Chapter Text
Victor Nikiforov is not a naturally deceptive person.
He’s not perfect, of course. He’ll admit he has a tendency toward something like arrogance. (Although is it really arrogance when he’s literally been the best for five years running?) He has no sense of direction, he forgets everything that’s not about skating, and deep down, he’s aware that there’s something indefinably wrong with him, something essential he’s missing.
But he has never been a liar. If anything, his typical fault is being straightforward when he should back down.
Which is why it comes as a shock to him when he realizes that he is perpetrating the biggest deception of his life on the man he loves…
#
It starts a few days after Victor arrives in Hasetsu, and it’s all because of ninjas.
He and Yuuri have just taken a tour of Hasetsu Castle, and Victor has posted his selfies with Makkachin. The view from the top of the castle is breathtaking. The blue waters of the bay lie to one side of him; the buildings of Hasetsu are spread in a half-circle to the other. A slow-moving river bisects the town. The lines of the houses are soft and indistinct in the lifting haze. Victor can make out a series of roads crisscrossing the perimeter, and that gives him an idea…
“Yuuri.” Victor puts on his best coach face, one that he hopes comes off as stern and yet supportive.
“Mmmm?”
“I noticed you weren’t running very fast on our way to the gym.”
“Ahhh!” Yuuri blushes. “I know. I’m—I’m not in the best of shape, but I’m improving already, I promise!”
Victor has been in Hasetsu for a handful of days, and he still hasn’t figured out exactly what Yuuri wants of him. Every day the man poses more of a puzzle. He runs away when Victor makes it clear he’s interested in anything and everything; he blushes and avoids eye contact at the first sign of flirtation. He talks like he’s a hopeless dime-a-dozen skater instead of one of the few people who could—in top form—challenge Victor for the apex of the podium.
Victor strokes his chin, looks at Yuuri, and tries to imagine what Yakov would do in a situation like this.
(He feels a twinge: Yakov isn’t here, and everything is wrong between them. But never mind that; Victor’s coaching right now. He can’t think of Yakov.)
“From here, it looks like it wouldn’t be that hard to go all the way round Hasetsu,” Victor says with all the cheer he can muster, refusing to think of how Yakov would say exactly the same thing in this situation. If his Russian rinkmates were here, they would already be groaning at these words.
“See?” He points out a loose route around the perimeter. “That road there, there, and then there, and back across the bridge.”
Yuuri gives him a suspicious look, as if he knows where this is going.
Victor’s smile broadens. “How far is that, do you think?”
“Four, maybe five K?”
“Hmm.” Victor does a little math in his head. “I think I’ll stroll down to that little beach and take a look around. Is there a place near there where we could meet?”
“Uh…” Yuuri squints toward the shore. “In front of the Nintei Kodomo En Showa Kindergarten is probably easiest.” His frown deepens. “But Victor, why do we have to meet somewhere, when we’re already together?”
Victor smiles beatifically. “Because you’re going to run around Hasetsu, Yuuri. I’ll meet you in front of the kindergarten. If I get there before you, you’ll have to do a hundred jumping jacks.”
Yuuri sighs. “It’s not even half a kilometer to the kindergarten. Obviously you’ll get there before me. Just tell me to run around Hasetsu and do the jumping jacks, if that’s what you intend.”
“I’m a tourist,” Victor tells him. “I’ll meander. A little.” He gives Yuuri a wink.
Yuuri blushes and takes a quick step back, as if Victor’s winks are toxic. “Right. I see. Yes.” A deep breath, before he looks back at Victor. “So… What if I’m there before you?”
“Then we’ll do a hundred jumping jacks together.” Victor bestows a magnanimous smile on Yuuri.
Georgi would have thrown something at him. Yuuri just shakes his head.
Victor sets his hands on Yuuri’s shoulders, swivels him so that he’s facing downhill, and gives him a gentle push. “What are you waiting for? Don’t waste time. Go!”
#
Victor plans to meander a bit. Based on Yuuri’s earlier pace, he figures that taking a little less than half an hour will be perfect—just long enough for Yuuri to arrive first, if he pushes himself, but not enough that he’ll have a chance to slack off. The goal is to convince him to do his best.
But there’s a problem with Victor’s plan, one that he really should have realized before he waved Yuuri off. The photos he’s been taking have eaten up the battery on his phone. It dies just as he’s taking a selfie in a park along the river. It’s his first time alone in Hasetsu. Normally maps and street signs would help (a little), but Victor can’t read Japanese.
Time for Plan B.
A second twinge: Victor’s usual Plan B is to wait for Yakov to find him.
Oh, God. He can’t think about Yakov.
Yakov, who knows Victor’s sense of direction is so utterly abysmal that he sighs and sends someone to rescue him every time he’s late. Yakov, who threatened to put a leash on Victor the fifth time he got lost going to the bathroom at an unfamiliar skating rink. Yakov, who would wait for Victor after every one of his interviews, because if he didn’t, there was a fifty-percent chance Victor would be unable to find his own hotel room. Yakov, who begged Victor not to leave, heard him say good-bye, waited ten seconds as he watched Victor walk away from him, before sighing and reminding him that the airport was in the other direction; if he was going to be an idiot, he should at least manage to arrive in the proper country first, and did he need a ride?
Yakov is not here.
Homesickness washes over Victor in a wave of breath-stealing loss. Yakov is back in St. Petersburg, and every time Victor calls, Yakov yells. Which he rather expects; Yakov yells when he’s happy, too.
Nothing in Japan has turned out as Victor expected. The Yuuri he remembers from the Grand Prix final, the one he came here to find, is refusing to talk to him about even the most basic things.
Victor’s lost in a strange place, and he’s the only one who can fix it.
He looks around in desperation, and finds…Makkachin. Thank God; he’s not really alone.
“Find Yuuri,” he tells Makkachin. “Find him! Good girl!”
Makkachin gives him an understanding look and sets off at a determined pace.
It’s as good an idea as any. She’s a surprisingly smart dog. She likes Yuuri. Her sense of direction is better than Victor’s.
(Everyone’s sense of direction is better than Victor’s. He suspects that acorns come equipped with better navigational systems.)
Victor follows her.
Of course, Makkachin has never been trained in anything like owner search-and-rescue, so they end up in a park he’s never seen before.
“Find Yuuri!” Victor says again. “Is Yuuri here?”
Her tail beats the air insistently. She darts across the lawn, her body language communicating delight and excitement, exactly the way she does when she sees someone she knows. Oh my God, Victor can’t believe this worked!
She stops in front of a tree. Sniffs. Then she comes bounding back, galumphing up to Victor…
Oh. That would be a moldy ball that she just dropped at his feet. She looks up expectantly, her tail waving madly.
You asked me for a thing! Was I a good dog? Did I do the thing?
“Um. Makka. That’s…”
Victor looks down into Makkachin’s delighted dark brown eyes, and… And what the hell. Victor’s not going to make his dog sad.
“Good girl!” he says. “You did great!” He throws the ball.
He has no idea where he is now. He is completely fucked.
Plan C: Find someone who speaks English, French, or Russian and ask for directions.
English is easy enough, but the directions themselves? Now that he’s completely off track, they’re almost impossible to follow. He can’t remember the actual name of the kindergarten he’s looking for, and even once he’s able to make himself understood, the directions he gets—“turn left on such-and-such a street” are useless because he has no idea where such-and-such a street is, how to identify it, or which way left is. Besides, he forgets the street name after he’s gone a hundred yards anyway, the unfamiliar syllables refusing to stick in his brain.
It starts to rain.
Victor is aware that he should be upset. But for some reason, this final touch—the cold droplets of rain soaking through his clothing—strikes him as so on the nose that he finds it hilarious. At least Makkachin enjoys the game of wandering down streets and swearing.
Victor eventually makes his bedraggled way to the kindergarten two and a half hours later. Yuuri is standing on a bench, scanning the street with a worried expression.
His eyes land on Victor, and for the first time since Victor has arrived, he looks happy to see him. A brilliant smile lights his face, a combination of relief and delight, and, oh, god, it’s so nice to see. Victor has been secretly worrying that Yuuri doesn’t even want him around, that Yuuri knows that undefinable lack that Victor has mostly hidden. That possibility has kept him up every night thus far.
“Victor, there you are!” Yuuri jumps off the bench and runs to him. “I’m so sorry, I know I have much to improve on—”
Victor wipes the rain from his eyes and wrinkles his nose in confusion. “You’re sorry?”
Yuuri nods vigorously. “I am a little slow. I could have pushed harder. I know you got tired of waiting and left, and I didn’t know if I should go back to the onsen to see if you were there, or if you’d just gone back to Russia…” He trails off miserably.
Gone back to Russia? Does Yuuri think Victor uprooted his life on a whim? Does he think Victor’s the kind of person who would leave someone he cared about without a word? Did the banquet mean nothing to him, that he can dismiss it so easily?
While he’s staring at Yuuri in affronted bafflement, the other man comes to almost military attention. “I’m sorry. I will do better. I promise! I won’t let you down again, coach.”
Victor is not sure how any man can be both so adorable and so utterly wrong at the same time. Yuuri looks as disheveled as Victor feels, his hair lying in strings along the side of his head, his rain-dampened workout clothing clinging…
Unf. No. Now is not the time to get distracted.
“Yuuri.” He takes a step forward. Yuuri freezes in place, a flush spreading across his cheeks.
“Victor?”
Victor hates admitting any vulnerability, even about something as small as this. But if they spend any length of time together, Yuuri will figure out that Victor’s sense of direction is utter shit. It’s not like he can hide this one. “I got lost.”
“You got lost.” Yuuri stares at him in confusion. “You got lost, going in a straight line from there”—he points up at the castle—“down to here.”
Victor smiles helplessly. “Yes?”
Yuuri has not yet known Victor long enough to realize that his getting lost is not just a mere possibility, it’s an inevitability. His eyes narrow in disbelief. “I ran around the entirety of Hasetsu in the time it took you to travel three blocks.”
“I…got more than three blocks lost.”
“How?” Yuuri’s head tilts. “The kindergarten is right next to the castle. You can see the castle from just about anywhere.”
“Yes, but which side of the castle?” Victor says. “And if you go far enough, there are trees, and you can’t really see it, and I crossed the river without realizing, and nothing looked right…”
Yuuri is staring at him in confusion. “Are you one of those people who can’t ask for directions?”
“Oh, no,” Victor says with a wry grin. “I’d never find my way anywhere if I couldn’t ask. I talked to five, maybe six people? It depends whether you count the last one as a separate person, since I also talked to him second. He took pity on me when he realized I was going in circles and brought me most of the way here. I’m usually pretty bad, but it’s even worse here because I can’t read street signs.”
The blush on Yuuri’s face spreads. “Oh, no. I didn’t think about that at all!”
Yuuri’s hair is a damp, unkempt mess, and little strands are drifting into his eyes. Victor wants to run his hands through it and make it even messier. The other man is even cuter than Victor’s memory painted him, and Victor spent months after the Grand Prix Final desperately trying to convince himself that he must have exaggerated Yuuri’s adorableness. Surely no one man could be that delicious.
This one man is.
He’s also a surprise.
When Victor first arrived, he expected… Oh, he wasn’t sure, exactly. Someone with a little more presence, someone with an arrogance that matched his own. (He had also expected someone who was attracted to him and wanted to act on it immediately, dammit.)
Instead, Yuuri is an adorably brilliant skater who can out-shimmy Chris Giacometti on a pole wearing nothing but boxer briefs, and yet blushes at a simple touch.
The only thing Victor likes better than a mystery is a surprise, and Yuuri is both.
“I’m sorry, Victor,” Yuuri says contritely.
Victor frowns, going over their conversation up to this point… “Yuuri, are you apologizing to me because the street signs are all in Japanese?”
“Uh…yes?”
“Don’t.” Victor taps Yuuri’s nose, leans in, and gives him a mock scowl. “Those of us from countries that eschew romanized alphabets need to stick together, do you hear? Never apologize.” He hopes Yuuri realizes that he’s joking.
But…
“Oh,” Yuuri says. He’s close, so close. His eyelashes are dark and thick; his glasses are spattered with little droplets of rain. Victor can see a pink flush spread over his face again, across his nose. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have apologized. I’m sorry.”
“You’re what?”
“Ah, I just did it again! I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry!” Yuuri blanches. “I mean—I—”
Victor gives up.
He thinks of Yuuri worrying that he would go back to Russia. It’s the most ridiculous thing he’s heard, and he doesn’t know how to reassure him. No, I need to be here. You made me feel things I didn’t even know existed. You made me think that maybe…
He doesn’t know to express this in Russian, let alone English.
So he tries another tactic entirely. He takes Yuuri’s glasses off his face.
Yuuri instinctively grabs for them. When he misses, his eyes narrow in Victor’s general direction in a squint. “Victor. I can’t see anything without my glasses.”
“Hush.” Victor brushes Yuuri’s wet hair back from his eyes. “I’m just cleaning them. I don’t know how you can see anything with them, given how wet they are.”
“You don’t have to. I can do that.”
“Hmph,” Victor says. “I’m your coach now. It’s my job to make sure you’re comfortable. Let me do this for you.”
Yuuri stills. For a second, Victor thinks he’s going to object. He’s pushed Victor away every time Victor’s come close. If he won’t allow Victor even this tiny thing, Victor thinks it will kill something in his heart. He can’t have been this wrong about the attraction between them that night.
Yes, something inside him whispers. You can be. You have been, and you will be again.
But Yuuri just tilts his face up, waiting. When Victor slides his glasses—clean now—on his face, Yuuri turns pink and smiles shyly.
Something takes root in Victor’s chest, something warm and lovely. Something that feels like it might eventually take the place of the aching homesickness he’s barely managing to suppress.
Go back to Russia.
Ha.
#
Maybe that day is when Victor’s deception starts—the day he gets lost going in a straight line for three blocks because his sense of direction is shit and he can’t read Japanese.
The deception isn’t intentional, not for a while. There are only so many Instagram photos that Victor can upload while Yuuri is running drills up and down the staircase of Hasetsu Castle, after all.
Victor had his wake-up call. He is functionally illiterate here. He’s going to be here for months and months—so many months. (Possibly, part of him argues, the rest of his life—but even though he secretly hopes that’s the case, he’s aware that it sounds utterly foolish.)
Anyway, the kana quiz app is easy to install. All Victor wants is to be able to read street signs. He’ll stop when he’s learned Hiragana.
#
He does not stop when he’s learned Hiragana.
#
A few days after he’s blown through Katakana, he realizes that he’s going to have to practice his nascent reading ability on something, and that means he needs vocabulary. Maybe he can learn a few of the most common Kanji. Victor loads up his phone with beginning Japanese podcasts, and when he runs in the morning (while Yuuri is asleep, because adorably enough, the man would not be able to wake up before ten in the morning if his bed were on fire) he introduces himself to seagulls along the way with a jaunty “Nikiforov Victor desu!”
The seagulls do not respond, but Makkachin manages to dredge up a piece of driftwood festooned in seaweed.
Victor doesn’t mention his podcasts to Yuuri. It’s not that he intends to keep his language lessons from his student; it’s that their conversations are about other things—things like skating, skaters, the Instagram accounts of other skaters, Victor’s own Instagram account, the best socks to wear while skating, and Yuuri’s prior sex life. (Fine. There’s very little discussion of the latter, but it’s not for lack of trying on Victor’s part).
Besides, at first Victor thinks it’s obvious that he is learning Japanese. Surely Yuuri has to notice that Victor’s picking up a few Japanese phrases? Yuuri must notice that Victor is now pronouncing his name correctly, with the lengthened u and the Japanese r that he needed three YouTube videos and several hours training muscle memory to pronounce properly.
Yuuri does not notice.
Yuuri, apparently, does not think about the fact that Victor is going to Japanese restaurants, buying things from Japanese stores, and living with a Japanese family. If Victor couldn’t say “good morning!” or “thank you for the meal” in the local language, that would be rude.
And maybe, maybe, it’s not surprising that Yuuri doesn’t notice, because those stock phrases are all the Japanese that Yuuri ever hears Victor use. The two of them can’t have interesting conversations in any language other than English. When your conversational skills range from “I have a dog” to “today is humid, isn’t it?” in one language, you’re going to stick to the language you’re fluent in.
How else will you discuss the virtues of cashmere versus merino wool socks?
#
(It is important to discuss socks. Victor is absolutely passionate about socks.
The right answer to the skate-sock question is never cotton. He and Yuuri agree on that much—never wear cotton socks when you skate.
Not unless you want to get trench foot. As a coach, it’s Victor’s duty to convey this very important, scientific fact to Yuuri, but it turns out that neither of them know how to say “trench foot” in English. They eventually have to look it up in their respective languages.
Once this dastardly communication obstacle has been surmounted, they spend half an hour arguing over whether it’s even possible to get trench foot from wet socks in skates. Yakov knew a man, Victor insists. Old coach’s tale, Yuuri says with a roll of his eyes.
Yurio—who is present at the time of this argument—comes to Yakov’s defense, because dammit, Yakov may not be speaking to either of them at the moment, but he’s their coach and this is important.
The argument ends in laughter and Victor tickling Yuuri until neither of them can breathe and Yurio slamming the door to his room.
All this is why, one month into his stay in Japan, Victor knows how to say, “My dog has trench foot” in Japanese. This is a phrase vastly outside the typical survival lexicon, and—Yakov’s lectures aside—he hopes he never has to use it.)
#
Maybe Victor’s deception doesn’t start at the ninja house. Maybe it starts later, on the beach.
After the Onsen on Ice event, Victor stupidly imagines that he and Yuuri will get together in short order. Yuuri has admitted that he has a bit of a confidence issue, but he worked through it, right? He found his Eros. At a minimum, the flirtatious look he gave Victor before he started skating is burned in Victor’s brain.
Instead, Yuuri avoids him even more assiduously. Victor doesn’t know how to fix it, but he knows how to try. Everyone wants him to be someone; he just has to figure out who Yuuri wants him to be.
But everything he tries only makes things worse, and Yuuri avoids him to the point where he’s skipping practice. Finally, in a fit of desperation, he corners Yuuri on the beach and asks him point blank what he wants.
Yuuri shakes his head at every option—not a father figure, not a brother, not a boyfriend.
“Victor,” he finally says, “I want you to be yourself.”
Victor isn’t sure what that even means at first.
How could he be anyone but himself? Confusion breeds more confusion. He’s never reacted to words this way before. His heart beats quickly; his palms feel too warm. It’s not an unpleasant sensation, but it is strange. Very strange. He doesn’t know what it means or what to do with it.
A month ago, Victor tried to tell Yuuri about his first boyfriend. He’d thought it would be like the time he told Chris. Victor made it sound sexy and glitzy, and Chris had laughed and called him a playboy.
Now he’s suddenly, oddly, glad that he never got to tell Yuuri that story. Yuuri sees far too much. He would have seen through Victor’s winks and smiles as quickly as he did that line about trench foot. Yuuri wouldn’t have heard the story of the wealthy French scion from some old family whisking Victor away in a private jet to a Mediterranean island and thought it sounded romantic.
Yuuri would have heard the truth.
Which was that Victor was at a party when he was newly in the senior division. He was introduced to a sponsor’s son—“he’s your age, Victor”—and they’d hit it off. The other boy had been wealthy and good looking, yes. But the thing that had clinched their whirlwind weekend together had been the moment the boy looked Victor in the eyes and said this: “I love you.”
Victor had been young, but he hadn’t been an idiot. He knew quite well that Jean-Philippe didn’t know him, let alone love him. But Victor hoped he at least wanted to, and it was enough for someone to want to love him.
On the last day of their three-day trip, Jean-Philippe had said, “My boyfriend will be so jealous that he missed out on this.”
Victor hadn’t let himself show an ounce of regret. He’d played along, smiling, because Jean-Philippe saw Victor as something like a painting on loan from a museum. Not a lover who could belong in his life.
It hadn’t been a bad experience. Victor had refused to get emotional about it. Victor had enjoyed having sex, didn’t have hang-ups about it, and Jean-Philippe had been good at it.
So what if Jean-Philippe hadn’t wanted him for himself? At least Victor had been wanted, hadn’t he?
Victor had grown so used to becoming the shape of someone else’s dreams that he didn’t know how to have his own.
But Yuuri looks at him on the beach and frowns at the list Victor’s recited, and he tells Victor to be Victor, not anyone else. It’s the first time someone has asked him to think about what he wants to be. It feels strange, so strange. He doesn’t understand what it really means, why his heart is beating so fast, until later that night when he burrows under his covers and stares up at the dark ceiling.
Oh, he realizes. Oh. That’s what this means. He’s happy.
It’s happiness with a bitter aftertaste, though, because now, when he thinks of Jean-Philippe and the half-dozen lovers who followed him…
Now, he doesn’t think, I want Yuuri to be one of them.
Now, he thinks… I wish Yuuri had been the first. It’s not that he regrets his past lovers. He just wishes that somewhere in those relationships, he’d been less of a piece of art and more of a person.
He doesn’t know why this revelation makes his throat ache. He can’t articulate it, not in any of the languages he knows. He does know that he wants to learn Japanese more than ever.
If this is what Yuuri can do to him with a few words in English, Victor wants to be able to communicate in Japanese.
#
That’s probably when his deception starts in earnest.
Victor goes out more than Yuuri. A lot more. Yuuri’s an introvert, and when Victor asks if he wants to come with him to restaurants or bars, Yuuri refuses more often than not, preferring to stay in with his computer, muttering something about facetiming a friend.
And Victor? He has a metabolism that Yuuri would kill for, and he loves eating. The first words he learns outside of his podcast are food words, gained at the bar in Nagahama Ramen, holding up bits of unknown delicacies with his chopsticks and asking Nagahama-san, “Kore wa nan desu ka?” in halting Japanese.
His Japanese sucks.
Victor used to think the initial milestone of language familiarity was when he first grasped something in one language that can’t be directly translated to another. But this marker doesn’t work in Japanese; there is no direct translation for “topic-marking particle,” and that makes even the simplest Japanese sentences non-literal.
Even some of the basic nouns he encounters at the raamenya lack useful translation: wakame, mozuku, hijiki. His dictionary unhelpfully describes all of these with the same word: seaweed.
Victor never knew there were so many words for seaweed.
#
At first, Victor thinks he and Yuuri touch so much because of the language barrier. They’re both fluent in English, but their English vocabulary is still limited. There are a thousand gradations of friendship and affection they can’t communicate any way except through touch.
“Hey,” Yuuri says, resting his fingers lightly on Victor’s shoulder as he passes by his chair in the evening. “I’m getting some tea. Can I get you some?”
Or: “No,” Victor says, skating up to Yuuri on the ice. “You have to push all the way from here, or you’ll never get the height you need for that axel.” He sets his hand on Yuuri’s ass, tracing the muscle group he’s referring to. “Not here.” He taps Yuuri’s thigh. He doesn’t know the words for the muscles in English, only knows how to show him.
Yes, technically he’s grabbing Yuuri’s ass, but how else is he to communicate? “Do it again.”
If Victor were the only one reaching, the only one touching… Well, that would leave an ugly taste in his mouth, reminiscent of long years he’d prefer not to think about.
But he’s not the only one. Those lingering brushes, the hugs they exchange before bed… They are both innocent and intimate at the same time, and whatever they might mean, they’re mutual. Yuuri reaches for Victor as much as Victor reaches for Yuuri, as if their hands on each other are a necessary part of the language they’re learning to share.
Touch by touch, they are building a lexicon of Victor and Yuuri that sits outside spoken language.
#
Beginning podcasts give rise to intermediate podcasts. “What is this?” in Japanese turns into, “Delicious again, Nagahama-san. How did you make the broth?”
Victor has a mind for languages. In part, it’s because he travels a lot, and he wants (possibly needs) people to like him. He’s fluent in Russian, French, and English. But he also can make himself understood in a smattering of other languages—Spanish, Tagalog (he trained as a junior with a ballet dancer from the Philippines; she taught him all the rude words), Mandarin, Greek, Italian, and German.
Of course, Japanese is different from anything he’s ever experienced, and with his knowledge of Kanji characters still in the dozens, the language is frustratingly inaccessible in print.
But Victor is stubborn. Exactly one person in the world can reliably land a quadruple flip in competition. Millions of people can speak Japanese. These two things have nothing to do with each other, but Victor doesn’t care.
He will prevail because he can, dammit. Winning is the only thing he knows how to do reliably.
#
Initially, it doesn’t occur to Victor that Yuuri never sees him practicing Japanese. Yuuri misses his first fumbling introductions, his pointing and gesturing, his graduation from repeating mangled phrases to forming halting sentences.
Besides, Victor’s not good at Japanese. He’s not even competent at it. There is no point in those first months when Victor feels that he should say, “By the way, Yuuri, I understand Japanese.”
Why would he say that? He doesn’t understand.
Except… sometimes, sometimes he almost does.
Sometimes, like the night in early August, with Yuuri’s first national tournament a month away…
Yuuri insists on English with his family when Victor is around. Of course, Yuuri’s English is much better than his family’s, but he usually translates when the conversation lapses into Japanese.
“I don’t want you to feel excluded,” he tells Victor. “You’re here, and you’re welcome, and…” And Yuuri trails off, blushing, leaving his sentence incomplete. Sometimes, though, he’ll touch Victor’s elbow, as if that is an explanation in itself.
But when Victor is doing something else—tonight, Victor is brushing Makkachin—Yuuri and his family will talk. Victor’s on the other side of the room, so of course they don’t think anything of speaking in Japanese.
This night, Victor’s paying attention to what they’re saying. Brushing Makkachin requires little brainpower, and language acquisition takes practice.
He doesn’t expect to understand much of anything. If they had been speaking slowly and simply, he might have been able to follow some parts of the conversation. But they’re not speaking for him, and so it feels like he’s standing in a quiet firehose of Japanese, the few words he knows standing out like fluorescent particles in the stream of syllables: something something boku wa something something kaeru something something yon kaiten sarukou something something something something. He recognizes words here and there. Numbers. Skating words. Some sentence patterns that he’s familiar with. A few sentence-ending particles, and after a few months of study, he’s still not exactly sure what the fuck a particle is anyway, because no other language he’s learned uses them with such bewildering intensity.
Then he hears his name.
He can’t help but perk up at the way Yuuri says Vikutoru-san. The syllables sound different in Japanese than in English, Yuuri’s voice breathy and low. His name on Yuuri’s lips short-circuits all Victor’s synapses.
Mari laughs and says something in return, something that makes Yuuri blush. (Not that that’s hard.)
But what Mari says is even more exciting, because Victor understands the sentence pattern—a simple one, one he’s already learned!—he understands everything in it except two words!—it’s about something that Yuuri did to him, and ooh, that was definitely the past tense!
Victor’s delighted to be able to recognize that much—look at him, getting actual information from conversational-speed Japanese!—but in an even greater stroke of luck, Mari says the same sentence twice, the second time in a teasing voice, giving him the opportunity to catch those missing words.
Victor sets aside the brush and sounds out the phrase on his phone dictionary absentmindedly. Something about how Yuuri chased Victor when he was in the flush of youth, maybe? Probably a metaphorical reference to Victor’s stellar junior record?
Victor’s just as absentmindedly adding the two words to the “new vocabulary” flashcard deck on his phone when his mind parses the second meaning the dictionary offered up. Suddenly Mari’s teasing tone makes sense. Not youthful flush, that’s not what Mari said.
She said childhood crush.
He stares at the flashcard he’s just made. His own cheeks heat, and he doesn’t dare look up.
He isn’t trying to eavesdrop. He’s just practicing his Japanese. How was he supposed to realize that Mari was teasing Yuuri about having a childhood crush on Victor?
Also, Yuuri had a childhood crush on Victor. That’s…great. Right?
“Childhood, ha!” says Hiroko-san from the couch near Victor, and something else he doesn’t quite catch—it’s a question and it has something to do with time.
Mari is still teasing Yuuri, with something like: “Does Victor know something something something?” Something something sounds suspiciously like the English word poster, probably borrowed directly from it. Does Victor know about your poster? he guesses. Maybe posters; Japanese doesn’t distinguish between singular and plural nouns, so it could be two.
So Yuuri probably had a poster of him back in the day. Should Victor admit that he paid a ridiculous price to have several of Yuuri shipped all the way to Russia last January?
Yuuri shouldn’t be embarrassed. Victor’s not. His posters were a business expense. He needed to stare at them to develop his Eros routine…
Yuuri being as easily flustered as he is, it’s probably best not to mention it.
Victor allows himself to look up.
Yuuri is blushing, protesting. He meets Victor’s eyes and blushes even harder.
Victor gives Yuuri an encouraging smile.
“We’re talking about your…coaching,” Yuuri says. “I was saying how…thankful I am for it.”
Here’s the thing: Yuuri obviously doesn’t want Victor to know what his family is saying, or he’d have translated it. Victor really didn’t mean to listen in, and something slightly sour settles in his stomach.
That moment of decision, brief though it is, passes with the best of intentions. If he says something now, Yuuri will become embarrassed all over again. They’ve become friends, close friends, and Victor doesn’t want to set their friendship back. Besides, this was a one-time thing, unlikely to happen again.
Victor’s not lying. He’s not saying anything at all, in fact. He’s just helping Yuuri save face.
Victor pockets his phone, picks up Makkachin’s brush, and stands.
“Well, talk away.” He smiles at Yuuri. He can’t help but smile at Yuuri. “I’m going up to my room. I have a phone call to make anyway.”