i.
Once upon a time, in a kingdom of ice and lights and the whirling freedom of soaring against the sun, there lived a king named Viktor Nikiforov. All who laid eyes on him adored him, and every year, the people would throw a banquet in his honour where all the princes of the realms would gather. And every year, he would charm them with his smiles, and dance with them until dawn.
Once upon a time, at the most spectacular banquet of the year, Viktor meets a new prince. He dances with this stranger through the night, and by dawn, knows in his heart that he will become a king.
Once upon a time, Viktor Nikiforov, King of the Ice, captures the heart of that dark-eyed prince and lives a fairytale.
ii.
That much is true.
What's also true is that no-one's seen Viktor for a month, a month and a half, three. At first they wail and weep and flock together to clamour his name, pleading that he come back to them. Then spring passes, bleeds into summer, and they prepare to crown a new King.
Then, half a year to the day he closed his doors to the world, Viktor bursts back in a blitz of blades and silver, like lightning, like fury.
Soon, the people begin whispering to each other that their Ice King flies like an arrow through the heart, and when he spins, he burns the ice.
He no longer graces them with his smiles, but it is only backstage, away from all prying eyes but Yakov's, that he slots skate guards over razor edges with white-knuckled fingers and snarls, fuck the people.
Be good, Yakov sighs.
iii.
He has been good.
He has been the best, has been idolised and has been fêted, has even been loved, maybe, once. He'd touched bliss, then, those long months ago, and had never thought to doubt that he'd deserved someone of his own, to worship as so many had worshipped him.
Perhaps, he thinks, closing his eyes against the spray of ice chips, white as a swan-feather-flurry, as he launches himself into the air, if he is better -
iv.
- he falls.
Swan, arrow, his cheek on the ice. He plummets, and watches the world rush past. Chill water seeps through lycra and lace. Sometimes, he can make out figures through the blur: pleading voices too muffled to reach his ears; grasping fingers that barely graze his skin. Inside, his bones have fractured, splintered, collapsed.
Some days he shivers in agony and howls silently into white. Other days, his flesh is numb to the cold.
v.
Warming up again is almost unbearable, but he does it. Slowly, he stops shying away from the scalding heat of his fans' overwhelming joy and his mother's gentle smiles. He reigns over the ice, after all, after everything, and can do anything. Eventually, he is almost ready to tell his story.
It goes like this.
Once upon a time, what felt like many lifetimes ago, Viktor Nikiforov was swept off his feet, quite literally, by one Yuuri Katsuki on the night of the banquet. He hadn't begun to fall just then: that had come after he replayed a video, purchased two plane tickets to Fukuoka, and hastily bowed from the international stage. In Japan, he'd met a completely different Yuuri, who stuttered endearingly over his sentences, overindulged on katsudon, and threw his soul into the ice. They'd taken the Grand Prix Final by storm, even if Yuri had swooped in to steal their thunder at the end. That night, and every night for the next month, Viktor had grinned helplessly into his pillow and savoured his happily ever after.
It hadn't lasted long. In the end, they weren't pushed apart by insurmountable differences, or torn from one another by inescapable obligations. All it had taken was a quiet road, a speeding car, and Yuuri, coat zipped tight against the cold and headphones in his ears, lost in the music for his next skate.
The driver had sobbed in honest repentance, afterwards, he was told. They also assured him that Yuuri had slipped painlessly from one world into the next, but by then Viktor was already suffering for the both of them.
A year later, and the sight of Makkachin, an onsen, a bowl of katsudon still stops him in his tracks, sometimes, as he fights to breathe through the agony, raw as shattered glass in his chest. His mother hugs him, fierce and comforting; Yakov screams at him, just as he always had; his fellow competitors look at him with a little more warmth than before, perhaps, a little more sympathy, and do their very best to thrash him on the ice.
He keeps breathing.