Chapter Text
Yurio seemed to realize right away that what he was seeing was not something he was supposed to be seeing. Yuuri didn’t know what to make of that but he didn’t have much time to think into it. Yurio took another look at the man--for a moment it seemed as if they made eye contact--and then he bolted, speeding across the ice before Yuuri could compose himself fast enough to get after him. He gave a worried glance to Viktor, who looked puzzled but otherwise seemed none the wiser to what had happened, and then he followed after Yurio, who by now had shed his skates and ducked into the locker room.
They were on rink time and so the ice was empty and the locker room was equally so. Yurio was sitting on the floor with his knees drawn to his chest, back to a locker. Yuuri waited a moment and, when the young skater didn’t immediately object to his presence, he stepped over and dropped down next to him. His face was buried low against his knees, blond face hiding his eyes, but the shake of his shoulders told Yuuri he was crying, even if he was so quiet Yuuri could hardly tell otherwise.
Neither of them spoke for a very long time. By the time the silence was broken, Yuuri had had time to run through every question he had, and there were many. He really saw Viktor, that much was clear, but how? Why? For how long? Did he see the same thing Yuuri saw when he looked at him?
Instead he said nothing, and let Yurio speak when he was ready. “My parents are dead,” Yurio said suddenly. Where usually he was so angry and volatile he now looked all of fifteen and sad and falling apart at the seams. The opposite of composed. “They died when I was young, and all of us—” He raised his head and swollen blue eyes met his, blond hair falling back from his face. “Everyone in my family dies young and—and horribly .”
Yuuri knew about his parents, had met his grandfather a few times—a quiet, somber but sickly man who cared dearly for his grandson—but he didn’t know details beyond car crash . If he remembered correctly, Yurio had been eight, maybe nine.
“And I see them.”
Yuuri choked on his tongue, eyes wide. “W-what? What do you mean?”
“Their souls are trapped here, to—to suffer.” Yuuri felt sick to his stomach, his heart lodged in his throat. He glanced around but they were still alone; Viktor hadn’t followed them. “And I see them. The souls of all of them, everyone in my family who has ever died and horrible death.” Yurio practically crawled to his feet, shuffling forward and hauling himself upright with the edge of a bench. He fixed an accusatory glare onto Yuuri, who made no immediate move to follow him. He was shaken and his alarm kept him frozen where he was. “But that man, he wasn’t one of them.”
“No,” Yuuri agreed. “He wasn’t.”
He stood and Yurio took a wary step away from him. “But he was like him. Who is he?” Somewhere in the bouts of silence between their broken conversation, Yurio had composed himself. His eyes were red, his body still trembling slightly, but his breathing was even and he stood on solid feet. After a moment he plopped down onto the bench. Yuuri didn’t move from where he was sitting.
Yuuri had never told a soul about the curse, not Phichit, not Minako, not Celestino. But he knew, he knew, that Yurio wouldn’t breathe another word to him about his own curse—was this what it even was? A curse? A second sight?—if he didn’t have something to offer in return. So he spilled a lot of it, but not all of it, just enough to connect himself to the situation; he didn’t breathe a word about the nature of his relationship to Viktor. Yurio sat on the bench and listened silently, and at some point Yuuri got up and sat next to him and the conversation ended in a long, heavy silence.
“My parents died in a car crash,” Yurio whispered after a bit. It was a lot to take in, and it seemed the gears were turning in his mind as he spoke. “They got caught in a blizzard and—” his voice cracked— “Their car went off a cliff. I was supposed to be with them, but I wasn’t. That’s my curse.”
He refused to say more, and Yuuri couldn’t make him say more, and that was where the conversation ended more or less. He didn’t say a word of it to Viktor, but it weighed heavy on his chest. It felt wrong to hide something from him, someone who for so long had been impossible to hide anything from.
“Did you have any family?” Yuuri asked one night, and Viktor looked up from his book with a curious look, though his mouth was creased into a frown. He’d said before that his life from so long ago was blurry, that he didn’t really remember it. “I think—” He hesitated. “I had a sister, I believe. And parents, of course, but I don’t remember well. It was so many lifetimes ago now.”
“Did you have any children?” Yuuri pressed. They were in the kitchen, Yuuri chopping vegetables for his dinner, the thick, starchy scent of rice in the air. He’d learned eventually that Viktor’s ability to interact with the physical world around him was limited, and so he leaned on the counter nearby, unable to offer much assistance and unable to eat any of the food being prepared.
Viktor’s face went still. He hesitated for a long time. “She told me when I was leaving,” he said at last. Yuuri knew what he meant: the beginning of the journey that led him to where he now stood; the mother of a child he’d never known. “I couldn’t be convinced to stay.”
Yuuri decided not to push the subject, but the thought in his head grew.
He got bits and pieces from Yurio over time. Now that he thought to notice he could see the boy looking off in the distance at times, as if seeing something no one else could. The same way Yuuri looked to others when he looked at Viktor. Yurio could see suffering souls, caught in the violent throes of their untimely deaths.
A feeling formed in his gut, a twisted knot of uneasiness that grew stronger by the day; Yurio wasn’t completely distant, but he was at arms length, all too ready to pretend what had happened hadn’t happened and that their shared truths didn’t connect them in any way at all.
Yuuri had a feeling their curses were something more. It couldn’t just be a coincidence.
“You don't have to look at me like that,” Yurio snarled one day, skirting his skates so he came to an abrupt halt.
Yuuri shuffled on his own skates where he stood by the rink guard, observing his performance. They had begun to choreograph a routine for the coming season.
“I'm sorry?” Yuuri honestly wasn't sure what Yurio meant and it was apparent that it annoyed the boy all the more.
“Like you're—like you're worried about me.” His eyes were cold and angry when Yuuri met them. “I'm not fragile.”
“I'm sorry.” He understood what he meant now.
Neither of them moved.
“Do you see them now?”
Yurios eyes went wide and he looked away. “Yes.” His eyes flickered to the other side of the ice and Yuuri followed his gaze. He couldn't see anything there. “But I'm used to it.”
“Hey.” Blue eyes jerked his way. “I think, maybe, we should have a conversation about this.”
“One day,” Yurio said to him. He glided closer, until he was casting an angry shadow across the ice. Their private rink time was always late in the evening, when Yurio had finished school, and the setting sun cast eerie, bouncing shadows all across the ice. “One day I’m going to die and it will be terrible and horrible and tragic. Then it will be my turn to haunt whoever is left.”
The words felt like a stab. Yuuri felt himself anger and he caught Yurio tightly around his wrist to keep him from skating away. “No,” he said, “It doesn’t have to be that way.”
Yurio snatched himself away but didn’t run off. “What would you know?” he snarled. Yuuri opened his mouth, started to say “I’m cursed too, that’s what I know” but he didn’t make it passed I’m before Yurio cut him off and continued. “I see how you smile at him” him was death, was the spector supposedly haunting him, was Viktor and his curse all at the same time, “You’re not haunted the way I’m haunted.”
Yuuri wasn’t having it. He had to remind himself that this boy was all of sixteen and behaved as such. All angst and turmoil and drama and moodiness. “Yurio, this can’t be a coincidence. Our curses—they have to be connected somehow.”
The thought was coming full circle. Viktor had once had a child, and if that child had had a child and so on and so forth, and if Yuuri’s family was cursed, then it wasn’t too much to assume that whatever family Viktor had was cursed as well. And if one day the child born was Yurio—
“And you can see him.”
“He’s Death,” Yurio countered, but his rage was subsiding.
“He’s only my death, Yurio, not yours. That has to mean something.”
Yurio seemed to finally agree because a few days later he showed up at Yuuri’s door. Viktor was on the sofa when he went to the door, but by the time Yurio came in he was gone. Once Yuuri had asked him where he went, when he wasn’t around. Viktor had cast his gaze at the sky—they’d been outside, it had been a crystal clear, crisp night—and he’d said “Somewhere quiet and dark. Somewhere almost peaceful.”
“Okay,” Yuri drawled, throwing himself onto the sofa as if he owned the place. “I’ve decided that I will hear you out.”