Glittering Gold
An LLS Production
A/N: So, my friend and I got talking, and we thrashed out a large portion of the plot between us, so I credited her as well. That being said, I'm the one writing most of this fic.
Since Kubo Mitsurō chose not to discriminate about the things people love in the actual YOI universe, I decided not to either. People can love freely in the idealised bubble of this fic. Furthermore, this story is taking place in the wake of tragedy already, so let there be happiness in this world too.
- LLS
Prologue: Three Sheets to the Wind
In the year 1918, following the Armistice of the Great War, my parents sent me to Kyudai as dreams of becoming a danseur had to be set aside in the name of practicality. Following the end of my second year, I left school and found work with the Mitsui offices, having polished my proficiency in English and Russian alongside my native language in finishing school. My work, profitable enough to set aside a small amount for my parents, took me to the Mitsui offices in Nikolayevsk-on-Amur in 1920.1 Having resigned myself to staying there, fate clearly did not agree with the current path of my life. In June 1920, Japanese and Russian alike were massacred by partisan forces of the Communists – this would be called by the newspapers the Nikolayevsk incident.
The campaign brought honours and promotion to many, but for others it had nothing but misfortune and disaster. Few returned alive from the maw of the Black Dragon River.2 Only sheer luck in the form of a White Army soldier, or so I was told by the Russian nurses, had carried me over the estuaries and the Mamiya Strait from the carnage of Tryapitsyn's Siberian butchery to safe haven in Sakhalin. Weak from the prolonged hardships which I had undergone, here I rallied in convalescence as my nurses commented upon the kindly soul who had paid upfront for my care in the midst of Russian hospitality. I had already improved so far as to be able to walk about the wards, and even to bask a little upon the verandah, when I was struck down by enteric fever.
For months, my destiny was tossed in the game of dice between life and death. When at last I came to myself and became convalescent, I was so weak and emaciated that a medical board determined that not a day should be lost in sending me back. I was dispatched accordingly with, by happy coincidence, the IJN ship Hibiki, and landed a month later at Sapporo Bay, my health irretrievably ruined, with permission from a paternal company to spend the next nine months in attempting to improve it.
When I came back to Hasetsu at long last, I felt that I wanted the world to be uniform forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. For three years I languished, invalidated from my body and soul by some nerve-wracking impulse of the spirit. Until a turn of fate carried me across the eastern seas towards America, and across the New World itself into New York, New York, where I met the sole exemption of my anguish towards life and all its tempests and disappointments:
Viktor.
Why?
Well; he was something gorgeous, with his heightened sensitivity to the promises of life. A Paris who celebrated as if the world were promised to him by the triple goddesses instead of Aphrodite alone; at least, I think that is the sentiment borne of people when they consider Viktor Nikiforov. Viktor was a perennial surprise, a Pandora's jar that sheltered the thoughts of my future from foreboding. Viktor represented everything which we call love, gliding across the rink of Madison Square Garden in a dance of frost and carved figures. What Viktor held was, to me, an extraordinary gift for hope; a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person, and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my mother gave me some advice that has drifted on the sea of old memory until now.
"Should you lose your way," she had told me, "remember all the people in this world who love you."
My father nodded and smiled with her the day I remembered; it was when I was about to break the news of my impending sojourn across the eastern seas to them, only to find out that they had already known. "Yuuri," he spoke, the dialect of Saga harsh against the newly standardised Japanese we were supposed to learn. "Are you sure about leaving?"
My father had not fussed when his son, too quiet for the rough-housing of boys like Nishigori, spent more time under the tutelage of eternally youthful Minako-sensei than the practical schoolwork and athletics that was expected. My father has not fussed since the event at Nikolayevsk-on-Amur, which had ended in tragedy and adventure for which I could not recount on my life.
I could not breathe. "I've been sure since my return from Kokuryūkō."
His hands tightened on my hands there and then at the mention of the Black Dragon River. "Yuuri... have a safe journey, and come back to us."
My family have lived for three generations, or so my father claims, in the castle town of Hasetsu. The Katsuki, though not a high-born clan, have a tradition of descent from the shinobi of the Nabeshima clan daimyō, but any actual descent from the samurai of Saga domain was debatable. With Hasetsu being traditionally neglected by the daimyō in favour of Arita's Imari porcelain, and now neglected by His Imperial Majesty's government for same, our Katsuki family thus managed to leverage enough money to claim and maintain an onsen ryōkan in this tiny castle town by the sea that was my hometown. This was how my grandfather had raised his family. This was how my father had raised my sister and I, and where my mother settled with her lot in life – excitingly, happily, cheerfully bustling about life with a smile to the world.
Her elder friend Okukawa Minako-sensei had no such plebeian ambitions. Thus she set out to become a prima ballerine on the world stage, culminating in her appearance as Danseuse Étoile in the Paris Opera Ballet. Now, she had moved to New York, and bade her first student – me – to travel the world to assist her. It was by coincidence that I had recovered my strength and sought at the same time other ways to earn my keep, than return to the company who surely did not care as much for its employees, so my parents advised.
"I'm not interested," my elder sister remarked, insouciant in her absent writings to magazines and literary works to pay attention to what the Radical Feminists refer to as the 'exploitation of the female body in performance art'. "I'm too busy."
Perhaps she was right. In the beginning, woman might be the sun3; but, the fires of passion and inspiration for women's rights struck from Mari's literary talent could only be rivalled by the fires upon which the fruits of efforts she deemed insufficient fed upon within the hearth.
"Yuuri can put all that ballet training to use with Minako-san," Mari continued, and thus put an end to whichever of us siblings should brave the Pacific Ocean to America.
On hindsight, I suspect that I would have gone anyway. In the time that I was away, Hasetsu went from being the balmy and warm centre of western Japan to the edge of the world's web. Thus, when Minako-sensei sent her desperate request from the centre to the edge, I had already acquiesced before my mother had requested, and made ready to leave home again. The uncles and aunts of Hasetsu talked it over with the gravity of choosing a school, and Hasetsu turned itself out to see me off with grave, hesitant faces.
It was therefore with various delays that I came east – temporarily, I thought, in the late spring of '23. It was a warm season and I had just left a country of friendly trees. The practical thing was to find rooms in the city with Minako-sensei, but her ladies' boardinghouse was far more restrictive to the male than the female. Thankfully, a young man from Thailand with his darkroom near the dance studio suggested that we go halves on a house together in a commuting town. It was the first of many ideas from Phichit Chulanont – some great, some terrible, all of them spoken with friendly ease that I both envied and balked at.
"It'll be a great idea, old boy." How many requests turned dares would begin with that sentence, I did not know then.
Phichit had been sent down from Oxford, and was nominally working with a gratuity from his parents – teak, I gathered, had been generous with the funds that allowed him to cross the ocean and plains to New York. Upon his arrival, though, going halves on housing had become less of an option, and more of an actual necessity to survive with food in his belly.
Phichit found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty dollars a month. I had a dog – a poodle that was named Vicchan in a fit of whimsy – an old Dodge shared between us, and Mrs Cialdini who made the beds and cooked breakfast and muttered Sicilian curses to herself over the electric stove. Her son Celestino, so I noted, spent his time coaching people in the nascent sport of figure skating for the Olympics. I barely ever met him – my life shuttled between the cardboard house we now called home, and Minako-sensei's studio.
One fine day, when Phichit was called to the Hamptons on some party that I had refused entry citing further ill health, and Minako-sensei had gone sallying out for tea with her friends, it was lonely. I took Vicchan out for a constitutional, and to explore my environs. Little did I know that some man would stop me on the road outside of our cardboard shanty-house during my constitutional with Vicchan.
Viktor must never know this, but here, I thought then, was one of the handsomest specimens of humanity ever seen. No wonder the Europeans were so obsessed with the semblances of Greek gods. With his blue eyes hooded against the sun's intense glares and running a hand through his artfully tousled silver hair, he seemed to me a figure straight out of the European fairy tales – perhaps one of the Wilis of Giselle fame.
An out-size poodle the colour of café au lait bounded along beside him. Vicchan touched noses with his larger brethren, and placed his hindquarters close to my scuffed leather shoes, which turned my concerns from examining everything else towards worrying over upsetting my image before a passing stranger.
"How do you get to West Egg Village?" he asked, his voice so melliferous in the warming summer. "I'm Viktor. Ah, yes, this is Makkachin. He really likes your poodle."
I gave my greetings and walked with him as we exchanged words. This Greek god descended from the heavens furthered his introduction as Mr Viktor Nikiforov, an eternal wanderer after the seizure of St. Petersburg – "St. Petersburg?" "Not Petrograd, never Petrograd, Yuuri," – and Russia tearing itself apart, and that coincidentally, would I care to call for tea? How long had I been in this part of the world, so far from the Land of the Rising Sun?
I was lonely no longer – I was a guide, a pathfinder. With the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees – just like the fast movies – I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer breeze.
He left, and the summer breeze seemed to go with him. Perhaps I am not to speak to you—I am to think of you when I sit alone, or wake at night alone.
I would prefer not to be alone.
I kept this thought to myself, of course, as I realised that somehow, we had walked the rounds of West Egg only for Viktor to stroll into the Long Island palace beside my slum.
Critiquez, s'il vous plaît !
1 After the Meiji Restoration, Mitsui Group was among the enterprises that could expand to become Zaibatsu not simply because they were already big and rich at the start of modern industrial development. Mitsui itself was founded in 1876.
2 The Amur River or Black Dragon River is the world's tenth longest river, forming the border between the Russian Far East and North-Eastern China.
3 "In the beginning, woman was the sun" (「元始、女性は太陽であった」) – a reference to the Shinto goddess Amaterasu, and to the spiritual independence which women had lost. This is the title and opening line of early modern Japanese feminist Hiratsuka Raicho's "In The Beginning Woman Was The Sun".
