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On Yuuri’s last evening in Sochi, he found out what the moon was for.
If he hadn’t followed Viktor that night, he wouldn’t have. All Yuuri wanted to do was explain—no, to apologize. Viktor knew he was a fan, knew how important the Grand Prix Final had been to Yuuri, and he’d tried to be kind. It hadn’t felt like kindness. It felt like pity.
Still, Yuuri shouldn’t have turned away. Maybe this is why, when he returned from his stress run that night and caught a glimpse of Viktor disappearing up the hotel stairwell, he went.
Yuuri followed, step by step, like he always had. Maybe he should have known Viktor needed privacy—should have realized that you don’t follow idols to rooftops at midnight unless you want to stumble into all their secrets.
Except Viktor’s secret was supposed to be a steamy rendezvous with Christophe Giacometti or using a mascara brand he hadn’t signed a contract with, not this .
Before Yuuri lost his nerve, he’d burst out onto the rooftop, and he’d seen.
Aglow. Viktor Nikiforov, blue eyes and moondust hair, making signs to the stars like they were long-lost brethren.
Minutes ago, it had been overcast—Yuuri had only stopped running because of the damp threat of rain. Now, the full moon is looming, intimately close and lake-smooth, enough that Yuuri can almost see the reflection of the sun in its surface.
As a child, Yuuri had thought that if he could only swim out into the ocean, he could catch the moon as it floated on the horizon. That he could ride it through the sky, and see every motion, every touch, every piece of love the world over.
Before he could appreciate it any more, stars began to fall. Just one at first. Then a chain reaction, the comet knocking more out of the sky, shimmering and rippling in every direction—so many that surely the planets were falling, surely other galaxies were exploding apart.
Yuuri had always felt small, insignificant, to his world. In the face of the cosmos, he isn’t even that.
Yet when Viktor spoke, he didn’t sound small.
“My time is over,” he said, “I understand. I’ll return to you, Yakov.”
He was already pulling his team Russia jacket from his shoulders, shedding his pants, revealing a dark, metallic mesh, nothing like his free skate outfit or anything Yuuri had seen in years—
He was undressing . Viktor thought he could undress, thought it was the dead of night, and Yuuri was jolted back into social normalcy, despite the star shower above. Somehow, he’s gone from the rooftop doorway to only several feet away from Viktor himself—making it back isn’t a viable option. Nothing is, except—
“Wait! Don’t take off any more clothes! You’re not alone!”
That might have been the end of it. Except, when Viktor turned around, Yuuri was reminded that he had walked into something more than him.
Yuuri’s seen a million photographs of Viktor, and his eyes had never been so blue.
Bright enough that it couldn't just be from the falling stars, or the full moon.
“Are you sure?” was Viktor’s calm, lilting reply. Yuuri couldn't even remember what he’d said.
He didn’t believe in spirits or gods, but he’d always believed in Viktor Nikiforov, so perhaps his inhumanity should have been less shocking.
“Where did you come from?” He managed, mouth dry. What are you?
“Most recently,” he stood before Yuuri, then, dark mesh clinging to the smooth slopes of his body, mesh that Yuuri realized must have purpose , “the moon.”
Two days later, Yuuri wakes up with a hangover, a phone with twenty text messages, and a memory.
Viktor Nikiforov is from the stars .
Yuuri has long dreamed about knowing Viktor’s secrets, of getting a personal, special dose of the man he admired. This is not what he had in mind.
You’re an alien? Yuuri had asked him, but Viktor had laughed, motioned quickly with his hands in an aborted, amused gesture, one Yuuri could only imagine was antennae, before he’d clarified:
No, no! Such a strange word, isn’t it? Call me a visitor, Yuuri!
A tourist.
For someone who the paparazzi were foaming at the mouth for details over, he hadn’t seemed at all concerned that Yuuri might, oh, sell the story that he wasn’t human .
Maybe he’d already known. If Yuuri—hopeless, crumbling failure—goes to the press, they’d laugh at him even more than they already are. Even Minako would wonder if, in all those falls, he’d hit his head.
Yuuri wouldn’t have gone to the press anyway. But Viktor didn’t know that.
Unless he did . Maybe Yuuri should stop making assumptions about Viktor, and what he’s capable of, what his intentions are.
(Or maybe not.)
Immediately, he decides that Viktor—beautiful, inhuman Viktor—must not care much for actions of someone as inconsequential as Yuuri.
Viktor will go back to Russia—not home, just Russia. Detroit will take Yuuri back in, like it spat him out. Not home. Just Detroit.
He wonders if Viktor wants to stop being a tourist.
When Viktor hit the skating scene, it was as though he’d rocketed, fully formed, from the sky. Left in the wake of his destruction, in the crater of his impact, were the dusty dreams of other skaters.
Nobody had even heard of him before— the paparazzi couldn’t find one picture or one person who knew him, not one, the root of a million scandals—but now everyone knew his name.
He made Yuuri dream, made him think that someday he could reach the stars. Held aloft in the night, Viktor was everything that Yuuri wanted to be—and everything he wanted.
This is what he thinks about, when he returns to Japan and finds himself in Ice Castle.
While Yuuri would argue that the most embarrassing and personal part of the viral video was the skating, the last three seconds get an absurd amount of attention. Years of preparation, minutes of Viktor’s choreography, and one question from Yuuko.
Why this program?
“Because he’s from the stars,” Yuuri had whispered. Viktor means something bigger; outside the boundaries of human language and comprehension. Viktor, before and after Yuuri figured out what the moon was for, meant love .
Three seconds, and he has Viktor’s attention again.
The moon rises and sets, and seeing it in the sky—the shape that’s inspired poetry for thousands of years, that’s watched his every anxious night run and skate, that gives the night hope—Yuuri wonders if Viktor ever watched him.
Viktor came from the stars—he towed the moon into orbit, so he could sit on its empty, empty surface and watch all that life, teeming. He’d watched from a distance for so long, he’d said, that night in Sochi.
It’s strangely comforting to know that, even as a speck, Viktor had seen Yuuri before Yuuri saw Viktor, and had his entire life upturned into desperate longing. He’d seen Yuuri’s home, swirling blue and green and white, and wanted to experience it for himself.
Human beings aren’t alone in the universe.
Look at me , Yuuri has always wanted to say. Please look. Please see.
Viktor, evidently, saw.
“You remembered,” is the first thing Viktor says, or at least what Yuuri assumes he must be saying. It’s difficult to hear, with the most famous poodle in the world trying her best to kiss every patch of skin as Yuuri’s laid out on the onsen floor.
Yuuri doesn’t know why Viktor sounds so surprised. It’d be hard to forget a night that rewrites his entire universe.
According to every piece of alien invasion media made, Viktor is here to abduct him and, possibly, do invasive things to him on top of a table in a spaceship. Video-game-obsessed Yuuri has had hormonal, lovestruck teenage dreams about both.
“I’m sorry I outed you in a viral video,” Yuuri blurts, once Makkachin has settled into licking only his cheek.
“It would not be the first time,” Viktor cheerfully replies. “Though maybe not that particular secret. If it helps, people didn’t understand what you meant, about me being from the stars. Anyway! Here I am.”
Here Viktor is. There’s a million questions Yuuri wants to ask, and all of them begin with—
“Why?”
Viktor Nikiforov always presents more questions to Yuuri than he answers, leaves him awed and fumbling.
“Isn’t it obvious?”
Several harrowing weeks later, his body sore and his mind just as jumbled and loose, Yuuri has a dilemma.
Maybe Viktor wants to keep an eye on him, by being his coach. Make sure that he never reveals Viktor’s secret. But does he really have to be so close , to do that? To essentially study him, to—
Oh.
“Please,” Yuuri says, one afternoon, when he’s practicing Eros and nothing is going right, “if you wanted to watch a human being and learn, I’m not the one to pick.”
Viktor glides a little closer. “I watched humans for a long time. I know what your species is like.” At the very least, he knows how to appeal to them. A little closer, a little sweeter. “Aren’t you the one who always thinks himself to be the most average skater? The most average man? Does that not make you a good representation?”
Yuuri’s not sure how Viktor could possibly know that this is the fear that dominates him, every day. He’s said as much in interviews, but it’s harder to imagine that Viktor would have watched those than believing that Viktor can read minds.
Yuuri can’t figure it out—not what Viktor wants, much less how to give it to him—and so he panics. Viktor takes him to the beach, sits him down.
Katsuki Yuuri shouldn’t be representing the human race. He can barely even connect to other people, and he tells Viktor as much.
God, how he wants to connect, how he wants to scream out the thousand things he’s desperate to say. Yuuri opens up, and in return, Viktor tries.
“Is there something,” Viktor asks, “that you want me to be?”
There’s so much. But Yuuri’s not like Viktor—he can’t move the moon, or travel across galaxies. He has to love the life he has, and make it as beautiful as he can bear, as he can build up the courage to try for.
All Yuuri actually says to Viktor’s question is silence, though, and Viktor foolishly assumes.
“Don’t worry,” Viktor says, deciding. “I can be human for you, Yuuri.”
“But you’re not human.”
“I’ll be anything. I can figure it out.”
The way he says it—like it’s some kind of comfort. Like Viktor thinks if he shoves all his stardust and light into the right shape, he can pass for whatever he chooses. Strong. Perfect. Mysterious. Anything Yuuri could love.
That isn’t what it means to live.
“There’s no right way to be human,” Yuuri bursts, “and no wrong way to be Viktor.”
Viktor has traveled light years to be here. Maybe, just maybe, it’s because he wants to be. Because he was hoping to meet someone.
Human beings aren’t alone in the universe anymore, but Viktor didn’t want to be alone either.
Yuuri looks him in the eye, shakes his hand. Then, with the surf beside them and the gulls crying overhead, they walk.
“There’s something I should tell you,” Viktor says, slowly. The tide swallows up his feet. “If we’re going to be honest. I need to show you what we’re dealing with.” Yuuri would rather not think about that we , fragile and new and sparking in his chest, or experience the suspense—suspense is just another form of anxiety. So he motions for Viktor to go on. “My mentor, Yakov, he helped coax the Earth into existence. It has a purpose.”
“A... purpose. Yakov’s the one who you were speaking to, that first night?”
“You must understand,” Viktor is explaining, too quick, “the Earth is very small, in terms of all the universes.”
It’s dizzying, but things are starting to align. Yuuri is seeing a constellation, now, when before he’d only seen the stars. The stars form beasts and animals, gobbling up whole galaxies. There are monsters, in the night sky. Yuuri never thought they were real.
But Viktor is painfully real.
“The Earth… is some kind of toy?” Yuuri asks, low. Viktor shakes his head, hums in dissent:
“Earth is a gift. From Yakov to Lilia, a whole planet with inhabitants that love to dance. It was, ah, what’s the expression—an anniversary gift. Now, there will be no more anniversaries. Yakov is insistent that I return the planet to light.”
Yuuri’s stomach drops. He stops walking, the sand suddenly and unbearably rough beneath him. If only it’d swallow him up. “You’ll… leave the Earth?”
You’ll leave me? This is something Yuuri should have known. Viktor won’t stay, not in Japan, not even—
“There won’t be an Earth.”
This is a different kind of devastation.
It’s ridiculous, to worry about whether Viktor might care for Yuuri, when the real question is whether he cares for any part of Yuuri’s world at all. Yuuri has seen things, now: stars falling, the moon flashing, the mesh of Viktor’s spacesuit, the way Viktor moves to music. He’s always known that Viktor was different. Special. Superior.
He’s never believed it more than now.
Seemingly oblivious to the way Yuuri’s glass heart is cracking, Viktor goes on:
“A planet is like a bouquet for us. Vibrant with life, blooming, but quick to wilt. The Solar System is unstable—a few infinisecs, and the sun will swallow you.”
“What’s an infinisec?” Yuuri asks numbly, because he can hardly bear to ask anything else.
“A few million years or so. Yakov simply asked me to speed things up.”
“He’d kill us,” Yuuri whispers, “billions of people. Doesn’t that matter to him? To any of you?”
“Life is a primitive concept. So is death. We all exist as light, and you’d just return to the collective.”
Yuuri swallows. “And you believe that? That life is a primitive concept?”
“I have spent only a breath of my existence watching Earth,” Viktor says, “an even smaller fraction present on it.” There’s something cold in Yuuri’s chest, something foreboding. The earth will be lost, if this is what Viktor believes—life silenced. All of the people that Yuuri loves will be… “Yuuri,” a pale hand tilts his chin up, fingers gentle.
“Viktor,” Yuuri breathes, and it’s wrong, the way it sends warm shivers spiraling all over his body.
“I already know that life is something more. I want to preserve it, I want to…” He trails off, contemplative, eyes on the ocean. When he finishes, it’s a whisper: “I want to live, too.”
Of course. Yuuri should be ashamed—he’s Viktor Nikiforov’s biggest fan, his most staunch supporter. In the time before he found out what the moon was for, he’d fought to tell anyone who would listen that Viktor was the best: talented, expressive.
Longing.
Maybe some of it had been a lie: Viktor is no ordinary man, no human. A body, no matter how trained, how magnificent, is just a shell for him. But the Viktor that Yuuri knows has always created beautiful things. A creator; not a destroyer.
Viktor longs to live .
“I want to help you,” Yuuri says, and before he knows it his hand is reaching out, “to understand.”
Viktor smiles, and takes it. “I know,” he says, “that’s why I chose you to be my one.”
Being Viktor’s one means, apparently, that the Grand Prix Final is the least of Yuuri’s concerns.
Before December, before the Grand Prix Final, Viktor is expected to decimate the planet and return to Yakov’s side. Viktor, as usual, has other plans.
“I—but in Sochi, you already told Yakov you’d come back!”
Viktor blinks. “I did. I will.”
“That was months ago!”
Viktor smiles. “I didn’t specify when , or for how long I’d return to him.” Somehow, Yuuri doubts that an entity who can apparently form and destroy planets will be pacified by that . “Besides, for Yakov and I, a couple of months is nothing. I have at least until December before he’ll check in on my coordinates! Plenty of time for me to prepare you.”
“You just said a couple of months was nothing to you.”
“Oops,” Viktor says, sounding extremely unapologetic, and taps Yuuri on the nose. “Well, nothing to me! But more than enough for a human being to reinvent themselves.”
It takes another few moments before Yuuri’s brain catches up to the conversation. “Prepare me to change for what? I thought… the Grand Prix final…?”
“Don’t worry,” Viktor chirps, which is easy for Viktor to say. Viktor is some sort of immortal galactic deity. Yuuri, on the other hand, is a painfully average mortal man, living on a doomed planet. “We’re going to convince Lilia to keep the Earth as is.”
“Oh,” Yuuri says. “Is she kinder than—“
“No,” Viktor says. “Lilia believes things must be destroyed before they can be rebirthed from the ashes.” Yuuri is finding it hard to breathe again. “Yakov is stubborn—he raised me. Look at how I am. But Lilia will be flexible, if there is enough beauty. If she can respect your effort.”
“I don’t understand.”
“This planet was made for passion. For dance. You will dance for her, Yuuri. Show her that you’re something worth keeping her eyes on, until the natural end.”
Until the end.
Yuuri will do it—he has to do it—but it won’t just be for Lilia’s eyes.
Yuuri doesn’t know why he assumed Lilia, a being who according to Viktor ‘has no corporeal form,’ would come watch him skate, like a spectator in the scratched-up stands of Ice Castle.
“We’ll broadcast your dance to her,” Viktor explains, “from my base.”
“Your old base as in the moon ,” Yuuri tries to clarify, even if he doesn’t believe a word of it. “I’m… not sure it’s possible to skate there?”
Viktor, the odd being that he is, just nods. “Don’t worry. We won’t be taking a jaunt up there every day—you can practice perfectly well in Ice Castle Hasetsu and at Minako’s. I’ve been designing skates that will make it feel just like skating on Earth, taking into account the Moon’s temperature and gravity, of course, and ice composition and atmosphere—“ Viktor’s face pinches. “If you’re not going to listen to me, say so.”
Yuuri is starting to suspect that Viktor likes it, just a little, when Yuuri doesn’t listen to him. But not like this.
“I may have gotten a degree in physics,” astrophysics, actually. Mostly because Viktor Nikiforov liked to offhandedly toss around wild comments about black holes and Saturn and wax poetic about the Milky Way and—oh. Oh. How had he never realized this, before? “But that’s a lot of information.”
Viktor smiles, indulgent. “Ah. Skates when you want to skate, dance shoes when you want to incorporate ballet. Gravity altered, so you won’t make a ten-foot-high leap unless you want to.”
Yuuri will weigh significantly less, on the moon. Maybe the worries in his heart will weigh less, too. They’re already beginning to melt away, bleeding into excitement.
Dancing on the moon.
“You always have loved your shoes,” Yuuri says, and Viktor beams . “But what am I supposed to wear?”
The spacesuit is grey mesh, tight, with crystals and a half-skirt. There’s no dome for the head—Yuuri’s face is bare—but Viktor looks mildly offended at the suggestion that it needs one.
“Those are stabilizers,” Viktor says, batting Yuuri away as he feels the warm gems beneath his fingertips. It needs fitting for Yuuri to wear it properly. “No touching, if you like your oxygen.”
What’s the point of oxygen, when Viktor is running his hands all over Yuuri’s body and he can’t breathe?
“This is your short program costume from Juniors,” Yuuri says helplessly, and then he shuts his mouth. “The crystals are stabilizers, but... what is the skirt for?”
“Fashion, obviously.” Viktor looks up at him from beneath his eyelashes, like he knows exactly what this examination is doing to his student. “The outfit my coach commissioned for me in Juniors that year was a mess,” he hums, clicking his tongue and dragging a final, clinical finger down Yuuri’s chest, his waist, his thigh. “I had no other choice. Okay, it’s operational. Ready?”
Yuuri would follow him to the end of time. The moon isn’t far at all.
The spaceship is cramped. As Viktor fusses with the controls for takeoff, Yuuri’s suit puts him to sleep.
When he wakes up, he can put the Earth between his thumb and forefinger. Viktor lets him cry.
Then, in a northern lunar crater, he skates. Before he begins, Viktor takes his hand.
“I know you can save this world, Katsuki Yuuri. Now show me .”
In between skating on the moon, Yuuri goes to competitions. Strange, that the pressure he normally feels at competitions is eclipsed by the prospect of skating for Lilia.
It helps, if the Cup of China is any indication.
After, his feet sore and his mind on the moon, on the stars, he takes Viktor back to their hotel room, and kisses him for the second time.
“ Oh ,” Viktor says, when Yuuri slips a tongue in his mouth, a hand up his shirt to feel the pulse that’s shaking in his chest because he desperately needs to be close, to know that Viktor is here. “Oh, oh, this is what it’s like , this is—“ it’s longer, until he can find his breath again. “I understand, I understand. Watching isn’t the same. Nothing is the same as living.”
Nothing is going to be the same, not any more.
“What was being on the moon like?”
Their hands are laced, for the first time, cuddled atop their pushed-together beds.
Viktor has held whole universes, if what he says is true. Yuuri can almost feel them still, stardust and blue fire burning, burning, between them. Gravity and magnetism working as one unstoppable, invisible force that binds them.
The way Viktor looks at him, it’s like Yuuri means more.
“I could see the whole of Earth,” he says, “so distant, and breathlessly blue. Your whole world, there in my grasp. Opposite it the lonely, star-littered chasm of space.” Where Viktor had come from. Where Viktor felt he had to return. “Beautiful,” Viktor says in awe, “and so very small. But the people on it were always living, always dancing, so full of purpose and meaning even though…”
Even though their time was short.
“I’m glad you came,” Yuuri said, “to my home.”
“Hasetsu is beautiful,” Viktor agrees.
“No,” Yuuri insists gently, “I meant to Earth. All those years ago. From the first moment you came, you meant something to me.”
Sixteen and inhuman and dancing, so alive .
Viktor, Yuuri realizes, intrinsically knows how to live. He just hasn’t let himself, hasn’t had faith in the feeling.
He needed someone hopelessly human to ground him. To keep him company, in a universe so empty and so vast.
I love you , Yuuri wants to say, but words are never enough.
Viktor plays with his hair so often, it’s only fair that Yuuri get to do it in return, to push back his fringe and run his fingers through the starlight while they lounge in the onsen.
“When I made this body, I thought silver was a natural hair color.”
“You thought this forehead size and this part were normal, too,” Yuuri teases, and kisses them both.
“Cold,” Viktor complains, pushing closer, “colder than the vacuum of space.”
“Why are you Russian?” Yuuri asks, question burning in his throat. He feels foolish for asking it, foolish for still being the fan who needs to know everything.
Viktor blinks. “I skate for Russia.”
“But—you’re not—you’re not actually Russian, yet you chose this coloring, the accent. You’re…” Viktor is smiling blankly at him. “ Don’t say that nationality is a primitive concept.”
“I won’t say it,” Viktor replies, aggravatingly polite. And then he pinches Yuuri gently, playfully, right where Yuuri’s stomach is the softest, and kisses him on the shoulder. “Russians had the first man in space— I’m paying homage. Do you know his name?”
“Was it… Viktor?” Yuuri turns, twining arms around Viktor’s neck, curling closer. “Don’t tell me it was Makkachin.”
Viktor rubs his cheek against Yuuri’s hair, laughs so softly that Yuuri is only sure of it because he feels it, shaking against him.
“Yuuri,” he says, and then again, closer and warmer every time, “Yuuri, Yuri, Yuuri, Yuri, Yuuri—“
It’s only after the tenth time that Yuuri understands, teases, “my mother was paying homage to the first man in space, too.”
“Your mother,” Viktor corrects, after he’s finished trying to squeeze Yuuri into the spaces between his ribs, right up next to his human heart, “was giving the Earth its best chance to go on living.”
Yuuri closes his eyes, so tight—the space behind his eyes darker than the night sky, not a speck of starlight. This is his mind, sometimes, what he can see.
He wonders if he believes Viktor, or if he should, whether he dares to hope that Viktor believes.
Soon, he will dance on the moon, and earn the chance for life and love.
It’s almost frightening, how intelligent Makkachin is, how she cuddles and studies and keeps a bounce to her step that belongs to a puppy, not a dog her age.
“The bestest dog in the world,” Yuuri whispers into the curls of her ear. “So smart. So sweet. So—“
Is she really the best dog ?
Viktor looks sheepish. Not an expression that Yuuri is used to. “She was born a purebred poodle,” is all Viktor will say on the matter, like Yuuri can’t deduce that the information leaves a 16-year gap in which things could have changed. “I may have altered her composition a little.”
“She’s sixteen and looks like she’s four! I think she’s figured out how to open the fridge and pull the plastic wrap off leftover buns, she’s so smart!”
“I thought you liked dogs,” Viktor accuses. “That is perfectly possible dog behavior.”
Yuuri’s honor as a dog-lover has been challenged, which is the only reason why he’s distracted enough for Viktor to evade the real question.
Hours later, Mari drops by Yuuri’s room with mail, only to find a messy room and two grown men in the midst of a pillow fight.
“Admit you’d keep the Earth because it’s the only planet with dogs!” A pillow sails through the air. “Humans have nothing to do with it. Admit it, Vitya!”
“I’d keep the Earth for one puppy , Yuuri, I have no shame in admitting—“
Mari snorts and leaves as quietly as she came.
The week before he dances for Lilia, Yuuri buys them rings.
It shouldn’t mean so much to Yuuri—it can’t mean much to Viktor. A tiny piece of metal, encircling a false body, mined and refined on a planet that lives and thus also is always dying. It has been months since they met.
Months are less than a blink, to Viktor.
“Not long ago,” Viktor hums when they’re in bed in Hasetsu that night, and Yuuri isn’t sure what he means by not long ago , “they used to harvest metal from asteroids that had fallen, and believed it was a gift from the gods. Metal was the only thing they believed could burn fairies, capture and hold mythical creatures.” Yuuri wants to catch Viktor, like he’s a falling star, wants to cup all that glorious heat in his hands and keep it. “Iron, gold, all metals humans use—they come from space, the hearts of supernovas. You promise love with stardust; you make it mean everything.”
Viktor treasures meaning, treasures stories, treasures love .
I want to live, Yuuri .
Yuuri has always orbited around him, and now he lets the gravity of Viktor’s hope pull him in.
Space is quieter than Yuuri realized, just the sound of his own breathing inside the flexible mesh of Viktor’s spacesuit.
He’s here to make music on the moon.
Viktor holds him close, kisses the ring on his finger slowly beneath the mesh. Yuuri can almost feel his breath whispering over metal and skin.
“Lilia is watching,” he says into Yuuri’s ear, and steps back. “Tell her who you are, Yuuri. Show her what it means to be human.”
Two chances are all that Yuuri has. So he dances.
“My name is Katsuki Yuuri,” he tells her, “and I am an average man.”
When he falls in the first dance, the whole of the blue Earth wavering in the corner of his eye, Yuuri gets back up. This, too, is what it means to be human: failure.
Failure, and redemption.
And love . Yuuri’s ring gleams, in the distant light of the burning sun.
When he dances a second time, blades gleaming as he rounds the icy crater, an average man gives a performance that could start the universe anew.
“Once more,” Viktor whispers, when it’s all over, and they do a dance together that isn’t meant for Lilia at all.
Then, hand in hand, they wait to see if Earth lives or dies.
They’re going home.
“You didn’t even think, in the beginning,” Yuuri laughs, softly, as the moon disappears behind them, “that I’d remember you came from space.”
Viktor blinks. He has the sense of mind to look apologetic. “Well. My spacesuit and base are programmed to erase people’s memories, if they see me as I really am. You can imagine that my true identity getting out might cause a bit of worldwide panic. But it must have realized,” Viktor’s gaze is soft, tone reverent, and Yuuri feels himself shiver, “that I needed you to remember me. Who I am. So it let you keep our first nights together, in Sochi.”
It’s hard to think, with Viktor pliant and vulnerable in front of him, but Yuuri’s mouth fires off without warning. “Nights?”
A flutter of silver lashes, and Viktor winks. “Well, I suppose they were more early mornings, the both of them.”
“The… both.” Yuuri is terrible at faking confidence and surety at his best, much less so when he’s not even trying.
“Did you forget the night on the roof?”
“Of course not! How else would I have already known about you being from the stars?” Eyes wide, Viktor covers his mouth with one hand. Covering Viktor’s mouth when he’s surprised is Yuuri’s job—one he prefers to do with his lips. “…Vitya?”
“It erased the banquet,” Viktor breathes, “because you saw me for who I am. We didn’t even talk about my inhuman origins that day, just—”
“Less talking now ,” Yuuri interrupts, head spinning, leaning over the console between them. Today, he danced on the moon. Today, Viktor loves him. They can revisit the past and all its revelations tomorrow. “More touching. You just saved the Earth.” Viktor makes a displeased noise that means he disagrees, but opens his arms anyway. “You’re going to stay, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Yuuri. Yes.”
Yuuri settles into him, wraps himself around the body that Viktor made to dance, that Viktor gets to keep. That Yuuri gets to keep.
This stardust body, and all the light inside it that makes Viktor who he is.
As their ship skyrockets through the fiery atmosphere, the clouds, and down into the ocean that watched them fall in love, they hold each other.
“Are you ready?” Viktor asks, at the Grand Prix Final.
Yuuri is a little nervous, will always be nervous, even when all that rides on a skate are his dreams and pride. Just because he’s stopped the destruction of planet Earth doesn’t mean he should stop trying to beat Viktor’s world record.
They’ve fought for life and love, so they’re going to enjoy them.
“He’s going to lose,” someone snarls from their right, and Yuuri finds himself face-to-face with someone blonde, green-eyed, and wearing so much tiger-print clothing that he can’t be human.
“What are you doing here?” Viktor asks pleasantly.
“You think you’re the only one who can blast to Earth and participate in their dancing and strange rituals?! Hah! I’m here to see what all the stupid fuss is about! And to destroy the mortal who thinks he’s good enough to—“
“Hi,” Yuuri says, “I’m Yuuri.” The little blonde alien stares at him, effectively stopped. “You’re…?”
“Yuri.”
“Oh.”
“You’d better watch your back! Watch me!”
Then, in a whirl of sharp glares and jarring fashion, he’s gone.
“Someone else from your family?” A nod. “Did he name himself after the first Russian in space?”
“…I think he named himself after you,” Viktor laughs, “but he’s not going to admit that.”
Well, Yuuri isn’t one to shy away from fierce competition.
“Viktor.” He’s the one to kiss the ring, this time, the pad of each moon-white finger. He’d asked Yuuri about the Grand Prix Final; soon, Yuuri will ask him about forever . “I’m ready.”