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Bad Ideas (and good ones too)

Summary:

Viktor Nikiforov, captain of his university’s hockey team, has slowly lost control of his grades (his mental health too, but he doesn't know that yet) and is being threatened with being benched; with some convincing, he seeks help from a tutor, and it’s the best decision he has ever made in his life.

Notes:

I was originally going to write a cute little hookup oneshot about himbo frat boy Viktor as a birthday gift for my number one beech, my silly lil goober of a bean, Sav, but. This fic grew legs and the plot ran away from me while I was writing. So! Have three chapters instead of one! Happy birthday honeybee! Thanks for the premise for the fic! 😂 ily ❤️❤️

beta-d by Linisen and Fuzzy ❤️

Chapter 1

Summary:

Viktor needs help, he just isn't ready to accept it yet.

Notes:

Recommended Listening:
Bad Ideas- Tessa Violet (x)
Mess- Noah Kahan (x)

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

“Vitya!” Christophe’s voice rumbled through the thudding music, handing him his refilled cup, PBR nearly sloshing over the rim. “You’re not having enough fun!”

His enthusiastic (and god, incredibly handsy) friend was wrong, Viktor was having exactly no fun. Zero. Absolutely no fun at all. Most of his teammates had already found someone to dance with, whether it was one of the girls from the sorority down the street or the frat next door. There were a few strange faces that Viktor didn’t recognize, outside dates and non-Greek friends were allowed this time around, being a weeknight and all. Low turnout made the house less attractive for the big weekend parties, after all.

Chris sighed dramatically. “Well. Fine. Go all stoic on me, Captain. But I have a friend coming later, and he said he’s bringing a friend too,” Viktor barely registered what his best friend was saying as he noticed the lack of his little brother in the fray of dancers. (Not biological, though the fact that the two of the only Russians in the house were paired up when Yuri joined the brotherhood three years ago had been a bit of a joke.)

“Where’s Yuri?” Viktor asked Chris, who had long since disappeared into the throng of moving bodies in the living room. Viktor sipped his beer and sighed, trudging up the stairs and away from the scene below, though the pulsing beat still seemed to follow him through the house. Up to the third floor, where Yuri’s room was, and had been since his first day. He had scared away every single one of his roommates, and was the only underclassman to have his own room.

He knocked gently on the closed door, but leaning in a bit closer to the thin wood revealed that Yuri not only probably didn’t want to be disturbed, but had a guest in the room with him. Viktor knew better to intrude there, having walked in on Yuri and his boyfriend, Otabek, a handful of times, like his big brother had walked in on Viktor and his various bedfellows in the past.

He turned on his heel and climbed up one more floor, where he, Georgi, Chris, and a handful of their teammates had made their home since they moved into the house. The crossover between the hockey team and the brotherhood made their bond even stronger, Viktor always explained in interviews. “It’s like playing with your brothers. We’re family out there on the ice, we take care of each other.”

Viktor downed his beer and dropped the cup on his desk, slumping into his chair; the music still pulsed painfully in his temples, thudding like his heartbeat. Maybe he’d need something stronger than the beer to forget that morning. He’d been sick to his stomach, aching down to his toes at the threat of academic ineligibility, the forced assignation of a tutor (which he staunchly refused to meet that afternoon) and the humiliating threat of being benched until his grades rose to their usual standard.

Viktor was an intelligent man, he had been told as such his entire life, stuck in gifted child and accelerated learning programs only to fall behind at some point halfway through college, his fellow students finally caught up with him, surpassed him, leaving him in the dust as courses continued to get harder. There were a thousand reasons, looking back on it, but before Viktor could blink, he found himself chest-deep in a cold, unfeeling numbness that only slightly receded when he was on the ice… but even that had begun to feel like drudgery.

And that was terrifying.

The email was still up on his laptop screen when he flipped up the lid, and Viktor pushed away from his desk at seeing the letterhead of the university.

As outlined in the student athlete agreement, athletes are expected to uphold at least a 2.5 GPA, failure to do so may result in temporary suspension and/or removal from the team...

It was time for a stronger drink.


Viktor woke with an ungodly hangover.

Nothing new for him at that point, he’d been alternating between long nights at the rink and getting embarrassingly, irresponsibly drunk for a few weeks now, but nothing made him groan deeper or with more frustration than waking to find someone sharing his bed.

Fuck, he didn’t remember what happened after Chris talked him into jello shots.

He whispered a soft apology to the warm body he had evidently shared the night with, his smaller frame wearing nothing but Viktor’s team sweatshirt. It was far too big and rumpled around his frame, his body utterly swallowed by it. Viktor took only a moment to enjoy the fantasy of someone wandering around a shared apartment in just his clothing, something that felt like fondness curling in his chest. He wrote out a short note with his phone number and slipped it into the unfamiliar wallet he had found on the floor.

He felt bad for leaving, but god, he needed to wash off the Malibu and sweat. After one last look at the body in his bed, small and lithe, his slender but strong legs twisted in his sheets… Viktor dared to kneel beside the bed, smiling at his half-open mouth. His liquor breath was strong and he was undoubtedly going to feel just as hungover as Viktor did. He pressed a gentle kiss to his forehead and ducked out into the hall, pulling the door softly closed behind him.

After a purposefully long shower, he made his way back to his room, finding it empty of the partner he had spent the night with, as well as the sweatshirt he had been wearing.

He shrugged it off, knowing he could always acquire hoodie. It was far from the first time he had lost an item of clothing to a hookup; he had it on good authority that there was a stash of his jerseys somewhere in Coach Feltsman’s office, for when he inevitably lost another jersey in a game of strip poker (which he was often purposefully bad at) or letting a one night stand wander out of the house in something a bit more appropriate than what he had come to the party in the night before.

Viktor grimaced as the sun streamed in through his window, heralding a shamefully late morning. After taking what he guessed was probably the right amount of painkillers and putting away nearly two full bottles of water left scattered around his room, he used the last of his phone battery to call in an obscene amount of hangover breakfast from the diner just down the street, ordering enough for the rest of the house to enjoy when they woke up too.

Only Georgi and a few underclassmen were awake so far that morning, and Viktor made easy conversation about the next planned mixer with Kappa Upsilon Alpha and the girls from Sigma Chi, all of them groaning in pain when the front door swung open, rattling loudly against the wall, heralding the arrival of their breakfast. (Viktor may have sweet-talked one of the freshmen into running deliveries for them.)

The few brothers awake dug in quickly, inhaling greasy hash browns and bacon, all of them accustomed to a hockey player’s diet of anything and everything. It wasn’t until Viktor’s phone had finally charged enough to turn back on that he noticed the time; he nearly choked on his over-easy eggs.

Viktor had three concurrent, immediate realizations.

One, he had slept in far later than he first thought.

Two, he had somehow cracked his screen the night before.

Three. He had missed his Accounting exam.

“Fuck,” Viktor swore, his mouth full of egg, coming out more a grumbled mess of sounds than a word.

“What?” Georgi replied with a yawn, still trying to shake the haze of tequila.

“I had an exam this morning,” Viktor answered after swallowing, wiping the stray grease that had stayed behind on his lips.

“Which class?” Georgi asked, the concern evident as he pushed away from the table, pulling out the ingredients for their typical hangover cure. Something Viktor’s mamochka had taught him the morning after his eighteenth birthday, a lemon wedge sprinkled with coffee and sugar accompanied by a shot of vodka. “Oh, Vitya… it wasn’t…”

Viktor groaned. “It was. God, Coach is going to kill me.” Yakov was going to kill him, he’d threatened as much when he had sat Viktor down last week about his poor grades. Threatened benching him, even. Viktor had brushed him off, scoffing at the idea that his coach would dare bench him in the runup to the playoffs, but the threat loomed closer and closer as his grades had begun to slip further into alarming territory.

“Can you email your prof? Maybe you can get a retake?” Georgi offered, sliding a saucer and a shot glass in front of Viktor with a comforting smile. They paused for a moment, biting into the lemon wedges with a slight wince, the coffee and sugar barely masking the tart flavor. Neither one of them was sure it worked, but nevertheless, they tried it every time.

“I really don’t want to,” Viktor groaned after they downed their shots, hissing at the burn on his tongue. “She’s a nightmare, Gosha. I swear he’s been trying to fail me all semester.”

Georgi rolled his eyes and focused on his breakfast again. “Or, hear me out, darling,” he cooed in the same voice he used on Yuri’s cat (that the landlord definitely didn’t know about), “You stopped trying a few years ago.”

Viktor turned up his nose at the accusation, regardless of how accurate it was. “Shut up, you know I’m useless at math.”

“Useless at math or not, Viktor Nikiforov is an intelligent idiot and never let a bad professor get in his way before.” Georgi’s retort rolled off Viktor’s back, lifting a bite of glazed ham to his lips. "Regardless of this… himbo energy you have going on.

“What’s this about Viktor being a himbo?” Chris’s voice drifted down the hallway, along with a soft giggle that Viktor didn’t recognize. “Go on, mon cher, I’ll call you after class.” his voice rumbled, bidding goodbye to his partner from the night before, holding open the door.

“Oh, have any of you seen Yuuri?” Chris’s friend asked, his chocolate eyes meeting everyone else’s one by one. Viktor shrugged, the name not sounding a bit familiar. He sighed and pulled his phone out of his pocket, clearly dialing his lost friend. “He probably went home last night… okay, thanks boys!”

Adieu, little bird,” Chris crooned, kissing him wetly on the mouth, making Viktor and Georgi roll their eyes. The front door swung shut and Chris eagerly joined the few seated around the table for breakfast. “Now, what did our beloved Golden Boy do this time?”

Viktor groaned and tossed a muffin at his best friend, who caught it easily. He had a goalie’s hands, Chris was always quick to brag.

“Our Vitka missed an exam and might fail a class.” Georgi answered for him when Viktor took another bite of his breakfast instead of answering. Christophe and Georgi took turns teasing him and comforting him, their chirping and playful teasing no less annoying than it was during games.

“Have you thought about seeing a tutor?” Chris offered after a while, all of them finally shaking the vestiges of their collective hangover.

“God, not you too.” Viktor groaned, pushing away from the table. “Coach keeps trying to set me up with a tutor. I swear, I would rather fail than have someone explain it to me like I’m a child.”

Georgi scoffed. “You sure are acting like a child,” he mumbled in Russian. “Yakov cares about you, Vitya. Pull your head out of your ass and give it a try.”

“Nyet,” Viktor snapped, “Can you two please stop talking down to me? Jesus.”

Maybe it was the hangover, maybe it was the frustration finally beginning to seep out at the edges. He had been carefully holding it back, never letting the cool, unbothered facade crack. Until today. He left his two best friends sitting at the kitchen table and took a tiny pleasure in throwing his door shut like a teenager.

There his laptop still was, that fucking email still open. He deleted it almost immediately, clenching his jaw as he began a new message to his professor, swallowing the ugly lump of pride in his throat.

After the email was sent, Viktor leaned back in his chair, deciding he could probably afford to skip his Anthropology lecture. Again.


Viktor groaned as he trudged across campus, his loafers felt full of cured cement as he made the walk to the library, only after stopping for a drink at the coffee shop in the student union building. His few attempts at studying for his exam retake had ended in disaster, not granted a single moment of quiet in the house or the coffee shop. All of the study spaces littered across campus were full of chatty people, fans who recognized him, or cute boys, and all of them were far too loud for his mind to focus.

So the library it was.

Georgi had finally convinced him to try the library, assuring him that it would be worth a try. Viktor’s visits to the library began and ended as a rendezvous point if he and his brothers got split up after a party crawl on campus… he had never made use of it after orientation. The building was new, a construction marvel that had ended during his first semester; five stories of stacks and study spaces, an outdoor courtyard with living greenery on the third floor, an entire wall made of glass running ground floor to roof. He had been told about the privacy of the upper level study rooms, but he hadn’t made use of them himself.

There were plenty of other places he had christened though.

Viktor swallowed as he pushed open one of the heavy glass doors, feeling the air conditioning blast like he had just walked into the rink. The space itself was daunting, and just the lobby proved to make him feel impossibly small.

His eyes fell on the large circular desk, full of very studious-looking people, all wearing name tags, shrouded in that librarian air that had Viktor’s stomach immediately churning. Not that he disliked librarians, of course, but he felt as if they could smell the desperation on him, and he’d rather eat his own loafers than be pitied by a stranger.

He turned sharply to the right, eyeing an empty table in the plush studying area, well-furnished with workspaces and slouchy chairs. He kept his eyes down as he moved, praying no one would recognize him as the clear fish out of water. As he moved, he passed a smaller desk, the sign strung from the ceiling reading Reference. A painfully attractive man sat behind it, his nose buried in a book. It was a novel that Viktor recognized, a romance novel Viktor himself had read; it had two gay leads.

Viktor’s step hiccuped, a blip on his gaydar turning into a full-blown five alarm warning as he caught a glimpse of a gorgeous pair of mahogany eyes moving in a slow line across the page, the tip of an adorable pink tongue pressed out in thought. Something about the gesture felt familiar, but Viktor shook himself and kept moving, despite wanting to stop and talk to the cute Reference Desk guy wearing his cute blue glasses.

He moved quickly, taking his seat as far away from the front desk as possible, unsure of why he felt so skittish in a place that was so clearly meant for academic help. He pulled out his well-loved laptop, flipped open his Accounting textbook and his notes from the previous unit. His eyes almost immediately glazed over, the numbers swimming in his head without hope of understanding.

He jumped at the sensation of someone tapping on his shoulder, feeling like he’d been caught doing something illicit. He turned and met the eye of who he assumed was a fan, if the school t-shirt was any hint. Viktor smiled as his stomach fell to the floor, remembering the call he’d received from coach, knowing that failing to pass his retake meant being benched. He nodded and talked politely with them, taking the compliments with a practiced smile.

“So, any professional hopes?” the fan asked, their eyes bright and sparkling, reminding Viktor distantly of Yuri on his first day in the house. “You’ve surely got a few scouts after you, right? You’re the most promising forward this school has had in decades, they’d be stupid not to.”

Viktor smiled and shrugged his shoulders. Sure, he’d thought about it, but his concrete plans barely went beyond the next Saturday night, never mind something so distant as post-graduation. “I don’t know, maybe I’ll go to a few tryouts, but I’m going to focus on playoffs and taking the ship this season.”

“Oh, oh of course,” they replied eagerly, standing from their seat. “I’ll let you get back to studying, Captain,” they babbled, hurrying away with a bright smile on their face. On any other day it would have made Viktor smile too, but it stung instead. He waited until they were out of sight before letting the mask slip, turning back to his still indecipherable notes with a sigh.

Fishing his headphones out didn’t help either, the music only made his mind more cluttered. The frustration mounted behind his eyes and it began to feel like a migraine, building in pressure until he couldn’t take it anymore. He couldn’t play in any games until he got his grades back up, but no one could stop him from practicing on his own. The ice didn’t ask questions, his stick gliding over the surface and vaulting a puck into the net didn’t make him run useless equations in his head.

He shoved his book back into his backpack, throwing the lid of his laptop back down. He could hear his mother’s voices encouraging him to stay, coach barking at him, demanding he figure his shit out. He stormed past a soft body, huffing an apology without turning around and made for the rink, hoping he could push the frustration out of his system on the ice.

His jersey hung loosely around him without his pads on, the chill of the ice sank into his skin like a friend; but the ugly pull of frustration still smoldered in his chest, no matter how many shots flew into the net or bounced off the boards.

He ran his footwork drills when his hands began to ache from the shudder of his stick against the ice, carving paths in the ice and sending sprays of shavings across the surface.

Sweat ran down his temples, traced down the curve of his spine, under his gloves and his shirt. His edge caught on a deep gash he had made in the ice earlier, setting him spinning off balance, catching himself on the upper lip of the boards, folding himself over the barrier to catch his breath.

Between breaths, he heard the loud grating rumble of the door opening, fluorescent light spilling out into the night. How long had he been skating?

“Fuck.” he gasped, finally feeling the exhaustion set in.

“Nikiforov.” Came the barking voice of his coach, the voice he had been dreading hearing most. He pushed off the barrier and toward the doored gap, very intent on ignoring him, despite the loud demands echoing off the walls. “Viktor, stop.”

He made no attempt to slow his step, not even stopping to slide his guards back into place on the blades. The rubber mats on the floor would shield them fine enough. He could hear the shuffling of feet as Yakov continued to pursue him, following him into the locker room.

“You’re being a child, Vitya.” his voice boomed even louder in the smaller space. “Do you have any idea the lengths I had to go to only have you benched for a few games? They wanted indefinite suspension from the team, Viktor. They’re not joking about this.”

Viktor huffed, dropping onto the bench and yanking his feet free from his skates. “Then you might as well just kick me off the team, then, Coach. Because I can’t fucking do it.” He snapped in retort, throwing his sweat-damp fringe back over his forehead. “I tried, and I still can’t figure that shit out, I never will.”

God’s sake, you’re a petulant brat, Nikiforov.” Yakov glowered, crossing his arms. “What about the tutor?”

“I didn’t meet the tutor.” Viktor replied simply, pulling his jersey over his head and throwing it into his coach’s arms, the red-ringed white number 96 still visible, though wrinkled and distorted.

“What?” Yakov snapped in disbelief. “The tutor I hired specifically to help you figure this out? You just blew him off?” Viktor nodded, a cold laugh bubbling out of his throat without trying.

“I’m not going to sit with a tutor like I’m twelve, Coach.” Viktor replied with all the bite of early January, sharp and frozen, cool, unbothered. The shame though, had been building. Shame that he needed help, shame that he had let it get this bad.

“And what, you’d rather fail the class, let your grades continue slipping the way they have been? Lose your scholarships? You’ll lose your professional prospects, did you think of that, Vitya? Both on the ice and off.” Yakov growled before blowing out a long, exasperated breath. “That stupid pride of yours is always getting in the way.”

Viktor met Yakov’s gaze at the sound of his slightly softened tone, a rare occurrence for his coach, who favored shouting to normal conversation most of the time.

“One session. That’s all I’ll ask, Vitya.” Yakov said, folding the jersey in his arms, his number facing up. “Meet him. Try your best on the retake. We’ll go from there.”

Viktor felt a small crack in the frozen facade slowly growing, a rumbling thudding sound as it crackled deeper and deeper into him, splitting the ice completely to his core. “I…” he began, interrupted by a firm hand on his shoulder.

“Get back up, Vitya. We all stumble. Champions get back up.” he said simply, turning on his heel and leaving Viktor alone in the cool of the locker room.

Notes:

Hope you like it so far! The next two chapters will be posted every other day, since it's already done! Leave a comment, drop a crumb of kudos, fuel the maniacal laughter machine that has recently replaced my brain!

love you all!
<3 ia