Chapter Text
Yuri has been friends with Otabek Altin for a little over two years now, and he’s pleased to realize that they haven’t lost any contact with each other since that day in Barcelona. He isn’t used to being friends with anyone before; he’s not used to needing anyone in his life before. Not in the way he feels he needs Otabek, anyway.
It started off casual - with he insisting that Otabek would get a messenger app so that they’d be able to talk more often, and then exchanging a few messages that were hours apart throughout the day (after all, a three-hour time difference was barely anything). Then they became more frequent, with the occasional voice or video call mixed in, and Yuri can feel himself growing more and more attached, no matter how much he doesn’t want to.
He’s just turned eighteen and he’s pretty sure the feeling in his chest is not supposed to happen. And he’s just as sure that he shouldn’t have his hopes up this high when he wakes up on his birthday and finds the letter O, in small handwriting, right on his inner elbow.
It’s probably ridiculous, like how some girls get a В on their eighteenth birthday and how they would wish it would continue to ‘Виктор Никифоров‘ - Viktor Nikiforov, even though the press has already seen Katsudon bearing that same mark on the nape of his neck.
Apparently the pig never looked at the soulmark after he received his first letter, and he feels really, really tempted to do the same thing now.
Otabek is already twenty years old, and Yuri’s sure he already has his soulmate’s first name complete, and maybe even the first few letters of their last name if they’ve already met. And he knows Otabek would never keep something like that hidden, so he would have said something by now, right?
Then it dawns on him that they’re going to meet up again soon, because after years of meticulous planning Viktor and Katsudon are finally going to get married. And they invited every single skater from the 2016 Grand Prix season to come to Japan and celebrate their union.
This alone is why he’s trying not to get his hopes up - but he doen’t even know why he was hoping so much. They’re friends. Best friends, he supposes. And maybe that feeling in his chest is some form of… platonic love, or something. (Or maybe, he could hear another part of him saying, he was just in denial. He’s really trying to kick that part of him down.)
He doesn’t bring it up to Otabek, and he doesn’t bring it up to anyone. He keeps his mouth shut, cover up the singular letter with his hoodie, finishes packing his suitcase and boards a flight to Kyushu, Japan.
Two weeks later and three weeks before the wedding, the second letter of his soulmate’s name appears. Now ‘От’ was carefully written on his inner elbow, and he can’t help thinking that’s nearly half of Otabek’s first name.
His mistake is getting out of his room to get breakfast without putting on his hoodie or covering up the mark with makeup beforehand. He’s barely gotten his first bite of omelette rice when he suddenly hears a gasp and feels his hand being tugged, dropping the spoonful of food in the process.
“Oi, what’s your problem-?!”
“Yurio, you didn’t tell us you already have your soulmark! And two letters, too!”
Fuck. Fuck. He pulls his hand away from Mari’s grasp, covering up the the soulmark with his other hand. He’s about to let out a biting retort when another voice interrupts him.
“Really, Yurio? Oh, right! Your birthday was two weeks ago! But two letters in two weeks is awfully fast…”
“I didn’t ask for your opinion, Katsudon. And stop calling me that!” he sends his most piercing glare towards him, and the idiot just sighs and rubs the nape of his neck, where he knows Viktor’s name is scrawled on.
Ugh, gross. But he doesn’t even have enough time to be disgusted by them before his hand is pulled on again, this time by Viktor himself.
“Amazing, Yurio! Hmm, let’s see what those letters are…” at this, Yuri yanks his hand again, but Viktor’s grip is stronger than Mari’s and while he did manage to get him to let go, he’s pretty sure Viktor’s already seen the letters in their struggle.
He seems to have the same train of thought as Yuri, because he has this shit-eating grin on his face that’s getting on every single one of his nerves. “My, Yurio, your soulmate couldn’t be -”
“Ugh, shut up, old man! Just because you and piggy think you’re the most perfect couple here doesn’t mean you have any right to pry on anyone else’s!” and before he knows it, before he can see anyone’s reaction, he’s standing up and storming back into his room.
He knows how doting the Katsuki family is, even to him, and as annoying as they are, he still doesn’t like the thought of worrying them. He just wants the stupid mark covered up so that no one will bring it up again. Because if someone brings it up again, he’ll start thinking about what those two letters mean, which would lead to thinking about whether or not Otabek is his soulmate. And he’s been doing a pretty good job of avoiding that topic.
He’d really, really rather keep avoiding it.
Pushing the thought to the back of his mind, as he always did, he grabs the nearest hoodie he sees and puts it on. When he comes back to the table, they must have figured out that he doesn’t want to talk about his mark, because he receives an apology from Yuuri, Viktor and Mari (he accepts it, begrudgingly) and they instead switch the topic to Viktor and Yuuri’s approaching wedding.
Which, to be honest, is where nearly all conversations with the Katsuki family end up in since he got here, but he’d rather tolerate the thought of those two dumb lovebirds than have to think about his own feelings.
Occasionally, though, he’d see Yuuri’s eyes drifting to his arm, now covered in black cloth, and he knows that he can’t avoid it forever.
“I don’t get why you’re the one helping me with my best man speech,” he spits out, crumpling another piece of paper and throwing it behind him. Honestly, the used papers are slowly growing into a pile behind him, but it’s not his room so he can’t bring himself to care. “You have your own dumb groom-ly duties to take care of, and I’m not even your best man, I’m Viktor’s, so what shit are you trying to pull?”
Yuuri, as usual, barely flinches at his words, and it infuriates him to no end. Worse, he doesn’t even answer his question. Instead he asks, “Yurio, why are you being so defensive with your soulmark?”
Yuri accidentally punctures his new piece of paper with his pen, but he hasn’t written anything dumb on it so he doesn’t crumple it up just yet.”What’s it to you, fatso?”
“Nothing, nothing,” he raises his hands up in defense, and Yuri rolls his eyes. “It’s just pretty obvious that you’re being kinda protective over it. You always snap whenever someone brings it up, and you always cover it up somehow. I’m just… curious.”
“Tch.” He messes up on his speech too badly again and another paper ball joins the pile. “Like I’d tell you.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“No.”
“Yuri,” Yuuri sighed, “I’m just trying to help. You know, Viktor and I -”
“I know,” Yuri hissed back at him. “You told me. He told me. Over and over. About how you never looked at your soulmark because you didn’t want to get your hopes up, and how Viktor never said anything because he thought you already knew, blah blah blah, now you’re getting married and I have to write this stupid speech.”
“That’s not what I was going to say,” Yuuri said, but the nervous laughter that came afterwards was a dead giveaway. “Well, not really anyway. It’s just… avoiding something isn’t gonna make it go away, y’know? Even if I didn’t look at my mark -”
“Oh god, here we go.”
“- it was still there, waiting to be seen. And your mark, your soulmate, is waiting for you too.” Yuuri smiles at him, and the way he does it, like he’s smiling at a child, infuriates him more. “Besides, from what I’ve learned, avoiding doesn’t do you any good anyway.”
“Tch.” His speech is turning out a little better, and if Yuuri doesn’t say anything stupid again maybe he’ll actually have a good first draft written down. “Just tell your family and your stupid fiance that prying is a shitty thing to do. I’ll stop avoiding or whatever.”
“Alright,” Yuuri’s smiles are too friendly. It annoys him that it comforts him in some way. “You still haven’t answered me, though. What’s so wrong about your soulmark? Do you think it’s gonna turn out to be someone you don’t like?”
He’s not prying, or if he is, he’s not being annoyingly pushy about it. Katsudon is annoying and weak, but he’s approachable and, after nearly three years of knowing him, he knows he can trust him. And keeping this secret wrapped up is getting exhausting for him. So he drops his pen and rolls up the right sleeve of his hoodie, revealing his incomplete soulmark.
“Ah, Yurio, you already have your third letter! Mari said it was two last week,” Yuuri commented as he grasped Yuri’s wrist, which made hm look back at his inner elbow in surprise. He doesn’t remember a third letter.
It’s an a. ‘Ота’ is now written cleanly on his skin and oh god, it really is him, isn’t it? Fuck.
He can tell Yuuri figured it out too, but confusion remains on his face. “It’s… starting to look like ‘Otabek’, isn’t it?” he drops Yuri’s hand, and he immediately picks up his pen to continue his speech. He doesn’t want to focus on this conversation too much. “Hmm, what’s the problem, then? You and Otabek are best friends, and I’ve seen the way you look at him sometimes -”
“What?!”
“- so I still don’t get what the problem is.”
Despite his initial outburst, he tries to sound as casual as he can, but it comes out as a mumble. “I dunno, I just… didn’t wanna start assuming things, when it was just the O. What if I bring it up to him by accident and it turns out we’re not soulmates and it makes things all awkward and ugh?”
He’s not good with words. Never was. But Yuuri was listening patiently, so he continued. “I didn’t stop looking it like you did, that’s dumb, but I just… didn’t want it to stay in my mind for too long. If I keep thinking about it I’ll start hoping that it’s actually him, and then it won’t be him and then it’ll suck.”
He isn’t as mortified as he thought he would be when Yuuri starts laughing at him, but he’s still angry that he is so he takes a couple of the paper balls from the pile and throws it at him. “Don’t laugh, you fucking pig! Is this your shitty way of trying to help me?!”
“No no no,” Yuuri manages to say, his laughter gradually calming down. “I’m not laughing at you, it’s just - you reminded me a lot of how I used to think with Viktor, that’s all.”
“Ugh, it always comes back to you and Viktor,” he grumbles, and Yuuri laughs again and apologizes. “Whatever. Is this the part where I beg you to tell me how you got through with it? ‘Cause I’m not doing it.”
“Well, no, but it looks like you need the help anyway,” Yuri sends him a death glare at that, because he doesn’t need any help at all, but Yuuri ignores it and continues. “But listen, your soulmark is completing itself at a really quick pace. I won’t be surprised if you complete the first name by the time the wedding rolls around. And if it does end up being Otabek, then you’ll just have to see if your name is his soulmark. If it isn’t… well, it’ll hurt, but you two are practically sewn together anyways. Even if you guys aren’t soulmates, that doesn’t mean you can’t still be together as best friends, right?”
Annoying as he is, he has a point. Approaching someone about this didn’t suck as hard as he thought it would.
“… Yeah, I guess you’re right, just this once,” he admits, and Yuuri smiles at him and he gives him a half-smile back.
…
“I want him to be my soulmate, though,” he mumbles, and Yuuri pretends not to hear for his sake.