The Outline of Our Lives

Part 2

Chapter warnings: mentions of rape, serious injury, blood, language. Slight Otabek/Yuri and pre-Seung Gil/Phichit.

This year, Katsuki Yuuri watches the Grand Prix from his Korean hospital room, holding Victor's hand so tightly it shakes.

The event is a goddamn mess. JJ chokes. Otabek chokes, and the commentators fill the empty block left by Yuuri and Phichit's absences by hitting hard on their falls, their missed quads, the cruel analyses of their careers' downward trajectories. The replays are brutal. Christophe squeaks by with a few uncharacteristic doubles and one solid quad, earning silver, and Yurio takes the gold, the fury in him fueling David Arnold's Midsummer Waltz to heights so intense that Yuuri's throat starts aching. Yuri cries all the way through his free skate. His ending close-up is all red eyes and tear tracks, a scowl when he realizes that the media is eating this up: Mysterious Tragedy Strikes Grand Prix Skaters. Katsuki and Chulanont MIA from Major Competition. Celestino and Victor offer no comment, and Yuuri holes himself away from the press, shades in his room pulled all the way down as he lies there under the heap of blankets Victor fetched for him.

He hadn't known he was bleeding between the legs that night until Victor's handkerchief came away saturated with blood. Didn't even register the pain until he was in the hospital, and the nurse told him he needed stitches, that he had significant rectal tearing and he'd sprained a hip and his nose was soundly broken. The dark, red-purple bruises under his eyes look like a mask. He's in enough pain that skating is impossible. Walking is impossible.

And he got off easy.

Phichit has a pelvic fracture. "It's not an injury you can walk away from as a skater," Victor explained, face pale. "Not with that kind of muscular and nerve damage. It's like a knee. It's never really the same again after a trauma."

"You're telling me that that guy literally fucked him until he broke," Yuuri had replied, and the laughter that spilled out of him was unbidden, terrible. He hasn't had a chance to talk to Phichit since that evening—Phichit's only been truly conscious once, and Celestino, watching over him that shift, has been tight-lipped about his mental condition—and that's just as well. The guilt consumes Yuuri. He wishes he could just fade away until he's nothing.

Why had he been drinking so heavily that night, two days before a competition? Why had he worn those tiny shorts, and separated himself from Victor, and forced Phichit to come outside with him? He might as well have done—that to Phichit himself.

No one has used the words yet, least of all Yuuri. They're still unthinkable.

Yuuri sleeps fitfully on and off all day, not speaking or eating. His tray sits beside him until the seaweed soup is cold and Victor has reluctantly eaten the rice, since he refuses to go to the cafeteria. Victor talks, but doesn't demand answers. He sings a little bit in his clear, cultured voice. "You're beautiful," he whispers at one point, when he thinks Yuuri is asleep. His lips are warm in Yuuri's hair. "You're perfect, my sun. I will never leave you."

He only really wakes up when Yuri kicks the door open and smacks a bouquet of freesias across his chest. He startles badly, but Yuri remains unmoved. Yuuri likes that.

"What time is it?" he mumbles, rubbing his eyes.

"Late," says Yuri gruffly.

Yuuri tries to sit up, grimacing. His body is screaming at him. Victor reaches to help him, and Christophe materializes to catch his other elbow, the two of them propping him up against a pillow. Yuri glares at him, and Yuuri squints back. It's dark. No light leaks out from behind the pulled shades. His fellow skaters have filled the room, and they're standing there in silhouette, like gargoyles. Chris, Otabek, JJ. Yuri.