The Depth of Green

Chapter 7

Chapter six recap: It snows! Some memories from Moscow, banter with Mila, and a new batch of omegas ensue. At the end of the showing, Otabek makes a (terrible) joke about Descartes and Yuri is caught so off guard that he laughs at it. Otabek is fucking thrilled and his scent betrays his affection for Yuri. Huh. Venom, I have good and bad news. The bad news: you will no longer be receiving a gift work in a few oneshots' time. The good news: said gift work has now become story-canon. You'll like this chapter. ;)

***

Ever since the last showing, the last time he'd seen Otabek, Yuri had been... distracted. Honestly, there wasn't any other word for it. And yet, he wasn't distracted by what one would expect him to be distracted by, the affection apparently prevalent in Otabek's perception of him, but instead was distracted from it, and purposefully so. Yuri forced his mind to the present whenever possible, focusing on the dough between his hands, the cold, redness of his nose, the sensation of tiny beads and a needle between his oftentimes clumsy, fumbling fingers. For all Yuri tried to drive the subject out of his mind, though, it was difficult, when sitting alone in his small, dark closet, haloed in the orangey glow of the lamp with mindless work to occupy his hands, to keep the thoughts from coming.

The thing was, affection, attachment, hell, even loyalty, to a degree, was dangerous. In any relationship, any of those things and many more were dangerous; if Yuri grew to develop personal feelings beyond simplistic, like/dislike perceptions of things, objects, people, most specifically, it put him out at sea. As Yuri knew far too well, had learned far too early, that nothing was constant, nothing was predictable, and nothing, following the trend of his life, would consider him when it did whatever it was wont to do. Yuri could count on one hand the number of people he'd allowed himself to care for in his life, and couldn't count on twenty how many ways in which those lapses in self control had come back to bite him in the ass. Even now -- especially now --, Yuri kept himself carefully neutral in any and all subjects. He disliked the lumpy soup he was served for dinner; he disliked his perpetual state of cold; he disliked the stares that never left him; but, truly, his life went on. He continued with his day, and they didn't matter to him. Sure, he enjoyed exercising his mind, he enjoyed his banter with Mila, he enjoyed the silence and stillness of his closet, but, without them, his life wouldn't be over. Yuri was painstakingly, laboriously neutral in every aspect of life, having become so years ago when he'd realized how much lighter the weight of existing was, when he simply didn't care.

Otabek, it seemed, had missed that lesson.

Maybe he'd never learned it, Yuri reasoned, with the cushy, alpha life the man led. He'd probably never lost something he loved, always enjoying the means to have it returned to him. He'd doubtlessly never had to worry about the things that would never cease plaguing Yuri's mind. A part of Yuri envied him for that, but the predominant, rational majority of him could only look away, teeth gritted. What did you say to someone when you knew they would lose? Because, at some point, Otabek would meet the harsh reality that caring and loving fostered; he would feel the anguish Yuri was forcibly impervious to.

It seemed, and Yuri almost regretted that it was true, that Otabek had met that moment in him. Even if he didn't realize it, even as he waded blindly into the murky, seductive realms of affection for Yuri, Otabek had met his reality check, had encountered what was possibly the only thing Yuri could imagine was out of his reach. In caring for Yuri at all, Otabek had set himself up for failure; Yuri, as stalwartly as he wasn't, was sorry about that.

But.

But, as Yuri mindlessly kneaded his allotment of dough, one day, listening with half an ear to Mila's perky, never-ending questions about Otabek and what he had said about the newest philosophy topic up for discussion (meliorism; at Mila's request, Yuri had explained it. She'd liked the idea; shocker), he had a thought. It was a dangerous thought, but a carefully hopeful, tentatively genius thought, nonetheless.