One day, I’ll be able to introduce myself with a simple hello.
When they ask for my name, I’ll be able to say: “You know who I am.”
They’ll frown. They’ll think. Their lips will part. Tiny cogs start turning inside their head.
“So you are,” they will say. “You are – oh.”
I won’t say anything until their eyes go wide. “Oh,” they will repeat.
“Yes,” I’ll say, amused and impatient, already pushing my sleeves up. “Now close your mouth and pull yourself together. We’ve got work to do.”
“What do I have to do,” the little boy asks, “to go down in history?”
We love you, they say. We will always love you. Our precious one. So tiny, so fragile. You’ll be strong one day, his father says. Successful too. You’ll be everything to be proud of. Grow strong, my son. I love you forever, his mother says.
Be careful, they say. Don’t hurt yourself. Do you want to cuddle? Here, have another bite. Your sister is home, why don’t you say hello? Ah, you fell. Shh, be brave, they whispers, I’ll put a band aid on it. There, all better. You’re so strong, we’re proud of you. Love you, little one.
You can be anything you want, they say. No, not that. That’s not a sport for boys. That’s – we don’t, I mean, your father wants you to turn out the right way.
The skating hall again? they sigh, smiling. Of course. Your father has made a sandwich. Yes, and your mother’s going to pick you up later. Be careful.
Stop this, they demand. Or I’m going to – yeah, you better flinch. A son should listen to his father. Don’t you dare cry.
Next time, they say with their arms around him, you’ll be better. Nobody’s born a master in anything. Get some sleep.
Please, she sobs into his shirt. Don’t go. He didn’t mean it. He even said you can keep skating. Just try, try to find a girlfriend? A girl? Please, a girl.
Well, she laughs, sighs then. We expected that. We’ll get used to it. Will you be happy? …okay. Okay then.
Congratulations, the letter says. Her writing has gotten smaller. Come home sometime. Below, his letters are harsh, scrawled. Not my son.
Where are you two? the text message accuses. Dinner is getting cold. Ask Viktor if he still needs his room or if he’ll stay in yours from now on?
“There are two ways,” his grandmother says. “You can be an emperor or you can be a lover.”
It’s dark outside when they’re finally alone, in front of the skating hall, no reporters or friends or anything else but the moon and the wind whispering through their clothes.
“Can I kiss you a second time?” Viktor says.
“Yes,” Yuuri says.
When she turned sixteen, the princess wished for a needle. “I want to sew a bit,” she wrote on a note and put it into the basket that went down her tower for food and books. “Just so I have something to do.”
When she received it, tucked under berries and cheese, the princess took the needle between two fingers. She went down the tower and to the door where the dragon lay.
“Beast,” the princess said.
The dragon said nothing. The chain around its neck was golden and terrible. Its wings were folded. It lay still and looked at the princess.
She lifted her hand. The needle gleamed silver in the dragon fire under the beast’s belly. “I can unleash you.”
For a while, the dragon only looked. It looked and looked, and then it opened its jaws. “And what do you want in return?”
The princess smiled. She went over to the dragon and pushed the needle into the lock sealing its neck.
“What do you want?” the dragon asked again. But the princess said nothing.
While she worked, the beast slowly shifted to its feet, and the princess did not flinch when hot breath flooded over the scars on her naked shoulder blades. She did not tremble when the dragon nudged her where her wings used to be, neither when it sniffed where horns used to adore her bald head, nor when it nosed at the burns that torches had left on her four arms.
The chain fell. A shudder went through the dragon’s body. It took a deep breath, its throat bulged, and magic erupted from its freed lungs. The door on the bottom of the tower burnt to ashes.
The princess smiled.
“Well,” the dragon said when they stood outside and looked at the sky. “Now you must tell me.”
And still, the princess smiled, a slow and horrifying little smile that stuck to her tiny mouth. The dragon stumbled away from her, terror shooting through his veins. He was up in the sky within seconds, but the princess only looked at him.
When she spoke, it echoed across the clearing deep in the forest, and the dragon in the sky shuddered from her soft voice that sang gently:
“I want to ask them why they did not lock me up a bit better.”
You thought you couldn’t live without them. But the day came, and your heart went into pieces. Maybe in silence, maybe with a whisper or the wail of a storm crushing your ribs and veins. There you were. There you lay.
Hello, how have you been since then?
They sure did leave some wounds in you, didn’t they. Let me see. Oh. Oh? That’s quite different now. Tell me, tell all of us – aren’t you alive?
The scars are still there. Nothing to fear, no shame to be found in them. But look beneath. Watch what you did below.
You filled the emptiness that they left, and what you poured in was yourself. You. Your mind and heart and the ever-growing swell of your soul that you thought wouldn’t ever recover.
You’re surely not smooth. Don’t have a flawless surface or boring, dull evenness characterising your presence.
“So full of themselves, that one over there,” the world says when they look at you. Yes, that you are. Nothing in the universe is better to fill your existence with than yourself.
He’s losing himself. Hajime sees it immediately. Knows him inside where it gets dark and ugly, has memorized the mile-high walls that crown his king.
He stands by Tooru’s side, a bit behind him. Is silent for a bit. Watches the game, too, but mostly he looks at the boy who cried salty frustration into his shoulder and his bed last night.
Tooru has his knees by his chest. His eyes, never soft when they’re away from togetherness, glint behind the new glasses. Hajime remembers buying them, searching the perfect frame, setting them on Tooru’s nose over parted, still red-shining-from-kisses lips. How do you know, Tooru had said without a smile, Hajime how do you know my lenses, that’s insane.
Loving him is insane, Hajime thinks back at the memory. Down below, the game heats up. Pure, horrible insanity.
He jumps over the seats. They banter, insult a bit, Tooru puts his legs down. Hajime keeps a seat between them and this time really tries to watch the game.
“You don’t have to wear them,” he says after two more points fall.
Tooru turns to him. “What?”
“The glasses. You, I mean. You don’t have to wear them if you – they’re too aristocratic anyways. But you like that kind of stupid shit, so I thought…”
“Oh. No, it’s okay.”
Hajime exhales, slow. “You sure?”
He had asked the same thing last night. Funny how life goes. He drops his head back, eyes going shut, touches his mouth once more. The kiss he’d given Tooru (not stolen, nobody robs Tooru of anything, it’s all granted or gifted) burns there like a secret little fire. You sure, he’d whispered when his nose nuzzled against the one he’d first touched when he’d been three days old. About this? About me and the future and what we could be?
“Hajime, honestly,” Tooru laughs and reaches, ruffles his hair with fingers that are rough and cracked and just a bit soft where they become his wrist. “I’m always sure about the stuff you do.”
Our world gets dark sometimes, but light is the fastest thing we know and one of the most incredible mysteries we do not know, so be certain that it will return. And in the meantime, there are adventures to have with your other senses, because there is never nothing left and who knows what waits for us behind the visible?
“One day I’ll make him speechless,” Yuri grumbles into his dinner. “One day, he’s going to be floored by my performance. He won’t be able to say anything. Because I’ll take his breath away. Just you wait.”
“I’m sure you will.” Yuuri folds himself into tailor style sitting and slides him another bowl of katsudon. “There you go. It’ll help. And of course you will.”
“Definitely.”
The moment that passes is barely a minute long, then Yuri stuffs a piece of egg into his mouth. “And you?” he mumbles, pushing the food into one cheek. “Don’t you want to do the same thing?”
“Happened already.” Fuck.
Yuri chokes. “Grh? Y’wha?”
“Forget that I said that.”
“No way in hell. Tell me.”
If Yuri is good at one thing besides skating, it’s bugging people, Yuuri finds. He spills it all (is practically forced to, alright) and Yuri stares at him like he grew a second head. “That’s – ew. Oh my god. That’s like hearing about your parents having sex. Fucking disgusting.”
“Yuri!” Yuuri gasps. “It was just a kiss!”
“A really good one,” Viktor says, walking in with two more bowls of katsudon. “Are you telling him how we got together? That’s so cute. Let me hear how you tell the story.”
“I’m going to bed. Let it be known that I never want to hear about this ever – ever! – again.”
Once Yuri has slammed the door to his room, Viktor sinks to the floor as well, lips brushing Yuuri’s temple. “Why’d you tell him about it?”
“He asked about it, that’s all.”
“How we got together?”
Yuuri smiles. He leans over, catches a kiss from Viktor’s mouth, thumb resting on his wrist. “How you made both of us speechless.”
The interviewer is a bit of an idiot, but Viktor had told him repeatedly to not say everything that crossed his mind when the public was talking to him, so Yuri does his best.
This time it’s some old guy trying to squeeze a scandal out of him. He looks like he hasn’t had a big story in years, greed shining in his tiny eyes that remind Yuri of bugs. When his assistant signals him that it’s just one more question, Yuri sits up straight.
“I think we’re almost done, so could you hurry,” he starts, but the interviewer interrupts him with a sleek grin.
“Mr Plisetsky, I’ve heard countless rumours about your love life. You’re sixteen now, and we’ve all been there, haven’t we, the exciting years are coming up. So tell me, from one man to another: Is there love in your life?”
Before Yuri can sock him right in the jaw (because he’s a Russian punk, damn right, but being punk doesn’t mean fulfilling stupid ideals of masculinity, and hes getting enough of that already just with doing figure skating), the guy raises his voice again.
“Or are you maybe a bit too young? Would be understandable, I assure you. Young men your age, especially athletes, have other priorities. And isn’t the physical part enough after a hard training? Doesn’t love distract one from their greater goal?”
Yuri knows that he had an angry tirade laid out and ready to hit just a moment ago. All of it seems to have died after that last sentence though. And while the interviewer stares, pen soaking an inky hole in his notepad, Yuri takes a deep breath.
He remembers a first meeting and an intimidated young man crying in a toilet, a video of a performance that made Yuri choke on his speechless tears, a tiny bathhouse and training so hard that everyone though ‘he can’t’ at some point and slowly, finally, a raised chin with calm, dark eyes.
He remembers admiration and a yearning to be like that, elegant and effortless and so stunning that the world would change its season for you, shattering under loneliness and façades and autograph-ink-stained fingers that become thinner, a new spark after losing all inspiration, gleaming eyes finding their old spirit in a country far away and finally, an embrace to seal that he’d keep his promise.
Yuri thinks of the way that Viktor speaks that name that’s so like his own and different in all the meanings. He thinks of hesitant fingers on cold-reddened cheeks when he’d been too early for training once and almost ruined the moment when Yuuri choked on “I love you, too” against Viktor’s lips.
He thinks of Yuuri pushing a bowl of food in front of him, of late nights after training and being treated not like a child or a man but someone who belongs.
“Mr Plisetsky,” the interviewer says.
“No comment.” His assistant has a coat ready. Yuri stands and slips inside in a motion that flows as if the room was made of ice. “I don’t discuss questions about my romantic life or my family.”
i can never know everything. there’s always something out of reach, something hidden, something buried, something so breathtaking in uniqueness, and it hurts me. species have passed without an eye to see them, colours and scents and the feeling of extinct air faded away like they meant nothing. it breaks my soul apart. don’t even think about the universe, the curious fingertips of our galaxy feeling into the darkness to search for more of infinity. don’t think about our solar system, the stars’ dying light touching our hair or the millions of years-things-lives before us and away from us. the lost history of earth is enough to slither sorrow into my bones. i bow my head. i weep for what i and you and the future will never know.
i can never know everything. there’s always something out of reach, something hidden, something buried, something so breathtaking in its uniqueness, and it gives me hope. there’s growth. life changes, and the change lives in everything. nothing lasts forever, they say, and look up to the night sky to remember the moon before one day, their children’s children ask about the history of the silver firmament where the mighty ocean obeyed the glint of something further away then the new continents. it breaks my soul apart that we will never run out of secrets and discoveries. i’m not afraid that there will come a time when the shiver of new words and mysteries settling into your mind through the pages of a book or a whispered tale or fingers drawing in the mud is unknown to humanity. history doesn’t run out of ink. it may change the font and go from black to blue or emerald, but the new chapters will always, always come out.
there are locked chests and hidden waterfalls, tree houses and underwater trenches and bird nests and old books. there are first steps and a new touch of fingers against yours and a million ways of getting out of bed so you can stand up to the sunrise and whisper: today, i want to hear a new story.
i lift my head. there is no need to cry.
we can never know everything.
“Because he is a brilliant skater. He’s overflowing with raw potential and you want to be the one to carve it out of him, but you were stupid enough to get admiration mixed up with love. You want to shape him, not have him,” his mother says.
“No,” Viktor replies. “That’s not the reason.”
“’Cause you haven’t had a proper girl in a while. I’ll find you one. Pay for her, even. My son ain’t sick. I didn’t raise a sinner. You like blondes or brunettes better? Fuckin’ answer me,” his father roars.
“No,” Viktor whispers. “That’s not what I want.”
“Because he’s just like a woman? Lets you hold him like one? I don’t get it, I suppose. But, uh. If you’re really gonna keep that up… don’t tell anyone that we’re related. Like, I don’t want my name in the paper,” his brother begs.
“No,” Viktor swallows. “That’s the last thing I’d do.”
“Because you’re an idiot when you’re not on the ice,” Yuri decides.
“Maybe,” Viktor laughs. “That’s probably part of it.”
“Because it’s convenient for you. He adores you as a skater and now as a man, too, and as long as whatever you have makes him happy, I’ll leave you be. But if the day comes that you hurt him, go ask that single god of yours for mercy, because there won’t be any from me,” Yuuri’s mother smiles.
“No,” Viktor breathes. “That’s not true, but I believe you.”
At night, Yuuri turns to him. Their futons touch where there fingertips are inches apart, Yuuri’s exhale burning an aria of electricity through his nerves.
Viktor searches for permission in his eyes. He finds liquid starlight poured into darkness, and he kisses Yuuri’s knuckles, one by one until they’re warm like his cheeks.
“Are you alright?”
“Yes,” Viktor nods. He watches Yuuri drift off to sleep, their fingers tangling over the futon’s borders. “I’ll be.”
Moami 