yuuri feels Victor lean away, taking his mouth with him, his soft, perfect tongue. Yuuri won’t let him. He wraps his arms around Victor’s neck, presses himself against him so hard there’s no space left to go but in. He opens, unfolds himself, lets Victor take his mouth the way he took his clothes off in the night, the way he took Yuuri’s hands in his and kissed his palms, the way he took every last ounce of sense he had left. 

The car horn blares again. The bang of footsteps shuffling down the stairs. Yuuri doesn’t need to look to know it’s the frantic gait of his dad. 

He sucks in a breath. Shoving Victor away is like ripping a band-aid off, that hard, throbbing zing of cheek-between-teeth pain. Victor wobbles back, dumbstruck as he stumbles against the coat rack. 

"Why are you still here?" Yuuri’s dad jerks to a stop when he walks past. "Kid’s going to get us fined." He gestures at the door when another honk makes the sky shake. 

Yuuri swallows. He wipes at his mouth like he’s afraid Victor might have left something there for his dad to see. 

His dad. 

His dad who helped him with his electric dough science project in fourth grade, who ruffled his hair and called him kiddo, who filled him in about the birds and the bees with a demonstration involving a garden hose and a plastic bag. 

His dad who almost caught Victor and him dry humping in the hallway. 

Victor. 

Victor who used to run through the sprinklers in the backyard in nothing but his giant flower-printed swim trunks. 

Yuuri shuffles to the side to hide the broken picture frame from view, the crack of wood under his heel, a shard of glass blinking on the carpet. It’s quiet. His dad’s eyes dart from Yuuri to Victor to the missing picture on the wall. 

Victor slides his bag over his crotch. He shoots Yuuri the kind of deer-in-the-headlights look he rarely lets slip onto his face. Yuuri takes a breath, opens his mouth. Victor bolts out the door. "Later, Mr. Katsuki!" 

His dad scratches his cheek. He frowns. "What did he just call me?" 

Yuuri flinches at the sound he makes. Something between a bark and a laugh, and it blares through the hallway, once and ringing. He coughs. He readjusts his glasses. 

"What’s going—" 

"Bye, Dad." And he’s out the door, laughing so hard his bones pop apart. 

Friday, Yuuri thinks, religiously, as he scrambles down the porch. Friday, Victor. Friday. Fly me to the moon and back and to the moon again. 

✕✕✕

Mila devours satan’s gelatinous urine like her life depends on it, letting Phichit document it on his phone because Seung-gil doesn’t believe anyone on the planet gets away with eating that stuff without melting from the inside. He’s the new kid. Came up all the way from Chicago in his unnecessary trench coats and his unnecessary beanies and his Vine slam poetry, and Phichit’s almost as obsessed with him as he is with his vegan Get Fit granola bars. ('Seung-gil? More like Seung-finally-a-beardless-hipster-I’d-fuck…gil.’—'Wow, Phich, did you rehearse that?' —'Don’t talk to me, Raggedy Ann.') 

"You’re disgusting," Phichit says once Mila slams the empty pudding cup onto her tray. "Shit’s delicious," she mumbles, still chewing, waving her final loaded spoon towards him like a parent playing here-comes-the-airplane. 

"Shit is correct." Phichit bats it out of his face and yanks his phone closer. 

Wiggling her eyebrows, Mila makes sure Yuuri’s watching when she stuffs the spoon into her mouth, chewing with such defiance Yuuri half-expects her to jump onto the table and flip off the ceiling. 

When another clump of students pour in, his eyes dart through the cafeteria. He jolts when he catches sight of a bright head beaming—slumping when he realizes it’s not him. 

He should be finished with class by now. 

Yuuri’s still not sure how he feels about having rehearsed the smile he’ll flash Victor in the bathroom earlier—because he’s crazy now—not too obvious and not too constipated to seem like he’s forcing himself not to burst into song and belt about those perfect eyelashes or that perfect orgasm face. 

That orgasm face. 

Yuuri saw his orgasm face, and it’s bolted into the back of his eyelids for life, gold-framed, glistening, something you could hang in the Metropolitan Museum, the Louvre, the Museo del Prado, between The Kiss and The Yellow House. 

Victor Nikiforov’s Orgasm Face. 

"You’re doing it again," Phichit cuts through his thoughts. He’s still staring at his phone. Yuuri blinks. "Hm?" 

Waving her spoon in front of his face, Mila traces Yuuri’s mouth from left to right. "Smiling like a sleep-deprived deranged person." She cocks her head to the side. "What’s the occasion?" 

Phichit finally looks up. "Get another C+ in math?" 

"Did your mom make that rice pork stuff?" 

Yuuri rubs at his cheeks until they prickle. "You guys make me sound really sad." 

Phichit shrugs. "Just be glad you don’t need much to be happy." 

"That makes me sound even sadder." 

"They had chocolate mousse last week and you almost stripped." 

"They never have chocolate mousse..." Yuuri grabs his fork and squashes the rice on his plate until it’s mush. He still can’t get himself to eat. 

Mila flicks her spoon onto her tray and shoves it aside. She smiles. It looks better than the ones from the days before, those tired failed attempts, head dangling, hair in her face. She looks okay. And then sometimes she doesn’t. Phichit keeps saying they should just let her be for a while. The one thing Mila hates more than Jean-Jacques Leroy’s tramp stamp is when people worry about her, especially the people she usually likes to worry about herself. Phichit dubbed it the mama bear complex. 

Yuuri flashes her a smile when she looks over. She rolls her eyes. A little laugh. 

"Or," she folds her arms and slides towards him, "is it love?" she coos, reaching out to press his glasses up his nose. Yuuri twitches away. He swallows. 

"Or just a good dicking." Waving a hand, Phichit flicks his attention back to his phone. Mila laughs at that, eyes fixed on Yuuri like she’s expecting him to snort and shrug it off the way he would. And he will. He’s about to. But it takes him one second too long, and Phichit’s head shoots up so fast the group of girls sitting next to them flinches. A shriek. Someone giggles. 

"Who?" Phichit slams his phone onto the table—before flipping it over to check if it’s okay. 

"Why do you have to say it like that?" Yuuri rolls his eyes. 

"No, I mean—How could you not tell me? Hello? I thought we agreed on me doing a background check on anyone who wants to get near your honeypot." 

Mila jerks her head back. "Did you just call his penis a honeypot?" 

"I wasn’t talking about his penis." 

Yuuri shoves a spoonful of rice into his mouth. "When did I ever agree on background checks?" he mumbles, chewing around his words. Phichit’s eyebrows shoot up so high they hit his hairline. "Uh—hello? We talked about it, like—what—in eighth grade?" 

"Yeah, and I said you were crazy." 

"But you agreed," he says, flapping a hand around his face. "With your eyes." 

Mila barks out a laugh. "For your safety," Phichit continues. "No freaks, no weirdos. You deserve someone who, like, babysits and enjoys taking care of old people. Someone who goes to church." His eyes roll to the ceiling for a moment. "Maybe. Sometimes." He looks back down, blinking. "Please tell me it wasn’t Lennard." 

"Wow, Phich, hilarious." Mila leans back in her chair. 

And then they’re going back and forth, debating how straight a half-zip pullover is on a scale of one to a million, and Yuuri’s just sitting there having his first-ever heart attack because the cafeteria doors whip open—and there he is. 

There he is and how in the world is he even more beautiful than this morning, than last night, than when he was bare and above, saying his name like Yuuri kissed the sky for him. 

Victor scans the cafeteria, eyes flitting over Yuuri before they bounce back. Yuuri can’t stop himself. Victor’s smiling so wide his mouth might as well gobble up this whole town, and Yuuri feels it in his cheeks too, the perfect, painful strain of it, and he knows all the smile-rehearsals in the bathroom just went to shit. 

Phichit stops talking. He’s still for a moment. Yuuri tears his eyes away from Victor’s, and it’s as agonizing as it was this morning when he shoved him off in the hallway, the throbbing sting of it like Victor took Yuuri’s tongue with him. 

And when Phichit turns to find out what caught Yuuri’s attention, Victor’s still standing there, smiling like someone scooped his brains out, and Yuuri wants to kiss him and smack him and kiss him again, kiss him all better. 

The group of girls at their table crane their necks when Mila starts laughing so hard she topples over, grinning at the way she yelps for air. 

Phichit turns back around. He looks like someone scooped his brains out too. And his face does this thing where it splits open in slow motion, eyebrows eating their way up his forehand, the flare of his nostrils, the way his mouth widens so much you can see the back of his throat. 

He inhales. "Shutthefuckup." 

✕✕✕ 

It takes them two hours to get to the city, windows down even in September, the radio blaring MGMT and Sundara Karma and The Vaccines, and they sing along terribly, horribly, head-banging all the way down the highway. Yuuri takes Victor’s hand off the gearshift every once in a while, holds it in his, kisses one finger at a time, the soft plump of his palm, every knuckle, the fragile stretch of skin between thumb and forefinger. He runs his tongue along it, digs his teeth in. 

And he smiles so much his cheeks quake under the pressure. Because Victor’s taking him out, taking him to the city. And Yuuri counts the streetlights that spark past in the late September afternoon, days shorter, nights longer, and they’re soaring towards a place where they’re nameless and new. 

Victor looks so nice. He beams in his coat and his shiny shoes, no wax in his hair, all wavy, billowing in the whip of wind. Yuuri dips his fingers into the strands every minute or two, and Victor grabs his hand to kiss it. Yuuri laughs, leans over to bury the sound into Victor’s cheek. 

All the hours he’s waited for this, eyes pinned to the clock ticking above the whiteboard, slumping in his seat every time he looked one time too many and realized not even a minute had gone by. Dribbling his fingers across the scar on his knee while Mrs. Parvati tried to pound trigonometric functions into their brains. His phone burring across the table. Phichit wouldn’t stop sending him pictures of Victor and Yuuri’s heads pasted onto Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze in Ghost, Britney and Madonna at the VMA’s, Kirsten Dunst and Toby Maguire in Spiderman. ('Just fuck you, guys. Fuck you. Are you kidding me. Fuck you. This is the best thing to happen to the world since the birth of yours truly.') 

Yuuri doesn’t know how they got out of the house without blowing it, blurting out whatever cover story they’d rehearsed in their heads all day, only to realize none of it lined up once they said it out loud together. And Yuuri’s mom just smiled and blinked. She told them they looked nice. 

Yuuri didn’t think he was being that obvious with the shirt beneath his sweater, the itchiness of it, the impending fear of sweat stains. He even sprayed on some of Koji’s cologne—getting it in his mouth and his eyes and his nostrils because he didn’t check where the nozzle was pointing at—and it ended up being an even bigger mistake when Victor leaned in to tell him he smelled familiar. Yuuri spent at least half an hour wiping at himself with a jacket sleeve. 

The radio crackles as they flash out of the woods, the world outside growing gravelly, gray, a landscape of scattered houses and buildings poking the sky in the distance. 

The last time they drove to the city was on Yuuri’s mom’s birthday. They spent all day having brunch at some fancy hotel, strolling along the streets when the sun went down, none of them wanting to leave, none of them wanting to go back to a place that felt so mute in the face of this one. 

Yuuri holds his breath when they rush through an underpass, exhales when they emerge, lights brighter, asphalt rumbling, all these people streaming into one crossing after the other. It’s so loud Yuuri can hear the world through his fingertips, the balls of his feet. And when Victor rolls the windows down, he feels it, feels the hum of the city pour in, the beat of it, the smell of food wafting off of street vendors, the ding of corner store doors like a Christmas jingle. 

He shoves his glasses into his hair. Streetlights, neon signs, blinking phones of passersby swirling like gasoline in a puddle. He wants to climb out of the window and bathe in it. Hold his breath. Go under. 

Victor shifts. "Eyes hurt?" 

Yuuri shakes his head, letting his fingers glide along the plastic temples of his glasses. "Sometimes everything looks better without them on." 

It takes them forever to find a parking lot. Not that Yuuri minds, nose pressed against the window like a kid in an aquarium, an airplane, too afraid to blink because he might miss something fantastic. 

Victor slumps in his seat once he manages to squeeze the Mustang into a spot Yuuri warned him he wouldn’t fit into. And Yuuri’s pretty sure the only reason Victor chose this spot was because Yuuri told him he shouldn’t. "Tell me why I wanted a big-ass car again?" Victor rolls his head to the side. He looks over. He glows. And Yuuri can’t help himself, the two of them, here, far away, wormholed to another corner of the universe. And he glows. Even here, he glows. And Yuuri wants him. 

Fumbling to get out of his seatbelt, Yuuri climbs over the gearshift. Leftover animal crackers crunching in the bag stuffed into the cupholder. "Yuuri." Victor snorts. Yuuri’s knee knocks against the dashboard, elbow on the horn. He flinches at the blare. His head hits the roof. And he can’t find the time to breathe, giggling when he finally crams himself onto Victor’s lap. His hand taps along the edge of the seat until he finds the little lever. He pulls. The two of them cackling when the seat whips back. Chest’s knocking, Victor grabs the back of Yuuri’s neck, their foreheads rolling against each other. "Hey." 

"Hi." Victor grins, breathing harder than he did before. "Couldn’t wait until we got out, huh?" 

Yuuri runs his fingers across Victor’s mouth, touches his teeth the way he wanted to the first time he saw him. Wobbling at the top of the staircase that afternoon, fever-flushed, in Koji’s giant hand-me-down pajamas. Victor, down there, leaning against the doorframe. 

You’re the Man in the Moon. 

He tips over, kisses him, once and hard and furious. Victor’s hands drag down his sides, fist his sweater, slip into the back pockets of his jeans. The sweet weight of him between his legs. 

Yuuri’s too caught up in the wet swell of his tongue to notice Victor grabbing him by his hair to tip his head back. His mouth on Yuuri’s neck. A bite. "You better get off me right now or we’re never leaving this car." He breathes a trail up to Yuuri’s jaw, his mouth dragging one word at a time. 

And Yuuri breathes in and out and counts to three. He’ll never not hate this part the most, the touching and then the not touching, the shoving off and stumbling away, that unhinged force of feeling his body on its own. 

Victor smacks his mouth against Yuuri’s neck one last time before giving his hip a hard tap. Grunting, Yuuri shoves the car door open and stumbles onto the sidewalk. He imagines this is the way people wobble out of bars in the dead of the night. Love-drunk. Barbarically love-wasted. 

Victor rubs his hands across his face. He shakes his head, grinning as he adjusts the seat to the way it was before. That color on his cheeks. Yuuri wants to kiss it, eat it off like frosting. He wants. He wants everything. He wants to grab Victor’s hand and bolt through the streets, tumble into every fancy store they run past, twirl around the mannequins, kiss against streetlights and street signs and rusty mailboxes that haven’t been opened since the Triassic period, stumble across the damp grass in the parks, the big, big buildings, sneak into the elevators just to shuttle off into the sky. The two of them, sitting on the edge of the moon to count the lights below. 

Yuuri’s already halfway down the street when Victor’s laugh rumbles after him. "It’s this way." He points in the opposite direction. Burying his face into his scarf, Yuuri jogs back, panting a little when he grabs Victor’s hand to tug him along. 

He looks down at their anchored fingers, and he likes the feeling of it, of this, holding each other out in the open because there’s too much going on in a place like this for anyone to care about two kids kissing at every block, sprinkling their shamelessness across these shameless streets. 

"Wait, you’re not taking me to some weird art exhibit, right?" Yuuri says when they stumble to a stop at a red light, rubbing shoulders with all these people who are buzzing with it. This it like a pulse, this restless rhythm, contagious. And Yuuri wants to run, run away, run forever. 

"Yuuri. " Victor snorts. He’s buzzing too, toes wiggling in his shoes. "I brought you here to feed you." The traffic light flashes green. Everyone zings forward, crashing like a wave. And Yuuri smiles, buries his face in Victor’s arm, puts his mouth there, coat coarse against his lips. 

Hand in hand, Victor guides him down one blinking street after the next. Yuuri’s Mad Hatter, his Merlin, Atlas of the Universe, tugging him along to show him this world and the next. 

Victor finally stops at the end of a narrow street. He lifts his arms in a silent ta-dah, grin so wide his mouth looks like a heart. Yuuri stares up at the red lanterns dangling in the draft. A hole-in-the-wall ramen shop, the cramped entrance buried behind a frill of noren. 

Victor’s still grinning as he presses a hand to Yuuri’s back, guiding him forward, the red cloth brushing their faces as they duck under. 

A pang of nostalgia hits when Yuuri feels the salty steam on his cheeks. He closes his eyes for a moment, and he’s back in Hasetsu, strolling along the cobblestone ways with his grandpa, the clouds of their breath, the sound of the sea. The ramen broiling in the kitchen at the onsen. Yuuri’s grandma shouting for everyone to come down for dinner. 

Victor snags them two seats at the crowded counter. Everyone’s head dangling over a bowl, steam shrouding the bar, the greasy pamphlets scattered across the tables. 

"How’d you find out about this place?" Yuuri asks after they order. He leans closer. That slosh of warmth when their thighs meet. 

Victor curls his hair behind his ear. He shrugs. "Walked around." He makes it sound like a question. 

Because of course. Of course Victor just walked around. Because Victor just goes and Victor just does, and Victor doesn’t use Yelp or Google Maps because he’s ridiculous, and also because Yelp and Google Maps are for people who don’t just go and don’t just do, people like Yuuri who’ve built up shrines in their heads dedicated to the sweet security of planning-ahead. 

"Why’d you never take me with you?" Yuuri says, thinking of all those times Victor disappeared on a Sunday, a Friday night, a whole weekend, even. To better places, Yuuri always thought. To places where anything and everything can happen for him, finally. 

Victor nibbles on his bottom lip. "Didn’t know how to ask." He laughs. It’s quick and small, and he averts his gaze when Yuuri leans closer, staring over the counter to watch the waitress slip out of the kitchen with a tray of bowls. "Sounds stupid now that I said it out loud." He slips his hand onto Yuuri’s thigh, presses his fingers against the soft underside. Yuuri swallows. He likes it when he touches that spot, likes the way it tickles and aches and aches enough to make it tickle. "Do you remember Mari’s prom?" 

Yuuri furrows his brows at that. "Uh...I think so," he says, wondering if Victor wants to change the topic or if this is actually going somewhere. "I mean, I remember that dress." Yuuri thinks of his sister, witchy and wild in that black frock, that neon-yellow leather jacket. "She looked like Morticia Addams and Freddie Mercury had a baby." 

Victor’s hand crawls towards Yuuri’s knee, cups it, rubs along the curve. "You had a suit on," he says, eyes strained against his fingers tracing the zig-zag-y scar poking into Yuuri’s pants. "It was ten sizes too big," Yuuri mumbles. 

"And you did this thing with your hair." 

"Mom’s max-hold hairspray...Solid cement for two days." 

Victor looks up. "And you had contacts on." His hand leaves Yuuri’s leg to nudge his glasses up his nose, to play with a strand of hair near Yuuri’s ear. He smiles that face-shifting, world-shifting smile. "And I remember you fell down the rest of the stairs because your pants were too long, and I swear, Yuuri, I swear, I wanted to throw you into my dad's car and drive and never stop. I wanted to so bad. I wanted to." Victor’s fingers run along the shell of Yuuri’s ear. "And I wanted to dance with you that night, remember?" 

Yuuri blinks. 

He does. Of course he does. 

The blue confetti, the glitter on the scratched-up gym floor, cardboard stars orbiting the disco ball the drama club made out of CDs. He remembers the smell of the spiked fruit punch and Michele Crispino’s cologne coaxing tears out of everyone he moonwalked past. He remembers Mari getting stoned in the parking lot. That boy with her. He made her laugh the stars into the sky, made her look like Venus in a neon-yellow leather jacket. And he remembers Linkin Park and Ke$ha, high heels scattered around the edge of the dance floor, painted toenails flashing when the girls lifted their dresses, makeup smudged, hair bristling, all the boys falling in love one song at a time. 

And then Victor. Lanky and fidgety, ponytail beating from side to side, that strand of hair in the corner of his mouth. He was sweating, breathing heavy. He’d been dancing all night, alone, and then with a girl in a dress shaped like a pastry puff, with Koji and Mrs. Parvati and Mari, helicoptering her leather jacket above his head, and then alone again. 

Yuuri remembers the stutter his chest made when Victor tumbled towards him, panting. The magic of him, his boundlessness and fearlessness. 'Dance with me.' 

"You looked like I asked you to jump into a woodchipper." 

Yuuri laughs so hard Victor jerks back, bumping against the woman sitting next to him. "I was fourteen," Victor whispers after he mumbles a quick apology. "You killed me." And his face cracks open, every thought streaming from his forehead down to his chin. With his eyebrows scrunched, his mouth so open, he looks like he did four years ago, a little restless, unruly, always bumbling from side to side like he didn’t know how to use this body he hadn’t grown into quite yet. 

Yuuri cups Victor’s jaw between his hands. He lets his nose trail along Victor’s, tastes his breath before he tastes his tongue. The soft smack of their lips when they pull back. Yuuri clears his throat, yanking his hands back when he catches the waitress staring. "Pretty sure humiliating myself in front of you was the mental equivalent of jumping into a woodchipper..." 

Victor nudges his head against Yuuri’s cheek, kisses his neck. Yuuri’s shoulder quirk up at the way it tickles. 

"Do you really think I would’ve cared? Have you seen my dance moves?" Victor laughs, hooking his finger into Yuuri’s belt and tugging him closer because he’s shameless. 

"So that’s why you never asked?" Yuuri says. "Because I was too busy internally combusting to dance with you four years ago?" 

"Yes." Victor lets go of Yuuri’s belt and splays his hands across the counter. "For starters." 

"For starters?" 

That awful smirk. "You don’t remember." 

"Remember what?" 

A quick finger-dribble across the counter, the clack of his heels on the floor. He grins. "Story for another time." 

Yuuri thinks about whacking him with the greasy menu when the waitress dashes past, slamming their bowls onto the counter so hard everyone’s heads twitch up. Victor flicks a brow at Yuuri and snatches the menu before he has a chance to. He hands it to her. "Thanks." He smiles. She’s starstruck for life. 

Maybe Yuuri can convince the guy to wear a bag over his head the next time they’re out in public. Or maybe just a whole potato sack. Yuuri could cut holes in it for his arms. They could still hold hands. 

"What do you remember?" Victor says, tapping his chopsticks against his spoon to the beat of the song crackling out of the radio in the kitchen. 

"Hm?" 

"I don’t know, I mean, what do you remember about anything?" He shrugs. "I just, I remember. I remember so much and I’ve never really thought about any of it. But then lately..." The wink of a smile. "I remember those glasses you used to wear in middle school. And they were ginormous and round and too big for your face, and I swore there was nothing in the world you wouldn’t be able to see. Koji kept saying you had X-ray vision." Victor reaches out and flicks Yuuri’s glasses again, smiling at the way Yuuri crinkles his nose. 

Do you remember... 

What did Yuuri remember? Sometimes he thinks everything. And then sometimes he thinks he doesn’t remember the things that mattered the most, those moments that slipped right past him to stay behind, untouched, a pocket in time, a secret oasis. 

"Do you remember that night we played hide-and-seek?" Victor says. "The block party?" His hand falls to Yuuri’s knee, fingers on his scar again, circling it. 

Yuuri thinks for a moment, watching Victor’s hand brush up his leg. The memory feels hazy, meager. He nods. 

The two of them, their bare feet slapping against the hot asphalt as they tumbled down the road, their sweat-streaked faces. The way Victor skipped higher and higher like he wanted to leap into the night, his hair leaving a trail of bright dust for Yuuri to tumble after. Even then...his Mad Hatter, his Merlin, his atlas of the universe. 

The collar of Victor’s bluebird blue T-shirt slipping, the way he kept pulling it back up for it to just slip back down, the scoop of his sunburnt shoulder there, blazing under the streetlights. 

Dina said he’d grow into it. And he did. He grew into it so much he grew out of it, and Yuuri remembers snatching it out of the laundry hamper after Victor slept over on Koji’s couch. He tried it on, staring at himself in the bathroom mirror, hooking his fingers into the collar and pulling it down just enough for it to slip off his shoulder. 

"That oak tree," Victor says, running his knuckles along Yuuri’s thighs. Arcane and mighty, the oak tree by the playground like a gatekeeper. 

Some girl fell from it years ago. The kids at school said she’d broken both her arms and her legs, all her fingers, all her toes, and Yuuri imagined her wedged into masses of cast like a swollen starfish. The whole town went berserk, littering the area with No Climbing signs and making sure bored moms patrolled the area at noon. Someone even whipped up a petition for it to be cut down, and then someone else whipped up a petition for it not to be cut down. The local paper had a field day. 

And while Yuuri had promised himself never to climb it, Victor had of course taken an oath to do the exact opposite. 

The two of them cowered in that tree for hours, cradled in the pit of it like they were sitting in its oaky, gnarled palm. And they held their breath listening to other kids howl into the sky, prowling the streets like a wolf pack. Victor grabbed Yuuri’s hand every time Yuuri got dizzy from looking at the ground miles below, and Victor pressed his mouth to Yuuri’s ear, chapped, hot. 'I’ve got you.' 

Their knees scratched open. The way they used to wear their cuts and bruises like badges of honor. Ants crawling across their bare feet, their legs and arms. Dirt-caked and panting. The wildness of them. 

"Do you remember?" 

Do you remember... 

Yuuri remembers. And Victor remembers. And he can’t help but kiss him one more time and then another. And it’s been so long since they’ve talked so much they’re warm and damp with it, sweating with the heat of the kitchen and the closeness of everyone. They almost forget to eat. Yuuri’s ramen is cold by the time he picks up his spoon. Victor inches closer, lets their elbows rub against each other while their heads dangle over their bowls. Yuuri rubs his head against Victor’s shoulder every once in a while, closes his eyes at the feeling of Victor weaving his fingers through his hair, pressing his mouth to the top of his head. 

Tasting his thoughts in the middle of a cramped ramen shop. 

✕✕✕ 

They stay until the waitress starts wiping the empty tables, flipping the chairs onto the counter, louder and louder each time. Victor shakes the sleeve of his sweater. His watch flashes. It’s almost midnight. 

Yuuri breathes in hungrily once they brush open the noren and step outside. It’s so cold he can see his own breath. 

"This the kind of place I want to end up in." Victor digs his hands into the pockets of his coat. "All the lights and all the sounds and all the people. All of them. All gazillion of them." He smiles, and he’s beautiful, and he’s a captain standing on the bridge of his mighty ship. Hair whipping in the wind. Triumphant. 

Yuuri traces the shape of his mouth in his thoughts. 

They stumble down the streets, lonely cabs lugging past, the infinite rumble of the city wedged under their skin. It’s so easy, ridiculously, to imagine they grabbed a quick dinner, and now they’re strolling back to their apartment two blocks down, small and busted, where they drink wine out of free giveaway mugs and try to grow plants but forget to water them, where they eat breakfast together and do the laundry, where Victor lifts Yuuri onto the wedged pantry counter and kisses him. Kisses and kisses him. Kisses him without worrying about the rest. Kisses him and he’s at ease because wherever they are, wherever they end up, being with Victor is like lugging your home around in a suitcase. And they’re okay. They’ll always be okay. 

Yuuri tugs at the hem of Victor’s coat. He presses their mouths together, against parking meters and deserted bus stops, on scattered benches until they’re numb from the cold, Yuuri’s mouth unhinged, open for everything Victor is willing to give. The taste of him under the streetlights. 

And he wants everyone to see it, the two of them slathered across each other people can’t tell them apart, muddled and endless. Victoryuuri. Yuurivictor. 

Yuuri laughs against his lips, feels Victor’s tongue dart out to trace his teeth, biting the corner of his mouth. This is it. All of this. He feels so stupid, so perfectly, blissfully stupid. Stupid with the feeling. Stupid with the way Victor’s hands pull at the hair bunched at the nape of Yuuri’s neck, the way he tries to say Yuuri’s name when they stop to come up for air. Stupid with the thought of him. 

I’ve got you, too. I promise. 

Yuuri’s not sure if he thinks it or says it. But he feels those words vibrate through him, warm and heavy, clumping the air together until they’re breathing in chunks. And he presses their foreheads together, holds Victor so tight it feels violent. 

"Yuuri." 

Victorvictorvictorvictor…

✕✕✕ 

They make their way back to Linhedge in the AM, stopping by a rest stop when Victor’s eyes flutter and he can’t stay in his lane. 

Yuuri watches him doze off for a while, traces the slope of his nose with a finger, the little quirk at the tip, child-like, the fleshy swell of his lips. They were made for kissing, Yuuri’s sure of it. He presses his fingers to Victor’s mouth, smoothes them across the cracked ridge at the bottom. Victor forgot his lip balm. 

And Yuuri doesn’t want to go back. He doesn’t want to go back to all the things he’s finally been able to forget about tonight: Blue Victor and that white house across the street, the way his mom keeps looking at her hands when Yuuri tries to bring it up with her in private, the things Victor won’t tell anyone and maybe never will, those awful things eating him up, eating him empty. 

And maybe it’s more than that. Maybe Yuuri doesn’t want to go back to a place where he wants to keep this a secret, where he wants Victor all to himself, tuck him so far behind his heartbeat he’s unreachable. Because Yuuri can’t help how he feels when he thinks about the way people look at Victor back at home—Victor, like a monument, a wonder of the world—worshipping him, scrutinizing him. 

Yuuri wants to hold Victor’s hand without people looking at him and talking about him, swishing his name through their mouths. 

Yuuri. 

Who the fuck is Yuuri? Katsuki? Koji has a brother? 

Because isn’t that how it’s always been? Mari, the theatre kid, and Koji, the jock, and then Yuuri who gets mistaken for being someone else from afar at least five times a day. Mari, the dreamer, and Koji, the fighter, and then Yuuri curled into himself at the bottom, the quiet one. 

The one who sits at the back of the class and wears the least 'out there' clothes, says the least 'out there' things and does the least 'out there' things because being 'out there' means staring the world in the face and saying, here, fuck you, take me as I am. And he thinks of Victor next to him, here, beaming in his coat, his shiny shoes, unapologetic, imposing. He’s the kind of person you’d take to war, the kind of person you’d want to be stranded on an island with. You’d let him catch you if you were to ever fall out of the sky. Or an oak tree at a playground in a town so small it’s an afterthought on any map. 

Sometimes Yuuri doesn’t know if he wants to be with that person or be that person. And maybe in the frenzy of it all, of wanting and caring and longing for, the lines blur so fast you tumble into both sides at once. 

Be with that person and be that person. 

If Mari were here to sift through his thoughts, she’d say, 'It’s all human and it’s all okay.' Maybe. To think these things. To want them. 

And he wants everything he had tonight. He wants the gait of a person who makes others wonder about who they are and where they came from, who loves them, who doesn’t, the way Mila does even now without her cheer skirt, soldier-sharp and not sorry for a single thing, like Koji and Phichit, Victor, Mari. All these people in his life who just are like they have the right to. 

Except maybe you’re never really given the right. Maybe you just take it for yourself, the way you have to take everything else in the world. And Yuuri wants to take. He wants to take without apologizing, overthinking, without twisting scenarios in his head and calculating every possible 

outcome on a checklist that never ends because he won’t let it. 

He wants to keep kissing Victor against parking meters and streetlights and storefronts, in ramen shops, make every waitress hate his guts. He wants to walk through this world like he’s ready to yank the sun out of the sky, and he wants to grab Victor by the collar of his shirt and tell him everything he hasn’t been able to, things he’s only ever thought about right before he falls asleep, when his caution tumbles and the truth is right there, close enough for him to catch. 

Yuuri rubs his thumb along Victor’s chin. He leans over to kiss his earlobe, the corner of his jaw, his cheek, the cracked ridge on his bottom lip. 

Leaning back in his seat, Yuuri stares up at the roof of the car. He doesn’t know if he wants to scream or laugh or cry, and he doesn’t get how you can think about everything at once and nothing at all, and how you can be so sad about being so happy, how you can love it as much as you hate it, but love that you hate it, and hate that you love it. He doesn’t understand why any of this makes him feel a little immense, a little everlasting. He has a love for the world he can’t explain. They're out there; he feels them, all these kids sitting in cars a million miles out of town. And they’re holding the hand of the only person who says their name the right way, the only way. They’re on the brink of something. Toe-to-cusp. 

Because maybe they know…if this is the first time it feels like this, then it might as well be the last. 

Chapter Text

Maybe it’s magic—conjury, diabolism (whatever the hell Mila’s mom could explain to you over peace pipes and hexed herbal teas). Maybe it’s the axis of the planet. Maybe they’re all tilted too far to the right, the left, not tilted enough. Maybe it’s orbital mechanics or incoming meteor showers or that thing with the butterflies where everything happens and happens and can’t stop happening. 

Yuuri’s trying to convince himself he’s not avoiding Victor, definitely not going out of his way to do it, but when it’s on his way—and Victor’s always, somehow, perfectly, impossibly, on his way—Yuuri feels ashamed for ducking, for looking away like he got caught. Because Victor’s there, always, leaning against a locker, at the dispensers refilling a bottle, bag lazily shucking off one shoulder. Victor, long and lean, flung into Yuuri’s circuit at every corner. 

Maybe it’s not the universe at all. Maybe it’s what Mari said about migrating birds, back when Yuuri was ten and tiny and she held everything, was so far in love her skin vibrated when she spoke about him and only him. Her secret him. 'They sense the planet’s magnetic north, and it’s crazy, and it’s instinct. So they go. Because they have to. Because they know and they know it so much. It’s like coming home, Yuuri. It’s like coming home.' 

Strung tight as a wire, Yuuri’s on high alert when the chime of the bell thrusts everyone from one class into another. The hallways flood, lockers whacking open, whacking closed. Someone snags the back of his foot, dislodging his shoe, sock half off, heel throbbing. "Ow. Seriously—" 

"Animals," Phichit yells after whoever dares shoulder between them, grabbing Yuuri’s arm and tearing him through the tide of backpacks and chirping phones. 

Yuuri reaches around, trying to prod his foot back into his shoe, stumbling, Phichit’s hand on his arm like a pipe vice. And when he looks up—because screw magic, screw butterflies and orbital mechanics and migrating birds—there he is, again and always, all hair gel, balmy smiles, standing at the end of the hallway in that new letterman he ordered, that shock of red, combustible, outshining all the others with their worn-out patches and numbers chipping. There are the cheer skirts, the ponytails, the ruffled scrunchies. There are the kids Victor paired up with for science projects, random study buddies, hurled into his orbit and unable to escape. All the space around him...taken. 

This was supposed to be easy. 

For what feels like the hundredth time this week, Phichit rolls his eyes and yanks Yuuri towards their lockers. "It’s like you die with your eyes open," he mumbles—which is better than that one time he told Yuuri it looked like he was trying to reenact an Animal Planet documentary. 'Stupid-hot snow leopard versus... gerbil.' 

The crowd around Victor scatters by the time Koji comes flailing through, jamming him against a wall, arms careening like he’s the inflatable tube man at Owen’s car dealership. Yuuri’s sure he’s going off on how he still can’t believe June Kunda agreed on tutoring him in algebra (but only because he panicked and belted out "Soul Provider" in the middle of the parking lot; June had to shut him up for the good of mankind). 

Koji’s so preoccupied spiraling down some pink-tights-induced hormonal crisis, he doesn’t notice Victor straightening, shooting Yuuri a smile. The sweetest fucking thing. The sweetest. 

And Phichit’s hand is still curled around Yuuri’s arm, and he’s babbling about the new English teacher —"Mara from chem says he used to be an underwear model. Shoot me." —and Yuuri’s losing his goddamned mind, too busy thinking about this morning, his left thigh still throbbing, that place Victor pressed his mouth to. Tender, open skin, all its nerves beneath, untucked. 

And these things inside boil over, simmer down, and Yuuri goes tumbling, and he wants him, always, always. He wants him everywhere, wants him more than when he slipped Yuuri that look this morning, still damp and sleep-warm, holding onto Yuuri’s waist when he tried to sneak off to the shower. 'Come on, there’s enough space for two,' tongue-pressed against the back of Yuuri’s neck. But Yuuri unlatched himself, felt like he was skinning himself alive every time he had to let go, sever, un-touch. Because they couldn’t risk it. Even at five AM when the rest of the house, half the world, was still asleep—they couldn’t risk it. 

✕✕✕ 

Lunch is as excruciating as always. Victor’s hair flares up just a few tables away. Chin in palm as he watches JJ stuff his ego down everyone’s throat, firing Yuuri these secret smiles, fizzing, electric. Zeus launching lightning bolts in broad daylight. Yuuri chokes on them, swallowing, has to tear himself away, over and over. 

Pushing his food across his plate, he tries to listen to Phichit’s Seung-gil-centric monologues. "It’s those beanies, swear to God. They’ve turned my life into a catastrophe." (Yuuri’s just thankful he’s done sending him collages of Victor’s face and his plastered over characters in Grease). 

Every once in a while, Mila nudges Yuuri’s knee with hers, shooting him worried looks when he loses the grip on his fork and it clatters against his plate. Because he’s dead with his eyes open. How could he forget. 

Yuuri looks back up—he can’t help it, he can never help it, never, never—and Victor’s watching him like he has all day, head crooked to the side, that soft swoop of hair, and Yuuri feels it, this big eager tugging, and he wants to fling his tray across the room, climb over table after table until he reaches him, until he can grab him by the shoulders and jostle him with kisses. Kiss him. God, he wants to kiss him. How could anyone go half a day without kissing him. Him. So much of him. The scoop between collarbones, the jut of knuckles and hips and elbows, shins, cheeks, wrists, hollows of knees, the solid arch from toe to ankle. Firm and alive and worthy of kissing, demanding to be kissed. 

Victor’s eyes dip, going dark. He gets up. Yuuri blinks, dizzy when he bumbles to his feet so fast he knee-jabs Mila in the ribs. "Sorry. Can you take my tray away? Thanks. I’m going to the, yeah, toilet. Going to the toilet." 

"With your fork?" That amused curl to Mila’s mouth when she pries the fork out of his grip. Yuuri lets go, flexing fingers, feeling nothing. What do hands feel like? What does anything feel like? 

His head whips up. Victor’s out the double doors. 

"Hey, I wasn’t finished!" Phichit yells when Yuuri stumbles through the maze of tables. The jab of a crumpled napkin against his head. He ignores it and picks up the pace. 

He’s after him. He’d follow him to the ends of anything. Mad Hatter, Merlin, Atlas of the Universe. 

The red of Victor’s sneakers winks at Yuuri from the end of a hallway, their soft crunch and squeak on the linoleum. Skidding to a stop, Victor slips into a classroom. Yuuri slows down when the pirate-bearded hall monitor stares after him, shoulders bulking like he’s ready to tackle whoever dares to so much as speedwalk. 

And Yuuri lurches around. He’s a spinning top, pivoting from one room to the next. He’s out of breath when he feels a sharp tug on his sweater. He sighs, and it’s so much relief, and he’s stumbling back, and he’s glad to. 

The sound of a door clicking closed. His spine slides against a wall. Victor’s mouth on him. Victor’s mouth. Opening, closing. The slipping of tongues. Hands in hair, pockets of jeans. 

"Hi." Victor’s voice feels like fog in his mouth. "Hi," Yuuri says, grins, tightens his grip on Victor’s hair, and his head falls back when those lips travel—chin to cheek to jaw to there—pressing into that sacred spot hiding behind the hood of Yuuri’s earlobe, popping it open like a locket, filling it with breath, humming against him, humming him full, lashes scraping skin. 

The soft thwack of lips when they part. Forehead to forehead, they sway, Victor’s hands around Yuuri’s jaw, Yuuri’s hands everywhere else, in Victor’s hair, around his throat, shoulders, torso, feeling the swell of lungs when he breathes in, breathe out. He rubs his knuckles across every rib, counting to make sure they’re all there, counting them like mala beads. 

Victor stoops down, humming into that spot again, breath boiling hot enough to feel damp against Yuuri’s neck. They’re still swaying, the beat slow enough to wedge the ground back under Yuuri’s feet. In another universe, Victor’s mouth is labelled with a caution sign: Brain-Evaporation Hazard! Watch Out for Liquid Limbs! 

Yuuri tears his mouth open, gulping down one big breath after another. His eyes shudder closed, fingers bolted into Victor’s letterman, new, smooth velvet. Victor tightens his arms around him, face digging into Yuuri’s neck, his sharp prick of teeth. Yuuri swallows. Victor hums. Yuuri’s dying. 

It’s slow and filthy, and batting his eyes open, his attention sticks to the corkboard by the windows, pin-sprinkled, all time tables and schedules and birthday dates scribbled across a splotchy, unhappy-looking party plate. 

This is school. He’s in school, and Victor’s ruining this room for him too. Just like he ruined his bedroom, every crevice and corner at home, the back of his stupid Ford Mustang, the front of his stupid Ford Mustang, the portrait-lined wall by the front door (now missing a picture of six-year-old Koji massacring an ice cream sundae—still on the kitchen counter waiting for a new frame). 

Yuuri catches himself counting like it’s part of a checklist, or maybe a countdown clock. All the places he’ll have me in until he’s ruined this whole town. 

Right now they feel like keepsakes. But sometimes he wonders how long it takes until keepsakes turn into unwanted reminders. 

Victor’s mouth urges Yuuri back, unmooring him, and it’s tongues again, hands and tangled legs, and right now it’s is a keepsake, this room and all the things that are happening in it. 

The bell rings, shredding through the sound of Victor’s breath on his cheek, the ruffle of sweaters bunched up, knuckles nicking skin. 

"One more," Victor mumbles, smiling, pressing his mouth against Yuuri’s, humming into it again, leaning in. Yuuri gasps, hands pressed to Victor’s chest—big and sound—and he counts down from ten, then again because he can’t make up his mind. He starts from thirty, fifty, and finally, finally, after one more try, he pushes him away. "Okay, just— " Victor’s mouth cuts him off, his hands, just as big and sound as his chest, everywhere. 

It’s so easy to tumble right back, to think,You missed a spot, here and there and here and over here. Put them here. Pleaseplease. Put them here. Put them here. 

Another smack of mouths. The clink of the doorknob. 

Yuuri shoves Victor off so fast he goes numb from the whiplash. Stumbling back against a table, Victor’s hands scramble, grabbing the closest chair as he tries to lean against it, body sliding into something unruffled, easy. Yuuri hates him for it. There he is, Victor, as poised as a dancer, and Yuuri’s left with half of himself scattered across the floor, and he’s breathing funny, and his brain’s still mush, and he still needs. He needs and needs. 

A girl trudges into the room, headphones on, beats thrumming. Tossing her backpack onto a nearby table, she looks up. Her brows clinch. 

Victor clears his throat. He smiles but Yuuri catches the cracks in it, those perfect bits he chiseled off when their mouths mashed together. He wants to reach out, chisel off the rest. Heading out the door, Victor slinks past a stream of kids pouring in. They bump each other’s shoulders, mumbling, staring after him. 

Yuuri swallows. The girl with the headphones is still looking at him, fiddling with the cord looped around her neck. Pulling his sweater down, he ducks his head and rushes out of the room. Bumping into groups of students, fighting his way through the after-lunch torrent, he ends up stumbling to the nearest bathroom and barricading himself in a stall. Forehead pressed to door. 

"Fuck..." His brain’s sticky, nothing but sludge, thoughts paddling through a Victor-soaked swampland. He stares at the tent in his pants. 

Yuuri swears he’s fourteen again, locking himself in the bathroom four times a day because everything’s tingling and everything’s on fire. And he can’t breathe, pressure building, like when you’re spilling your guts, like when you need to say something, need to say it so much, when you’re strangled, gagging, when someone’s got their hands wrapped around your throat just for you to find out they’re your own. 

Yuuri wants to crunch himself into a ball and just think about him. All he wants to do is think about him. 

Groaning, he knocks his head against the door again, waiting for the world to put itself back together. Somewhere in the back of his brain, he knows he’s late for class. His phone won’t stop vibrating, probably Phichit having a panic attack. 

Blinking, Yuuri backs away from the door, eyes clinging to the gibberish scrawled across the stall, names and smileys and backbiting. (Mila says the girls’ bathrooms are prettier. 'More hearts. More scandals. Haikus.') 

He stares at a familiar black smudge, an oil spill among the mess. Yuuri presses his fingers to it, 

remembering that time he armed himself with a Sharpie and slashed out the bullshit until there was no ink left. Something about Victor and dicks. His phone number. 

Touching it like this, feeling the chipped ink against his nails. 

It’s easier to think you can do things right, have things and take them for yourself, when you’re miles out of town, buzzed on city lights and shamelessness, of feeling like, for the first time in your life, you can have it all and let yourself be had by it. 

And when Yuuri’s on his own, when no one’s around to see his thoughts leak down his face, he falls back into that night. The feeling of Victor’s hand on his neck, soaked in a pillar of streetlight, soaked in the feeling of him, soaked in the hope and the wish and the need, let me remember this forever. There’s a hatch at the bottom of him, this secret sanctum in time, where it’s stashed away, double-locked tight. 

Now Yuuri’s in this stuffy stall, with his head full of sludge and the weird new strangeness of secrecy, and he doesn’t know what lies on the other side of it, of something covered being uncovered. 

What does it feel like? 

He knows Victor’s never known anything but, knows he’s been living stripped bare his whole life, and that he meant it when he looked at Yuuri on Friday, the two of them sitting in his car at the end of the night, back home, back where neither of them wanted to be ever again, and Victor took his hand and said, 'It’s different here. This town, this place ruins things.' A silent understanding between them. An agreement. 

What does it feel like? Yuuri can’t help thinking it. What does it feel like to be spotlit forever? To have your name carved into bathroom stalls? To have everyone care? 

What would they feel like? Together? What about a kiss? What does a kiss feel like with all the doors open and the curtains pulled back and the walls down. 

✕✕✕ 

Yuuri wonders about it the most at home, where they used to have sleepovers on the trampoline and hid beneath the porch during hide-and-seek, the place where everything began. 

Victor slides his foot against Yuuri’s calf during dinner, and Yuuri watches his mom and his dad and Koji fight over the last piece of unagi, and he wonders, just for a moment, if things would change, how they’d shift, if they’d shift at all. 

What would it feel like? 

And when he’s standing by the sink afterwards, rubbing shoulders with Victor as they scrub plates, Koji tornadoing into the kitchen—and Yuuri doesn’t back off as fast as he should, lingering there for a second. His elbow to Victor’s. 

"So." Koji claps his hands. "As we all know, your boy’s gotta hot date on Friday." 

Victor snorts. "She said she’d tutor you." 

"It’s code. She said it all...sexy. Which, you know—date. It means date." 

"She was literally shouting at you," Yuuri says, scratching dried rice out of a pot, remembering 

how June’s neck bulged when she tried to yell over Koji’s tone-deaf crooning. 

"Yeah." Koji nods. "Sexy." 

In his head, Yuuri’s strapping him to a chair and tearing his eyelashes out with a tweezer. 

"It’s body lingo," Koji says, whacking his hands towards Yuuri. "It’s fucking chemistry. Something you wouldn’t understand." 

Victor turns towards him, pigeon-puffing his chest like he’s about to challenge the guy to a jousting duel. 

Koji doesn’t seem to notice, lifting himself onto the kitchen counter, kicking a rhythm into the cabinets below. He sighs. "Anyways, I need something to wear." Nudging his head towards Victor. "You’re helping." 

"When have you ever felt self-conscious about looking like a trash bag," Yuuri says, cracking a smile when Victor kicks his shin. 

"Said the trash bag related to the other trash bag," Koji snaps. "It’s June, okay? Queen of the... mathletes. And she dresses like Martha Stewart, and she says stuff like 'non sesqueteer'." 

"Non sequitur," Victor corrects, and it’s kind of hot and Yuuri wants to kind of, very much, kiss him. 

"Exactly!" Koji leans back, head knocking against the cupboards. He grunts. "You need to make me look smart, man." 

Yuuri wonders how confused it must make him to be attracted to a girl with an IQ higher than a spoon’s. He can’t stop laughing, and Koji throws a ladle at him, and Victor does the pigeon-puff thing again, and it’s stupid, and Yuuri kind of, very much likes it. 

✕✕✕ 

Yuuri charges at him the second his door opens, wrapping himself around him like a giant koala, arms around his neck, legs fastened against his hips. Victor chuckles, gripping into Yuuri’s thighs as he shushes him, trying to nudge the door closed without waking anyone. 

Sighing, Yuuri digs his face into Victor’s neck. "Please tell me you made him look stupid." He breathes in all that leftover cologne. 

Victor shucks him up, jiggling him like a puppet, making him cackle. He steers towards the bed, maneuvering them over scattered socks, highlighters, the scrambled physics homework Yuuri tried to brawl his way through, slumped across the floor by the end of it with his brain steaming. 

"Actually, he looks kind of nice in proper jeans." 

"Disgusting." 

"Yuuri." A snort. Yuuri whips his head up and pecks him on the mouth—twice because he likes the way it sounds, smack-smack, the way it feels, needle-prick, electric-zap. 

He flails when Victor throws him onto the bed. 

"I feel so sorry for her." Yuuri sprawls across the sheets. "How are we part of the same family? What if he’s adopted and we just don’t know? What if some white nurse jumbled up the babies because we all look the same? What if my real brother is out there winning Nobel prizes and we’re stuck with this...human cabbage." 

"Okay, interesting choice of vegetable." Victor flops into the free space next to him, mattress wobbling, frame keening. (Yuuri has no idea how his bed has kept up with all the late-night action. Victor’s too afraid to touch the headboard now, after having popped it off like a Lego block one night. Yuuri didn’t think that was going to be a thing for him—but Victor’s giant hands accidentally disassembling furniture is a thing for him. A really great, fantastic thing.) 

Yuuri twists around to face him. "We should warn her." 

"I’m sure she can handle herself just fine." Victor runs his thumb along Yuuri’s brow, humming. Always humming. Hand hooked around Yuuri’s neck, he pulls him close. "Missed you today." 

Yuuri’s the one to snort this time. He’s getting better at it. "We saw each other, like, every hour." 

"Not the way I wanted to." Low and muttered. Victor grips into Yuuri’s hips, rolls them over, legs locked against him, pressing him down. 

Yuuri swears in the center of the mattress, in that beaten patch where it dips the most, worn out by the shape of you, that’s where everything happens, where everything hits harder, where you feel so much and think so little. And Victor kisses him and kisses him until his brain unwires. Yuuri’s gutted. He’s drifting. 

Moving on their own, his hands tangle around Victor’s neck, hanging on because there’s nothing else left to do when he holds you like this. 

And it’s only been a few nights—Victor in his bed with his hands on him and in him and everywhere else—but Yuuri catches himself, that fear that after one night too many, Victor will have found out all of his tricks and surprises. He’ll be done with him. On to the next. 

So maybe it’s pride or maybe it’s relief, every time Yuuri catches the way Victor’s eyelids twitch when he touches him, knowing Victor feels him in places too, knowing he’s reached something. Tugged the right lever, lit the right match. Sometimes he’ll give Yuuri more, a surprise smile that creeps up on him, a real one, strong and honest, that, finally, unfurls his face the way his real smiles do. And Yuuri will look up at him, marveling, musing, speaking to the universe, I do this to you. 

For those little moments, he knows he’s still in, that this still matters and this still fits, that it’s his and it’s real, and he’s still dying. 

Yuuri tries to keep up, panting for things, fumbling because he’s still trying to understand how they work together. Hands and feet and knees and elbows. Nails scraping and bones popping. Hair in mouth. And skin. There’s so much skin. 

Is this okay? Does this feel good? Do you know? Do I? 

Victor mouthes along Yuuri’s crooked thumb, kisses the back of his head, that patch of scar tissue where no hair grows, traces the star-shaped scar on his knee. Because Victor knows these things about him, and Yuuri knows these things about Victor too. All his body-stories uncovered, laid bare just for him, from the soccer injury on his right ankle to the notch on his wrist left by a carelessly swung cigarette. 

Yuuri traces a path between, connect-the-dots, x-meets-the-spots of the old operation scar curling down Victor’s heel. He feeds off the way Victor’s breath hitches in the dark, higher, higher. Their mouths meet in the middle. 

"Yuuri," Victor says, and there’s something about talking with your tongues touching that makes it the dirtiest, most intimate thing he’s ever felt. Speaking right into someone’s mouth, all breath and soggy words. Because maybe there’s more there, thoughts trickling through, the things you decide to save for later. Save forever. 

Yuuri doesn’t know who falls asleep first. He doesn’t know who wakes first, either. He’s been stumbling through weird sleeping patterns, having trouble sleeping with someone else around, especially with someone who makes him want to fight sleep so hard he shakes with it. 

They sleep, they don’t, they sleep, they can’t. They end up awake in the early morning hours, touching or not touching, listening to each other breathe. 

Yuuri sniffles, rolling over and feeling Victor’s hand reach for him, tugging him closer. Victor’s eyes are open and glassy in the dark. Nothing but night water. 

There’s something that happens at four AM. Something that happens to the two of them. Things are different at night, when skins unzip and faces fall. Yuuri wishes he could turn the lights on and see what Victor looks like, open, everything running wild. Touching his face, Yuuri lets his fingers wander across his cheeks, the smooth slide of his nose, trying to read him like this, trying to feel for all the things that are alive there. 

"Your room’s right across from mine," Victor says, breath warm and sour, and it takes Yuuri a few moments to understand what those words mean strung together. Blinking, he realizes Victor’s looking past him. 

He turns. The curtains ripple to the side every time the breeze hits, cool air climbing into the room through the open window. 

And there, on the other side of the street, there, with the satellite dish scooped like a silver pond, windows barricaded by sealed curtains, drawbridge tucked tight—Victor’s house and everything in it. 

Every time Yuuri looks out of his window, he sees nothing but a reminder. It hooks into him, yanks him out of this place Victor and him have built, where they don’t speak about these things, don’t think about them, a place for forgetting. But Yuuri looks at that house, and everything is real again and heavy, and he remembers the way Victor felt in his arms that night in the laundry room. He remembers what Victor looks like when he sneaks out at night, scaling the fence around that house, his shock of bright hair blazing. He remembers, how just a few weeks ago, Dina made the whole town shake. 

He remembers but then he forgets, because Victor coaxes him into bed and puts his hands on him and touches away all the worry and the ache, touches away all the parts of the world Yuuri’s too scared to wrap his head around. 

Looking at Victor in the dark, Yuuri wonders if maybe Victor can’t bear to wrap his head around those things either. 

"I used to watch you," Victor says so quietly Yuuri isn’t sure he’s fully awake. "I remember that time you and Mari were dancing." 

Leaning in close, he wraps an arm around Yuuri, fingers trailing along the knobs of his spine. Yuuri shakes his head. "I don’t remember..." 

"Long time ago," Victor says. "Music was so loud the whole block could hear it." 

Yuuri huffs at that, remembering so-loud-the-block-could-hear-it was the only way Mari knew how to listen to music. The Clash and Dead Kennedys blowing the house to bits, her furious feet-trampling shaking the light fixtures in the living room. 

"Sounds about right," Yuuri says, swallowing when Victor’s fingers reach the bottom of his spine, digging in there, lingering, until they trail back up. 

"She’d sit on the roof," he says. 

"In the dark," Yuuri says. "Smoking." Waiting. Speaking to the night. 

Victor nods. "She was the coolest person in the world." A smile thawing his words. Yuuri smiles too. He wonders if that’s why Victor ended up sitting on his window ledge. 

Those nights Yuuri would spot him there, back when that house glowed white, always, mystical, a dream palace for three. The way Victor’s funny thirteen-year-old body would pour out of his window, skinny legs dangling, arms like the technicolored Sticky Hands Koji used to slap against doors and windows and Yuuri’s face when he least expected it. Victor’s feet too big. His face too full, cluttered like a treasure trove. 

Yuuri never knew he was out there watching Mari too. Everything they wanted to be and need and find, forever. 

"Did you see me?" Victor asks, and he asks this so carefully and quietly Yuuri wonders if he’s falling asleep again. 

He thinks of Victor on his window ledge, floating through the kitchen, the hallways, his Mustang revving in the dark, midnight thunder, window rolled down with his arm dangling there, as smooth and pale as a gum tree. 

Yuuri swallows. "Sometimes." 

"You didn’t look hard enough," Victor says, and Yuuri doesn’t know what that means, doesn’t know if he’s awake enough to ask. But it sounds so sad and curled-in, and Yuuri holds him close, sees nothing but blue in the dark. 

The Victor in his bed at four AM is nothing but secrets. 

And Yuuri, wonder-bristled, mystified, Yuuri at four AM is Yuuri at fourteen, hand picking at the frayed waistband of his boxers, wondering what Victor’s fingers feel like in his mouth, in his hair, 

in all the places he can’t touch like that because he’s afraid of what he might find. 

Yuuri at four AM wondering, Victor at four AM unknowable. They’re two ships on opposite ends of a tide. 

✕✕✕ 

Friday. They have the house to themselves. No waiting. No sneaking around. Yuuri’s thinking takeout and Friends and the living room couch. 

Koji’s off trying to woo June with proper jeans, and their parents are cooped up at Little Rome for Date Night (Mom allowed Dad a cheat day, which means he’s there for the fettuccine and not his wife). 

After practice, Victor drives Yuuri out of town, the two of them shower-damp and sore, too tired to talk. Swaying back and forth as the car curls through twisting roads, cradled by woods and sky. It’s too cold to drive with the windows down but they do, wind blasting, punching them into the seats and tearing at their hair. 

Every once in a while Yuuri’s hand scoops over Victor’s on the gearshift, fingers running over knuckles, the winding loops of veins. And it’s quiet. It’s so quiet it’s deafening, and it’s so deafening Yuuri can’t think. It’s good like this. 

Leaning against Victor’s arm, seatbelt pinching his neck, Yuuri sinks his mouth into Victor’s hair, still wet, breathing in the soft dew of shampoo. It makes Victor smiles, and he twists his head at the next red light, their mouths mashing, clumsy and aimless, the clatter of teeth. "You make me want to pull over," Victor mumbles. 

Yuuri smiles, kisses him again. "Then pull over." And Victor does, laughing, filling Yuuri’s mouth with it. Seatbelts sliding off and hands going haywire. Everything smells like shampoo, deodorant. Everything, fuck, everything smells like you. 

It’s so easy. 

This is their place, where Yuuri forgets, where he doesn’t have to think about bathroom slander and what-would-it-feel-likes and all the things he remembers when he looks out of his bedroom window. 

It’s easy. Except when it isn’t, and Yuuri feels that place, their place, fade quicker and quicker every time they pull away. 

One bag of animal crackers later—leftovers of decapitated sheep, one lonely revenge-hungry elephant sitting in the crumbs of his herd—they hum along to MGMT, veering down their street. 

And this is it, their little town that ruins things: Victor’s phone vibrates in the cup holder, a jumble of numbers flickering across the screen, no name. 

It’s dark out. The motor stutters to a stop in the driveway. Yuuri feels it jolt something inside, the snuff of the engine snuffing him out too. He looks at Victor; Victor looks away, and his mouth moves slowly when he says, "I’ll see you inside." Blue. 

Yuuri swallows. He still smells shampoo, tastes it, still feels like he’s dipped in summer, the phantom-chafe of the leather backseats against his cheek. Just moments ago they were fighting about who got to have the last hippo cracker. 

It was supposed to stay easy. It’s Friday. They were going to eat potstickers and throw their chopsticks at the TV every time Ross acts like a sociopath. Yuuri wanted to kiss Victor on the couch. Not-Blue Victor. 

But Blue Victor is sitting right next to him, staring at his phone. Maybe it’s selfishness or fear, force of an old habit, the easiness of sidestepping that’s too tempting for Yuuri not to give in. Maybe he’s done this too many times not to. Maybe he can’t help looking away when he shouldn’t. 

Yuuri reaches for his backpack, the door handle, the slide of cool leather as he stumbles onto the asphalt. Everything sways. Victor’s phone shakes and shakes and shakes. 

Yuuri’s up the porch, that one wobbly step creaking under his weight. He fumbles with his keys, looking back, watching Victor get out of the car and shuffle to the sidewalk. He stares at the house on the other side of the street. That phone buzzing, furious, a pesky yellowjacket drilling its wings. 

Yuuri pulls himself away. Because it’s Friday. Because it’s supposed to be easy. Because maybe if he doesn’t see it, it’s not there. 

Shouldering the door open, Yuuri catches one last look of Victor before it swings closed, crushing him from view. 

The low rumble of his voice. The silence of that house. 

Yuuri flings his backpack into a corner, rushing to the kitchen and opening the fridge like he needs to keep his hands busy, his brain. Sticking his head into its cool white belly, he breathes, in, out, scrunching his nose when the smell of sour milk hits. He closes his eyes. He sees blue. He flings the fridge closed, bottles and Tupperware clinking. He sneaks to the window, blinds bristled by breath, fingers wedged between the plastic blades as he pushes them apart, peeking through. 

Victor’s standing on the edge of the sidewalk, closer to the street now, leaning over it like he’s looking in. The concrete in the dark like something alive, rocking, lapping. Yuuri thinks about widow’s walks, about planks jutting off the edge of pirate ships. 

Hands in his pockets, Victor stands there. His hair is still damp, curling carefully the way it does when he skips the blowdryer. Yuuri stills feels it tickling his hands, feels it the way he did just moments ago, in the backseat of Victor’s car, far, far away. 

But now they’re here, and that house glares down at the both of them. Something inside of it stirring, roused and watchful. 

Victor’s hand jerks out of his pocket, twitching through the air, and his voice rises enough for Yuuri to hear. Just when he thinks he’s caught something, the shred of a word, a name, maybe—Victor lowers his phone. 

Yuuri inches away from the window. His breath strains through his throat. He swallows. It’s silent. He waits, hoping he’ll hear the sound of Victor’s shoes on the gravel, the porch, that one squeaky step at the top. The way he’ll say Yuuri’s name in the hallway. 

But all he hears is the car door open, slam shut, engine revving. He thinks his hearing might be clogged, clogged the way everything about him has been clogged these past few days. But it’s the engine, loud and purring. 

Yuuri rushes outside, loose sneaker tripping over a notch in the driveway. Face lit up by the dashboard, Victor sits in his car. 

"Vic?" Yuuri knocks on the window, knocks again, knocks until Victor rolls it down. He looks up at Yuuri like he could be looking at anyone. 

Yuuri knows this face, knows its mechanics, all the screws bolted shut, no seam left frayed, no space to squeeze even a finger through, a thought. Impenetrable. 

"What happened?" Yuuri leans in close, bending his knees like he’s about to climb through the window to hold him tight. Victor swallows, hands around the steering wheel. "Nothing," he says. And Yuuri knows that voice too, that voice that sounds like a heart monitor flatlining. 

"Don’t do that." Yuuri shakes his head. "No, don’t do that. Come on." He reaches in, fingers curling around Victor’s wrist, the only dainty thing about him—bones fine, soft grooves of muscle—tightening the pressure when Victor’s grip around the steering wheel wavers. "Come inside. We don’t have to watch Friends. I know you don’t like it that much, and I’m sorry for forcing it on you. We can watch something else. We can do whatever you want. We can talk. We can—" 

"Yuuri." Yuuri like Anyone. The mouth that says his name like that is the same mouth that kissed him just an hour ago. 

Victor shakes his head. "I just need to get out of here." 

"Okay." Yuuri nods. He tries to understand how he feels about Victor pulling his hand away. "Yeah, okay. Okay, do you want me to come with—" 

"No," Victor snaps, softens. Something moving in the corner of his face. "I just..." He scratches the back of his neck, red patches sprouting there. He looks away. Impenetrable all over again. 

Yuuri wants to take a sledgehammer to his face, a shovel to dig and dig. He wants to pry Victor open with his bare hands. 

Do you want me to get in? Will you get mad if I don’t? Do you need to be alone? What do you want me to do? What the hell do you want me to do? 

And in an hour—when he’s alone, sprawled across the living room couch and hurling his chopsticks at Ross’ TV-fuzzed face—Yuuri will know what he should’ve done, what he should’ve said, what he shouldn’t have let happen. In his head, where everything is easy and he does everything right. 

But right now Yuuri doesn’t know what to say. Right now, he watches the car rock back, Victor’s foot easing pressure off the breaks. Right now, Victor reaches out for Yuuri’s hand and squeezes it once, twice, before he backs out of the driveway. 

Yuuri stands there watching the tail lights flicker down the street, feeling it untwist something, a memory playing over and over again in his head. All those times he watched Victor sneak out into the world at night. All those times Yuuri felt shut out from the things Victor felt out there, craved and chased after, all the things he ran from. 

✕✕✕ 

Opening the door wearing heart-shaped glasses, a nurse costume wedged over his T-shirt and sweats, Phichit lets him in. 

Yuuri doesn’t ask about the getup. Phichit doesn’t ask why he’s here. He gives him the rundown, "Mom’s not home. Mila’s here. You’re just in time for Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horror. Drink?" 

Yuuri sighs. "Yeah, that would be—Yeah." 

He’s tired and muddled, and his legs ache from riding through town trying to find a stupid Ford Mustang, veering down every street, barely dodging red lights and dogwalkers, because it’s Friday night, and Victor’s out there somewhere, and Yuuri can’t think—can’t think when he’s with him, can’t think when he’s not. 

And it’s that big rush of relief when Mila smiles at him from the couch, a pink feather boa puffed around her neck. She looks just as ridiculous as she looks worried, but she doesn’t ask either. Instead, cocking a brow, she tosses something towards him. A flimsy police badge. 

"We found a kink box in the back of his mom’s closet," she says. 

Phichit rolls his eyes. "Stop calling it that." Handing Yuuri a glass of something that smells like pineapple and drain cleaner. "They’re old Halloween costumes," he says. 

"You sure?" With a finger, Mila lifts a pair of fluffy handcuffs. 

Yuuri jerks, flinging the badge onto the coffee table and feeling stupid for wiping his hands on his pants. Mila laughs, full rubber-ball thunder, screeching when Phichit kicks her until she scoots up the couch. He slumps into the free spot, looking up at Yuuri. "So you want to talk about it?" He shoves the heart-shaped glasses into his hair. "Or do you want to watch Snoop Dogg narrate a bunch of zombies painting a mural with someone’s brain matter?" 

Yuuri stares down at his glass. An hour ago, Victor said Yuuri’s name like he’d forgotten who he was. He said, ’Nothing.’ Low and empty like he made sure to chisel off all the edges until it was more of a black hole than a word. 

And one hour later, Yuuri still doesn’t know what he should’ve said. But it’s Friday. It’s the empty Snickers packets scattered on the carpet in Phichit’s living room, the crumb-infested bowls. A lonely bottle of Bombay Sapphire rolling across the floor. It’s Mila’s fierce slash of a smile and Phichit fanning that stupid skirt. And for a moment, it’s the way it used to be, back when none of them had their heads full of secret special someones, and it was just this. This is easy. Yuuri cracks. 

He grabs the badge from the table and crashes into the space between them, Mila’s feather boa in his face, Phichit’s skirt tickling, and they flinch their way through all of Snoop Dogg’s Hoods of Horrors, drinking every time someone’s ass crowds the screen. Phichit posts a picture of one on his Instagram ('Booty and brain matter, baby!'). Mila falls asleep for the rest of the movie but jerks awake when Lynda Day George starts screaming, "BASTAAAARD!" during Pieces. Phichit leaps onto the coffee table, fists clenched as he howls along with her. 

And Mila’s cackling into her fourth, fifth, hundredth drink, face almost as pink as the feather boa tangled around her throat, and she smacks her hands against Yuuri’s cheeks, pulls him close. Phichit tells them to get a room. She smells like Cheetos and perfume, bursts of pineapple-sour, and she sways his head back and forth, they’re bobbing through waves, and she looks at him like she knows. Maybe Yuuri’s had too much drain cleaner, maybe he imagines her saying this, maybe he says this himself. "Whatever it is, it’s going to be okay." The sureness of it, unyielding. 

Mila smiles. It’s so much. It’s all of the world. And it stays there, smoothed across her face, even once they’re sitting on the floor of Phichit’s pantry, stuffing themselves full of canned frosting (because they’re disgusting), drinking from his mom’s expensive stash of Whistlepig (because they’re disgusting). 

"It’s supposed to taste like...earthy allspice whisper," Yuuri reads the label on the back of the bottle, trying to swallow away the bitter fumes tapered to his tongue. "Sour cherry essence...Who comes up with this stuff?" 

"This is ass." Mila’s feather boa floats when she whips her head back and forth, smacking her lips together. 

"That’s a ten-year-old rye whiskey, you best believe it’s ass," Phichit says, thumbing through his phone. 

Mila giggles, tipping backwards and spreading herself across the floor. She fiddles with a hole in Yuuri’s sock when he starts spacing out, falling away, thinking of him, always thinking of him. He gives her a tired smile. All night she’s been trying to shake him out of it. 

A movie’s still playing in the living room—Killer Klowns from Outer Space—a Scream Queen’s piercing wail almost drowning out the sound of Phichit whacking his head against a shelf, gasping. "How the hell did I not know about Chris’ party?" He thumbs through pictures pinging across the screen. "Seung-gil’s there. Everyone’s there. How is everyone there? How did we not—" Phichit stops, fingers flicking, zooming in on a picture, zooming out. He shoves his phone into Yuuri’s face. 

It’s JJ, his unmistakable grin cracking the screen in half. But there next to him, staring into the camera like it caught him by surprise, Victor’s eyes wide, bloodshot and blown blue in the punch of light. Grabbing the phone, Yuuri cradles it close. He zooms in on Victor’s face. Soft dip of lips, tongue there, that strain between brows he wishes he could knead away. 

Victor looks like that, and Yuuri goes tumbling into a memory he wishes he could forget: Koji’s panicked voice fizzing through his phone, the Mustang flung across a parking lot, the lake, Victor’s hair, the sound he made when Koji hauled him into the bathtub. 

Mila’s head wobbles up when she looks at Yuuri, looks at Phichit. Something in her face falters. She blinks, bumbling forward and prying the phone out of Yuuri’s hands. She grabs the Whistlepig. 

"I’m taking the ass whiskey to go." 

Yuuri’s wading through a dream. 

✕✕✕ 

Chris’ house flares up around him, smoke-jammed, rattling, bass like drumfire. Heads and hands and feet. Someone’s long hair slaps him in the face, fish-hooked into the corner of his mouth, tugging. 

Phichit dives into the crowd, the frills of his skirt rippling in the dim lights. Mila’s hand around Yuuri’s, until it isn’t anymore, his palm left clenching around air. Her mouth to his ear. "I’ll make sure he doesn’t do anything crazy," she says. Brushing his hair out of the way, sliding his glasses up his nose. "Go," she mouthes, her lips, gooey with lipgloss, softly popping. 

And it’s that look again and that smile, that understanding, knowing that none of this makes sense and never will, that it’s inside-out and upside-down, it’s everything, it’s nothing—’Nothing,’ Victor said and it wasn’t a word—and it’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay. 

Her nails dribble across his cheek. There’s frosting in the corner of her mouth, but she’s gone before Yuuri has the chance to wipe it away. He’s left twirling, dizzy, bumping into shoulders, shins, someone’s solo cup, cool liquid seeping into the front of his sweater. "Watch it," someone sighs or yells or sings. Yuuri’s brain is soaked in ten-year-old whiskey and he can’t tell the difference, can’t tell if he’s sighing, yelling, singing anything back. 

He fights his way up the stairs once he’s circled the ground floor, keeping a lookout for a burst of silver, a shade of blue. The carpeted steps tacky with abandoned plates, more cups, a cluster of cigarettes rammed into a piece of half-eaten cake. 

His hand trails the family photos lining the wall. Mostly cats and Chris’ mom—bouquet and sash, beauty pageant dazzle—former Miss Linhedge five years in a row. He spots a single picture of Chris and his dad wedged between all the tiaras, the toothpaste-commercial grins. Quiet, smiling with their mouths closed. 

Upstairs, the hallway is just as cluttered as the rest of the house, kids twisted around each other, pressed up against walls, whispering, kissing, a long line snaking to the bathroom. The music’s muffled. A door shudders open, shudders closed. Two girls shouldering past him, their hands clustered, hair swinging. Someone’s laughing. Maybe they’re crying. Yuuri hears it in the walls. "Hurry the fuck up." A guy drums his fists against the bathroom door. 

This hallway, with its carpeting threadbare and baby blue, the bowls of potpourri, vinyl wallpaper peeling. Yuuri remembers. 

Captain Morgan. Door. Room. Bed. Victor. Girl. A dark blur where her face should be, like he pressed a cigarette to the memory, scorched her out, didn’t want her there. And he thinks of her now, thinks and thinks of her until her whole body’s on fire, charred for good. 

His hands move on their own, opening doors, yanking at the locked ones, knocking and knocking, pushing his way through the crowd. He calls Victor. He still won’t pick up. 

Yuuri sways, back against a wall. Chris’ mom beams at him from a glitter-framed portrait across the hallway, big hair chunked around her head like butterscotch pudding. He’s on the verge of calling Koji when his phone buzzes. A text from Phichit, Found him in the basement. 

Yuuri rushes downstairs, tripping over plastic plates, cake on his shoes. He ignores it. 

The music in the basement is louder, obnoxious. It’s just the way he remembers it, the splotchy floorboards, the reclining sofas as big as beached whales, air thick and stuffy like they’re hunched in a bunker. 

Everyone’s cheering around a tarp-tucked pool table, slick with spilled beer, toppled cups. Balls darting through the air like bullets. 

"Trick shot! Drink up, dick cheese!" On the other side of the room, JJ clambers onto Chris’ shoulders. "Kings of Pong!" he roars before Chris loses his balance and slams him into a ceiling beam. 

Yuuri pushes his way around the pool table, dodging rioting elbows, table tennis balls, a group of girls trying to kiss JJ's forehead better. And there, sprawled across the sofas, playing with the label of his beer, face curtained by hair, there he is. 

Yuuri feels the world drop onto his shoulders, drop away. Because it’s like with migrating birds. Because he follows, he has to. Because he knows it and knows it so much, all he can do is give up and give in. 

Victor doesn’t look up when Yuuri looms over him, the tips of his cake-smeared shoes nudging red Chucks. He bumps their knees together, a tender knock, a beat down low. Shuffling closer. Victor’s head lolls up. He blinks slowly, comatose, his face out of focus, that telltale flush budding across the bridge of his nose, eating away at his cheeks. He looks at Yuuri like he’s looking through him, until he isn’t, until his shoulders jerk, eyes darting from Yuuri’s face to his chest to his feet, to his face again. 

"Hey," Yuuri says, words swallowed by the booming bass and JJ’s demands for an ambulance. Victor’s nose crinkles and he sways a little when he tries to look past Yuuri, body stiffening like he’s trying to sober up. He shifts away. Yuuri shifts closer, keeps their knees pressed together. 

And it feels stupid for this to mean so much, the relief to know that Victor’s here and he’s okay. It’s the drinking and the awful, awful music and the thought of everyone hopelessly tangled into someone for a night, and how here, of all places, in the midst of water bottle bongs and spilled beer, nothing matters until Monday morning. 

Right now it’s sloppy Snapchat videos and secrets and stolen touches in the bathroom with the door locked. It’s slurred late-night texts that don’t mean anything but mean everything, hold everything, because that’s how things work when you need too much and know too little, don’t know what to do, ever, how to do anything right, because nothing works. And it’s devastating. Everything is devastating, and everything feels good, and everything hurts. 

One second you’re sitting in the passenger seat, holding someone’s hand, and the next thing you know, there’s a phone call and silence, and you don’t know what to say, and it’s stupid because it shouldn’t feel like so much. Why does it feel like so much? 

But here, in Chris’ basement, Yuuri can’t get himself to care. And he hates this, wants to set fire to the ugly sofas, wants to slap JJ’s mouth shut with duct tape. But this is the one place where he doesn’t have to think about that woman and that house and Victor’s black-hole nothings. This is where Victor looks at Yuuri like he climbed into a rocket and hurtled to the moon for him, where Yuuri needs and needs, needs always, needs to slather Victor across his body until he’s soggy and drenched-through, until he loses himself bit by bit and in an instant. 

Yuuri slips into the space between Victor’s legs, those heavy burnished thighs that can split a soccer field in half, make it ripple like a blanket. He leans down, holding Victor’s face in his hands, swirling his thumbs through the color on his cheeks. 

In his head, he imagined this being more dramatic. More door-busting, more spotlights, less slurred howling in the background, no splotchy floorboards. But it’s Victor and it’s Yuuri, and they go under in all of this noise, the cheers around the pool table, JJ wailing, Chris slurring along to the next song. The clamor of steps upstairs, kids swinging wildly across the makeshift dance floor. 

And somewhere in that furious swirling mess...there’s this. There’s Victor with his fingers hooked into Yuuri’s belt loops and Yuuri’s mouth on his. And Yuuri doesn’t care if this matters or if this doesn’t, if this is enough to mean anything to anyone other than them. 

Dazed. Swimming. The two of them plowing through breath. "It’s going to be okay," Yuuri says, presses it into Victor’s open mouth. 

He doesn’t know if he means today, if he means everything they’ve been trying so hard to outrun, to look away, hide from. But it’s out there and Yuuri means it the way Mila did on Phichit’s living room couch. The way she tore a cleft into space and time and placed it there, because it’s there to stay. 

It’s going to be okay. 

Maybe when you need too much and know too little, that’s the only thing you can promise. Cross your heart and hope to die. 

✕✕✕ 

Yuuri loses track of time once they’re strolling down the streets, dragging his mom’s bike along. It’s silent, just the whirr of the wheels below. Yuuri whacks his shin against the pedals every once in a while, cursing under his breath. Victor chuckles. It comes out strained and out of place, like he’s taking someone else’s laugh for a spin. 

It’s a while of this, of quiet wandering, roaming through rays of streetlights, not knowing what to say because maybe they don’t need to, because luring them in, the roads open. Their white lines like arrows pointing to places far away. Bigger places. Better places. 

And all Yuuri has to do is reach inside, unhook that hatch at the bottom of him, unlock and unlock, and it’s right there, the memory of that night humming, drenched in city lights. Walking down the cracked roads of Linhedge, it feels like part of another Yuuri’s life, another Victor’s. A world where things are better and always beautiful and nothing hurts. 

Victor’s shoulder bumps into his, too hard for it to be by accident, and his fingers brush Yuuri’s, hold on, hands meshing tight, squeezing once, twice. His hair glows, lit tinder. Where things are always beautiful and nothing hurts, Yuuri thinks. He smiles and presses his mouth to the sleeve of Victor's jacket, kisses him there. 

Maybe they didn’t know where they were headed. Or maybe it’s magic too, butterflies, orbital mechanics. Maybe they’re all tilted too far to the right, the left, not tilted enough. Yuuri spots it shining at the end of the street, the skewed outline of it so familiar he could trace it with his eyes closed. 

He barely remembers the last time he was at the playground. It still feels like the spine of the world, the universe, the tiny crooked center of all things. The way the neighborhood kids would flock towards it, barefoot in the hot aching trenches of summer, their infantries of rollerblades and shiny new Birthday BMXs, skateboards carving eights and zigzags into the flaking rubber of the basketball court. 

This place that comes before water parks, before Danny’s Ice Cream Parlor where you can spin on the counter stools, before Creek Inn with all the big kids and the lights grownup-low, before you start feeling things you’re ashamed of, wanting things you’re scared of, before a sloppy first kiss behind the bleachers, before bonfires in the woods, before you cough your way through your first cigarette, before summer camps where someone touches you just to never touch you again, before 

pep rallies and house parties and the basement of a forgotten Beauty Queen’s home. 

This place that comes before everything happens...and happens too fast. 

Once they’re close, Yuuri leaves the bike on the sidewalk and steps onto the technicolored rubber tiles, feeling them give way. He slaps his hand against the spiral slide, that familiar hollow sound, its plastic glowing green in the dark. He smiles, turning. Victor’s still standing on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets, smiling too. It’s small and tired and dipped in blue, but it’s there and Yuuri takes it. 

Ducking under the slide, he makes his way through the playground, twisting around the rubbed-off still rings, the wonky horses on springs, kicking the see-saw, pushing the merry-go-round, listening to it creak and squeal and rasp, remembering what it felt like to lie in the middle of it, brain twirling in his skull like a wheel of fortune. 

And above all of it, just as arcane and mighty as it was back then, with its trunk as thick as a titan’s wrist. The old oak tree. 

Yuuri stares up at the beastly branches cloaking the playground, stooped over it like a cupola, a cupped palm. 

The memory of himself at seven years old, trying to prove to a cackling Mari that he could wrap his tiny fat arms around the trunk, how it felt like holding something so big and so alive, cheek scraping across the bark—riddled with pocket-knife love declarations, hearts clasping names—pawing at the carved indents five years later, watching Mari use her car keys to scratch in her own pair of initials, her own jagged heart. 

M+T 

'Who’s T?' he asked, and Mari at sixteen, smiling at him—mid-summer flushed, rockstar kohl-liner and Mom’s stolen lipstick, all fury and soul, all revelation—she looked so sad she looked happy, the happiest she’d ever been in her life, ever. ’The beginning of everything,' she said. 

Yuuri stands at the foot of the tree now, hands knocking against the bark, feeling for all the names stuck in time and paired forever. 'Guess I’m part of a club now,' she said. A finger to her handiwork. 

M+T 

M + The Beginning of Everything 

Shoulder to shoulder with all the other letters, all the other beginnings of everything. So many hearts the bark was blazing with it, a cesspit of wild, wild thrumming. 

And Yuuri’s tired, full of Whistlepig and pineapple drain cleaner, and he’s neck-deep in night. He knocks his forehead against the trunk, breathing in the earth and the musk of outside, all the lifetimes worth of obsessive breakneck love, that nuclear hurts club. 

When Yuuri closes his eyes, he swears he feels the tree sway, unhurried, no other place left for it to be. He listens to Victor’s footsteps drag through the first few leaves littering the ground, the hush of grass chafing against the rubber of his sneakers. A tremor through the trunk when Victor leans against the other side. Reaching around as far as he can, Yuuri smiles when he feels Victor’s hands gripping his. The two of them, wrapped around some tree at a playground, in a tiny town, in the dead of the night. And it’s the spine of the world. It’s the tiny crooked center of all things. 

Yuuri thinks of the two of them back then, crouched in these branches, back when they were half their size but their bodies were full of more than they could ever be full of now, back when everything inside beat faster, felt more, wanted everything. 

Yuuri lets go. His hands fall. He listens to Victor’s footsteps again, traveling around the tree until he’s in front of him. Yuuri looks up, the branches spread over that pretty head, and when Victor leans in close enough, and Yuuri sees nothing but him, it’s like he’s wearing a crown, a laurel wreath. God-like. Apollo. Eyes severe. Eyes set on fire. 

He’s the boy from back then, always. 

Something inside gives way, sighing, when Victor finally touches Yuuri again, big hands cupping his face, the tough pad of his thumb wiping at Yuuri’s cheeks, chin, the edge of his mouth, pressing in. Like he found something there, trying to unearth it. 

"I’m sorry," Victor says, and Yuuri leans in close, closer, close enough to know what every word tastes like when they’re fresh off his tongue. "I just..." Victor swallows. One big inhale. One big exhale. It sweeps across Yuuri’s face like a wind whip. "I don’t know how to do this. I’m not good at this stuff." 

"You think I am?" Yuuri says. 

Victor shakes his head. His words come out slurred when he says, "I’m not good at—you. With you. I don’t know how to—" He lets go, leans back. Yuuri stumbles forward, everything tilting. 

He knows Victor feels it too, but he’s moving farther and farther away, and Yuuri’s left crooked, like he’s in those optical illusion rooms they visited at the museum in fourth grade. Floors pitched, walls slanted, and he’s being pulled and pulled. And it’s dark and it’s quiet, and Yuuri hears the folds of his brain beating, and in the center of it—because Victor’s always the center of things, of attention and gravity—there’s nothing but him. Always him. Only him. 

"You," Victor says, swaying, shaking his head. "Your house, your family. Everything that happened before all of you...like, I can’t—-It didn’t matter. Everything that came before you guys didn’t matter. Because when I think about growing up, I think about that fucked up trampoline in your backyard and the sprinklers and Mari and her combat boots. And your mom. I think about your mom." He looks up at the tree, smile going tender-fuzzy the way it does when he’s drunk and he can’t hide. 

"Toshiya’s insane ties. The one with Nicholas Cage is..." Victor looks back down, at the ground, his feet kicking a rock lodged in the dirt, "insane." He laughs. "They’re crazy. And I think about that time I landed in the ER with Koji because he’s a piece of garbage, and I love him. Don’t tell him that." He clears his throat. "I love his shitty couch. I’ve been sleeping on that nightmare since I was ten, like, sleeping on the floor is more comfortable—but I love it. I love it. And I love—" He groans, loud, wiping his hands across his face, before flapping them around like he doesn’t know where they should go. 

"I think about you. It’s always you, Yuuri," he says. "And I used to think it was unfair that you got to have all that, all those people around you who care. Used to hate it, that you and Koji have a family that actually works. But now it’s the one good thing in my life. You’re the one good thing," Victor says, and his voice cracks, and Yuuri doesn’t remember ever hearing it like that. 

"And something’s happening because something’s always happening, and I’m so sick of it. I’m exhausted, okay? It’s—I’m so fucking tired. And I can’t tell you about it because I don’t want it anywhere near you. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Because—But the second I have something good 

and I don’t watch out, everything just...stops being good. And I guess that’s life? And I guess I’m barely old enough to know what it feels like to be in it, what anything feels like. But this feels—I mean, you feel like—" A jittery inhale. He swallows. He stops. 

The last time Victor told him how he felt was when they were kids, back when he didn’t know he had the option not to share. Yuuri tries to look back and find it, that exact moment Victor decided to hide all his cogs, all his blundering machinery, to hide all the ways he works and all the ways he can’t get himself to. 

And now Victor looks so out of place in his own body, slumped and sprawling, like he doesn’t know where anything goes, all these big clumsy pieces that don’t make sense. He looks at Yuuri, foggy, face gaping with everything he just poured into the night and Yuuri’s open hands. 

Yuuri swallows, listens to the creaking of the tree, the way it sways in the dark, listens to his breath. And he steps towards Victor, because he always will, because he’ll follow him anywhere, his atlas of the universe, and he picks up Victor’s pieces from the ground, hooks them into place, his dazed limbs, one big hand at a time, rearranging, putting him back together, closing him again. 

"I’ve got you," Yuuri says, tilting Victor’s chin towards him when he tries to dive away. "Hey. Look at me. I’ve got you. We’ve got you and we’re not going anywhere." Yuuri’s hands slide down Victor’s neck, anchoring him. Victor makes a small sound when he loops his arms around Yuuri, holding him so tight he’s holding all of him, inside and out. 

And Yuuri’s ten, and Victor’s eleven, and they’re clinging to each other on the itchy carpet in the hallway. Yuuri’s rain-drenched clothes soaking Victor’s hair, so much of it, roped around the two of them like cable wires. Victor, shaking and furious. Yuuri, on fire, alive, with his knees bleeding and his left eye swollen shut. 

He holds Victor’s comb so tight the bristles stay lodged into his tiny palm for days. 

I’ve got you. Always. 

✕✕✕ 

He can’t sleep. He’s hungry. He’s in the kitchen. Lights off. Towing limbs against the tide as he opens the fridge. 

Something moves by the windows, a shadow like a sapling, long and spindly. 

Maybe it’s one of those dreams where you know you’re in a dream, and you know what’s happening to you. You feel your body, your legs unfurled beneath you, and you’re moving but you’re not moving on your own, a whirl of force keeping you upright, making you float. He floats. She floats too. She’s always floating, inside and outside of dreams, floating up their driveway, floating towards their porch. 

Yuuri closes the fridge, a waft of cool air licking his toes. He feels himself being tugged, slow, careful, out the kitchen and into the hallway, bare feet bristling against the carpet. His hand heavy as he unlocks the door. The clack of the deadbolt. 

Open. 

Maybe he dreams this. Maybe he doesn’t. 

The first time he saw her, she drifted into their living room with a peach cobbler. Her long dress swinging. Perfume, lipstick. Flushed and florid and looking at the world like she’d just been kissed. Yuuri swore women like that must be kissed every second of every day. Gazing up at her, her glassy red nails clacking across their kitchen counter, smiling so politely when Mom wouldn’t stop gushing about her looking like Lauren Bacall. Lauren Bacall from To Have and Have Not, from Key Largo and the Big Sleep—those black and white movies his mom would cry over every Friday night—queen of all silver screens, wound in the arms of men, their burly rain-pearled coats, being kissed and kissed over. Her coils of silver hair. 

And now she’s here, slouched on their porch in a stained sweater, hair thin and streaky. There’s something dazed about her, catatonic, the way she shifts back and forth, out of this world, into this world. Her eyes are open so wide Yuuri can look right into them, right into that tender head. Black ravine. 

She floats towards him. Yuuri’s paralyzed, can’t speak, can’t move. She’s so close he can smell her, a sick kind of sweet, fruit forgotten on the countertop. 

"Tell him I do." She whispers this like it’s a secret, the kind you cradle in a coffin and keep forever. 

Her slender hands brush along his jaw. And he blinks, and they’re back at those barbecues. The glow of their backyard during summer afternoons, everyone’s skin damp, everyone smiling, the smell of meat and charred coal. She’s still so tall, and Yuuri still has to angle his head to look up at her. The way she’d shine down on him, shine down on everything in this town. 

"Tell him I do," she says it again. Again. Stream of thought. "I do. More than anything, I do. Promise me you’ll tell him. I do." Her fingers bolt into his skull now. "You need to promise me." She shakes him, and it's violent, and it feels like the end of something so big he can't breathe. He doesn’t know what to say. He nods. All he can do is nod. 

He wants to reach out for her, but she's fading fast when she turns her back on him. She’s a ghost. She’s a pipe dream, a bedtime story. She’s those thoughts your brain decides aren’t important enough to keep, flung into a landfill of discarded memories. 

He blinks. Something inside of him starts to rattle. He feels his legs, his hands. The world slams into focus. He sees Victor, sees her, sees Victor again, Victor in his arms, at the playground, in the laundry room, and it’s his face, the way it writhes and empties, and he says, 'She’s my mother.' 

Yuuri's awake. 

"Wait!" It comes out garbled as he stumbles down the porch, arms reeling. 

Dina rushes along the sidewalk, a shadow roving through streetlights, towards a car. Her car. Yuuri doesn’t remember the last time he saw it outside of the garage, as small and sleek as a missile. The kind of car a Lauren Bacall would drive into the sunset with a man wearing a rain-pearled coat on the passenger seat. 

Yuuri’s feet slap across the cold gravel. "Dina!" But she’s already inside. The dashboard glows, the engine hums. Yuuri’s reaching out, reaching, and he’s running now, chasing after the car dashing down the block. Taillights gleaming. 

He's awake. He's awake. He's awake. 

Yuuri heaves once he crosses into the next street, stumbling to a stop, hands on his knees. They crack under the weight. Everything’s spinning. He looks back up. The sky looks swollen. He sees the sun. Scaling rooftops, tangles of telephone wires. 

And before he lets it sink in, before everything changes and happens and happens too fast—Yuuri thinks about that peach cobbler. His dad said it tasted bitter. 

Chapter Text

It’s Koji’s phone. Of all phones in the room, of all phones, ever, anywhere—it’s Koji’s. 

Something in Yuuri chips open and falls apart. 

On the kitchen island, the phone rattles and rattles away, rattling louder than the hum of their dad’s voice in the living room, the static of walkie-talkies and the heavy jangle of cuffs on ink-black duty belts. The police officer’s rough, "Ma’am, ma’am, calm down." The scuffle of Mom’s panda slippers on the carpet, bathrobe flying, the way she won’t stop whooshing from one corner of the room to the next like a big spooked bird. 

Koji leaps across the kitchen island, grabbing his phone. He’s too fast. Everything’s too fast. It slips out of his grip, lurching into the air too slowly for Yuuri to be sure if time’s even moving right. Koji lurches after it, fumbling to keep it from meeting the floor, his swirl of fingers, his face crunched tight. He slams his phone to his ear. 

"Victor?" He shouts it. The house goes quiet. 

Everything bright and strange, movie-like, suspended in time or maybe space, everything happening outside of himself. And Yuuri’s right there, waiting, watching the happening of things—and if he wanted it bad enough, he could rewind this moment over and over, watch everyone else move and move. He can’t move. Can’t feel his feet, still bare, so cold they’re numb to the slippery touch of the kitchen tiles. His left toe throbs, nail bleeding from when he scraped it across the gravel on the street. 

The drag of big boots shuffling into the kitchen. Yuuri can’t stop thinking about how there shouldn’t be shoes in the house. It’s not allowed. It’s not okay. Mom should be telling them it’s not okay, but she’s all blurry with movement, her bird wings flapping, whacking up dust. And the TV’s on. Someone turned the TV on, some random news anchor wedged into a dress so tight she looks like a sausage. And the fridge. The way the burly officers tower over it like it’s a toy. The pictures scattered across its white sheen. 

Victor’s almost on every single one: face teetering on the edge of a polaroid; or there, his milky-tanned hand shining on someone’s shoulder; his bright burst of hair in the background. 

Koji’s voice comes from far away, muffled, and Yuuri tries to fight the ring in his ears, tries to listen. 

"Are you okay? Where the hell are you? Where is she—Is she—" The low murmur of a voice on the other end of the line. Yuuri hates himself for how he can’t tell if it’s him. 

Koji’s nodding, swinging his head back and forth so wildly it’s like he’s trying to shake something out. The voice on the other end of the line snaps through the speaker. Victor, out there, somewhere, speaking. Yuuri wants to grab the phone. He wants to talk to him. He wants to yell at his brother to put him on speaker. 

Just a moment ago things were moving too fast. They’re moving too slow now. One of the officers says something, loud like a thunderclap, and those huge leathery hands like baseball gloves reaching out for Koji’s phone. Yuuri’s mom is reaching out too, reaching for something. And Yuuri’s dad in the doorway, arms stretched out like he’s here to catch whatever falls. 

Mind spiraling, suddenly, there’s so much time, too much of it stacked on top of itself, and Yuuri remembers those ancient Greek paintings pasted into corners of his history books, pictures of gods, women, children, soldiers, faces tangled in pain, all of them with their hands spanned wide, bodies stretched taut and theatrical, straining to reach for the sky like there’s something there to save them. 

Koji’s pressed against the sink, still nodding, fending off the officers with a batting hand. And Victor’s voice and Yuuri’s chest and his feet that he can’t feel. 

The sun shines through the kitchen windows, a glaring kind of white. It’s a beautiful day. 

✕✕✕ 

Yuuri doesn’t like hospitals. Never has. Bleach-scrubbed, sterile, the way everything squeaks and looks like it squeaks and all the nurses slur through chipped sleep cycles, telling you, 'We’re out of chocolate pudding, sorry, hon’.' 

Gripping into his crooked thumb, Yuuri runs a finger along the jagged notches of his scar, remembering that hospital bed, whirring up and down like a crane because Koji had hogged the remote, trying to squish Yuuri together like a sandwich. 

He grabs his phone. It’s something to hold onto. He calls Victor again, the space between each beep filled with static. He tries one more time, staring at the floor as they march down the winding hallways. Bright blue, throbbing under fluorescent lights, throbbing like the sea. It’s high tide. Yuuri can’t breathe. 

There’s still a leftover hair roller clinging to the nape of his mom’s neck, pinching pink, swinging every time she snaps her head back and forth. She’s still wearing her bathrobe. It’s flapping open, the string tugged too far to one side and dragging across the floor. His dad leaps towards her to catch it, trying to fix it back into place. Batting his hand away, she hisses—something Yuuri has only ever heard her do once. (That time she and him got lost in the corn maze on Halloween, running into one dead-end after the other. The last two idiots left. Dad had to ask someone to plow the field with a tractor to get them out because they were too busy having a meltdown.) 

Yuuri watches his mom try to yank the string of her bathrobe into place, eyes blown open, rabid. She never looks like this. Undone by something, fraying and coming off the seams. 

When moms look like this, Yuuri’s sure the rest of the world frays and comes off the seams too. He watches the walls of the hospital peel back, the floors crumbling open. He swears it should rain, but the sun’s still shining outside. 

The receptionist doesn’t look up when they crowd around the counter, the four of them, still halfway in PJs. At least his dad put on jeans. He’s wearing flip-flops. It’s too cold for flip-flops. 

The receptionist, skin ruddy-raw in the glare of her computer screen, has a phone jabbed against her neck, one hand scribbling furiously onto a notepad, the other pigeon-pecking across the clunky keyboard. Jab, thunk, jab. 

She doesn’t look up. Yuuri’s mom is talking, but his ears are clogged. He’s clogged all over. He’s in a dream, he’s in a movie, he’s stuck, and he can’t do a single thing except for watch his mom smack the air until she knocks a cup of pens onto the floor. The clatter tears him back. He blinks, shakes his head. He bends down and almost butts heads with his dad, who’s already on the floor, grappling to clean up the mess. 

There’s a woman behind them, arms crossed, fingers tapping impatiently against a Chihuahua squished against her chest, his stubby legs paddling, the soft pink jut of his tummy. 

They forgot to feed Makkachin this morning. Fuck. Fuck. 

Yuuri’s dad quickly whips back up and wraps his hand around Mom’s arm, trying to calm her down. She hisses again. And the receptionist is nodding, and Yuuri doesn’t know if it’s for them or the person on the phone, and she’s waving a marker through the air like a baton. 

Koji groans. "Fuck this." He pushes away from the counter and bolts down the next hallway, shouldering past nurses, yelling Victor’s name. 

"Uh—sir? Sir! You can’t go in there!" Someone rushes after him. 

"Where is he?" he shouts like he thinks he’s Liam Neeson. A big surly nurse with a mountain-feller beard grabs his arm and shoves him back into the waiting area. 

Rubbing a hand across his face, Dad sighs, but it comes out garbled like he’s underwater. They’re all underwater. And he’s telling Koji to calm down, and that makes Koji do the exact opposite. He’s raising his voice at a nurse who looks like she hasn’t slept in ten years, and Yuuri’s hands swinging around, hurling apologies at anyone Koji so much as glares at. "I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry." 

"I’m sorry, but you’re not immediate family." He hears the receptionist say over his barrage of apologies. 

"No, but we—I mean, we’re—Can’t you just tell us if she’s okay?" Yuuri’s mom waves her hands at the receptionist, rubbing at her eyes, squinting. She forgot her glasses. Dad grabs her arm again and leans over the counter. 

"We’re looking for her son, surely there’s something—Her son, he’s here. Can’t you just tell us where he is? What kind of hospital is this?" He’s raising his voice now too. It’s a frazzled kind of anger. His too-polite-for-his-own-good dad, who trips over shoelaces and apologies, lets everyone with a basket skip in front of him at the checkout. His dad who eats whatever order the waitress misheard. 

The receptionist gives him a stern look. Yuuri expects her to tell him they’re all out of chocolate pudding. "You’ll just have to wait like everyone else. Take a seat." 

The Chihuahua behind them barks. 

Yuuri’s mom whacks her hands through the air one more time, before she grabs the strings of her bathrobe like jumper cables and stomps to the waiting area, slumping into a seat so hard it makes the whole row wobble. His dad follows, picking up one stray pen they’d missed before. 

Standing by the reception, Yuuri stares at the few people wedged into the waiting area, tired, hollowed-out in the pale light. There’s a man in the corner in his PJs too, red flannel, and he gives Yuuri’s mom a small smile and a nod like a friend in battle, like he wasn’t expecting to spend his Saturday morning like this either. 

Koji’s off sneaking into hallways again, and his parents are too tense to tell him not to. Yuuri doesn’t know if he should follow or not. If he should make a scene, drill his fists into the walls, kick every door down. 

The same nurse from before forces Koji back into the waiting room.

"Yeah, yeah.." He scoffs. 

"Sorry," their dad and Yuuri say at the same time, apologetic smiles taped into place. Yuuri tries to call Victor again. Again, nothing. Koji’s got his phone out too. But nothing. They wait. 

The sun’s high enough to slowly prod its way across the filling seats, the bright blue floor, nipping at Mom’s feet in her panda slippers. Yuuri stares at the missing eye on her left one, a stitched x, button-less. 

Their heads whip up every time a door swings open, hinges squeaking, floor squeaking, just for them to dangle them back down when it’s a false alarm. 

They wait. 

Finally slumping into a seat himself, Yuuri clenches his eyes closed.

He can’t stop going over it in his head, rewinding, speeding through, reeling it in again. This morning. 

Watching Dina’s car disappear down the street, how he’d waited for her to come back, for the sun to stop climbing, for a sign. But his feet were aching, and his throat went sticky, and it settled in like a terror. That this meant something, that this wasn’t a beginning but an ending, that this wasn’t a dream, and he bolted back to the house, stumbling over the boardwalk, too worried to care about the pain wracking up his shin. Bursting into their house, up the stairs, shoving their parents’ door open like he never did now, feeling that strange creep of shame as they shot out of bed. 

'She was here. She was here.' Words mashed into one another. 

And then that flood of, 'Yuuri, calm down!', 'Yuuri, you’re not making sense!'. And Koji’s door banging open, his groggy-confused, 'Where’s Victor?' And Yuuri’s door opening just as quickly, and Victor there, in his sweats and one of Yuuri’s droopy T-shirts. Koji’s face twisting and twisting. That big whoosh of silence, everyone staring at each other, eyes twitching back and forth like a game of ping pong. 

Yuuri, still heaving, keeled over with his hands pressed to his knees, going over it again, over and over again—'She was here. She was here.’—until something in Victor’s face slammed open like a door kicked in, and he hurtled down the hallway, the stairs. The sound of the garage door opening, the hiccuping engine of Dad’s Kia Sedona. And Yuuri’s mom rushing after him, and his dad, standing there, hand to cheek, confused. This weird whirl of mayhem, of everything having been flipped upside down. Of everything happening and happening too fast. 

"Victor!" Yuuri’s mom jumps up so fast the whole seat row wobbles. She steps onto the loose string of her bathrobe, stumbling. 

Victor’s standing by the double doors, the squeak of them swinging back and forth behind him. Victor, pale and defeated in the flare of fluorescents. The soft crook to his neck as he clutches at himself, swaying, loose and disjointed. 

The world starts moving again, moving so fast Yuuri’s wobbling onto his feet. 

His mom is the first to reach him, and Victor stumbles back when she wraps her arms around him, touches his face, pats down his shoulders, rambling. 

"What happened? No one told us what happened. Are you okay? Victor, are you okay? Is your mother okay? What happened?" Victor’s still swaying, and his eyes dart across the room over her shaking shoulders. He sees Yuuri, and Yuuri sees him too, sees him and sees him. And all of him hurts so much, and it’s relief and it’s fear—and with a puff of relief and fear all the same, Victor’s face cracks, chiseling off like someone kicked it free. He falls forward and digs his face into Mom’s shoulder, his long arms spooling around her. She’s so small he’s hunched over her, he’s swallowing her whole. But she keeps him steady, Yuuri knows she does. She keeps them all steady. 

Koji’s by their side, a hand on Victor’s shoulder, clawed so firmly his knuckles pale. Yuuri’s dad hovers by, shuffling from one spot to the next, nodding, saying things that are too mumbled for Yuuri to understand. And Yuuri comes closer, watches Victor’s hand twitch against his mother’s back, and he reaches out, carefully, hooks his fingers into Victor’s until he feels him hold on. Yuuri brushes a thumb along his knuckles. He’s cold. He’s shaking. And Yuuri holds him like this. He meets Koji’s stare over their mother’s head, strange and dazed, but Koji looks away before Yuuri has enough time to catch the rest. 

They stand there for a long time, Yuuri’s mom against Victor’s chest, Yuuri’s hand around his, Koji gripping his shoulder. Clumped together in this pale squeaking space, all PJs and sleep-rumpled hair, while Yuuri’s dad roves circles around them, a meteorite caught in a cycle. 

The double doors swing open, swing closed. People rushing in, rushing out. And they stand there. They stand there waiting for someone, anyone at all, to let go first. 

✕✕✕ 

You can hear it from the hallway, the rhythmic beeping of machinery. That blue door shoved open, a spill of light seeping through. 

Yuuri fights with his jacket sleeves as he tries to hold a steaming cup of coffee through the cotton. It’s a smell he welcomes, and he lifts the cup to his nose in hopes it will crowd out all this bleach and rubbing alcohol. 

He’s stuck in a movie, walking back and forth, from the cafeteria to the hospital room, grabbing crackers for everyone out of the vending machine with the twitching lights and the rusty spirals, going on coffee runs and nibbling on a stale cheese sandwich on the bench outside of the room when it gets too much. And it gets too much. It’s the jittery energy lurching through the air, it’s the hoping and the waiting and the pacing and the not understanding, and everyone’s phones whipped out, looking up names of hemorrhages and bone types and, 'What the hell does sesamoid even mean?', trying to wrap their heads around things that don’t happen enough for you to feel your feet when you walk up and down the hallway outside. Things that happen on AXN at nine PM every Friday after that show with the hoarders, these things that happen to neighbors two houses down, to a friend of a cousin’s friend that summer five years ago, that summer that was so hot bad things were bound to happen. But never to you. These things never happen to you. 

Staring at his swollen reflection in the bent mirror in the bathroom—not even that feels right. 

Yuuri shuffles past Koji sitting on the floor outside the room, hunched over his phone, furiously thumbing apps away. He doesn’t look up when Yuuri walks past. He hasn’t looked at him in a while. 

Trying his best to be quiet, Yuuri slips into the room. 

It’s all beeping, purring, and lines on monitors jerking low, jerking steady. Tubes tangled everywhere, roped from one bag of liquid to the next. 

She’s right there, buried under a web of wiring writhing around her like tendrils, up her nostrils, her gaping mouth corked shut. Stomach and chest bloating, deflating, breath forced in, forced out by a whirring machine. 

The harsh lights bend her face into something outlandish, forehead swollen black-blue, a deep dent down her cheekbone. Her arms are bandaged, cast leg hooked up and held there by a cable, like some puppeteer one floor above might pull and she might dance. 

Swallowing, Yuuri stares at his coffee, then at Dina’s eyes puffed closed. He tries to find her there, the Lauren Bacall from the house across the street, the fallen queen. 

And lying there, sunken like a caved roof, beneath that mass of tubes and needles and bandages, you can see her veins, blue, swear you can see them throbbing. It’s the only thing Yuuri holds onto. She’s alive, he thinks. There’s someone in there, and she’s alive. 

He sets the coffee on the window ledge before squeezing into the free space next to Victor on the couch. He’s been sleeping for an hour now, head propped up on his bunched-up jacket. It took all day to even get him to sit down. 

But Victor’s quiet now, curled into himself, shoes kicked off. There’s a hole in his sock. That split in the mesh, the pink of his toe peeking through. Victor doesn’t have holes in his things, doesn’t have weekend scruff or disheveled hair, or thick grooves of worry bunched around his forehead. 

Yuuri takes Victor’s free hand limply propped in his lap. Jerking, Victor whips his head up, blinking. 

"S’ just me," Yuuri whispers, his other hand smoothing along Victor’s arm. Victor’s eyes reel through the room, stick to his mother, then to Yuuri, to his mother again, before he clenches them closed so hard his nose scrunches. He inhales, exhales, loosens. He nods, swallowing. He opens his mouth to say something—but doesn’t. 

Yuuri pushes him, carefully, back down, and Victor doesn’t put up a fight, letting Yuuri’s hand lead him back to his bundled-up jacket. He’s so small like this. He fits right into Yuuri’s palm. 

"I’m here," Yuuri whispers. "I’ll be here." 

✕✕✕ 

Yuuri’s parents pass the room once, checking in. Yuuri doesn’t have the energy to give them more than a nod. Hand resting on Mom’s shoulder, his dad shoots him a quick look. The last time Yuuri saw his face like that was after his grandpa’s funeral. 

They’ve been calling people all day, the two of them huddled against the vending machine at the end of the hallway, their polite grown-up voices ringing through the bustle of people rushing past, the squeak of the shiny floors, talking to nurses and doctors and a woman in a crumpled suit, the way she looks just as exhausted as everyone else, her shadows swooped and lines deep. She smells like cigarettes and cheap hotel soap. 

Notepad in hand, she wakes Victor twice throughout the day to ask him questions. And he’s nodding, barely opening his mouth to answer. Eyes unfocused, far away. She keeps talking and talking, looking at him, and he keeps nodding and nodding, looking away. Yuuri wishes he could hold his hand. 

He ends up in the hallway again, unsure of what to do with himself. Koij’s sitting on the floor, head leaning against the wall with his eyes shut, breathing too quick to be sleeping. 

He knows he doesn’t want to talk. Yuuri doesn’t want to talk either. 

✕✕✕ 

Falling in and out of sleep on the couch, the night goes by in sluggish moments of clarity. Victor by his side one moment, gone the next. Yuuri blinking, fighting through the fog of exhaustion, catching Victor’s shadow framed by the open door, dim lights washing through. Koji’s voice, Victor’s, in the hallway. The squeak of sneakers. 

His dad is still pacing outside, checking in every once in a while. Mom left a while ago to grab them some fresh clothes, pack some food. Maybe she’s back. Maybe she left again. She must’ve pulled a number for the nurses to have let them all stay here until tomorrow. 

Yuuri dips into sleep, jolts awake, falls asleep to the sound of steady beeping. He wakes up to Koji shoving him up the couch. 

It’s four AM once Yuuri decides to give up. He lets his dad take the free space on the couch, and it doesn’t take long for him to start snoring, almost loud enough to drown out the machines. It’s the first time Yuuri welcomes it. 

Roaming the empty hallways, Yuuri looks for Victor, passing hazy-lit rooms, people like Dina bundled up in beds, some alone, some with someone else contorted on chairs or squeezed close, folded onto the white sterile sheets, some with Get Well Soon balloons bobbing against the ceilings, flowers and plushies congregated at the foot of their beds. Two nurses whisper to each other in a corner. A baby’s wail rippling through the building. And somewhere down these winding, never-ending hallways, somewhere close, or somewhere far away, someone laughs. 

Yuuri finds Victor in the cafeteria. It’s closed, scattered tables lit by nothing but the string of vending machines flicker-fizzing in the back, neon chips packets and candies glowing, printing bright colors across the linoleum floors like city lights. 

Yuuri thinks of a ramen shop down an alleyway. He swallows. Nights like that feel so long ago they belong to someone else. 

Victor’s hunched over a table by the window, an empty coffee cup toppled over by his elbow. He’s fiddling with a napkin, tearing off bits and pieces, scattering them. 

"Hey," Yuuri whispers, slipping into the seat across from him. 

It takes a few moments before Victor looks up at him, and it’s the first time in hours that Victor looks at Yuuri like he knows he’s here and he’s solid, knows this with a certainty, knows this fully. 

Victor lets the last shred of napkin sail to the table and slides his hands towards Yuuri. Yuuri grabs them so fast Victor flinches, bundling Victor’s hands in his own and pulling them to his mouth, kissing those knuckles, closing his eyes and breathing. Breathing into them, breathing from them. The taste of sweat and heat pricking on his tongue. Victor’s so warm. He always is. 

Yuuri sighs into it, the way Victor’s fingers grapple to twist into his palms, burrowing themselves as deep as they’ll go. And clenching his eyes closed, Yuuri swears that for the first time in hours, he can feel himself again, feet on the ground, heart in chest and brain in head, and muscles there, flexing against bone, feel the soft itch of his skin against his sweater, his jeans. 

Tightening his grip, Victor tugs at him so carefully, like he’s not sure he can, pulling Yuuri off his seat and around the table. Victor’s hands are clenched into Yuuri’s as he scoots back, the legs of his chair screeching, and Yuuri stumbles into his lap, half-clambering, half-floundering, finally, fucking finally, and it’s that unbelievable shaking sigh of relief when Victor tugs him close. Yuuri wraps his arms around his neck. Victor’s hot blasts of breath against his shoulder. 

"I’m here," Yuuri says. "Still here." Letting Victor sway them back and forth the way he always does, like he’s one moment away from asking Yuuri to dance with him, whirl him through the air until they’re caught in a dizzy loop. And Yuuri feels it fling everything apart, because it tugs him back to these things that he knows, these places that feel so right they’re familiar, they’re normal. Victor sways with him like this, and it’s theirs. The steadiness and the sureness of it, like he’s being rocked to sleep. Yuuri breathes him in, heat, shreds of out-worn, sweat-swirled cologne that has lost all of its bite by now, and something deeper there, feral. The way you’d smell at the end of everything, standing in dust, on fire. 

It sends a hot zing of through him just thinking about it, thinking of Victor seeing that smashed missile car, that splash of silver hair through the windshield. And the feelings. All those feelings. All that fear for her and only her. 

They’re still rocking back and forth, slower now, calm. Yuuri stares at the empty coffee cup rolling around the table, the dark dried ring stuck to its bottom. 

"She said she needed me," Victor says, mouth pressed to Yuuri’s shoulder. "When I was on the phone. She said she—And I never knew how to say no to her, and then I did, because I had to. I fucking had to. I just couldn’t...And now—" A sigh that wracks through both of them. "How can anyone say it’s not my fault." 

"Hey." Yuuri scrambles to push him back and cradle his face. He presses their foreheads together. "Of course it isn’t. It’s not. Victor, it’s not." 

"I know her. I know what she can take and what she can’t, and it was getting so bad...It was so much, and I just—For a night, I just wanted to feel like she wasn’t this thing that I have to constantly drag around." He swallows, clinging to Yuuri. 

"I’m sorry." It’s all Yuuri can find in himself. "I’m sorry." 

"Me too," Victor says, eyes closed, mouth pinched. "She said she needed me—and I got drunk in a basement." 

"Victor—" 

"She was almost there," he whispers with a voice so low Yuuri can only feel it. 

He shrugs back. "Almost where?" Yuuri asks carefully, stroking his thumb across Victor’s chin. "Is that how you found her?" 

But Victor closes his eyes, closes everything, and Yuuri’s hands roam his face, helplessly, trying to find the right latch, lever, trying to find the lock to crack it open. 

Victor tugs him close again, presses Yuuri’s face into his shoulder, and all Yuuri wants is to see, just show me, please show me. Victor’s throat shudders against his cheek when he speaks. 

"I don’t get it," he whispers. "You can hate yourself for loving someone because they keep doing all this awful shit, because it’s all they ever do, and it’s always—It’s all they know how to do, and the only reason things ever get better is for them to get worse, and it’s always worse, but you can’t get yourself to stop caring." Victor’s fingers bolt through Yuuri’s clothing, right into his skin. 

He feels her here, throbbing through this hospital. She’s in the walls. She’s in every empty space. Frail and shiny and devastating. 

"I’d do anything for her," Victor says. "You have no fucking clue what I’d do for her." 

✕✕✕ 

Dina wakes up a couple hours before Victor’s dad arrives. She can’t say anything, just breathes and wheezes and points with a finger wedged into a clunky white clamp, eyes swollen, shuddering, acid-wash blue. 

And beneath all that sagging broken skin, those muscles torn and bones split apart—there she is. There she is, and her nails are licked Mustang-red, and her silver mane glowing, and she’s beautiful and sad and the last thing left on the planet. 

Her perfume. Looking at her, it’s all Yuuri can smell. That sticky-sweet vapor, thick enough to make your nose tingle before she’s even in the room, thick enough to linger days after like a layer of dust. It sits on her and sits on you, and Yuuri catches himself pressing his hands to his nose in the bathroom, smelling nothing. 

Back in the hospital room, Victor stands at the foot of her bed, watching her watching him. Strings of silence tied between the two, wound so tight Yuuri expects to feel them flex against everyone’s faces and chests when they shuffle in and out of the room, nurses, doctors, like they might have to wipe themselves clean afterwards. 

Mom stays by Dina’s side in moments Victor can’t get himself to. Yuuri’s stopped stumbling after him once he realized the only reason Victor kept rushing from room to hallway to bathroom was to get rid of everyone. 

'Just let me breathe,' whispered to Yuuri over the buzz of the vending machine, followed by a peck to his cheek too soft for him to feel. And Victor’s face in tangles, eyes veiny-red, and everything looped upside down and tilted sideways, and Yuuri had to clench his hands into fists not to touch him. Make him right. 

Standing in the door of the hospital room, one foot planted inside, the other softly kicking its toes into the hallway, stuck on the fringe like this, Yuuri watches his mom brush a finger across Dina’s hand. Thinking of back then, the two of them tipsy on too much wine spritzer, heads huddled close, conspiring like the girls at school who always made it feel like they were talking about you. 

And now, here, this long-ago thing of theirs severed and tied together again, something broken mended carefully and quietly between the rough glare of hospital lights and warbling machinery. All that guilt wrenching at Mom’s face. The forever-sorrow in Dina’s eyes. 

Mom’s mumbling things to her; it’s too quiet for Yuuri to hear a thing. But Dina blinks in response, once or twice her chin jutting out like she wants to say something, words nudging at her mouth, the tube there keeping them in. And her eyes slowly lulling from one corner of the room to the next, rolling like marbles, like she’s in something and out of it again. 

Once even, she looks at Yuuri, and he twitches back, feels like running into the hallway, feels like running after her car glinting metallic in the distance. 

She looks at him and it’s the heaviest thing in the world. 

Yuuri leaves the room once Victor’s dad arrives. Matthew, in his shiny suit and shinier shoes, that chunk of a watch on his wrist that Yuuri swears weighs enough to make him walk lopsided. His voice is smooth when they all huddle around him in the hallway. Yuuri wonders if Victor knows he’s here. 

Matthew pats Koji and Dad on the shoulder, kisses Mom’s cheek—like the last time they saw him wasn’t that summer three years ago, when he brought them cigars from Cuba, weaving tales of him pushing a broken-down Chevrolet Bel Air up a hill in Trinidad. 

The mystic man himself. Here and gone and here again. 

When Yuuri was a kid, Matthew was one of those characters in cartoons that were so tall the screen capped them off at their necks. 

"Thank you for everything, truly," Matthew says, the way he says everything, loud and stately like he’s running for mayor. "But I think it’s in Dina’s best interest if it’s just immediate family for now." He slips his jacket off, lacquered smooth as butter as it falls to the bench outside the room, undoing his cufflinks and rolling his sleeves up, one at a time. "I’ll keep you updated," he assures them. 

Koji jerks forward like he’s about to protest, but Yuuri grabs his arm. Koji dodges his stare but stays quiet. 

Their mom nods, a strained smile on her face. She looks so tired. "Alright," she mumbles. "Please do." 

A loud squeak down the hallway, the bathroom door swinging closed. Victor stutters to a stop when he sees his father. It happens so fast Yuuri’s reeling form it: Victor’s shoulders bolted into place, chest, chin rising, locked in, and his face putting itself together in ways. Something graver, something that can take a hit. 

He doesn’t falter when he marches towards them down the hallway. Matthew doesn’t either. 

"Victor," Matthew says, like he just remembered something so important the remembering of it amuses him. His smile more smirk than anything. 

"I’m guessing this is what it takes for you to finally show up," Victor says, not flinching away from it, steadfast. 

If it hits its mark, Matthew doesn’t show it, just breathes deep. The two of them standing on opposite ends of the hallway like gunslingers, hands hovering over pistols ready for a quick draw. 

When Victor’s finally close enough, his face under fluorescents, Yuuri sees and sees—the Victor curled beneath it all. Chipping away, unstringing. Yuuri wants to grab him and kiss him and hug him through. 

But his mom is already unfurling her arms, spanning them wide like wings to scoop him up. Yuuri’s dad clears his throat and pats him on the back, giving his shoulder a squeeze. Koji shoots him a chin quirk. 

And when Victor’s eyes flick over to Yuuri’s over the dip of his mom’s shoulder, all Yuuri can give him is a smile that feels too crooked to be one. 

It’s over before he knows it, and his mom is tugging him down the hallway by his sleeve. She makes grabby hands at Koji, and with a grunt and a look over his shoulder, he lets her hold his arm. Their dad shuffles after them, close enough for Yuuri to feel his breath like a sure gust. 

The four of them, their shoes squeaking across the shiny floors. Yuuri feels like they should be limping, hunchbacked, blind and deaf. Because things like this don’t just happen to the family two houses down, to a friend of a cousin’s friend during a summer too hot to leave space for anything good. 

Looking over his shoulder, past his father’s strangled face, Yuuri stares at the two silhouettes standing in the rays of light in front of Dina’s hospital room. 

It’s like he’s back home standing by his window, watching the shadows in the house across the street move together, move apart. 

✕✕✕ 

Yuuri wakes to the slam of a car door. It’s dark. 

He reaches for the right side of the bed, always left untouched for him. It feels wrong sleeping on it, like he’s taking something away. A possibility maybe. An infinite wish. He doesn’t know. Sometimes it worries him. 

Rubbing his eyes, Yuuri pats his hand across his bedside table reaching for his phone, tearing down a stack of books when he forgets to disconnect it from the power cord. 

Pinching his eyes against the glow of the screen. There’s a text from Victor sent a little past midnight. Yuuri feels his chest go hot for missing it. 

Headed back now x 

He stares at the X for longer than he should, twisting its shape through his head. Thinking of the sound Victor’s mouth makes when you kiss it. Pressing his hand to his lips, he swallows, stares into the dark. 

Not even giving himself time to shake the sleep off, Yuuri stumbles out of the sheets and through the room, blindly reaching into his laundry hamper looking for pants. Wedging himself into them while he heads into the hallway, trying not to make too much noise. 

A band of light reaches through the gaps in his parents’ bedroom door. A hiccup like a cry. His mom’s voice, high and strange. 

Squeezing his tongue between his teeth, Yuuri shuffles across the carpet and down the stairs, avoiding the wonky steps and almost slipping on the last one when Makkachin bolts past him into the living room, his tail wagging, his whimpered yelp. The bell on his collar jangles. 

Yuuri hears the patio door slide open, a hushed, "Hey, buddy." 

Slipping around the corner—there he is. Victor’s long shadow hunched over on the patio, his hands buried in Makkachin’s fur. 

"Missed you too," Victor whispers, bending down further to curl his arms around the poodle’s fluffy neck. 

Yuuri stays quiet as he makes his way towards them, leaning against the door frame, shrugging his arms over his stomach. He rubs at his arms. 

When Victor finally looks up, it’s too dark to tell if he’s surprised. "Hi," he whispers. Different. Distant. 

"Hey," Yuuri whispers back, and he bends down next to Victor, his knees cracking, and brushes a hand across Makkachin’s back. 

They don’t say anything for a while, rearranging themselves onto the small flight of stairs leading down to the backyard, shoulder to shoulder with Makkachin spread across their laps, heavy and breathing and smacking his big mouth every time Victor scratches the back of his ears just the way he likes. 

The nighttime quiet. Wind in the trees. 

When Victor finally speaks again, he doesn’t sound like himself. 

"I knew where she was going because she had nowhere else to go." 

Makkachin’s ears twitch when he hears a dog bark in the distance. Yuuri tries to calm him with a long pet down his back. 

"We buried my grandma an hour outside of town. It was Dad’s choice, and Mom hated it, but when he says we do something, we just, we do it. He thought it would be good for her or something. I don’t know," Victor says, shrugging. "I met my grandma once when I was eight. I think. Seven? I don’t really—I just remember she looked way too young to be anyone’s grandma. And we were at her house, and she was wearing this red lipstick, and it was on her teeth. It was there for, like, hours, even after we ate. And she was drinking. She got so drunk my mom got angry, and I remember, like...I remember my grandma pulling me into the kitchen, and she was completely out of it—kept talking about family trees and bloodlines. Just wacky shit." Victor stops for a moment. He swallows. 

"She said all we’ll ever be good for is ruining. That it’s in the face, you know? It’s in our face." His voice low, ten million miles away. "Mom never let me see her again after that." 

This is the Victor he only gets to see at night, where everything is different and everything is more, twisted too much and too deeply, until you can’t make out the shapes. It’s here, curled into the dark, cloaked by the stoop above their patio, that Yuuri understands when Victor tells you the truth, it isn’t a choice; it’s the space in his body filling and filling until he can’t keep anything shut, his lids popped open, and all of it, those dreadful, tremendous, unlooked-at, untalked-about things, spilling out and away, spilling into Yuuri’s hands by chance. 

"She never went to any of those yoga retreats," Victor continues, staring out into the black beyond of the backyard. "There’s a motel one block away from the cemetery. Sketchy as hell. Someplace you’d buy, I don’t know, crack or something. She’d spend weekends there—just alone, just her. One time she was gone for so long I thought she wouldn’t come back." 

Yuuri tries to puzzle it together, all these specks of answers to questions he’s never bothered to ask. Thinking of how Dina would drop Victor off at their doorstep, head wrapped in a scarf, her big cat-eye sunglasses. Off to glorious places. 

And Victor, rushing to the kitchen window, hands to the glass, watching her fly away. 

"Sometimes she’d bring me...when I was younger and you guys weren’t home. She’d make an exception, like it was—like it was the biggest inconvenience in the world, and she wouldn’t talk to me or look at me, and we’d spend hours in a motel room until it got dark. It’s that smell, you know? Like, from the beds. I remember that smell." Hand hooked to his neck, head dangling. Makkachin stirs in their laps. 

"She never bought flowers. We wouldn’t even walk up to it, we’d just stare at that headstone from, like, twenty feet away. And she’d look like she was—" Victor blinks and his eyes flick up to meet Yuuri’s. Yuuri feels it on the inside of his skin. "I know that look," he whispers, and something tucked into it, something that sounds too familiar, too skin-close, like Victor knows that look when its spread across his own face in the mirror, staring back. 

"But she’d still go every weekend," he says. "And then things changed, and she stopped going anywhere." 

Yuuri reaches for him, softly pawing at Victor’s cheeks, pulling him close until he’s a blur. He pinches his eyes closed for a moment too long. That night replaying over and over again. Dina, broken in half, shaking at their front door. Dina, bolting into the night. Yuuri’s head caught in a tumble, thinking of all the places she could go, miles away, lightyears, planets over, all the people and things she could leave behind and find in another universe altogether. Because women like that are boundless, they have everywhere to be. Everything to have. 

"She had nowhere else to go," Victor says, breathing in, gently taking Yuuri’s hands in his and plucking them from his face. He places them on Makkachin’s back, their fingers tangled together. 

"Why didn’t you ever tell us?" Yuuri’s voice comes out croaky. He wishes could’ve found anything better. 

"I didn’t want to," Victor says. 

It’s quiet again, quiet everywhere. Yuuri feels the emptiness ballooning in his head. There should be so many things to say, more things to do, but he stares at the gloomy sheen of grass, the hedge out back bordering their neighbor’s house. The lights are on in the attic, an orange glow tinting the patterned curtains. He pinches his eyes. 

Hearts. Yuuri never noticed they were hearts. He swears for a moment he sees them move. 

"Apparently there’s this really great clinic in DC. She’d be the perfect candidate," Victor says, pulling his hands away from Yuuri’s. "My dad’s ready to leave. He’s checking out a house up there. He says the schools are good too. Great soccer programs." 

It takes Yuuri too long to make sense of what he just said. It’s too late and too dark, and he’s too tired, and he’s reeling from it. Still stuck thinking of Victor standing in his grandmother’s kitchen. It’s the face, it’s in the face. And Yuuri turns to look at him, trying to make his eyes do crazy things in the dark, like maybe if he wants it bad enough, everything will light up for him, and he’ll see. He’ll understand. 

"Okay," Yuuri presses out. He tries to swallow, but his throat’s all sticky. There’s something in there, and he swears if he were to put his hands on his throat, he’d feel it swell. 

"Yuuri—" Victor’s wet swallow. Maybe he has something stuck in his throat too. "I told him I wouldn’t. I mean, I don’t—There’s no way." 

But. 

Yuuri can feel it in the air, can feel it like a fist to his chin, ready to whip his head the wrong way round. 

Butbutbut. 

"But," Victor starts, a crackle of breath, "I talked to Linda and she—" 

"Wait, Linda?" Linda. Wispy dresses and scarves so long they lick at the floor. The last time saw her was in the school hallway weeks ago, Victor bolting himself shut right before her eyes. 

"She calls to check in every once in a while," Victor says, watching his hand swirl circles into Makkachin’s fur. "I mean, she’s not supposed to...but it’s been helping." 

"You didn’t say anything," Yuuri says, feeling like he’s running circles repeating himself, because things aren’t clicking and he can’t catch up. 

His stomach caves in at the thought of Victor talking and talking and talking about these things that bend his body backwards, talking and talking and talking about them to someone who isn’t Yuuri. 

Victor nods, weary, too much dangle for him to even lift his head all the way. 

"She thinks I should move. She wants me to go with them—just over school break, to think about it. Maybe this could be good, you know? Like, maybe leaving Linhedge...She says it could be good for all of us." A long, long breath that seems to never end. "And I think she’s right." Until it does. "Maybe I need some space." 

Yuuri’s stuck. 

There’s so much, so fucking much he can’t get close enough to. Because even when you grow with someone, toe to toe, hand in hand—even when you kiss them like that, and touch them, touch and touch them in ways—you can still be stuck on the other side. You can still be left empty-handed. 

Yuuri can’t stop thinking of the possibility, thinking that when he and his family were in California visiting Mari, chasing seagulls down the pier and lying on the beach in the sun, Victor was stuck in a motel room. And those beds. Yuuri knows that smell. Knows that there’s so much missing, and there are so many things Victor can’t tell him yet—and might never tell him, ever. 

All those days and nights they let Victor stay in that house. All those days and nights they never once thought to worry, because why would you ever? Because it was Victor with his head held high and his smiles too big, and Dina, all gleaming hair and dresses twirling, kissing Matthew on the cheek before the stepped into his jet-black car like a limousine, dashing to work. 

Yuuri spirals, grabbing fistfuls of Makkachin’s fur so tight the dog yelps. Smoothing a hand over the spot. "Sorry," he mumbles quickly. "I’m sorry..." Bending down to bury his face in the fur. His glasses digging into his nose. 

Fuck. 

Yuuri breathes in, Makkachin, all musty, warm, the smell of outdoors and home and their backyard in the summer. Sprinklers twirling while Makkachin chases him round in circles trying to grab the beef jerky out of his hand. And Victor, gap-toothed, gangly, standing on the patio, laughing with his face yawning wide. 

"Yuuri," Victor says, almost like a gasp, like it’s everything, and everything is falling onto him and onto Yuuri, onto the world until it’s sinking. And where to? Victor says his name like that and all Yuuri can hear is, Where to? 

"Yuuri— " 

"No. No, it’s okay. It’s okay," Yuuri says, swooping up for air. "It’s okay. It’s—Whatever you need, okay?" He doesn’t look at Victor, knowing he’ll see right into him even in the dark, find all these things in the middle that don’t add up, these things that are selfish and childish and needing, curled up, rocking back and forth, facing corners. 

The way it sounds. Whatever you need. Like something you say ten years from now, where everyone is grown and everyone knows what’s right and what couldn’t possibly be, because everything is clear and folded straight and every corner meets another, and no one does the things they ache to do, ache all over, pour gallons and gallons of gasoline into their mouths and set fire to the words they’d kill to say. But you don’t say them. You can’t, because you keep those things fist-pressed against the back of your throat, keep them there until they’re kicking, wheezing, on the floor. You can’t, because all that’s left for you to do is slam your face into the ground and pray to god nothing squeezes itself through the cracks. 

Whatever you need. 

Yuuri stares at his fingers still curled into Makkachin’s fur, his puppy-fast breathing, belly rising and falling. 

✕✕✕ 

The last week before break feels like a blur. Yuuri’s tucked into some distant pocket, numbed to everything, watching the world pass by with his hands pressed against these milky walls he’s built. 

He’s too far away to even be mad about some picture of Victor and him circling around school. The two of them, blurred in the background of a girl’s selfie: Yuuri stooped over Victor, face cradled in his hands, kissing him on that grimy sofa in the corner of Chris’ basement. 

A night that feels so long ago it couldn’t possibly have happened. 

It’s funny how, for so long, Yuuri’s wondered what being seen could feel like that for a blissful, perfect moment he forgot to think about what others would see. 

Ugly murmurs swapped in locker rooms and bathroom congregations, chirping on phones and etched on torn notebook paper. 

'Guess who’s so horny he’ll stoop down to any level?' 

He should’ve known better. The thing about Victor is his shadow’s twice as big as anyone’s, twice as big and three times as deep—and Yuuri should’ve known it would eat him whole. It’s not Yuuri and Victor, Victor and Yuuri. It’s Victor and the kid he managed to get his hands on for another carelessly flung-away night. 

Too bad he doesn’t have enough time to take these things apart before they’re whisked aside by a hurricane of conspiracies twisting circles around Victor’s family, his mom and her little car belted around a tree down Aspen Road, between a cemetery and a seedy roadside motel. 

'I heard she swallowed a whole bottle of Oxy.' Hushed by the lockers on his way to Spanish. 

'No way!' Yuuri overhears Evie Hoffman hiss in the cafeteria line, thrust into the middle of a flock of glitter hair clips and perfume. Her infinite spout of scandals, never running dry since preschool. ’I heard my mom say she spread her legs for someone’s husband and the wife found out.' 

'Bullshit,' hissed right back. 'Victor’s dad knocked up his secretary.' 

'She did it on purpose,' murmured between two boys on the track field, stretching their legs for a 100 meter dash. 'My uncle was there. She didn’t even brake.' 

"Fuck 'em," Phichit keeps telling Yuuri, shooting him reassuring smiles during class and sending him videos of dogs farting in their sleep. He’s been weirdly sweet all week, even going so far as to bribing Edith the lunch lady to sneak him some extra chocolate mousse. They ended up hunched behind the bleachers, downing six cups while skipping algebra. 

And it’s almost good. Sometimes even, Yuuri forgets to think about Victor. He hasn’t been to school these past few days, spending most of his time in the hospital and the rest of it helping his dad clean out the house. Yuuri’s been trying his best not to look at the For Sale sign bolted into their front yard. 

Yuuri catches sight of Matthew on and off during the week. Most of the time he’s dressed in his slacks, shirtsleeves rolled up like he’s running for a campaign, ready to jump into any crowd to hold a speech about tax evasion. Maneuvering movers and pretending to help lift couches and bed frames, letting his hands hover like he’s assuring them he’ll be there to catch whatever drops. Most of the time he’s just standing next to the moving truck with a phone to his ear, waving his hands and laughing without his face moving. 

Koji and Dad have been going over, helping out. Mom has been making sandwiches for the movers. Yuuri doesn’t know why he can’t get himself to do anything but stick to his bedroom window. Watching these strangers carry a dining room chair, a desk, a shiny mint-green fridge. And he keeps wondering which one of these things could be Victor’s, that wooden bed frame or that closet with the mirror doors. That box, or the one after that. It tugs at something in him, knowing that he doesn’t know, knowing that he looks at all this furniture, that house, and he recognizes nothing. 

Koji still hasn’t said a word to him yet, and even around Victor he’s been quieter than usual. He won’t look at Yuuri, won’t even shove him into the wall on his way to the bathroom, the way he always has time for, no matter if they’re fighting or not. 

He doesn’t know. Yuuri doesn’t know anything anymore. All he knows is that Victor wants space and that space means the right side of his bed has been cold for days, with Victor sleeping in his house again. And at four AM, when Yuuri can’t get himself to keep his eyes closed, when it’s almost like back then, half-lidded and the world molten, where he hopes that perfect lanky shadow might lean over his bed, press his mouth to his ear, 'Are you hungry?' or 'Let’s watch a movie. I can’t sleep.' —he sneaks to the window and peers through the curtains, thinking of Victor there, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, guarded by boxes and bubble wrap. 

Yuuri caught him by the open window only once, leaning out into the night, waving his phone through the air, the pale glow like a lonely star. 

I’m okay, Victor texted. You should go back to sleep.

You need it more than I do, Yuuri texted back.

Can’t. 

Come over. 

Yuuri... The three dots bouncing in that text bubble before they disappeared. 

Please. Yuuri’s thumbs shaking over the display. He hoped Victor could tell he was wearing his jacket. 

A ping. Victor slipping back into his room, shutting the window. Go to bed x. 

Yuuri stared at that X and pressed a knuckle to his mouth. That X that pulled him in, tripped him back to that place, that divot in time where everything felt good and Victor’s hands had a way of touching him, touching everything whole. 

X. 

Yuuri has been tracing it into his palm all day, in the back of Phichit’s car on the way to school, in the hiccups of clarity during his chemistry exam, in the showers after practice, legs quaking and sore in the stream of hot water. 

He traces it onto his wrist now, leaning against the kitchen counter, staring out the window. He didn’t even bother to slip his school bag from his shoulder, just marched straight here and tugged the curtains aside. 

The moving truck is big enough you can only see the roof of the house peeking out above it, its faded sky-blue and bowed eaves, four missing shingles to the left. The arrowed weather vane looping lazy circles. 

'That’s a real Hollywood family,' his mom whispered to him on the day the Nikiforovs moved in. Standing right here, hiding behind the curtains, holding her breath. Watching those three gleaming figures bathe in sunlight. 

Back then everything was bathing in it.

"Yuuri?" 

Yuuri blinks and jerks around. His mom is leaning against the kitchen island, hands swallowed by the long sleeves of her sweater. He didn’t hear her come in. 

"How was practice?" she says. "You hungry?" Leaning towards the fridge. 

But Yuuri’s floating, only halfway here, and his eyes latch onto the crinkled polaroids around the ice maker, the torn picture fixed with tape, fluttering under a neon butterfly magnet: another long-ago summer, Victor and Yuuri grinning into the camera, mouths pasted with chocolate ice cream, a stray sprinkle dangling from the tip of Victor’s nose. 

Swallowing, Yuuri shakes his head. "Not hungry," he says, shucking his bag off his shoulder and heading for the door. She picks at his jacket when he tries to brush past her, pulling him back. 

Yuuri sighs. "Mom, come on—" A shaky inhale. She pulls him back harder, turns him around until he’s looking at her. There’s something about her face that makes her look twice as old. 

"Talk to me," she says, and her voice so tired, stretched thin. All Yuuri can think about is how he hears her pad through the kitchen in the middle of the night, how the pouches under eyes have gotten so bad they look bee-stung. 

He knows she’s been visiting Dina behind Matthew’s back, baking trays and trays of cookies, heading out with stacks of Tupperware and always coming back with them still filled to the brim. 

"Talk to me," she says again. "Yuuri— " 

"What do you want me to say?" Yuuri looks at the floor, can’t get himself to see her like this. "That this sucks? Because this sucks. This fucking sucks." Skipping over breath. She pulls him close, her hand traveling up and down his back, digging her nails in, giving him those long, grazing scratches he used to like as a kid. 

"I know," she whispers. "This fucking sucks." Foreign and clunky in her mouth, and for a moment he thinks of her years ago, thinks of her at seventeen, thinks of all the times the world tumbled apart and tumbled back together again. Wonders if she ever got used to it, wonders if she thinks she ever will. 

Yuuri lets his bag fall to the floor. 

Chest shaking, something in him wracking open. 

"How did I not know?" he says. "How the hell didn’t any of us know—They live right there. They’re across the street—" 

And there’s more, there’s so much more but all he can think of is, What if he doesn’t come back? His mom’s hand rakes from his back to his neck, to his hair, fingers roaming like they’re looking for something. She stops at his scar right above his left ear, runs her nail along the wrinkled skin. 

Closing his eyes, Yuuri lets his forehead fall to her shoulder. His scar answering her touch with a low throb. 

He hears her thinking about it, knows even before she starts speaking again that it still flips her voice upside-down. The car, his bike, the ambulance, the brain scans—and how, even though it’s impossible, in Yuuri’s hazy, jumbled kid memory, the dark stain left on the street was splattered in the shape of him. His shadow forever branding the gravel. 

"Sometimes what’s done is done," she says. She’s upside-down. "We can’t go back, and we can’t fix the things we should’ve fixed. Sometimes we just have to let them be—let the rest of it happen." Her hand on his back again, rubbing up and down. She nudges him back by his shoulders, her face grave in the bright kitchen lights. 

"We have to let people do what they have to do, let them go through whatever life needs them to go through—and sometimes it’s...Sometimes all we can do is let them know we’ll be there when they come out the other end." She pulls him close again, rocking him in her short, stubby arms. "And, yeah, it sucks. And it’ll keep sucking for a really long time, but sometimes that’s just what we’re left with," she breathes. "I’m sorry." Like she knows it’s not what he wants to hear, knows that she can’t give him anything clear, whole enough to hold, a checklist, a path of footprints pressed deep enough for him to trail after. Anything that makes more sense than 'Let go of the fucking steering wheel.' 

Yuuri presses his chin into her shoulder, his glasses crooked as he looks out the window. The bright neon orange of the moving truck stares back. 

Her eyes are wet when she pulls back, smoothing her hands across his sleeves to straighten them out, along his shoulders, like when he was younger, having tossed anything on before heading to school, all of him frayed and crooked and inside-out, and she’d stop him at the door. Straighten his shirt. Flatten his cowlick. 

"Here’s what we’re going to do," she says, sniffling, wiping at her splotchy cheek. "Here’s what—Okay." She laughs. It doesn’t look right. She swallows it. "We’ll take it one step at a time, okay? Bring your bag upstairs, do your homework as best as you can, and I’ll make dinner." Like life can be split into three easy steps. 

And maybe it’s the sureness of her, her steadiness, the phantom-touch of her fingers pressed into his scar like she can press all the way in, press it away. 

Yuuri swallows. He nods. 

"I’m making katsudon," she says, voice still tilted too much to be the right side up. 

She pecks his temple and makes sure his glasses are straightened. Yuuri only thinks of Victor for a split second. 

"Okay?" Taking him by the shoulders, she leans back to look at him, fingers pressing in. 

Yuuri inhales, long and forceful. "Okay." He exhales. 

He tries a smile. She tries one too—but he sees her falter before he’s even looked away. It breaks his heart ten times over. 

✕✕✕ 

Yuuri doesn’t understand, can’t fathom, can’t wrap his head around it, his arms, legs, lungs, heart—how he could possibly forget that it feels like this. 

Victor feels like this and makes him feel like this, and he touches Yuuri, and it sucks everything inside of his body out of it, scrambles it over and over, mashes it together backwards and zigzagged, slanting into every direction, and with one more touch, punches everything back in. Victor touches him and he swears nothing will fit right for the rest of his life. 

Yuuri can’t make sense of himself anymore, can’t remember how they got to the parking lot by the lake, can’t remember what song blasted through the busted radio, what song is blasting through it now. 

Remembers only waking up to the unmistakable rumble of the Mustang’s engine. Victor’s arm dangling out of the window of his car, paint gleaming a dark dreamy maroon in the driveway. The nighttime magic of it, like he might take Yuuri to places so far away he’ll forget where he came from. 

Let’s get out of here, Victor’s text glowing across his screen like a promise. 

And now they’re here, jumbled across the backseat. How Victor, above him, looks at him like he’s waiting for Yuuri to tell him no, to back away, and Yuuri can’t, not for the life of him, imagine a version of himself, any fucking shred of him that wouldn’t want this, wouldn’t do this for him, with him, wouldn’t jump from the moon to let himself be had like this. Yuuri wants. Wants him so much his chest feels as heavy as the sky twice over. 

It’s a whirlwind of things. Their bodies clashing through movements so hastily, movements they’ve been through over and over already, but feel different now, violent, feel like something at the end is being tied shut, and they need to get there faster, need things bigger and more, just to squeeze themselves through before it closes in front of them forever. 

Yuuri’s clinging to him, fingers bolted into the hollows between the wings of his shoulder blades, those tender spots that hurt Victor just enough to make his throat click, his breath drilling too fast for Yuuri to ever keep up with. Legs hooked over Victor’s hips, ankles twisted and turned. And the stickiness of the backseat leather clinging to Yuuri’s spine, biting into him every time Victor shucks him up, peels him off it. And Yuuri lets him, will always let him have him this way and that, fling him around and snap him into as many pieces as he needs. Turn me into this and this and this. Please, please. I’ll let you. Let you have anything. Everything. 

Yuuri’s thoughts chucked in half and stitched back together. The weight of it all in his head, this big mangled lump. He wonders if Victor can see, if his face is spread too thin to hide it, if he’s warped and marred in places, those sutured thoughts poking their edges through. 

Everything’s moving too fast not to feel muddled. Yuuri sees only in glimpses: crackled skin stretched across Victor’s elbow, the wet arch of his cupid’s bow, soft hairs shining down his forearm like spun gold, his knee cap, his ankle, the tender dip in the corner of his mouth that Yuuri presses his tongue to, swears he tastes something sweet. 

All these little flashes like morse code, one piece after another to build a whole. All dots and dashes, skin and bone. And Yuuri wants to punch them into his brain to keep them there. 

It’s moment after moment, dot after skin after bone after dash, and Yuuri soaks himself in it until he’s choking. Until he thinks, if it’s this, if this is everything, he could die like this. 

Just like this, Yuuri thinks and can’t get himself to stop thinking. 

Victor’s hands, those warm, mighty things, smoothing him down, from his cheeks to his jaw, to the place beneath his ears, there, that feels like skin peeled back, nerves bared, needing, and his tongue dipping into it, and Yuuri’s brain turning and turning, toppling over. All he can get himself to do is hold on. Because when Victor is like this, when Yuuri is, holding on is the one and only thing left to do. 

By the end of it, Victor’s palm is pressed against the window, Yuuri’s leg flying high, his foot bolted tight into the roof of the car. Limbs wheeling like they’ve been spun loose, and that cry, coming from Victor, coming from the very bottom of Yuuri himself. 

By the end of it, he feels changed. He’s caught up to all these things that are happening and happening too fast, have been and always will. Yuuri, yanked out of his bubble and thrust back into the world for good. 

Victor above him, heaving, heavy. Like back then. That night. The two of them sprawled across the backseat like this, shoved apart and chests shaking, and Yuuri knew with a sureness that pried him out of something he’d always felt safe in, suddenly bared to it all: things couldn’t possibly go back to the way they were. 

Feeling his arms and legs settle, sink, Yuuri untwists himself from Victor and lets himself be pushed back down into the seat. 

It’s too to dark see what Victor’s face is doing, so Yuuri curls his arms around Victor’s neck and pulls him down with him, feels for him with his mouth, noses brushing against each other. 

Yuuri hopes to god no one cracks a window or opens a door. He wants to stay drenched in this, the stuffiness of breath and things undone and skin unraveled. So much of it. Yuuri missed this, still misses it, will always miss it. 

Closing his eyes, he hums when Victor opens his mouth against his. Sliding of tongues, that deep wet heat that reaches all the way down to something Yuuri’s still too ashamed of to think about when it’s over. Like he doesn’t understand where it comes from, like he’s lurched back into his body wondering who took over, where he went, what happened, how much was taken. 

Victor’s hands dig into his hair and pull his head back. Yuuri’s neck arching and Victor’s mouth painting things there, one short hard bite, a snap of teeth. Jolting. Yuuri hisses, snaps his legs against Victor’s hips again like he pressed a pedal. 

But Victor sinks down again, drops his head and mashes his face into Yuuri chest. Yuuri feels him breathe, in and out, counts it to ten, feels like Victor’s pulling breaths from Yuuri too. You can’t untie them. You’d have to hammer them apart. You’d have to kill them. 

"I miss you," Victor says, his mouth moving against Yuuri’s beating skin. 

"Miss you more," he whispers into the dark. 

Yuuri clutches at Victor’s shoulders, arms, neck. He holds him close. 

"I’m sorry," Victor says, swallowing. "About this whole week, I’m just—I’m sorry." 

"Victor..." Breathing and breathing. 

"It’s been a lot. And when I’m with you, I can’t—think. And I feel like right now there’s so much thinking I have to do, and I need to figure out all these things. And when my dad’s around, it’s like I have to be—like, I feel different. It’s different with him. Half the time I don’t even know what I’m doing." Victor inhales, lifting his head to look at him. He’s so close Yuuri feels the skin on his face hum. "Sorry," Victor says, words dipping at the end, weighted and sinking fast, and Yuuri wants to dive after them to drag them back up. 

He clutches at the back of Victor’s neck. "Don’t be. Please don’t be." 

"But I am." 

Yuuri tries to pull him even closer, because there’s more, there needs to be more Yuuri wants to say, but Victor’s slipping through until Yuuri’s left clutching at outlines. He’s all vapor. 

A song’s playing on the radio, something tinting the air blue, something that makes Victor look half-here. 

"There’s this night I keep thinking about," Victor says. It’s so soft it sounds like he’s dreaming, or maybe Yuuri’s dreaming...of him...of this. He hums in response, sliding his thumb along Victor’s spine, as far down as he can reach, and then back up. 

"What night?" Yuuri props his head up against the car door. It’s uncomfortable. His neck strains. But it makes Victor huddle closer, all hot sticky skin. 

"In Chris’ basement," Victor says.

"Last week?" 

Shifting, Victor shakes his head sinks back down to press his cheek against Yuuri’s chest. Yuuri’s hand in his hair like it belongs there. He inhales. 

"Two years ago...three?" Victor says. 

There’s only one night he doesn’t remember being at Chris’: the first and last time he let Phichit talk him into almost drinking an entire bottle of Malibu, after which he woke up regurgitating half a tiki bar with a headache that split his body into ten different pieces. 

"Jesus," Yuuri groans, slamming his head back into the door for good measure. "I don’t remember a thing. Pretty sure I died at one point." 

Victor snorts, and the lightness of it takes Yuuri by surprise. 

"I’d never seen you like that. You were so," Victor tapers off. "It was like you were opened. Back then you were always so quiet—and I mean quiet. You’d just sneak up on people. Koji kept trying to convince your mom to get you a bell." 

Yuuri rolls his eyes. 

"Always hiding in corners, and always—You always looked like you couldn’t stand to be anywhere. But then that night you were all there. You were dancing, you wouldn’t stop dancing. And you were standing on the dining table, just like, absolutely losing it." Victor blurts a laugh, and it comes out of nowhere, smacking against Yuuri’s skin like a flicked rubber band. He smiles. Enjoys for a moment how everything feels normal and whole. 

"It took three guys to get you back on the ground, and you still wouldn’t stop. By that point everyone had already joined in...Everyone was dancing, and it was like," Victor traces a shape into Yuuri’s shoulder, over and over, "there was just you, and you were laughing—and everything was spinning around you." 

Yuuri swallows, feeling himself go fuzzy. Victor looks up at him again. "I don’t remember ever wanting to kiss someone more in my entire life," he says. "And I don’t remember what happened next or how we ended up in the basement, and it was just you and me in the corner, on those ugly fucking couches, and you were laughing so much. And, god, I felt so...I felt like you’d given me everything, fucking everything, Yuuri. And before I knew it you were in my lap and—doing things. I just couldn’t—" Victor shakes his head. "I was sixteen. I was going to die. I just remember not knowing what to do, because there you were, right where I wanted you for so long. But you weren’t, I mean, you weren’t...I didn’t want it like that. And I knew you wouldn’t have wanted it like that either. Who knows what you were on that night, because the next thing I knew you were retching everywhere." 

"No." Groaning, Yuuri slaps his hands over his face. Victor’s little laugh as he slides closer, softly peels his hands off his face, kisses one palm and then the other. 

"I panicked," he continues. 

Yuuri snaps his eyes closed, shaking his head. "No, stop talking." 

"I dragged you to the bathroom." The light ring of Victor’s laugh. 

"Stop." Yuuri tries to smack his hands against his ears, but Victor holds him in place. 

"Had to throw a bunch of kids out of the bathtub. The lock didn’t budge so I ended up grabbing the cabinet and jamming it against the door." 

Yuuri throws his head back and laughs, loud and ridiculous, a panting thing. "What?" 

"I never said anything about me being sober," Victor says. 

"More sober than I was apparently." 

Giving him a tired smile, Victor smoothes a thumb into the corner of Yuuri’s mouth. He hums. And then his face falling and falling until it’s all the way at the bottom, wilting into itself. 

It happens so fast Yuuri wonders if he missed something. 

"You started crying," Victor whispers this. "You wouldn’t stop. And you were throwing up, and there were no goddamned cups in that bathroom, so I tried to make you drink from the showerhead because the sink wouldn’t turn on. Water everywhere. I think I emptied a whole can of Febreze at some point, and it was too much, and the whole bathroom was foggy, and it ended up burning our eyes, so we were both crying. It was a huge mess." 

Yuuri groans again, can’t help but turn to the side, dig his face into the backseat—but Victor coaxes him back, leans in close to kiss his cheek so softly Yuuri only feels the heat of it. 

"In one single night, you were the happiest I’d ever seen you and then in an instant, you weren’t. You were saying things," he whispers. "That you were always watching from the back. You were always the one left behind. I thought the world was going under. I didn’t know what to do." 

Victor takes Yuuri’s head in his hands, dragging his thumbs under the soft patches of skin beneath his eyes. 

"I don’t remember how long we were in there. I just remember holding you, and you were crying so much, and I didn’t understand how you could be that kid downstairs doing the Macarena on tables and then...that. It was the most I’d ever seen from you." Victor’s hot breath fanning across his face. 

"I brought you home. Koji had to help me drag you up the stairs. We told your parents you had the flu or something. They knew, though. I mean, they always do. I guess." Victor huffs a laugh that doesn’t sound like one. 

"I thought everything would change after that, that things between us would...you know, that we’d be...you know? But you said you didn’t remember anything, and for the longest time I thought you were lying. I didn’t know what else to do—so I made it go away. And things stayed the same," Victor breathes, mouth hovering over Yuuri’s. "I think it almost got to a point where I was okay with that." 

Looking up at him, those eyes big and glassy in the dark. For so long Yuuri was caught up in wondering about Victor, about all his secrets buried deep, that he never stopped to think about how Victor might wonder about him too. That he could be just as far away, just as unknowable as anything. 

Yuuri lets Victor lift him to his lips. Kisses him once, twice. Mouths lingering. Forehead to forehead. 

He doesn’t know what to say or where to start, what to pick apart first. All he knows is that he’d do anything to keep having him like this. This. This thing that is theirs and should keep going, going, endless orbits, because it’s huge and awful and incredible and too much and not nearly enough, ever, and Yuuri wants to jam it through his body all at once. 

This. 

He’ll let go of the steering wheel for this. 

Because the things I’d do for you—anything, fucking everything. I’ll do this too. I’ll do this for you. 

Because when Yuuri took Victor’s hand at the playground, dipped into that night, under that tree, he promised him he had him. Promised him he’ll be there when Victor needs him—and step aside when he can’t possibly. Because Yuuri said 'I’m here', and Victor—Victor, of all people; Victor, tired and crumbled, torn into every direction at once; Victor, shining, above him like the moon—deserves someone who means it with all of their pieces. Means it heart-in-hand. 

Yuuri feels a pressure building, pelting like thunder. The shadow above him in the shape of Victor’s face, fuzzing, curling close. 

"Hey...it’s okay." Victor’s thumbs smooth down Yuuri’s cheeks. 

"It’s okay," Victor mumbles, kissing his cheeks again and again, his eyelids, his nose, his chin. "It’s okay..." 

Yuuri keeps shaking his head, goes dizzy from it. And Victor, trying so hard to keep him still. Their foreheads bump together again, and Victor strains his hands against the back of Yuuri’s head, finally, managing to make him stop. Bated breath. Bodies reaching into each other, touching those distant, tucked-away corners where nothing goes and nothing ever should. And the shame that sinks away the longer Yuuri lies there, unsheltered, giving himself over with his hands tied. 

Victor stretches his arms out and hovers above him. Yuuri doesn’t need light to know he’s smiling. Reaching up, his fingers on Victor’s mouth, touching all of his perfect, dazzling teeth. He lifts himself onto his elbows to kiss them, he’ll try to kiss them one by one, peck them with his tongue. But Victor’s already reaching for the car door, and his eyes sparking, and, no, no, no, no, don’t let this out. How dare you. 

With a click and a snap, the door swings open. Cold air rinses away all that they’ve collected here, swirling it into the night like bathwater down the drain. Yuuri could weep at the loss, but Victor bends down to give him a quick peck on his forehand before he’s climbing over him and out into the parking lot. 

"Come on," he says before all Yuuri can hear is the patter of Victor’s bare feet on gravel. 

Yuuri’s too caught up in the whiplash of it all to know what to do next. Arching his neck, he looks back, the beam of Victor’s bare ass scurrying across the parking lot and disappearing into the black tangle of forest beyond. 

"Come on!" Echoing from the trees. 

Yuuri wipes a hand across his face. "Jesus." Scrambling to grab his shoes and Victor’s jacket. It’s freezing and stupid, but Victor’s yelling his name into the night, and Yuuri stumbles out into the parking lot, shoelaces untied, hastily rushing towards the trees before he remembers to run back and close the car door. 

Looking over his shoulder, he stares at the emptiness around him, the big looming pine trees, the streetlights of the main road spliced by forest, sprinkling like dust. 

"Victor?" Yuuri shouts, climbing over a fallen tree trunk and batting branches out of the way, his shoelaces trailing behind him, snagging on the underbrush. 

The croaking of frogs too quiet, the insects’ hushed buzzing like they’re scared of stirring something. He remembers the first night Victor brought him here, remembers the world dipped in something special. 

When he finally reaches the pebbled beach, Victor’s standing at the far end of the crooked dock. Shaking, arms knotted, clasping his naked torso as he jumps from one leg to the other. Wood keening from it. 

"You’re kidding," Yuuri shouts, shaking his head, pulling the jacket over his crotch. 

"Come on," Victor just says, nudging his head towards the lake, wiggling his knees back and forth. 

"It’s freezing!" Yuuri says, kicking rocks as he skids down to the docks. The black water lapping at the shoreline, something shimmery about it beneath the moon. 

Victor snorts. "That’s the point." 

"You’re a big fat idiot." 

"Sexy big fat idiot." Victor smiles, arching a brow. And Yuuri wants to slap him because he can’t understand how this kid can stand there, shivering and butt naked, looking like he’s spotlit, struck by something that shines only for the holiest of things. With the lake behind him—like from a storybook, fairytale-spun, where big things happen at midnight, where toads are kissed and princes go missing and nothing ever stays the same—Yuuri can’t look away. 

It’s Victor, Victor who has a lighter in his pocket and goes out on Friday nights, steals you to places far away, who touches you in the back of an empty classroom and the back of his car and tells you of nights where everything spun around you. And he’s an idiot—god, he’s an idiot; a sexy big fat idiot. Never needs a plan, just does and wants and feels and feels over, and laughs like a bottle rocket. 

Because it’s in the face—a face like that, full of everything that is good and whole and sound. 

Yuuri’s stupid to do this, but wanting Victor Nikiforov might as well be the sanest thing he’ll ever do. 

"Come," Victor mouths, too gentle for the wind not to grab it. Hair messy, thrashing. His arm stretched out like an offering. 

Come. 

Hobbling across the docks, loose shoelaces bobbing after him, Victor’s jacket loose around his shoulders. It’s so cold Yuuri’s shaking, and Victor’s shaking, shaking and laughing, laughing and shaking. And the way it tilts the whole planet sideways, and Yuuri’s caught in a tumble, and he refuses to reach out for a single thing. 

Victor’s hand in his once he’s finally by his side, jacket slipping to the ground, one shoe kicked off at a time. 

One gulp of breath. 

Yuuri doesn’t even have time to back out before Victor’s jumping into the air, pulling Yuuri with him. Everything caught in a whirl. The big bursting shock of cold shooting from his toes to his brain, eyes vibrating with it. 

It’s rock-bottom black, darker than anything Yuuri has ever seen. He’s scared of opening his mouth too far, like it’ll grab hold of his tongue, yank itself in, climb all the way down until he’s full of it. But Victor’s hand in his, as sure as an anchor while they float in this silent nothing like space, like up is down and down is up, and Yuuri feels his skin fall, feels suddenly all these body-below things. Wet slide of muscle, murmur of lungs, his heart throbbing like a big tadpole. 

They drift to the bottom. Yuuri’s feet meeting strings of kelp, like hair, twisting around his toes. He jerks back and tugs Victor up as he kicks to the surface. 

Coughing, gurgling for air, thrashing his arms and legs. He tries his best to knot his fingers into Victor’s, tries his best to keep him close. 

Victor whips his head back, hair flying, water spraying up into the air. He opens his mouth. He howls. Like something wild, something torn free, like something that belongs here, between the water and the trees. Something born from it maybe. 

It makes Yuuri laugh through clenched teeth. And Victor, grinning, looks at him again. The moon shining through a shroud of clouds, its thick light like steam, coating Victor until he’s wearing it like a cape, a crown, like something adorned. 

"We need to keep moving or we’ll freeze," Victor shouts, smiling with all his teeth—there’s no need for him to raise his voice; it’s just them, and the world is quieter here than anywhere else—but he’s switched on, running on something loud and alive, and he’s one hundred feet tall. He’s got the voice of giants, he’s wearing the moon. 

It’s in moments like these Yuuri swears Victor’s shoulders press against the sky to keep it from falling. 

When Victor squeezes his hand once before letting go, Yuuri gasps from it, feels himself surge after Victor as he swings one arm into the water, feet kicking him farther into the lake. Smooth, solid motion. The burnished bend of his forearm as it curves through the water, his shock of beam-bright hair. Scoop of his heels thrashing as his legs kick and kick. 

Yuuri’s after him. Crashing through the water like something might take him if he doesn’t touch him in time. He’s spewing lake water, its ice-cold zing, body numb and rigid. Feels the tug of it, hears the thrashing of Victor’s feet underwater. And Yuuri’s reaching, reaching, body burning, lungs clawed, crunching shut. 

He’s almost there. Almost. He’s almost, almost, almost there. And then he is. Arms moving in time. Their mouths reeling for air. 

Side by side. 

Until they aren’t—and for one dreadful, glorious moment, Yuuri’s faster. Bursting through the water, flying, feeling like he’s got everywhere to reach, all of it laid before him, waiting. Yuuri could take them anywhere, steer them right off the edge and tear through the horizon—further, further. 

With one final stroke, Yuuri dives down and slips through the cloudy depths, body burning cold, until he kicks himself up through the surface. Mouth ripped open, choking on breath. 

Victor reaches him, hair slicked to his face when he kicks himself upright, tugging Yuuri close. Their knees hit, toes crushing. Yuuri’s hand in Victor’s. Victor’s hand in his. 

Body settling, a weird rush of warmth brews in his stomach, fending off the freeze for a moment. Victor bobs close and crushes his mouth against Yuuri’s. His lips are cold, tongue hot. 

They’re in the middle of the lake. The sky above, ten times its size, and the moon heavier than anywhere else. A string of stars threaded through, bright enough for Yuuri to count them, lift his fingers and press each one in like shells into the sand. 

He doesn’t let go of Victor’s hand when they lean back, floating on their backs. Bare and shaking, all gasps of breath. He’s so cold he swears he’ll be blue until the end. 

But in the center of himself, there, right there, curled so carefully, running warmer than anything... there’s a place. 

Another universe, one cosmos over, where a Victor and a Yuuri live on a planet of their own. It’s covered in ocean—bluer than Neptune, bigger than the sun. And right at the top, right in the middle, there’s a floating house where they lie on the deck and let the sun dry them. 

Nothing hurts there. Nothing ever will. 

"I get it," Yuuri finally says, his voice hoarse. He bobs his head to the side, water lapping at his cheek. 

The delicate lines of Victor’s profile. He smiles. 

✕✕✕ 

When Victor and Matthew left, a wind chill the size of half the planet pummeled into Linhedge alone, shaking trees and freezing weather vanes into place. 

Watching Matthew’s oily-black car dart down the street, Yuuri thought of Mari on her way to college. That rickety truck of hers she’d saved up for a year to buy. How sometimes it would look orange, other times red, how no one could agree on what color it was. Mari with her hand shoved out the window, Sex Pistols roaring. The puff-choke of the exhaust pipe. Koji running down the street waving his arms through the air. 

Yuuri stayed back, because he’s always been awful at goodbyes. He headed back inside, letting his dad pat his shoulder on his way up the porch. Grabbing a bag of stale Cheetos from the kitchen counter, he ended up on his bedroom floor, staring at the freshly-pasted band posters washing over his ceiling. 

Turns out Yuuri’s not just bad at goodbyes, he’s bad at see-you-arounds—even worse at see-you-laters. 

In the distance, Victor’s hand waved out the passenger seat window. Koji jogging after them, stopping at the end of the block. 

Yuuri felt stuck to their driveway, thinking of all the ways that hand has touched him, of all the ways Yuuri has touched that hand, kissed it, held it, kept it close. How he swore something had been taken. 

Up until now, he’s refused to leave his room, staring at the house across the street through gaps in the curtain, something in there, small and secret, crooking its finger towards him. 

Pressing his mouth into his scarf, Yuuri lets his hot breath puff against his nose. He doesn’t know how long he’s been standing on the Nikiforov’s lawn, watching the big For Sale sign rock back and forth, creaking from its hinges. Some pasty-faced real estate agent plastered to its front, wired stock-photo smile. 

Shoving his hands further into his pockets, he rocks from one foot to the other, trying to keep himself warm. Looking up at the house, empty now, scooped clean like a carcass. He swears he hears the wind howl through it, climbing in through tears and nicks and gaps in windows. And to think so many things can happen in one place, so many people rushing in and out, doing things, living lives, and then in an instant—for it all to be gone, to leave no trace. 

Yuuri wonders who might’ve lived in this house before the Nikiforovs, and who’d lived here before them. How far back does it go? All these stories overlapping, washing into one another, washing away. 

Yuuri walks up to the house. To the left, those empty patches of brown by the porch where Dina would plant her flower beds—glowing in the sun, her hair ribboned down her back, hands in big gloves, wiping sweat from her brow. 

He looks over to the right, the dark shadow of grass beneath the living room window. He sees the shape of her, gentle outlines pressed into the ground like a fossil. Dina sprawled apart, staring at the sky like it held things just for her. Clutching that bottle to her chest. 

Yuuri stares at it for so long he swears he can see through time like a tunnel, see her there, all her stillness. That white bathrobe poured around her like a gown, like she’d fallen here from places far away, places better and more. 

Yuuri blinks. He shakes his head. Shakes it again. Takes a breath. He looks over his shoulder, but other than an old man cowering over the sidewalk while trailing after his dog, the street is empty. 

Yuuri swallows. He waits a minute, and then another—before he makes his way to the fence around the house, pressing his hands against the paint-chipped wooden gate. It’s locked. He bites his lip, thinking for a second. Shooting a look over his shoulder one time and then another. He wipes his hands on the front of his jeans and jumps up. 

It takes Yuuri a few tries to climb over the fence, wood chipping and biting into his palms, a long scratch etched into his wrist once he plunks down on the other side, landing on his back. Victor made it look easy. 

The backyard is as clean as the front. Yuuri always wondered if Dina came out here at night when no one saw, a ghost drifting over the grass, tending to her flower beds, her rose bushes by the fence, mowed the lawn and watered it all. The black night sky like a cloak. 

And maybe it’s the neat emptiness of everything that leaves enough space for Yuuri to remember. He can close his eyes, he can see it, he can go back. 

The monstrous grill set up in the corner, the long table spanned across the grass like a ship’s plank. Those polished wooden chairs with the red cushions. How Yuuri would stack five on top of each other so he’d reach the table, and how everyone would laugh and find it funny except for him. The birthdays they had here, the Friday nights and the block parties, Super Bowl Sundays and Fourth of July. 

Koji and Victor cackling, stumbling around with sparklers in both hands, daring each other to eat them. Dina and Matthew glowing in the soft light by the patio. Mom and Dad laughing, sloppy on one too many beers, straightening each other’s glasses. Mari lying on the grass with her Walkman. Paper plates with their frilled rims fluttering when a summer gust hit just right, empty bottles tipping over, napkins scattering into the sky like a flock of birds. 

Yuuri sees it all, there, and real—until it fades, and it’s just grass and wind, and he’s left with this heavy not-enough feeling. Nowadays it’s always the same feeling. 

Inching his way around the house, he tugs at windows until he finds one open above the sink in the kitchen. It takes him another few tries, and a splinter in his pinkie, until he manages to crawl inside. 

For a moment that lasts too long, Yuuri left blinking at all this empty space, he swears he’s broken into a stranger’s home, in a town he doesn’t know, on a planet so far away from this one it’s nameless. 

Steps echoing as he makes his way from deserted room to deserted room to deserted room. And something in him coiling tight. How none of the pieces in his head slot into these spaces. Was this door always here? Was this wall always white? Wasn’t it blue? Did the wallpaper peel like this? Were these tiles always cracked? 

Something wiped away the sheen and all that’s left is this: another empty house that could’ve been anyone’s. 

This isn’t the house he sees from across the street, from his bedroom window deep in the night. That house exists somewhere else, someplace far away, where everything is bathed in sunlight and beautiful in ways nothing here has the right to be. Where a Victor half his size sits on window sills and his parents slowdance by the fireplace that’s always roaring, even in summer. 

They don’t have a fireplace Yuuri realizes once he’s in the living room. But he swears they did, he swears. And didn’t they have marble kitchen countertops and a chandelier? Ten chandeliers? Didn’t they have a winter garden? And didn’t Dina stretch herself across that red chaise lounge in dresses too long, book curled in one hand, the other petting satin, fingers swirling there like a girl daydreaming by a pond? Didn’t Matthew, all smooth slacks and inkblot shoes, sit in the living room puffing cigars, that crystal tumbler with a nip of scotch? The light of the fireplace painting him golden. 

But room after room, the same gray silence sits on everything. 

Yuuri trails a hand across the walls, some speckled with stains, some covered in pale patches left by pictures or paintings, winding all the way up the wall bordering the stairs. 

He remembers that family portrait, the nice one with the patterned baby-blue background like waves, their white beaming smiles. The three of them shimmering even when you closed your eyes. A real Hollywood family. 

They took it in the strip mall, between Ben’s Bakery and the BBQ place that got shut down because they tried to sell horse meat. That grimy little photo studio that took Yuuri’s family photos through the years, their pictures for Christmas cards and Mari’s big graduation photo. 

None of it ever looked anything like the Nikiforovs’. The Nikiforovs, who had a way of sprinkling something into the air, like the circus coming to town, all glitz and dazzle, too bright for you to catch the stitched hem of Dina’s dress, the stray hairs standing up on Matthew’s head, the crooked left tooth when Victor smiled too wide. These things Yuuri only saw once they left the room, and he lay in bed, replaying details of days mashed into one twisting showreel. 

Yuuri grips the railing of the stairs. Looking back, they didn’t get to go upstairs much, not even to Victor’s room. To this day, Yuuri barely remembers what it looked like, where he slept, if he hung anything on his walls. All Yuuri would see from his own bedroom window was the cleanness of it all—the kind that he now thinks of as emptiness. 

Looking down at these chafed carpeted stairs, Yuuri takes one slow step at a time, listening to each creak, thinking maybe, impossibly, he’ll reach the top and something will change. That maybe he was right after all, that maybe this place, protected by some ancient spell, will only open itself to those who look hard enough: a golden doorknob in a wall, a secret spiral staircase. 

But once he’s upstairs, staring down the narrow hallway, he knows this is it. No heaviness to the air, no glowing dust or hidden passageways. 

The master bedroom is small, the bathroom even smaller, and Yuuri runs his hands along the dusty countertop, opening the drawers where Dina stashed all her shining woman things, her lipsticks and powders, perfumes. How everything back then was dusted pink and gleaming in the pale bathroom lights—the shower curtains, the spotless bathtub—and how you felt cleaner leaving this place, after touching those things, felt like something had touched you too. 

Koji always thought it was gross, and he’d spray perfume into Yuuri’s mouth, cackling as he watched him dry heave. 

But Victor, always so careful here. That soft sheen of wonder. 

'She puts this on her eyes sometimes. It makes her look like a movie star,' he said, holding something that looked like a CD case, and the only reason Yuuri knew it was eyeshadow was because Mari used to steal some from the mall, paint her face with it until she looked like Dee Snider on his Stay Hungry tour. 

’Sometimes she looks like someone else,' Victor said, a sadness on him so heavy it dripped down the corners of his face like wet paint, splashing the tiles. 

Looking in the mirror, grimy and smudged with fingerprints, Yuuri blinks at his reflection. Cheeks nipped red from the cold. He remembers a time he wasn’t tall enough to see himself there at all. 

Rapping the counter with his knuckles, eyes sliding across the space one last time, Yuuri walks back into the hallway. Popping his head into the second bathroom, cramped and crooked. Matthew’s office facing the garden, remembering how the curtains were always drawn even when the weather was nice. 

And finally, Yuuri steps into Victor’s bedroom. It’s smaller than he remembers, gloomier, like it’s never gotten much sun. 

He shuffles to the big window, milky from time and weather, and it takes him a few tries to jam it open, swinging it out into the yellowing evening glaze. Leaning out, elbows on the thick ledge. 

His house stares back at him. Eaves a little crooked, color chipping right beneath the drain. The lawn haphazardly mowed, streaky and missed patches outgrowing others. Their swamp-green curtains Yuuri’s mom proudly bagged at a yard sale. Lights on in the kitchen where she’s making dinner. His dad on the porch sneaking a smoke. Koji’s room dimly lit, his shadow curled over his desk, the glow of his computer screen. 

And Yuuri’s room, right across from Victor’s. 

The corners of posters drooping down from the ceiling. His cluttered shelves and stacks of books, his unmade bed, curtain rod slumped to one side, framing it all into one crooked picture. 

'I remember that time you and Mari were dancing.' 

Yuuri doesn’t remember that night, doesn’t remember any nights. Never thought they could mean something to someone. Never thought someone was right here, elbow to ledge, leaning out, watching. Maybe catching him in passing, wondering quickly and then quickly forgetting. 

What happens in that house, with that family, with all of those things in all of those rooms. 

✕✕✕ 

"Hi." 

"Hey." 

Static. 

"How is she?" 

"Better." 

Static. 

"She’s in good hands. She’s talking again. Yesterday she said the croissant I brought her was stale...so. You know, full sentences. She sleeps a lot though. But she’s better. Yeah. She’s better. This place, it’s, yeah, it’s good for her." 

"Good." Swallow. "I’m glad. 

"Me too." 

"And you?" 

"Hm?" 

"Are you okay?" 

Another pause. 

"Comes and goes. You?" 

"Goes and...comes." Stupid. 

But Victor laughs. Yuuri wishes he could touch his mouth. 

"The house—" Yuuri clears his throat. "It’s weird looking out of my window. Like, I expect everything to look some type of way—and then it just doesn’t. I don’t know." 

Static again. Static for so long. 

"I don’t miss it," Victor says. "Sometimes I feel like I never lived there, like there’s just this big empty space in my memory that just...You know?" 

Yuuri nods. "Yeah." 

"It’s hard getting used to not seeing you guys every morning." A linger, and then, softer, like something secret, "Hate how the bed feels too big." 

It yanks at Yuuri so hard and suddenly he stutters through an inhale. Heart clutched, fisted tight. 

"But, um...yeah, I mean, it’s nice here." Victor’s long inhale. Yuuri imagines him outside, in a park somewhere, sitting on a bench with his head leaning back, breathing in that new crisp air. That cleanness washing through him, washing things away. "There’s so much to do here and, god—like, places. The places, Yuuri. There are so many places to go. It’s just, it’s a lot. I always end up lost." 

"That’s what you wanted, right?" Yuuri hates himself for the way it sounds. 

"Yuuri—" 

"Sorry." His breath hitching, pulling his phone closer, cradling it to his ear, thinking of the way it feels when Victor whispers to him in the dead of night. Yuuri..."Sorry." 

"No, don’t—Look, I’m—It’s just different here, everything is, and sometimes it’s exactly what I need, but then sometimes..." he trails off, and the static crashes between them again, drawing a thick writhing line. 

"I miss you." Yuuri whispers this, like it’s cut out of him, huge and heavy, throbbing through the quiet of his room. He can’t feel his hands. 

Victor’s breath there. "Miss you too," then a pause, a muffled sound, a ruffling, and suddenly his voice louder, grainy, like the receiver is pressed right to his mouth. Right to Yuuri’s ear. Wet, hot. "You have no idea how much I miss you." 

Yuuri swallows, feels everything inside of him reaching, pulled and pulled, and he wishes he were small enough to climb through the phone, through the tangle of wires and waves, to squeeze out the other end and do everything to him. Let me do everything. Please. Please. 

A gruff murmur on the other end of the line, the sound of a man. Maybe Matthew, but Yuuri can’t really tell. 

"Say hi to everyone for me. Talk to you later," Victor says, different again, far away. And Yuuri can hear the armor clicking into place, brick hitting brick as he’s patched shut, the door closing, the lock turned. Key thrown into a hole. 

Yuuri’s squeezes his phone. 

"Bye." 

A shred of static. Click. 

He listens to the beep for so long he hears it hours later, slumped onto this bed, face in the sheets, holding his breath. 

✕✕✕ 

It’s a gloomy, damp Sunday when Koji finally whacks Yuuri’s door open and trudges over to his laundry hamper just to kick it over, swishing his foot through the clothes rolling onto the floor. Yuuri looks up from his homework. Koji looks back, softly kicking at a hoodie. 

"How long?" Koji says, digging his hands into his pockets, bulging there like they’re lumped into fists. 

Leaning back in his chair, Yuuri shucks his pen to the side. It rolls off the table but he doesn’t bother to pick it up. Staring at his brother, weirdly folded into himself, old soccer jersey with the collar worn and ropey, his stained sweats Yuuri swears he probably hasn’t washed in a month. 

"How long," Koji says again, kicking the hoodie hard enough for it to slide to Yuuri’s feet. 

And looking at him now, the way he almost seems timid—it’s nothing Yuuri expected. He was ready for disgust, for anger maybe, confusion. But this is smaller, rattled. This is careful. And for someone who’s all elbows and brawl and locker room talk, careful doesn’t feel right. Yuuri doesn’t know what to do with careful. 

Shrugging, Yuuri fiddles with his hands, twisting his fingers together on his lap. "Why does it matter?" 

"Why does it matter..." Even Koji’s scoff comes out smaller than he probably meant it to. "It matters. Of course it matters. I mean—" He juts his jaw out the way he does when he’s one second short from flinging his homework out the window. Mom says it makes him look like a French Bulldog. "Victor? Really?" 

Yuuri doesn’t say anything, just keeps staring. He shrugs again, feels stupid for shrugging, feels stupid for not knowing what to do next. 

"Did you blackmail him?" Koji asks. 

Yuuri’s eyes widen. "Fuck you?" 

"Oh, come on, man, he dated Tina freaking Bennett. Big Tits Tina." Mangled, like he’s already chewed at it one too many times. His eyes flick to Yuuri’s chest, flick away. 

"He had a thing with Aaron too," Yuuri says, folding his arms around himself.

"Yeah, Aaron, who looks like a fun-sized Zac Efron." 

"Again, fuck you." 

"Just tell me how long." 

"I don’t know," Yuuri mumbles. "It’s—complicated." 

"How the hell is it complicated? Just tell me when you guys started, uh—screwing each other behind my back." He bites it out like it leaves an awful taste in his mouth, face scrunched and mouth smacking. Breathing in and out, he massages his fingers into his eyes. 

Yuuri straightens. He feels like he should be getting up, squaring his shoulders, getting right in his face to spit in it—but he doesn’t manage more than, "Is that what you think we’re doing? That we’re just—" 

"I don’t fucking know because no one’s fucking telling me fucking anything!" The posters flutter, curtains swishing open. "Why didn’t you just tell me?" Koji says, spreading his arms and slapping them against his sides. "Do you know how shitty it is to have to find out your best friend’s been doing it with your little brother this whole time?" 

"Stop saying it like that. It’s not like we’re—" 

"I had to find out like everyone else," Koji says, and he looks eight years younger, crouched in the corner of a hospital room in his oversized soccer jersey, his face stretched taut and thin, staring at the bandage on Yuuri’s head like he’d let this happen to him. 

"Do you know how often he’s dodged my calls? Telling me he’s hanging out at Chris’ for five damn days in a row, that he can’t sit with us during lunch because he has to finish some fucking essay that doesn’t even exist. And then he’s literally gone in the middle of the night, and for weeks he’s telling me he’s been sleeping in the living room because he can’t handle my snoring." Koji wipes a hand across his face. "It’s not even that bad, okay? Like, dude, it’s—I swear it’s one snore. Who the hell can’t handle one snore? We’ve slept in rooms together since, like, forever, and all of a sudden he can’t deal with a single fucking snore? I’m not an idiot." 

Yuuri leans back in his chair. "Clearly."

"You don’t get be a dick right now," Koji snaps, taking a deep breath and tilting his head back. He looks at the ceiling. Dr. Know from Bad Brains dangles over him, smirking, looking back. "He didn’t tell me," he says with that carefulness from before, something softly cracked. Yuuri’s numb to a Koji like this. 

"He tells me everything." Hand hooked to his neck, Koji stares out the window. 

For a moment Yuuri wonders if his brother ever looks at the house across the street the same way Yuuri does, wondering, questions spiraling, swinging back and forth, needing things, craving answers that never seem to line up once they’re caught. 

When Koji shuffles towards him, Yuuri expects a headlock, a wedgie, ten sucker punches. But he just leans against Yuuri’s desk and warily mashes his knuckles into the wood, knocking them against it a couple of times. Fidgety, like he doesn’t know what else to do. And Yuuri, sitting there, waiting, staring, doesn’t know what to do either. 

He didn’t think he’d have to, expecting Koji to just roll with the punches, let these things happen until they can’t anymore. Koji, who runs big circles around Yuuri until everything finally settles on its own, quietly, the way it always does. 

But now Koji’s here, and he looks like something was taken from him, something he never thought to second-guess. 

"This is weird. You can’t tell me it’s not," he says, eyes bolted to his fingers picking at an old Digimon sticker clinging to the edge of Yuuri’s desk. 

Yuuri nods. "I won’t." 

It’s quiet again, nothing but the hush of wind crawling in through the open window. Yuuri stares at Koji’s bitten fingernails as he keeps scratching at the sticker. The pink shine of skin, his blunt and stubby thumb. 

"Does it mean something?" Koji doesn’t look up when he asks this. "Like, are you guys—Is it serious?" 

"I think. I don’t know." 

"You don’t know?" 

"Sometimes. I don’t—It’s—" 

"Complicated," Koji breathes. Yuuri nods, picking at the sticker now too, scraping his nail into the streaks of glue. 

"Things won’t change," Yuuri says, knows it’s what Koji is thinking, has always been thinking. 

Koji and Victor, the big boys and their endless victory laps, big-sneakered, rough-palmed, kicking soccer balls against the side of the house, biking down streets and climbing trees higher than rooftops. The way they’d sneak out at night to kiss girls and jump fences, hide a pack of cigarettes 

in the backyard, in the hole at the bottom of the maple tree, like treasure. Yuuri there, days later, smoothing his fingers over the plunder, the tawny filters, popping one into his mouth to feel the weight of it there, that secret wickedness, wondering when he’d finally catch up. Kiss a girl of his own. Climb the highest tree to see the world, every inch of it at once. 

All these things they had together. All these things Yuuri had to want from a distance. 

"Things have already changed," Koji says, with the kind of sigh that presses heavy on Yuuri’s chest. "I guess it’s just something we all have to live with." A final pick and scratch, and Koji peels the sticker off the desk. He crunches it into a ball and throws it over his shoulder. 

"Just don’t do any weird shit in front of me," he says. "Don’t want to see it." 

"Not even a little?" Yuuri manages a grin. He can almost feel it.

"Fuck off." 

And maybe it’s almost like a curtain lifted, like something that has been tilted for so long is straightening slowly, slowly, flicking back into place. And Yuuri looks at Koji, and he’s all elbows, all brawl and locker room talk, and he dodges Yuuri’s attempt at kicking him in the shin, blabbering a nasty laugh. But Yuuri won’t have it, leaning back to try and knee Koji in the stomach, shrieking when he’s grabbed by his legs and torn from his chair, trying to paddle himself free. 

"I will shit on you," Koji warns, trying to lock his arms around Yuuri’s thrashing legs. 

"Double-dare you—" Yuuri bites out, kicking Koji in the chin when the asshole tries to shove his pants down. 

"Dicksucker!"

Yuuri’s eyes widen. "Mom!" 

"It’s Sunday, for god’s sake!" Dad’s boom from downstairs. 

Koji snorts, and Yuuri hates him, and it’s almost relieving, thinking about how much he wants to grab this idiot’s head and jam the corner of his desk into his eyeballs, one at a time. And he’s charging towards him, but Koji’s already scrambling away, sprinting down the hallway, the stairs, howling a laugh. "Fucker!" Yuuri blurts louder than he means to. He hears his mom gasp, his dad cackling once, cut-short like he got caught. 

The TV’s on downstairs. It smells like sukiyaki. They only eat sukiyaki on Christmas. 

✕✕✕ 

Victor sends him a picture: smiling, bundled up, beautiful, standing in the middle of a crowded street with his hair hit by a gust of wind. 

How he slots into it so perfectly. Like someone cut him out of this years ago, and finally, now, he’s stitched back, every one of his grooves, curves, corners folding into it, fitting like he’s whole. 

Yuuri wonders if he asked a stranger to take this picture for him. He wonders if he’s made any friends. 

I’ll take you here one day, Victor texts. Yuuri presses his phone to his mouth. 

✕✕✕ 

"And then—and then, shit, and then, then, he—he—shit. He—" Guang-Hong blubbers, his face exploding, pulling itself together, exploding again. All of him splashed and unsplashed across Mila’s kitchen. Snot leaking from his nose into his open mouth. The herb pouches dangling from the ceiling beams shake with him, the beaded curtains, the crystals rocking on crooked window sills. 

Mila pulls him closer, rubbing his back. Phichit’s standing at least two feet away, holding out a napkin between pinched fingers like he’s scared he’ll catch something. If he had a stick, he’d poke Guang-Hong with it. 

"He said he needed to—" Guang-Hong’s chest stutters when he wheezes another breath. "Said he had to figure some stuff out or something, something really, really stupid, and I’m really, really stupid. And he said he can’t do all that with me—" he stops, before he’s cracking again, "with me clinging to his fucking leg." Howling. "But really he’s just too busy screwing half the cheer team." 

An ugly groan wracks through the room, all spit and snot and gurgling throat, it’s almost as bad as when his dog died—or that time in second grade when he lost the class pet frog after taking it home over the weekend. His mom found it floating belly-up in their pool. 

Yuuri takes a seat at the table across from Guang-Hong, watching Mila rub a hand across his shoulders. He looks so small next to her. 

"Called it. Knew it. But no one trusts my highly functional cunt-radar," Phichit says from where he’s pacing around the kitchen, batting pouches out of his way like he’s swatting flies. He grunts. "I kept telling you—" 

"Not helping," Mila hisses. 

Sighing, he flicks a hand. "I’m just saying, I was the one who was like, hello, Stockholm Syndrome?" 

"Phichit." Mila’s eyebrows do the thing.

With another sigh, an eye-roll and an even flimsier flung hand Phichit says, "Fine, silence the man who wields the truth." 

"How about you wield it with your mouth shut." Mila’s all eyebrows now, head to toe. 

"Yeah? Well, how about you—" But he shuts up when he walks straight into a lantern low enough to whack against his teeth. Flinching, Yuuri watches Phichit’s mouth wrench into a silent scream as he bows forward. "Cursed," he shouts. "Today’s fucking cursed!" 

It’s not just today; this whole week’s been backwards. 

Maybe it’s been backwards for a while and Yuuri’s just been stuck looking the other way, looking back, looking at that house across the street and all the things that aren’t there anymore. It’s so easy to forget the rest of the world keeps moving when your little part of it creaks to a halt. 

First day of school break, Mila declared her sudden and undying love for her lab partner who not only looks like Sara Crispino’s long lost twin, but loves flannel, her septum piercing—and her boyfriend in Omaha. Two days later Leo’s caught with his head up Ashley Kim’s cheer skirt. And just an hour ago Phichit found out Seung-gil is saving himself for marriage—which in its own right, according to Phichit, might as well be the closest thing to a cataclysm. ('Do I fucking look like I have time for that? Me? My dick’s gonna shrivel. Raisin dick! Yuuri! This body was not built for raisin dick!') 

And then there’s Yuuri, wondering about Victor—because when is he not. Victor, out there, in a place full of places, where things happen and always happen, and the world turns faster. 

All the while Yuuri’s stuck here, standing in a cramped kitchen that smells like someone shoved a bowl of potpourri in the oven, watching Guang-Hong blow his nose into a Halloween-themed party napkin because that’s all Mila could find aside from a burnt dishrag and Swiffer wipes. 

"Alright, let’s do this!" Helen whisks into the kitchen, her arms heavy with things Yuuri’s only ever seen in the haunted house at the carnival. 

"Mom." Mila’s voice drops. "I already told you we’re good." 

But Helen dumps it all onto the table, her ringed fingers twinkling as she dances them over her things like she’s about to cast a spell. 

She’s a one-woman-show, smacking her hands into the air and bobbing her head, eyes slugging back. Roving her arms over Guang-Hong’s head. Mumbling, clucking her tongue. Grabbing vials of powder and pouring piles of it onto his shoulders. He looks just as mortified as he did when Helen tumbled down the stairs to greet them, barefoot, fork-in-socket hair blasting into every direction. That tight weight of worry when she saw his face. ’Oh, sunshine, it’s your heart, isn’t it? It’s your heart?' 

Mila groans when Helen reaches for something that looks like a smudge stick. "Oh my god, Mom. Seriously?" 

"Shh!" Helen’s hand shoots up. 

Phichit hiccups a laugh, but sucks at his cheeks, trying to deadpan. "Let her do the juju," he whispers. 

It takes Helen a few tries to light the smudge stick before she’s pulling it through the air, like a shaman, dancing, murmuring things in languages unknown, her long frayed sleeves, wispy and wild, coiling like burnt paper. 

Everything goes smokey. The whole kitchen smells like lavender. 

Phichit’s backed into the doorway now, Mila by his side, her left brow twitching. And staring at Guang-Hong, face streaked wet and swollen while Helen presses a thumb, smudged in black powder, to his forehead, painting a circle—Yuuri thinks of Ashley Kim and her giant head and her giant hair, and how he hated sitting behind her in Spanish, neon pink manicure sparking every time she flipped her long curls onto his table. 

Lobster husbands suck. 

Guang-Hong finally stops crying once Helen blows the powder off his shoulders, pulling him into a hug. His arms dangle by his sides for a moment before he twists them around her shoulders, holding on. Yuuri guesses four hours of sobbing have softened his defenses. Maybe Helen’s dancing helped. 

They stay quiet, scared of unsettling something that has finally settled, and for the first time since Yuuri arrived, he can hear the trees outside, the wind shaking leaves. 

Helen, all calm and sure now, floats to the stove to make them tea. They drink in silence. Guang-Hong keeps looking at his mug funny, sniffing at it. 

"It’s just chamomile," she whispers, smiles, before smacking her hands together and breathing in. "Alright, shoo, my kombucha won’t brew itself," she says, waving at a big empty jug in the sink. 

"I’m pretty sure that’s the whole point of kombucha," Mila mumbles under her breath, grabbing everyone’s mugs. 

"Hey, I wasn’t finished—" Phichit starts, but Mila’s already jamming everything into the cluttered dishwasher, forcing it closed with a knee against a dent there. 

Everything in this kitchen has a dent, a dimple, ten thousand nicks. Mila once said it was because a deer got in through the backdoor on New Years, and Helen was convinced it was the totem spirit of her great, great grandmother causing a ruckus. To this day Yuuri’s still wondering if it was a joke or not. 

Guang-Hong wobbles his way to the front door like he’s sleepwalking, taking one slow drag of a step after the other. He looks half his size, ten times his age. 

Yuuri’s going to TP Leo’s house every day for a week. 

Huffing, Mila follows Guang-Hong out of the house. Phichit shoots Yuuri a look before stumbling after them, hitting his forehead against a herb pouch and almost yanking it off the ceiling. "Helen!" he yells, flinging his arms into the air. 

"Eyes, my poppy seed," Helen grins, "open them." Phichit groans in response. 

Rapping his knuckles against the table, the spilled powder and open vials, smudge stick blackened, Yuuri gives Helen a smile before he heads after the others. 

"Oh, Yuuri!" Yuuuuuuuuuuuuri. Like the world’s longest Laffy Taffy bar. He stops in the doorway. "Yeah?" 

"Wait, wait." All swirling bright fabric when she rushes to one of the windows, pushing heavy curtains aside and tinkering her fingers over a series of stones on the sill. She closes her eyes, head arching back, concentrating like she’s feeling for something. Her eyes pop open. 

"Ah," she muses as she picks out a tiny pale stone, milky, like a planet, a shrunken moon. Spinning around, arms spread, sailing towards him, she reaches for his hand and curls the stone right into his palm, locking her hand over his, warm. 

"What’s it for?" 

"Just keep it close," she says, says it quietly and strangely dry for someone who cuts her hair according to the lunar calendar. 

She slaps his cheek lightly. "Alright, get out. It’s kombucha time," she says with her arms flung wide again, shooing him out of the kitchen. 

"Okay, okay." He chuckles, staring down at the stone before digging it into the bottom of his pocket. It feels warm there, feels like something that could belong. He slides a smile over his shoulder before he heads outside. 

It’s still as gloomy as it has been the past couple of days, clouds dangling low, bloated with the threat of rain that never wants to come. Something’s stuck up there. Yuuri’s been waiting for it to dislodge, hoping for it almost, like it’ll wash things away, wash them new. He misses the sun. 

The others are clumped together at the foot of Helen’s vegetable garden. It’s barren now with fall sweeping in. Yuuri thinks of it in the bright belly of summer, a wild witch’s garden, everything teeming and climbing into one another, scattered, thick-through. Bumblebees bobbing from one daisy to the next, a lost butterfly or two. The maze of birdhouses chattering. Sometimes he swears if he looks hard enough, he’ll find something strange. A singing mushroom, a two-headed toad. 

Guang-Hong’s spread across the grass by the rundown fence, Phichit lying next to him with his head resting on Guang-Hong’s stomach. Mila sits crosslegged by their side. 

Yuuri feels something pop open, a memory or a feeling of it, something that he can pull from himself like a loose thread. The four of them two summers ago. Mila with her freshly-cut hair, knees still bruised from cheer practice long over, that stinging sadness to her that only blurred when she was with them, when they were together, soaring through the neighborhood on their bikes and Guang-Hong’s busted skateboard, to the edge of the woods, spending afternoons trudging up the hiking trails with bottles of liquor stolen from Phichit’s basement. 

Those afternoons feel like lifetimes ago. How anything and everything seemed to have squeezed itself into then and now, with all its twisting and shifting and happening. 

Every time Yuuri thinks he’s in the clear, it leaps out at him: change comes faster and faster until it’s part of every moment, woven into the very fabric of you. 

Yuuri falls into the grass next to Mila, letting her lean her head on his shoulder. He watches Guang-Hong card his fingers through Phichit’s hair. 

It’s quiet. 

Guang-Hong’s never been the one to talk about these things, always stuffing them into the very back of himself until they riot in the middle of a physics exam, bursting from his eyes, nose, mouth, and someone has to call his mom because it looks like he’s having a seizure. 

Yuuri just hopes they’ll have enough time to be there for it when it happens again. He hopes they’ll be there to catch him. 

"Who’s going to take me to homecoming now?" Guang-Hong’s voice frail, chipping in the cold rush of wind. He rubs a hand across his face, smudging the black circle on his forehead. 

Phichit barks a laugh, and he snaps his head back to look at him. "I will, Stupid." He smiles. Crocodile Dentist. "And I’ll take you too," he nudges his head towards Mila. "And hey, Lover Boy—" Yuuri looks up. "You too," he says it like pinkies linking, twisted into a promise. 

Yuuri’s face heats up with a smile, and he leans his head against Mila’s, feeling the soft shudder of her as she laughs, the thrill of it scattering between the trees beyond, glowing in the dark underwood. 

Things will always keep happening, and there will come a time when they’ll outhappen each other, outgrow, outrun, scatter apart, lose sight of what they used to be like, together, what it felt like to be in bodies like this, thinking these thoughts and wanting these things, these toe-to-cusp things. Life to their chests. Beating. Infinite. 

In a few years time Yuuri will remember this and wonder where they are. Who they’re with, who they’ve become, how many wrong-right, right-wrong choices they’ve made. If they’re married, if they almost were, if they have kids, if they’ve lost anyone, if they’re alone. If they ever visit Linhedge and look at its smallness and remember how big the world promised them it would be. 

If they’re happy. 

If they’re loved. 

Mila’s hair brushes his cheek. She smells like lavender. 

Yuuri smiles fully and unshakable, because for now, he knows. Because for now, they are these kinds of friends. 

✕✕✕ 

It’s three AM when Yuuri reaches for his phone on his bedside table. 

I’m here, he texts, meaning it more than he did in the hospital that night, meaning it more than anything he’ll wish to mean, ever. 

I’m here. 

✕✕✕ 

It’s weird with Guang-Hong being back, quiet and jittery, still looking off-balance like he was struck by the flu. On some days he’s okay, on others he’s blubbering, snot-streaked, lumped together on the bumpy, worn armchair in Yuuri’s room, talking about the mole on Leo’s left shoulder that looks like a heart. If you really, really squint. And you’re drunk. And the lights are low. ('Yeah, and my belly button looks like Tom Hanks if you close your eyes.' —'Phichit.'—'What.') 

There are days where Yuuri imagines himself in that armchair, wailing, getting spit all over Mila’s shoulder while he tells her about how eatable Victor’s earlobes are, and Phichit, pinch-faced, standing in the corner pretending he’s not checking his phone every minute, Guang-Hong trying to feed him an apple slice or two. 

Or maybe Yuuri would be silent about it, trailing after the others while they ride their bikes to the strip mall, blowing their money on Dairy Queen and the rigged claw machine next to the laundromat. Think about Victor’s mouth in the back of a car, the back of a classroom, in his bed at night trying his hardest not to look up at David Bowie, remembering that night Victor broke the headboard, the way he’d laughed so hard he tumbled to the floor, wheezing. 

Sometimes Yuuri sleeps on the pull-out couch in the living room. No one’s asked. And Yuuri’s not sure if it’s because they know or because these things have happened and they’re big enough for everyone to just let him be. 

So maybe if he’s being honest, he’d rather open his bedroom door for Guang-Hong’s sob sessions than wedge his chair against the knob to lie on the floor and think of all the things he’s tired of thinking about. Because it’s nice not to worry about your own shit for a while. And, god, it’s fun to hate someone together. And it’s fun to get drunk on so much Whistlepig that you only manage to hurl one roll of toilet paper over Leo’s house before the lights snap on and his dad stumbles onto the lawn, wielding a rolled-up newspaper, in nothing but his underwear. 

The four of them floundering onto bikes and handlebars, shrieking all the way home, where they lay on Mila’s bedroom floor, and Yuuri curled close to Guang-Hong, the two of them smelling of sweat and a glimmering night, and Yuuri looking at him like back then, like he could read his mind if he just came closer, just pressed his forehead to his. How do you feel? Yuuri thought. And Guang-Hong’s hand on his mouth. Chubby-cheeked, the smallest smile. Like I’ll be okay. Humming there in the corner of his eye. 

It’s like time stood still two years ago, everything unchanged, forever. The four of them lazing around Phichit’s living room, throwing chips at the TV during Hobgoblins (and then at Phichit when he pounces onto the coffee table during Pieces to howl with Lynda Day George). 

Trudging up that overgrown trail that leads to a waterfall—Mila leaping in with one shoe still on, her hair bursting fire-bright, laughing with her mouth so wide it split the whole forest in half. 

They even convinced Helen to lend them her truck, and they drove up to the mountains, camping out for two days. Misassembling tents and not knowing how to start fires, smashing cans of beans against rocks because no one thought to bring a can opener. 

And at six AM on a foggy Tuesday deep in the wild, sleep-deprived and malnourished, one by one, they threw Leo’s mixtapes down a cliff. 

Something in Guang-Hong’s face lifted, and he gulped lungfuls of mountain air like he hadn’t been given enough for lifetimes and lifetimes over. 

I’ll be okay. 

Because sometimes you can come out the other side of things this big, not whole...but better. Just better. Better than you felt the day before. Sometimes a little, and sometimes so much—sometimes barely. But Yuuri thinks these thoughts soothe him in ways nothing else could possibly. 

We’ll all be okay, Yuuri thinks now and lets himself think, at three in the morning, the four of them in JJ’s trashed living room. Kids checked out on the leather sofas, dangling over armrests and scrambled across the stained white carpet. Someone’s in the pool sleeping on a flamingo floatie. 

And the four them, the last ones standing, jamming to the songs shuffleplaying on Phichit’s phone after he snatched the AUX cord from a passed-out JJ. Doing the Macarena to "Oops!...I Did It Again" and "I Saw Mama Kissing Santa Claus", and Phichit belting out the wrong lyrics to every song. Arms and legs jumbled, nothing moving right and the whole room reeling when Mila forces Phichit into reenacting the Dirty Dancing lift with her. 

"I thought you used to be a cheerleader," Phichit says, huffing after another failed attempt. 

"Shut up." Mila cocking a brow. "I thought your arms weren’t made out of breadsticks." 

And when Robyn’s "Dancing On My Own" pounds through the living room, Guang-Hong tugs at Yuuri’s sleeve and yanks him close, tries to teach him how to Fox Trott, the rhythm off while they stomp over each other’s feet. Somewhere in the wild whirl of it, Guang-Hong squishes his mouth to Yuuri’s ear, warm, whispering, "I wish it could be like this every day." 

It’s stupid, awful, awful—here, in JJ’s aircraft hanger for a living room, stumbling around, heads punched back, cackling. And with Helen’s stone heavy and sacred in his pocket, Yuuri twirls Guang-Hong round and round, clutches at his waist to swing him into a dip, and Guang-Hong’s face erupting like something marvelous, and he’s laughing, jaw swung open, and everything about him larger than life. The last time Yuuri saw him like this was when Phichit let him drive his parents’ minivan down the highway with his foot punched into the accelerator, all of them screaming at the top of their lungs, hands out the window. 

The music swells, and it’s louder than it was before, and the four of them, dancing and dancing, stumbling over, into each other, limbs flying. Headless and head-banging over abandoned plastic cups and bent cigarettes, and Yuuri’s too tangled up in this to care about standing in the middle of it. All his doors open, his curtains pulled back, walls cracked in half and on the floor. 

Hurtled right into the center of something amazing. He’s got everywhere to reach, all of it laid before him, waiting. 

It’s the unbearable stillness beyond—but here, right here, beneath flapping hair and loose shoelaces snapping, between laughter tipped over and eyes wide, full of beautiful, unspeakable things...here, here, here, here, the world spins. 

It spins around them. He makes sure it does. 

✕✕✕ 

Yuuri doesn’t know what time it is once they scrape their bikes off JJ’s glossy pebbled driveway, making their way back home. Guang-Hong’s slumped over Phichit’s handlebars, trying to wave Yuuri goodbye. Mila zooms past them, out the gate, swerving back and forth with her arm in the air, flipping them off. 

"Burgers for breakfast at my house," Phichit yells after her, before he yanks his bike in the other direction. Yuuri watches them blunder down the next the street. 

"Bye, Yuuri!" Guang-Hong shouts from a block away, his blips of laughter hopping through the night. 

Too dizzy to get on his bike, Yuuri decides to walk, stumbling down empty streets after empty street with his shoelaces untied. 

Somewhere in the drunken whimsy of it, head rolling loose and eyes heavy-lidded. It starts with a soft pelt. Droplets on his hands, pinpricking his forehead. And when Yuuri finally looks up, the clouds open so violently it tears a sound through the sky. 

Then it rains. It finally rains. 

Canyons worth of it descending on Linhedge, crashing through roofs and chimneys, cracking windows, flooding lawns and basements, spouting through storm drains. Yuuri swears they’ll wake up in an ocean. Swears that something has opened up there, and opened in him, finally, fully, and he spreads his free arm out, palm outstretched. He’d sing if he could, about the way the rain feels in his open hand. 

In the dark like this, between streetlights in these patches of black-blue nothing, this jetstream of water—he walks so carefully, taking it one step at a time, heel to toe, wet gravel crunching. 

There’s something about it that hurts. 

He could go anywhere. He could be anyone. 

He feels suddenly like he did back then, walking down these same streets with his bike in tow, unwilling to hop on because it meant he’d get home quicker, meant he’d be there for dinner on time and he wouldn’t get to see the sun disappear behind the trees, the smooth, shingled rooftops and slung telephone wires. Meant he’d miss more of this feeling, this everything-everywhere feeling. Too big and too much, forever, this feeling like forever, and how he loved it with his knees buckled, hands to the sky, loved it from the very bottom of himself. 

How much he cared. 

Because you had to with these things—you had to, more than anything in the world. You had to. 

It takes Yuuri ten years to get home, it takes him an hour. The rain having calmed to a soft drizzling mist. He feels cleaned by it, like he’s stepped out of something, body twisted and turned, different. There’s a newness to everything, a newness to him. Or maybe he feels the same. 

Maybe when you finally settle, when you come home to yourself, it almost feels like changing. 

The lights in the kitchen are on. His mom’s still having trouble sleeping. And Yuuri’s too comfortable like this, too hazy all over to care about her seeing him drenched and twirling. He’ll kiss her cheek, take a shower, ask her if she wants to watch a movie. Because sometimes life can be split into three easy steps. 

They haven’t watched The Big Sleep in a while. Maybe his dad didn’t finish the pint of Chunky Monkey. Holy shit, Yuuri wants to jam his head into some Chunky Monkey. 

Leaving his bike strewn across the front lawn, he drags himself up to their porch and digs his hands into the empty flower pots by the bench, looking for the house key. He wavers when he finds it, and for a second he feels a burning on his neck, like something’s out there, on the other side of the street, watching. Holding his breath, he turns: small, gray, satellite dish tilted back just enough to catch the rain. 

It could be anyone’s house, it could house anything. 

For the first time, it’s not hard to take a deep breath, turn around and look away. 

Yuuri runs his thumb along the ridges of the key before he fumbles to jam it into the lock. Squinting when he realizes the door’s already unlocked. But it’s too late or too early, and he’s tired, changed and exactly the same, and he shrugs it off, shuffling into the house, feeling almost like laughing. 

"Mom?" he whispers. His shoes squelch as he stumbles out of them. He doesn’t bother with the puddles he leaves on the floor as he stumbles to the kitchen. 

"You still up or did you just get up?" Yuuri says, feeling woozy as he turns the corner, grinning.

"Still up—I mean, I took a nap, so I don’t know if that counts." 

No crackle of phone speakers. No glitching connections. 

Something in Yuuri crashes through him, hits his feet. 

He’s dreaming. He must be. He’s had too much of everything. He’s too full of things, and the world’s too full of things, and right here, framed by the arch of the doorway—leaning against the kitchen island, mug in hand, those pair of jeans that fit him in ways and ways, hair ruffled loose, moon-dusted—he stands there like something painted. 

This golden thing in the air. Glowing. The thrill of it. And it’s this feeling, this everything-everywhere feeling, and Yuuri swore, at age nine with four screws in his skull, that life was too small for him to feel it twice. 

Shaken awake and wide open. 

Victor says his name. 

Yuuri hears his heart in every corner of the room. 

✕   Eight Years Ago   ✕  

"Wait, why’d you switch—" Koji flaps his arms through the air. 

"Not appropriate," Dad says before he flicks a button below the radio and all the windows roll down, the steaming highway wind whooshing through the car so hard and fast it pulls a laugh out of Yuuri. 

The sun’s blasting down. Even with the wind, it’s the hottest day in the history of the world, ever. Yuuri’s scared all the pools at the water park will be dried up, and he’s been snapping his eyes closed at every red light, hoping really, really hard that there will be enough water left for him to jump off the highest diving board this time. Victor did it last summer. He ran right off it, not shaking, not stopping, not even once. He was so far up it looked like he was falling to earth. 

"But Daaaad," Koji tramples, kicks his feet against the back of the driver’s seat, "it’s Soulja Boy!" 

"Yes, and you’re nine." 

"I’m ten," Victor shouts, because he’s really proud of it, and he always wants everyone to know, and sometimes Yuuri thinks it’s annoying, but only because he wishes he were ten too. 

Victor’s tall enough to look thirteen, all noodley and really, really long, like he makes Koji pull at his legs at night, letting him stretch and stretch him for hours. Yuuri swears he’s always an inch taller in the morning. Mom swears so too. And Yuuri swears twice-over, he’s going to be taller than him one day, so tall he’ll crash through ceilings, balance the sun on his head. 

"Soulja Boy’s awesome..." Koji says. 

"Well." Dad looks at him in the rearview mirror. He jiggles his eyebrows. He thinks it makes him look serious. "Sorry to break it to you, buddy, but Soulja Boy sounds like a misogynist." 

"Isn’t it called masseuse?" Victor says, batting his hair out of his face. 

Yuuri shakes his head. "No...massager." 

"No, he’s a rapper," Koji shouts over the rumble of a truck thundering past. "He’s the best rapper." 

Dad does the finger thing, pointing and whirling it, and sometimes it makes him look like he’s in a fencing battle with a really quick ghost. "Sure, and as long as you’re in my car, we respect women," he shouts, missing the ghost by a hair. 

Koji kicks the seat again. "What does that have to do with massaging?" 

"Massaging?" Readjusting the rearview mirror, Dad’s eyebrows bump together, and it looks stupid, and Yuuri grins, and Victor tries to paddle his noodle legs out, shouting he’s pretty sure it’s called masseuse, because he always has to be right about things. 

Dad whacks his hands through the air, talking about women’s rights and something about 1976 and voting. Yuuri thinks he just said voting. But Koji stopped listening a while ago, sticking a finger up his nose and then out the window, and Dad’s too busy trying to switch through stations to tell him to stop. Shreds of songs zapping until he finally settles for something bright, bouncy, something Mari probably listens to when she lies on the floor and stares at the ceiling, holding a Twizzler to her mouth, pretending it’s a cigarette. 

Bobbing his head, Yuuri yanks his seatbelt back and forth, smiling at the way it slaps against his chest. Victor bobs his head in time with his, and he’s smiling too, smiling wider. And that gap between his two front teeth. Yuuri swears it gets bigger every time he sees it. He could stick his pinky in it. A Slurpee straw. A Poky. He wants to climb into it sometimes, like a tunnel to places deep down, and what does Victor’s laugh sound like from inside of his head? 

Yuuri doesn’t know why it made him sad when Victor told him he’d be getting braces next year. 

They’re bobbing their heads together, Victor’s hair shaking everywhere, touching everything, and Yuuri runs his fingers through it when it snaps onto his lap, like something alive. 

"I like this song," Victor shouts, and then he’s laughing so close to Yuuri’s ear it makes him go all twisty, like something pulling him, pulling as far as he’ll go, spinning him round and round, one way, then the other. He likes it. He really, really likes it. Like going on the carnival’s Free Fall ten times in a row—and Yuuri’s not tall enough yet to go on it, but he bets it feels like this, like your stomach’s crunched tight, jumping up, pushing your heart into your mouth. 

Yuuri’s heart is in his mouth. 

"I like it too," Yuuri says, but it’s too quiet and the wind’s too hard, and Victor’s already leaning away, lifting his arms to try and shove his fingers through the crack in the moonroof. 

Dad swerves around a van ahead of them, and they’re going faster, faster. And his fingers tapping on the steering wheel, tapping to the beat. Koji moping with his head lolled back, hand stretched out the window, letting the wind slam into his open palm. 

Victor’s hair flies now, spindling through the car, reaching impossible places, brushing against Yuuri’s cheek, the corner of his mouth. It makes Yuuri’s head spin, makes him lean towards the window because he swears he needs more air, needs the wind to fill him up like a balloon. And the sun blasting close and hot, and Yuuri swears he could chew at if he opened his mouth wide enough. 

Victor’s leaning towards the window too; he’s so close Yuuri smells the sunscreen on him, the greasy shine slapped across his cheeks. It’s this smile on his face, this smile like he’s about to do something he shouldn’t. Like that time he threw bang snaps into Mrs. Abbott’s open living room windows on the Fourth of July, popped Koji’s bike tires when he ate Victor’s secret stash of Oreos he kept under a loose plank on their patio. 

Victor like this, wilder than wild, like he comes from that island Mari told him about where only boys live and flies. That gap between his teeth growing with his smile, and it’s so big, and he’s reaching for his seat belt, reaching for Yuuri’s too, that snap-click of it when it springs loose. Leaning towards the window, his hand around Yuuri’s, pulling. 

Koji’s saying something, and their dad’s yelling, slamming his hand against the passenger seat, "Get your tiny butts back in your seats right now!" 

But Victor, all spark and trouble, climbs over Yuuri, his never-ending twist of legs. He sticks his head out the window, letting the wind swat his hair out of his face. And Yuuri, feeling his heart again, feeling it do big weird loopy things in his mouth, climbs up onto his knees. Holding his breath, holding everything, he pops his head into Victor’s wild stream of hair. 

And when he turns, when Victor looks at him, so close, white hair tangling around the two of them, cocooning them so tight. Shards of sun shattering through. And Victor’s face soaked in light. 

Tell me, Yuuri thinks and thinks so much he swears he’s saying it out loud. Tell me it will stay like this forever. 

✕   Fin   ✕