Disclaimer: Beyblade is copyright Takao Aoki.
Warnings: Mentioned character death, mentioned drug/alcohol abuse (not graphic).
Note: Using original names. POV changes a couple of times, but I hope it's clear when it happens.

Yuri Igorevich Ivanov
Loving friend and brother.
Gone but never forgotten.

"Do you miss him?"

"Course I do."

"Kai's been recently, can tell by those fancy flowers."

"He'd have come at the weekend."

"I'm sorry, Borya."

"You always say that."

Yeah, he did. He knew he could blurt apologies until the sun burned out and the planet exploded and it wouldn't make an ounce of difference. Apologies couldn't bring people back. But if it made Boris feel just that little tiny bit better, reminded him that he wasn't alone, then Ivan would say sorry every single time they came back to visit Yuri.

Ivan scuffed his feet as Boris sunk to one knee and soaked his jeans in the wet grass. The rain had stopped only minutes before they'd arrived, as if it knew what they were there for and had decided to allow them a moment's reprieve. Cold wind battled through the trees surrounding the clearing just as Ivan battled with the need to joke and make light of the situation. A coping strategy in times of stress, his therapist had said.

He cleared his throat as Boris straightened up, his grip on his hat tightening before he pulled it on; the smallest sign of how much it still hurt for him to do this and the one that Ivan looked for every single time. "Still think he'd have hated that headstone."

Boris huffed a breath in response but said nothing, though Ivan caught the barest hint of a smile curling his lips. They'd chosen one between them; simple, grey, a name and a date and none of the sickly, grimace-inducing engravings that were offered because they knew Yuri would've turned his nose up at them. But then Kai had swanned in with his wallet and his heart-wrenching desire to max out every gold credit card he owned—heart-wrenching because there were surely more important things he could splash his money on—and they'd ended up with the red and gold monstrosity that now stood before them.

It really was a shame that Yuri couldn't berate Kai for his bad decision, Ivan would've loved to hear it.

"Drink?" Ivan asked as Boris took a step back from their friend's final resting place, signalling without saying a single word that visiting time was over.

Boris gave a sigh that was swallowed up by the wind, turning his face up to the sky for a second before fixing Ivan with a look that was both grateful and disbelieving. As if he should've known by now what they always did afterwards. "Drink."

Ivan stayed a moment longer as Boris retreated to the entrance gates, casting his eyes over the headstone one more time. Their little bouquet paled in comparison to the grand display Kai had left, but Boris always assured him that it was the thought that counted and not the money they'd spent. Roses and chrysanthemums this year—or so he'd been told—because Yuri had been so picky about everything in life and Boris, always so thoughtful when it came to the redhead, hadn't wanted him to get bored with their offerings.

He shuffled closer, tucked his hands deeper into his pockets against the cold and took a moment to simply stand, eyes closed and head bowed. Boris would wait for him by his truck out on the road, just as he always did, and Ivan knew that he could stand for minutes or hours and Boris would never once complain about it. A mutual understanding, one that didn't even need words, because people paid their respects in different ways.

Yuri had taught him that.

"Want to drive?" Boris held out the keys to him as he pulled the cemetery gate shut, a slightly crushed, unlit cigarette hanging from his lips. More habit than anything; Yuri had hated him smoking so damned if he was going to light one up in view of his headstone.

Ivan shook his head, tugging his hood down as he rounded the cab and climbed in. "No thanks. Can't reach the pedals anyway." He caught Boris' smirk as the engine spluttered to life and rolled his eyes; wasn't his fault that he was 38 years old and still barely came up to Boris' shoulder.

"Still don't understand why you drive this piece of shit, it's a fucking deathtrap." He was lying; knew full well why Boris was reluctant to get rid of his old pickup. It had been the first thing he'd bought when he finally got his license back, brand new at the time. He'd taken to tinkering with it outside the house, borrowing Ivan's toolbox without asking, more playing around with it than actually doing anything constructive.

He'd got pissed off with Boris eventually—frustrated with his trial-and-error attitude and cringing every time he went for delicate wiring with heavy pliers—and had stepped in to actually show him how to do something useful with the tools in his hands. It was probably the first time they had done something together without tripping into a gaping chasm of anger and pointless arguments. Yuri had stood in the doorway and smiled at them.

Still, sentimental value or not, the truck was still a heap of junk now and try as he might with all his mechanical expertise, it was well past being savable.

"I like it," Boris admitted quietly, blasting them both with cold air before he remembered the heating no longer worked.

Ivan forced down a shiver and settled back in his seat, watching Moscow's streets shoot by in the warped wing-mirror. "Never thought I'd see the day you turned soft, Borya."

Silence reigned until they reached the highway to the other side of the city, broken only when the sky deemed them far enough away from the cemetery that it could start pelting them with rain again. The wipers left a long smear across the windscreen and Boris grunted in frustration before opening fire with the washers. It didn't make an ounce of difference, so Ivan made a mental note to change the damn things once they were back home. Driving around Moscow was risky enough without the added danger of not being able to see.

"Mind if we stop by the garage? Said I'd grab something for Anya," Ivan said, watching as the crumpled cigarette made it's way from Boris' lips to his fingers so that he could take a gulp from their flask. He muffled a snicker at the look of irritation that crossed Boris' face—of course the coffee was cold, what did he expect?—and simultaneously quashed the urge to hand the guy a light.

Boris retaliated by throwing the thankfully sealed flask in his lap. "You mean those lace panties she left the other night?"

"What?"

"Come off it Vanya, you couldn't have made it more obvious if you'd tried." Boris' expression flickered from playful to borderline disgust, though Ivan could tell from the tone of his voice that he wasn't serious about it. "Just hope you're planning on valeting that car by the weekend; it's due out Monday and there's no way I'm explaining the stains in the back to the snob picking it up."

Embarrassment instantly flushed Ivan's cheeks, not so much at the fact that he'd been caught out—hell, he'd caught Boris in the act more often than he would've liked—but more so at the fact that they'd left evidence after being so damned careful. As usual, anger fought it's way in to smother the embarrassment. "Can't you do it? I'm a mechanic, not a fucking cleaner."

"And I'm an accountant, not your slave. You made the mess, you clean it."

Ivan slumped back in his seat, relenting for now and crossing his arms. "You can be a right prick sometimes, you know that?"

"Thought you said I'd gone soft?"

"Yeah, fucking soft prick."

Boris gave a bark of laughter, his face lighting up just enough to almost tip Ivan over the edge and ruin his sulking act. "Do you even hear what comes out your mouth?"

He pulled the truck up on the drive outside the garage, leaning back on the bonnet and glancing up at the sign as Ivan hopped from the passenger side and let himself in. Papov's Motors. He'd laughed at first, laughed even harder when Ivan had tried to convince him to get his name up above the door as well. After all, it was a joint venture; Ivan looked after the front of store, rebuilt the engines and fixed the bodywork, and Boris took care of the finances behind the scenes, making sure Ivan didn't sink them both into debt. Within the first few months of starting, his role had somehow changed to include manning reception and meet-and-greet, but even though he complained about the fact to Ivan at least once a day, he didn't really mind.

They were in it together and both had equal stake in the business, but there was no way Boris wanted his name on the garish sign Ivan had paid over the odds for. It was Ivan's dream after all, not his, and as immature and irresponsible as Ivan was, Boris knew full well just how much work he put into keeping that dream alive. They shared a flat; how could he not notice Ivan sneaking out to the garage overnight to work?

Shaking his head, he trudged over the square of dirt that had once been a flowerbed to the backroom door, kicking the mud from his boots against the wall before walking in. Just as he'd left it, unsurprisingly; Ivan knew better than to even breathe near the bomb site that was his office. He'd made an effort to clean it once, filed all the invoices, sorted job cards and customers in to alphabetical order and even built himself a set of shelves with some old scrap-yard timber to tidy everything away. The next day, however, he'd come to the irritating realisation—whilst he had some smarmy, impatient bastard whining down the phone line, no less—that he couldn't find a single thing he was looking for. He'd torn the place apart again like a tornado only seconds after violently ending the call.

Ivan was still banging around in the workshop, so he threw his jacket over his chair and perched on the edge of his desk to wait. "If you're looking for her panties, they're in the old Lada where you left them."

"Fuck right off, Borya!"

He chuckled, closing his eyes and resting back on his hands. Yuri would have killed him if he saw the state of his workspace. Killed him and made him clear it up, in that order. A sigh escaped his lips and he twisted to reach the photo by his keyboard, tucking his free hand in his pocket as he held the frame in his lap.

The last photo they'd ever taken of the four of them together. It ached, just a little bit, and he couldn't stop thinking about just how young they looked. There wasn't much he could say about Sergei—it'd been over a decade since they'd last seen him—but the years certainly hadn't treated Ivan and himself with much respect.

And Yuri… he swallowed the sudden lump in is throat. At the time none of them had really noticed how sickly their friend looked. Staring down at the photo now, it was so blindingly obvious that Boris felt the urge to put his fist through something. His own face, ideally.

"You really miss him, don't you?"

He jerked upright, startled by Ivan's voice, sighing as he tucked the frame back into it's rightful place. "He was everything to me, Vanya. You know that."

"He didn't."

No, because deep down Boris Kuznetsov—voted the scariest sports personality of the year more than once in some stupid indie magazine—was nothing but a pathetic coward. The one regret he'd carry around with him for the rest of his life. A small, morose smile twisted his lips as he thought about it.

Yuri and Kai had been together for nearly two years before it happened, and as much as Yuri had complained tirelessly about how frustrating Kai was, always away on business, always on his phone or his laptop whenever he was home, Boris knew that Yuri had never cared for anyone as much as he did for Kai. As Yuri's oldest friend, he had always listened, whether it was three in the morning or in the middle of arranging a contract with a well-paying customer, he had always been willing to drop whatever he was doing and rush to Yuri's aid without even a second thought. Yuri loved Kai, that had been clear, and Boris loved Yuri too much to admit his feelings for fear of tearing them apart and hurting the redhead.

Ivan half-shrugged, jumping up onto the desk at his side and sending papers fluttering to the floor. A scowl settled on Boris' face as he watched Ivan pluck a cigarette from his pocket. He'd been attempting yet again to give up for the past month, just as he did at the same time every single year, going it 'cold turkey' since the various nicotine replacement therapies he'd tried only seemed to make him crankier than usual. Not good, especially when you were dealing with an irritated customer.

Boris made a move to snatch the cigarette from Ivan's hand, but it was a half-hearted attempt and Ivan had been expecting it. "No smoking in my office."

"Sorry, want one?" The packet was offered up to him without hesitation. His scowl lessened to a frown and he chewed his bottom lip for a second before giving in to the temptation. Ivan nodded his head towards the photo Boris had been looking at. "When was that taken, anyway?"

"March." He knew the exact date and time as if someone had burned it onto the inside of his eyelids. They'd lost Yuri four months later.

Ivan looked as if he was about to speak, but a flicker of sorrow crossed his eyes and he thought better of it.

Boris gave a soft chuckle, taking a long drag from the cigarette. "I can still see him walking through that door and yelling at me. Even though we didn't have this place back then…"

"You need to move on. It's been over 15 years; you can't wallow in grief forever."

"That's probably the most adult thing you've ever said."

A shrug rocked Ivan's shoulders, his smug expression not quite reaching his eyes as it usually would. "It's true though."

"Yeah, I know."

Ivan shifted further back on the desk and kicked his heels up against the wood. Boris rolled his eyes at what he knew was coming next; Ivan Papov, Mother Russia's extraordinary matchmaker. They went over the same routine at least once a week and Boris' answers never changed. They both knew why, yet there was something vaguely heart-warming about the fact that Ivan still tried. "What about Evgeny? He's alright."

"Casual, nothing more."

"Stanislav?"

Boris shook his head as usual. "Casual."

"The guy who works at the store… Denis?"

A bubble of laughter lifted the air in the room just a little bit. "He's young enough to be my kid, Vanya."

"Fine, so you want an older guy," Ivan said, the corners of his mouth curling upwards and betraying the fact that he wanted to laugh as well. "What about that barman at Nina's? I forgot his name."

"I've never bothered to ask his name." And that was the absolute truth, because oddly enough, the more drunk Boris became the less things like names mattered to him.

"You're a monster. Could always try online dating?"

This time the bubble became a full on guffaw and Boris nearly choked on the smoke in his lungs. "Because that worked out well for you, didn't it."

"You'll never let me forget that, will you?"

"Nope."

Ivan treated him to a sharp punch on the arm and launched a full-on defence, his voice climbing in volume. "How was I supposed to know Sveta was a guy? You met her—him, whatever—admit it, even you were convinced."

"Are you serious? He was twice the size of you and his voice was even deeper than Seriy's—" The very second their old friend's name slipped out, Boris could practically see the office freeze over. The playful anger slipped from Ivan's face and he stared hard at the floor instead.

"He's not coming back, is he?"

Boris sighed, laced his fingers through his hair and closed his eyes. "I don't know, Vanya. He blamed himself for… for what happened." Even now, so many years later, Boris still couldn't bring himself to say the words. Ivan understood easily enough though, sparing him a small, pained smile that was more of a grimace than reassuring.

"But it wasn't his fault. Wasn't anyone's fault."

"No, it wasn't."

Sergei hadn't seen it that way. He'd been there, alone with Yuri and his suffering. If anything, it should have been him and Ivan who blamed themselves; whilst Sergei was watching one of his closest friends die, they were off with Kai enjoying Moscow's nightlife, a belated birthday celebration. Sergei had stopped talking from that very moment, didn't say a single word to any of them, and then one day he'd just vanished completely. No note, no explanation, as if he hadn't even existed in the first place. 15 years and still nothing.

The damned silence settled again and Ivan shifted uncomfortably next to him. The air in the room felt heavy, but Boris knew he wouldn't be able to escape it until he'd gone over the same thoughts and regrets that had plagued him ever since.

They were no strangers to hospitals, but never before had they left feeling even worse than when they'd arrived. When his weak knee had caved—the bone fragmented from too many clashes with the Abbey's stone floor—he'd been whisked into surgery within a week and sent home on crutches a few days later. Sergei's hands and wrists had spent more time healing in thick plaster than inside his boxing gloves, though they still hadn't worked out how the guy always managed to injure himself so badly. When Ivan had returned from a once in a lifetime trip to the furthest corners of the world and had brought back a contagious, life-threatening disease, he'd been released from quarantine a month later with the all-clear and a shit-eating grin on his face.

Yuri had gone in to pick up another prescription for his migraine pills and to make his monthly complaint about his aches and pains, and had come out with only a year left to live. His condition had been inevitable and incurable; his heart weakened by Biovolt's cruel experiments. Kai had got him into the best hospital in Moscow but even that hadn't been enough.

They'd turned up together, rushed there before Sergei had even ended the call. Kai, completely sober, and Ivan, good at acting as if he was, had both been sent straight up to the ward. Boris—so utterly drunk that he could barely form words—had been forced to stay in the waiting area. Probably would have been left there all night if Ivan hadn't come sprinting down the hall and dragged him up to Yuri's room. Apparently Yuri had asked for him, had whispered his name, but when he'd arrived the redhead was barely breathing.

He'd been drowning himself with vodka in a useless attempt to erase the thought of Yuri's fate from his mind, but had ended up being there when it happened regardless.

Ivan sighed, waiting silently for Boris to reappear from the darkness of his own mind. His hand lay limp on his thigh, forgotten cigarette burning into a long cylinder of ash. Ivan stubbed his own out on the corner of the desk and flicked the end into the bin before lighting up another. Smoke curled up to the ceiling, vanishing into nothingness as it reached the lights.

Losing Yuri had hit hard for all of them, though Ivan, the youngest, had been forced the bear the brunt of everyone else's pain as well as his own.

They'd moved back into their house in Saint Petersburg only a week after it had happened, yet Ivan never quite felt as comfortable as he had before. Going from the lavish Hiwatari mansion where they'd been staying to be closer to Yuri, back to their freezing home in the dirtier area of the city without the redhead, had all but torn them apart.

Kai threw himself into his work, locking himself in his office and refusing to see or speak to anyone. Ivan hadn't been there, but he'd heard from a friend of a friend that if it hadn't been for Kai's colleagues intervening he probably would've worked himself to dust. Sergei stopped talking, hell, seemingly stopped caring about anything or anyone. He spent the day earning money in amateur boxing matches or training the youth team and the night in dark abandoned warehouses, fighting strangers until he was black and blue.

And Boris… Boris had gone off the rails completely. Disappearing for days on end only to turn up in the middle of the night looking like a tank had rolled over him, reversed, and come back for a second go. And then there was the six months he spent behind glass doors, trapped between clinically white-washed walls, shaking and hugging himself through withdrawal. Ivan had rarely visited him in that place, couldn't quite bring himself to set foot over the threshold, something about it just screamed fear.

Sergei left his monthly pay packet, Boris' bank card and the minute payout they'd received from Yuri's life insurance, and Ivan, 23-years-old and fresh out of college, had been charged with watching the house, paying the bills and keeping the remaining shreds of their family together before anyone else got lost. Between his anger at Kai for not helping them, praying that Sergei's street fighting didn't end with a fatality, and wishing to heaven and back that Boris was released sooner rather than later, Ivan had been forced to put his own sadness on hold to suddenly grow up and skip the joys of his early-20s.

It had only been through his therapy sessions a decade later that he'd finally managed to grieve.

"Never thought it'd end up like this, just me and you left," Ivan murmured quietly, his second cigarette joining the first near the bin. Boris didn't acknowledge him but flicked his ash onto the carpet. "Always thought you'd be the first, actually." He waited for a response, a sign that Boris was back in the room and listening to what he was saying, but got nothing. His next words fell from his lips regardless. "The first time you ended up in hospital 'cause you'd overdosed, honestly thought that was it."

Boris gave the tiniest shrug, his voice flat and lifeless. "If it wasn't for rehab, probably would've been the first to go."

"Took you a while to get out of it, didn't it?" Ivan asked, though the question was completely rhetorical; Boris' first stint in rehab had been for an entire year, not long after they'd earned their freedom from the Abbey. "It was Yura who told me, actually. I can still remember how stressed out he looked when he came and got me from college."

"How old were you?"

"19. Damn, that sounds like centuries ago." Ivan chuckled and shook his head, fixing Boris with a disbelieving stare. "Now look at us; two old men smoking our lives away in a dingy little office—"

"My office isn't dingy, Vanya. And we're not old either."

"You are; the big four-zero, right?"

"Fuck off, you're only two years younger than me," Boris bit back, because if there was one thing Ivan knew got under his skin it was reminding Boris of how old he was.

They'd joked about it in the past, sharing dreams and ideas over too many vodka shots and a packet or three of cigarettes, and built their own imaginary future; the two of them sat in rocking chairs on the porch of some run-down retirement home, dressed in checked shirts and faded jeans, smoking pipes and complaining about youth and the economy. The sort of thing you saw in old American movies.

Not too long ago, Ivan had stayed away for a week with his then girlfriend in Strelna and, when he was just about to tear his own head off in frustration at being dragged around shopping centre after shopping centre, had come across checked flannel shirts that immediately reminded him of the scene they'd put together. He'd bought a matching pair, much to his girlfriend's disgust, and had proudly wrapped Boris' in paper as a gift.

When he'd arrived back at their flat late on Sunday, Boris had been sat in the kitchen nursing aching arms and plucking splinters from his fingertips. It turned out that he'd spent his week of peace and quiet salvaging wood from the local scrapheap and building the rocking chair Ivan found in his room. He still believed Boris should've taken a job as a carpenter.

Boris stood up suddenly, fishing through the papers on his desk until he found an ashtray—an old foil takeaway carton that he'd folded the hell out of—and stubbed out his cigarette. Thinking time was over then.

The calendar on the wall by the door caught his eye and he clocked the date in the back of his mind; August seventh. The following day was highlighted by a blot of red pen just as it had been the year before, and all the years before that. Boris paused pulling on his jacket and followed his eyes.

"It's the eighth tomorrow."

"Yeah?" He couldn't help but sigh, knowing what Boris was thinking; he hadn't ever forgotten. "I'm not getting you a calendar next year."

"I'll get my own and hide it."

Ivan rolled his eyes as he zipped his coat right up to his chin, grabbing the keys to the truck and throwing them at the back of Boris' head. He laughed as the other fumbled dumbly with them for a moment. "Come on. I've got what I came for, first round's on me."

The grandfather clock in the hall chimed midnight and Boris leaned back in his chair to steal a glance at it. Hideous thing, both himself and Ivan agreed it was, but Yuri had bought it because he loved the intricate design in the woodwork and so the clock had moved with them to Moscow. Ivan was right about moving on, Boris knew that. Yuri had always said that he would rather be forgotten about than make them all suffer every year by having some sort of remembrance anniversary, but he'd never really been one for following orders.

Boris smiled and raised his drink to the stars. "Happy 40th, Yura."