Chapter Text
Ten years ago, Yuuri, Yuko, and Takeshi had been skating around Ice Castle Hasetsu, when the exact conversation of true names had come up.
"Actually, my name's already appeared," Yuko said slyly, grinning at Yuuri. Her pointed cat’s ears, the same warm brown as her hair, flicked with a bit of mischief.
"Whoa, really?" Yuuri asked, eyes wide and staring. True names appeared only in the proximity of one's soulmate, and to find it so young was both a blessing and a curse. He watched Yuko turn another of Victor's spins before she answered.
"Yup. But my name's top secret. I won't tell anyone!"
"She's probably lying," Takeshi snorted. He and Yuuri were cutting figures in the ice. It had become some kind of unspoken competition between the two to see who could make them neater, more closely overlapped. Yuuri was winning, narrowly.
"Am not!" Yuko said, sticking her tongue out. "It's on my arm, right here!" She tugged on her sleeve to indicate the spot.
Takeshi paused. "Really? What..." He paused his figures, and so did Yuuri.
Takeshi blinked a few times, like the words were gone. Like the puzzle was missing a piece that had just been in his hands. He was looking at Yuko now as though she'd suddenly gained the power to rip the very sun from the sky, and the fear and awe that came from that was greater than any mortal emotions could ever measure up to. Even his expressive ears had stilled, the rounded black points tipping back with nerves, his short tail bushing. He whispered, softly, "Natsukashii?"
Yuko froze, cheeks hollowing as she sucked in a breath. "How do you know that?" She rolled the sleeve up, and the kanji and kana were there, sharp and black, on the inside of her forearm. Takeshi rolled back his sleeve, showing the mark's mirror on his own skin.
It was a word without a direct English translation. Nostalgic was a close cut, but not perfect. Nostalgia implied pain. A desire to return to those from memories of the past. With natsukashii, there was only joy on the look backwards, a love for the past that mirrored the love of the present.
Names were often a representation of a pair, of the bond they would share. Sometimes platonic, sometimes romantic, sometimes something more. A name like that was something deeper than the oceans, a promise of a joyful eternity.
Yuuri left the rink, and the soulmates, alone that day.
He didn't look back on that particular memory unhappily. There was no pain in the thought of it, as their true name seemed to symbolize so perfectly. With the two of them, there was only the comfortable presence of them, one beside the other. They lost their ears to each other, marrying after high school. Then along came the triplets, adorable little blanket-wrapped terrors, screaming for attention and lashing their tiny tails. Forever awaited the happy pair.
But Yuuri... Yuuri was alone. It wasn't so bad. The world could be cruel place for those who retained their ears too long into adulthood, but it could have always been much worse.
Keeping them was a childish thing. It was for those whose inexperience was as obvious as the nose on their face. A set of perfect cat ears, a tail that betrayed every childish emotion, and no sign at all of a true name.
Not that he needed one. Finding a true named soulmate was rare enough to make it less of a requirement of existence and more of a promise of a permanent bond between two people. Relationships outside of names were extremely commonplace, especially with platonic names.
The thing of it, though, boiled down to one simple problem. Yuuri was old enough to drink in America. He attended University. He was, by all other estimations of the word, an adult. But as long as he retained the cat ears and the short bobtail, he was treated differently.
Really, Yuuri didn't care what the other students of his university thought of him. He didn't. Fears of intimacy and social anxiety aside, Yuuri was quite happy like this. Because getting rid of them in a drunken haze at a party (which Yuuri hated going to anyway) or to Phichit (to be fair, the boy had offered, thinking it would help Yuuri's anxiety) would just be lying to himself.
As a figure skater, he knew he was in the public eye a bit more than the average person. Even a dime-a-dozen skater like him would have the status of his ears broadcast around the world. Getting rid of them now was equally as bad as keeping them was.
It would be... mildly problematic for Yuuri to one day lose his ears for no explainable reason. He might have been a no-name skater barely certified by the JSF, but his ears were all he had to cling to. The scraps of recognition he got from them were all Yuuri could rely on.
If he wanted to skate the same ice as the great Victor Nikiforov someday, to be recognized as an equal to his idol, at least a tiny degree of recognition would be necessary. Keeping his ears this long for that reason alone felt like a cheap, flimsy excuse, even to him. But it got Yuuri through the first four years of university in Detroit easily enough.
Phichit was a good roommate. He didn't bring people back to the apartment if he could help it, he didn't complain about the endless posters of Victor's face on the walls, and he kept his hamsters' cages clean.
He was also a solid 60% of Yuuri's self control and sense of worth.
Phichit didn't say anything when he sat down beside Yuuri on the bed. He offered up a hamster, and the cuddly little thing settled easily enough into Yuuri's palm. It was one of the nice ones, a silver and white hamster, not the little golden asshole who liked to bite Yuuri's thumb until it bled and ran on the squeaky wheel all night.
Yuuri glanced around his room with hooded eyes. His favorite Victor poster was the newest one to be released, a limited edition early run of Victor in his Stammi Vicino costume, taken during the first performance of the routine a few weeks ago. It was a flattering picture, some combination of the expression on his face, the complementary color of the costume against his skin, and the gleam of lights in his silver hair.
Yuuri had gotten it in the mail yesterday, paying extra for overnight shipping, and had tacked it up almost as soon as it had been unrolled.
It was in a position of honor, even nudging out Yuuri's now-second favorite poster and relegating that one to a new spot. The old one was now above his bed. It was an older one, of a younger Victor in a black costume decorated in silvery jewels.
His hair had been long and he still had his ears back then, crisp points like a Russian blue. Tails were a bit of a crutch in the junior division, lending an extra bit of balance on the ice, and Victor had often kept his long, silvery tail pressed close to his back as a matter of pride.
But sometimes, very rarely, he'd let it uncurl, brushing sinuously through the air when he bowed, or settled into a finishing pose. Of course, Victor had shed his ears and tail early in his life. He hadn't even been eighteen yet, causing a bit of a stir when Victor refused to elaborate on who had taken them. All he'd offered was a wink and a smile. A few years later, the hair had gone too.
Now, in the senior division, it was rare to see anyone with ears or a tail. If there was, they were expected to do as Victor had done, keeping it tucked close to their bodies. Failure to do so would result in technical penalties. Yuuri's little bobtail had no issues, fortunately. Phichit, wordly as he was, didn't have that problem.
Yuuri leaned against Phichit, letting out a ragged sigh.
"I can't do this."
"You can," Phichit said firmly. "You've already medaled in two events. Do it again, and the Grand Prix Final is yours." Phichit patted his shoulder and left with his hamsters.
Somewhere along the way, Yuuri had made it to the finals. He picked his suitcase and flew out of Detroit for the Grand Prix Finals. How he accomplished that was anyone's guess. He didn't belong, and he could feel it in the way people stared at him as he passed. He'd seen it in the eyes of those who had missed the podium because Yuuri had somehow taken a spot by some fluke. This was a mistake.
The stress of it all was eating him alive.
He checked in and settled in for a quiet night of self-love, hoping it would help tone down how keyed up his nerves were making him. It didn't do anything for the pointed ears. Only another person could do that. In Yuuri's selfish, foolish dreams, it was always Victor. It had always been Victor.
It seemed almost poetically fitting, having the news of Vicchan arrive late that night. Yuuri was almost feeling confident, for a moment, like this was something he could manage.
In one sentence, Yuuri knew. He knew, and there was nothing he could do to stop the tide of emotion. It didn't take a genius to see the effect it had on him the next morning. His pointed ears drooped, nearly flat to his head. His little tail hung limp between his legs, like a dead thing. But there was no Phichit here to provide comfort, and Celestino was at a loss to proved true comfort.
Yuuri was just a kid. Despite his age, despite his experience, in spite of it all, Yuuri was not the adult he wished he was, and everyone could see it. All Yuuri could do was grieve, as well as butcher his entire performance. The free skate the next day was even worse.
At the end of it all, Celestino forced him to put on his suit, determined that, 'at least he can relax a little with his fellow skaters', and dragged Yuuri into the banquet hall.
Yuuri turned to the champagne, and he hid in his corner the rest of the night. No one wanted to talk to a childish loser like him, and Yuuri wasn't going to make them.
It was a boring affair. The answer to that was another glass of bubbly.
Yuuri awoke the following morning with a blistering headache and a tongue like sandpaper. Ink was smeared down his arm. Curiously, he was wearing nothing but his boxer briefs. He flicked his tail and rubbed at his aching skull, focusing the pressure at his temples for a moment before turning it to the knots behind his pointed ears.
He needed a shower before his flight. There was no doubt about that.
Filled with self-loathing and a feeling of 'I can't believe I let everyone down like that', Yuuri returned to Detroit.
Everything was pretty par for the course, as far as Yuuri's life was concerned. Any trace of hope destroyed, all happiness obliterated, and Yuuri was left in a dark pit of eating too much and skating too little.
And then it got worse.
As the weeks passed, Yuuri got at least a little grip on his life. He settled into spring semester, focused all that negative energy into studying. Normalcy came slowly. It was hard for it not to, wen at the very least, Yuuri was such a no name skater that the others in his university knew him better for his ears than for his failures. He found solace in one thing, and one thing alone: skating Victor's performances the way he once did with Yuko.
He skated late into the night and slept late into the morning, only waking up and getting ready for the day when Pichict bodily rolled him from his bed. As the routine became more familiar by turns, his love for skating slowly returned. He wasn’t in a good place by any means, but he was recovering.
One morning, Phichit was getting testy. He wanted to shower before class too, and, "come on, Yuuri, save at least a little hot water for me?"
Yuuri turned the water off and wrapped his towel around his waist, settling it comfortably just below the base of his tail. In the mirror, he could see the growing softness in his cheeks. He never had much in the way of abs, so to speak, but any trace he might have once had were long gone now. His ears flicked indignantly.
He turned away, replacing his glasses on the bridge of his nose. They fogged up instantly.
"Sorry, Phichit," Yuuri muttered as he passed, making room for Phichit to take the bathroom.
Phichit gasped. "Yuuri." Phichit sounded some combination of angry, scandalized, and excited. "Yuuuuriiii! Why didn't you tell me!? I thought we were friends!" Phichit wailed.
Yuuri turned. Everything was a fog cloud, but it was slowly clarifying now that he'd left the bathroom. He frowned. "What are you talking about?"
Phichit made a strangled noise and had to clamp his hands over his mouth to keep from screaming. "You don't know. Oh my god, you don't know."
"Don't know what?" Yuuri asked, starting to get a little testy. Phichit dragged him into the bathroom, sputtering.
"Just look," Phichit ground out, spinning Yuuri so he had his back to the mirror.
Yuuri stopped breathing. Everything stopped. The world simply ceased to exist for the span of those next few seconds. All Yuuri could do was look, twisted to see his back, struck dumb and mute by the reflection.
Near the base of his spine, printed in a bold gold font, cursive in nature and glittering softly under the harsh fluorescents, was writing. Two words, so innocent above his tail. History Makers.
The old conversation from ten years ago passed through Yuuri’s head. Memories from when he, Yuko, and Takeshi discussed soulmates, and Yuuri had felt the simultaneous joy for his friends, that they were so perfectly destined for one another that even fate itself could see it, and the ache of longing that came from the small pangs of envy.
To see the printed words on his back now...
"Oh my god, Yuuri, it's so beautiful, it's so pretty, lookit!" Phichit was almost screaming now, flailing helplessly in the little bathroom beside Yuuri. "Who is it? Who's your soulmate?"
Yuuri could only stare. "I don't know."
The only thought in Victor's mind when he awoke in the morning, aside from the quick decision that perhaps he should have skipped one or two of those extra glasses of champagne during the banquet, was a burning ache of longing.
Yuuri Katsuki. A man Victor couldn't have.
Yuri gave him a lot of shit for not knowing the man was a competitor when Victor had asked after a commemorative photo. A surprising amount of shit, actually. Little Yuri wasn't the type to care about these things. But he was also inclined to yell at Victor for any little perceived fault, and so it must've seemed only natural.
Victor tried to approach him, guilty after Yuri's comments, but Chris had pulled him away before he could catch the man's attention. He asked some question or another that Victor couldn't find it within himself to remember. Victor had felt a rush of warmth over his back, but nothing so strange that it made him worried.
Yuuri Katsuki. One of the only skaters in men's singles who still had his ears and tail. Poking out the back of his ugly suit, Victor could see the tiny bit of fluff, the tuft of inky black fur that nestled at the base of Yuuri's spine. The ears, flat against his skull as he downed glass after glass of champagne.
And then, as the night progressed, Victor could see the way the young man’s eyes went mildly unfocused and his ears cropped up, searching, eager. On a mission. Untouched, beautiful, and innocent.
At least, until he began to dance.
Only one thing held Victor back. One thing kept him from asking, no, begging, Yuuri to join him in his room that night for a different sort of dance off. Victor would have done anything to be the one to claim Yuuri's ears, be the one who could say he was the first to lay with the inhumanly beautiful Yuuri Katsuki.
And that was his soul mate.
Yuuri's soul mate, more accurately. Because there was no question that Yuuri had one, not when the gold across his back spoke volumes about what his true name was and what his destiny entailed.
History Makers. The words set Victor on fire, burning with desire at the very idea. Yes, yes, it seemed so obvious. The man danced as though he dragged the music out of his very soul and made it real.
But he was bonded. With who, Victor didn't know. But the other skaters in the room had seen the words as Yuuri twisted himself around that pole, they mused quietly about the implications of the words on last place's spine. There were some half-smiles, some less than pleasant implications.
Victor silenced the hungry voices in his head and helped Yuuri's coach drag the skater to his hotel room, waving off the thanks with his signature smile.
He scrawled his number on Yuuri's arm, because Victor was a grown ass adult, and because Victor had, indeed, promised to be Yuuri's coach if Yuuri won the dance battle.
And that was that. If Yuuri called, excellent. And if he didn't? Well, Victor was a grown ass adult. Late 20's perhaps, and still no soul mate, but he was an adult. He could handle rejection. And Victor really didn't need the distraction of playing coach in his life. Yakov would laugh him out of the rink if Victor even suggested it.
When Yuuri didn't call the first day, Victor was still feeling pretty good about himself. He was flying home himself, and he was so busy that he wouldn't have been able to talk, regardless. Day two, and Victor grew a little more restless. He unpacked his suitcase, rested with Makkachin. But Yuuri had a longer flight, and probably jet lag at that.
When Victor had started strutting around the locker room of the skating rink on day three, half nude and as carefree as he could make himself under the circumstances, Yuri started to sputter.
"Something wrong?" Victor asked.
"Nothing," Yuri spat, whirling around with unusual vehemence. He stalked out to the rink, his tail lashing the air in furious strikes.
Victor shrugged and bent double, searching for a shirt.
Georgi's eyes went wide. "Victor. Your name..." Victor glanced back. Georgi's eyes had taken on a misty twinkle. "Ah, you've found your soul mate."
Victor found a handheld mirror. He screamed.
The mirror shattered when it hit the ground, and the mess of broken glass trapped him, openly weeping tears of joy, in the locker room until someone could clean it up. He cried like Georgi after a breakup.
Yuuri Katsuki, Victor Nikiforov, History Makers. Victor loved the sound of that, more than he loved teasing Yuri about about his obsession with all things feline, more than he liked cracking jokes about Georgi's dramatics, more than he joked with Mila about her throwing Yuri around like nothing.
Did Yuuri know about the match? Should Victor tell him? Did he even need to be told?
When day four arrived without a call, Victor started to worry that he'd been forgotten. That Yuuri didn't want him after all. The rejection stung sharp and hot and bitter all at once.
By day 38, Victor stopped worrying at all. Because Victor was a grown ass adult, after all, and despite what Yuri might suggest, he knew when he wasn't wanted, however much it hurt.
Skating for Yuko was pleasant. Coming home had been rough. Getting affectionately ribbed by Minako about still having his ears after college was the worst.
When Yuuri had knelt in front of Vicchan's shrine, he'd felt only a numb sense of loneliness. Time had softened the blow, and seeing it now was just a sour taste and a gentle ache.
He took all those emotions and threw them into the mix when he skated for his old friend. His ears twitched nervously in the rink, waiting with baited breath for a response to his performance. Without the cat ears, her emotions were harder to read.
At long last, Yuko slammed her hands down on the side of the rink and cried. "It was as good as Victor!"
The triplets wiggled their tails with gleeful vengeance as they snapped pictures of their father teasing Yuuri, and for a moment, everything seemed... right.
When it was just Yuuri and Yuko alone again, she pulled him aside. "You seem different. Is everything alright?"
He let the moment carry through the air, poignant and piercing, before he broke the silence. The words were hard to say. They were almost an admission of guilt, and saying them carried the weight of a death sentence. "I don't know. I'm confused."
Retirement seemed like such a pleasant promise. Yuuri had a degree from an American university. Getting a job wouldn't be too hard. He'd never have to count calories again. Never slave over the ice until his feet were bleeding and his hips were stained black and blue with bruises, more like a spill of ink than actual skin.
But leaving it all behind left a bitter taste in his mouth, even without the mark on his back conflating the issue.
History Makers sounded nice in theory. But it was a dark prophecy, and one that could go several different ways. History to whom, Yuuri wondered, when he laid in his bed and stared at his ceiling in sleepless agony.
It wasn't just that Yuuri now had this looming over his head. It was also something he seemed to be cursed to share with someone else, someone Yuuri had met at some point in his life and would probably never meet again. Someone who would have to spend the entire rest of their life with pitiful, tailed Yuuri Katsuki as their soulmate.
"I just don't know what to do anymore."
Yuko grabbed his hand. "You do what makes you happy."
Yuuri blinked twice, letting the beats between them form a natural spacing for his thoughts. He felt a wave of foreign courage through the touch. Yuko had always been there. She deserved to know.
"I found this while I was at school. But I don't know where or when I got it," he said. He turned his back, lifting his shirt.
Yuko gasped. "Oh, Yuuri. It's amazing!"
"It feels like a lie."
Arms closed around him, and she shook her head fiercely. Her denial was nice.
For things to get worse after all of that, it seemed like a cruel irony from a goddess of fate.
Yuuri added another view to the video of him skating to Victor's program, because Yuuri loved death and the pain that came from watching his fat, tailed ass flub its way through a program about love and sex and staying together in perpetuity. There were stereotypes, lots of them in fact, about the kind of programs that people with ears should and shouldn't do. This did not match what Yuuri usually did, and for good reason.
The comments were even better. An absolute riot, really, picking on every little insecurity Yuuri held privately inside his head. Some were nice, but then again, law of averages. Someone out there had to be nice enough to lie.
Yuuri hid in his room and buried his head in the pillows, feeling the unpleasant drag of fabric over the fur of his ears. Goodbye, cruel world, and all of that other nonsense.
He turned his phone off, hoping to escape the world.
The world did not want him to escape. As if physically manifesting all of Yuuri's regret, there had been a snowstorm in the night, covering everything in thick, white piles of ice and pure misery.
His mother passed him a shovel. Yuuri took it without much more than a twitch of the ears. He pulled on a hat, wincing at the uncomfortable press against his ears, and headed for the door. A dog greeted him, a barking, precocious mess of silver grey that tackled him to the ground.
"He came with a handsome foreigner," his dad said, like it was normal. Like it wasn't the absolute worst thing in all of Yuuri's existence to hear. And the pieces, unfortunately, clicked. A beat of motionlessness. It settled into his mind as a thought that, no, this did not seem to be a dream, nightmare or otherwise.
Yuuri ran.
He was in the bath when Yuuri found him, the towel over his head as he reclined against the rock.
When Yuuri crashed through the doors, Victor Nikiforov's expression shifted. A smile spread, and he rose from the water, letting it sluice down his chiseled body. He was buck ass naked, and he tilted his head alluringly.
"Hello, Yuuri! I'm going to be your coach!" And, as if the world hadn't been cruel enough already, Victor slowly turned, exposing the length of his back and the glittering of gold lettering across his spine. "And you're going to win."
How many times since discovering the mark, Yuuri wondered, had he stared at it in the mirror, willing it to explain itself? How many times had he been driven to tears because the weight of the lie on his skin seemed to cause physical pain?
"Y-you... your true name-" Yuuri choked. Victor took measured steps closer to Yuuri, still smiling.
"Can I see, Yuuri?" he asked, twirling his finger.
Yuuri was paralyzed. His idol, the man who lived on his posters for years, was asking to see the words on his back, the ones that were identical to the golden letters along Victor's own spine. Yuuri turned, every step robotic, and Victor tugged the shirt up with a pleased humm, exposing the matched words on Yuuri's skin.
Yuuri glanced back, horrified, as Victor smiled. "Beautiful," Victor breathed.
This was a joke. A cruel joke. Someone had tattooed Yuuri in his sleep, or somehow convinced the fates to give him the most ill-fitting true name in the history of eternity.
They fed Victor, and he'd absolutely roasted Yuuri's current weight. But he was here to be Yuuri's coach, of that, there was no joke.
No one else had seen Victor's back, nor Yuuri's for that matter. No one questioned when Victor asked Yuuri to show him to his room, a disused banquet room that would have to serve.
Alone, Victor turned to Yuuri. "We should spend some time getting to know each other, don't you think?" He knelt beside Yuuri, curling a finger under his chin. The half-cocked smile was all intentions and arousal.
Yuuri flew backward, hitting the wall hard enough for pain to blossom in his tailbone.
"What's wrong?" Victor asked, looking genuinely baffled. As though a casually sexual touch to a guy who still had his ears was in no way abnormal. Like it shouldn't provoke a reaction. They were true named, after all. Victor could have thought he could have anything he wanted. And the worst part was that Yuuri probably would have let him.
Yuuri fled to his room.
But there was no reprieve. A knock at the door was followed by Victor's cheerful voice. "Yuuri, let's sleep together~!" And let Victor see the walls of Yuuri's room, completely plastered with all those old pictures of Victor?
"Nooo!" Yuuri moaned, untacking them at the speed of mortal terror.
"I won't take your ears if you don't want me to," Victor said. "I just want to get to know you! Yuuuri~!"
The fear worsened as Yuuri clutched the posters in his fingers. The thought, frankly, hadn't even occurred to him. Being sexually desirable to Victor Nikiforov? Impossible.
But goddamn, now that it had cropped up, it was taking over Yuuri's mind like the assault of an Ancient Roman legion. The thought of Victor leaning him back into the bed, kissing him gently, or maybe with a bit more ferocity, of Victor's long, thin fingers sliding through his hair and settling against his sensitive ears, rubbing the soft fur until Yuuri was purring beneath him. Bending him over and lazily driving into him until the little bobtail was gone from his back, and all that remained was the gold lettering.
It was a frequent fantasy of Yuuri's, but it had always been just that, a fantasy. He never actually considered the idea that Victor would ever want...
Yuuri shivered.
"Nooooooo," he said, shaking his head fiercely.
And yet, even as Victor surrendered and returned to his own room, Yuuri could feel the elation sizzling under his skin.
There was hope. Maybe his back wasn't a lie after all.