Work Text:
I don’t know what came over me. Except, as always, obviously, it was fucking Victor’s fault.
You can’t blame me. It had been four fucking years, and it was still all my fiancé this and engaged that. “Fucking get married already,” I grumbled under my breath, watching him carry on at the other side of the ballroom, trying to set the back of his stupid silver head on fire by force of will.
“What?” Shit, I hadn’t meant to be heard. Maybe I was a little drunk; I was definitely checked out, one thousand percent over this banquet. I shook my head and gestured for the person I was supposed to be small-talking with — boring little guy in a bad suit, I don’t know, an ISU official or something — to continue with his dumb story that Chulanont and I were pretending to care about. Something about a ski trip. Phichit kept sneaking his phone out of his pocket when the guy wasn’t looking.
Whenever reporters asked (often), the line was that they were planning to tie the knot after Yuuri retired from competition. Why wait? Was there some ISU regulation about coaches marrying their skaters? Weird for there to be rules restricting that, but nothing about the shit they got up to in hotel rooms, locker rooms, public bathrooms, parking garages, airplanes, restaurants, literally every single fucking place up to and including the ice itself. It wasn’t the gold medal, that bullshit requirement was filled long ago — Nationals, Worlds, 4Cs, Grand Prix — unless they were holding out for the Olympics, which, fat fucking chance as long as I’m competing, motherfuckers. One popular, unflattering, plausible theory was that combining retirement with the wedding would cause Maximum Drama and let Victor hold the spotlight and feel relevant a little longer; the slightly less unflattering version was that planning a big wedding is a lot of work, and dividing focus during competition season wouldn’t do them any favors.
There weren’t any good reasons for them to not be married already. I knew that. The reason they were doing it: not good.
Late one night at the onsen last summer, both of us half-drunk with exhaustion, muscles turning to jelly in the hot water, Yuuri had told me: he had decided to delay the wedding until after he retired, because in his head there was still a chance that Victor would wake up one day and see it was all a mistake. Like once Yuuri wasn’t competing, Victor might just become bored with him and fuck off out of his life as suddenly and capriciously as he’d entered. He didn’t want to “trap” Victor in marriage if it might turn out that Victor was really only interested in him professionally after all.
Three notes about this line of reasoning. One: Yuuri was mentally ill. A certain degree of cognitive distortion was a normal symptom. Two: Yuuri was the stupidest person to ever fucking exist, with the sole exception of his clueless fucking fiancé. Three: I couldn’t in all honesty completely guarantee that Yuuri was wrong.
So standing in that ballroom, half-listening to Bad Suit blather on about slopes and chalets, while across the room Victor fluttered and preened and Yuuri pretended to not be embarrassed at the attention (he’s a lot more boring at parties since he stopped drinking in public), I felt a deep, burning, ineluctable urge to break something. I wanted to throw a bomb, start a fight. I wanted to fuck shit up.
I can’t explain how that urge manifested, after Boring finally concluded his long-winded anecdote by recommending some ski resort or whatever, with me saying, “Sure. But my fiancé and I have to focus on the competitive season, so.”
Phichit’s head snapped up as if he’d been electrocuted. “Yurio! Did you just say—?” He stepped closer, taking both my hands in his. “You and Otabek are engaged?” he whisper-shrieked.
The part of my brain not currently possessed by a chaos-demon was screaming whatthefuck shutup shutup shutup shutup —!! “Uh,” I managed.
Phichit squealed, jumping up and down with my hands still in his grip. “Congratulations! I am so, so happy for you! I would have thought—” He dropped my hands and glanced around, seeming abashed at the spectacle he was making. “Of course, he’s so private,” he murmured. “I would have thought you would post something about the proposal. That’s so exciting!” His eyes sparkled.
“Uh,” I tried again. The voice of reason had settled into a wordless panicked wail.
(He was right, by the way. Engagement photos with the hottest man on Earth would have been the definition of premium social-media content; I absolutely would have whored out that moment of personal joy, if it had happened.)
“Is it a secret? I swear I won’t tell anyone, if it’s a secret.” His phone, already in his hand as if by reflex, slid silently back into his pocket. “Did you propose, or did he? Are you going to have a big wedding, do you think? Or,” he giggled, “just elope on the back of a motorcycle?” He was bouncing on the balls of his feet again, uncontainable.
“I don’t know,” I croaked. “We haven’t — figured it all out yet.” That, at least, was completely true.
I glanced across the ballroom at the slow-rolling emotional train wreck that was Victor and Katsuki, and the chaos demon inside me grew wings. “It doesn’t matter, does it? None of that shit’s important. All that matters is that we’re going to be married.” That’s all anyone cared about with those two, anyway. No matter what was going on under the surface.
When I looked back at Phichit, I was horrified to see honest-to-god tears on his face. “Yurio!” he wailed, and caught me up in a tight hug. “That’s so sweet,” he cried against my chest. I patted him awkwardly around the shoulder. After a moment he pulled back, blotting his eyes with a handkerchief. “You’ve really grown up in the last few years. Oh, I’m sorry,” he laughed damply, “that was patronizing, huh?”
Yes. More than a little back-handed too, but I didn’t say so. At that moment, his timing uncanny as ever — “Otabek!” Phichit flew into another hug.
My boyfriend looked calmly past Phichit to me, his eyebrow raised two millimeters to indicate what in the entire fuck? I grimaced an attempt to communicate just go with it.
Phichit soon released the hug, wiped his face, and said to Otabek, “Yuri told me. I’m so happy for both of you!”
Otabek, whose excellent poker face is also his normal face, nodded and thanked him without a hint of surprise or confusion.
Phichit excused himself, presumably to go touch up his makeup — the man’s eyeliner game is world-renowned. Otabek stared patiently at Bad Suit Guy until he, too, made some indistinct excuse, offered congratulations, and left. (Beka, bless every little bone in his body, has a way of paying complete, polite attention, and also never smiling casually, that seems to unnerve the stuffed shirts. I would have started a lot more fights at a lot more banquets over the years if not for him.)
We were alone then, and the eyebrow had not yet been appeased. I cleared my throat. “I, uh. I might have kind of told them that we’re engaged.”
Otabek blinked, and said, “Oh.” This was an extremely Beka response: not why did you do that or what were you thinking, not even that’s an odd thing to do. Just “oh,” and a slight softening of his expression like a nice thought had occurred to him.
“Yeah.” I chuckled unconvincingly. “Dumb joke, right. But Phichit just — believed it.”
Otabek went hmm and looked out across the room.
People often call Otabek unreadable, which is utter bullshit — like any reading, you just need to know the language. I generally consider myself conversational, if not fluent. At that moment, it felt less like language and more like tarot cards or bird entrails.
Then I noticed he was looking towards Victor and Katsuki, and I silently cursed. Maybe he didn’t need to ask what I was thinking. That full-attention thing isn’t just for bullshit people, and we’d known each other a long time.
Before I could scramble some kind of deflection, he nodded once and said, “Okay.”
“What?” I sputtered as he turned back to me, warm-eyed. “‘Okay’ what?”
Beka smiled at me, sphinx-like — that is, a smile that could eat me alive — and murmured serenely, “No take-backs.”