Chapter Twelve: Let's Take a Break! Winter in Hasetsu!
"Please don't levitate your suitcases, Victor," Yuuri hissed in his ear. "There are No-Majs who can see us from here."
"Oops," Victor tucked his wand back in his pocket. "How else am I supposed to get them all inside then?"
I'm not the one who insisted you needed to bring all fifteen suitcases to Hasetsu, Yuuri thought. We're only going to be here for two weeks.
"One at a time, I guess," Yuuri told him instead, lugging his own trunk and one of Victor's suitcases together. The taxi driver who had picked them up from the rural area to which they'd Apparated looked suspicious as to how all of the suitcases had fit into his car, but seemed to think it best not to ask.
"I'm home!" Yuuri called as he opened the front door. He was immediately bowled over by some kind of mystery fluff monster who wasted no time in trying to lick the inside of his nostrils.
"Help," he tried to say, but it was so muffled he doubted anyone heard him. Behind him, he heard a thud as Victor dropped the suitcase he'd been holding.
"Makkachin!" Victor cried. The fluff monster used Yuuri's chest as a launching pad to pounce on Victor. "What are you doing here?"
Yuuri got to his feet and turned around to look at Victor, who was being assaulted with love by a gigantic poodle.
"How...I thought he was at Durmstrang?" Yuuri asked no one in particular.
Just then, he spotted a distinctive tiger-striped suitcase on the other side of the room. Oh boy...
"Victor?" he asked.
"Yes?"
"Did you tell Yurio you were coming here for the winter break?" Yuuri asked, already knowing the answer.
"Yes, why?"
"I think—"
"Yuuri!" Yuuri's mother came rushing in from the kitchen to greet him. "And you must be Victor."
She bowed to him.
"We have a guest who says he knows you," she continued. "He got here a few days ago."
Three guesses who that might—
"VICTOR!"
There it was.
Yurio came stomping out of the hallway with his broomstick.
"I want you to teach me the side dive that Katusdon tried to do during his last game," he demanded as though Yuuri wasn't right there. "But I'll do it without breaking my face."
"Yuuri, did you break your nose?" his mom asked, reaching for his face.
"No! Well, yes. But mom, I—"
"Where do you usually fly around here?" Victor asked him. "Do you have a pitch?"
"There's not—"
"Yuuri's home!" his dad called, coming to join the confused jumble of people plugging up the genkan. Makkachin gazed adoringly up at Victor, leaning on his legs to prevent him from walking away.
"Hi dad! Did you get my—" Yuuri started, only to be interrupted by multiple people at a time.
"Katsudon! Where is the Quidditch pitch?" Yurio insisted.
Victor said, "I didn't introduce you yet! Yuuri, meet Makkachin. Makkachin, this is your new—"
"Are you boys hungry? I could make you lunch if you—"
"Lunch would be great mom, thanks!" Yuuri called over everybody.
He glanced over at Victor, getting ready to apologize for the chaos, but Victor just smiled back at him, eyes shining.
"It already feels like home," he said.
Yuuri's parents had evidently ignored his request for them to hide or destroy all of his Victor memorabilia and when Victor barged right into his bedroom, Yuuri scrambled in from behind him to repair the damage.
"You have a dakimakura of me?" Victor asked, picking the giant pillow up off the bed. "How does it compare to cuddling with the real thing?"
I wouldn't know, Yuuri thought, scrubbing his hands over his face to hide his burning cheeks. I didn't buy that thing for cuddling.
"Oh my God!" Victor exclaimed, abandoning the body pillow for the long lock of silver hair draped neatly over Yuuri's bedside. "Did you win this at the Nimbus Drive for—"
"Yes," Yuuri groaned into his hands.
"I cut my hair for that," Victor whined, stroking it like a kitten. "I don't regret it because it was a good cause but I really miss having it long sometimes. I've been thinking about growing it back out, what do you think?"
"I..." Yuuri was so overwhelmed he couldn't think about Victor's damn hair. Victor was in Yuuri's bedroom, surrounded by himself. And he didn't even seem to mind.
"Oh, your Skrzak calendar is on the wrong date," Victor said, flipping past an image of his own half-naked body. "Have you really forgotten to change this thing since last February? You should be on Kuznetsov—he was September..."
"I think I hear Yurio calling you," Yuuri said over Victor, steering him out the door and shoving him into the hallway. Yuuri closed the door firmly behind them and made a mental note to burn the entire room to the ground later.
Yurio was devastated to learn that the nearest Quidditch pitch was right in the middle of there isn't one, this is a No-Maj town and he spent the rest of the day complaining loudly about it.
"What is there to do around here if there's nowhere to play Quidditch?" Yurio asked during lunch. It was difficult to hear him through his chewing.
"When did you get here, Yurio?" Yuuri asked.
"Oh Yuri's been here five days already," Yuuri's mom answered for him. Yurio's mouth was full of katsudon, so he just nodded.
What on earth had Yurio been doing in his house for five days?! God, Yuuri hoped he didn't snoop around in his room too.
"Not that I'm not happy to see you," Yuuri told him (which was only partly a lie), "but why are you here instead of at home?"
"My mother told me my grandpa wasn't coming for Christmas this year," Yurio said. "And since he's the only person I actually like in that family, I had no reason to go home."
He didn't seem in a big hurry to explain further.
"Well, there's always sightseeing," Yuuri started listing, going back to Yurio's original question. "There's a ninja castle nearby..."
Victor gasped. "A ninja castle?!"
"Or shopping," Yuuri suggested. Yurio perked right up.
"What kind of shopping?"
"All kinds," Yuuri told him. "There's a shoutengai not too far away. They have food, clothes—"
"Do they sell Bludgers?" Yurio interrupted.
"No," Yuuri said. Of all the many things a person could buy in Hasetsu, he felt confident that Bludgers were not one of them. "Oh, and they only take yen."
"What's yen?" Victor asked.
"No-Maj money."
Yurio dropped his elbows to the table and rested his head in his hands, huffing in annoyance.
"Then what is the point of this place?" he asked the room in general.
"Well, what have you been doing for the last five days?" Yuuri asked him.
"Nothing," he sulked. "I've been bored out of my mind."
"There are a lot of things we could do," Yuuri reminded him. "Just...No-Maj things. We could see a movie."
"What's a movie?" Victor asked. Oh my God. These people had literally never heard of a movie. Yuuri felt like the other kids at Mahoutokoro who came from wizarding families were less clueless than these guys. Nobody could possibly know this little about the No-Maj world.
"A movie is like...like a picture," he explained. "Except it moves, and it tells a story, like—"
"So... a picture," Yurio grumbled. "I have plenty of pictures. Next."
Yuuri decided that explaining the appeal of movies was a lost cause.
"We could go ice skating," Yuuri suggested. "There's a rink—"
"What's ice skating?" Yurio asked. "Sounds lame."
And that was how Yuuri came to be standing at the counter of Ice Castle Hasetsu after lunch, trying to find skates for two people who didn't know what a shoe size was.
"Why don't these things just adjust to fit your feet?" Yurio complained, trying to force his foot into an obviously too-big skate. "Katsudon! Shrink this for me."
"I'm not shrinking your ice skates in front of No-Majs just because you don't know how small your feet are," Yuuri mumbled to him, hazarding a guess at Yurio's shoe size and asking the girl behind the counter for a smaller pair.
Yurio fell flat on his butt the instant his foot hit the ice and Yuuri watched as his face turned several shades of red. It was like standing next to a possibly live grenade and not being sure when or even if it might explode.
"I don't see how this could possibly be fun," Yurio gritted out.
Yuuri stepped confidently into the rink and turned to face them.
"Why didn't you fall?" Yurio asked accusingly, as though it was Yuuri's fault that he had.
"Yuuko and I have been coming here since we were kids," Yuuri told him. "I was pretty good, actually, and if I hadn't ended up going to Mahoutokoro, well..."
Victor stepped tentatively out onto the ice and immediately grasped Yuuri's arm for support.
"You guys have really never been ice skating?" Yuuri asked incredulously, lowering his voice. "Not even like...you know, a magical version? I thought you said Durmstrang was freezing."
"It is," Victor confirmed. "But no one at Durmstrang would know about this because they don't come from No-Maj families."
"You...you don't have any kids with No-Maj parents at Durmstrang?" Yuuri asked. He'd thought everyone had dropped that prejudice decades ago.
"No," Yurio said, staggering as he attempted to stand on the skates. "All-magic families only."
Yuuri had assumed Victor's parents were a witch and wizard, but he'd had no idea that this was Victor's first exposure to No-Majs ever. It seemed crazy that someone could live that long without ever really setting foot outside the comparatively tiny magical community. Yuuri was all for the magical community in general—he intended to live the rest of his life with wizards, preferably in a town or city with at least a marginal magical population—but there were certainly things to be said about the No-Maj world. Like movies. And ice skating.
Victor slipped his arm through Yuuri's elbow.
"Show me," he said with a smile.
They spent the entire afternoon on the ice. Victor remained attached to Yuuri in one fashion or another the entire time—arms linked, holding hands, steadying himself by grasping Yuuri's forearm. Yurio wasted no opportunity to complain that this was boring, stupid, pointlessly difficult and painful, but he got the hang of it as the sun went down and they practically had to drag him away from the rink when it closed. It was only when they got home that Yuuri realized Yurio had stolen the ice skates he'd been wearing all day.
"I paid for them," he insisted. "I left a galleon on the counter."
"No one here even knows what that is," Yuuri tried to explain to him.
But in the end Yuuri let him keep the skates, partly because of how embarrassing it would be to return them, but mostly because Yuuri was positive he was going to take them to Durmstrang and practice with them on the ice there, and would probably come back able to do a flying sitspin.
Yuuri was thoroughly exhausted by the end of the day, but when he went to collapse on his futon, someone was already sitting there.
"Well, well, well," said Mari, pulling a cigarette out of her pocket. "You're home."
Yuuri smiled. She gave him a lot of shit, but his older sister was still one of his favorite people on the planet and he was grateful to her for waiting until it was quiet to come see him.
"Yeah," he said, flopping down onto the futon next to her. "Don't smoke in here."
She ignored him and pulled out a lighter. "So. Victor Nikiforov, huh?" In that moment, she reminded him very strongly of Minako.
"Yeah," Yuuri said again.
"I see you got rid of your shrine," she commented, looking around at the walls, which were now stripped bare of their usual Victor collage. "Guess you don't need it when you've got the real thing. Why isn't he sleeping in here with you?"
"Why would he?" Yuuri asked, making a face.
Then he realized. She thought—
"Oh," he corrected quickly. "No no, it's not like...it's..."
"You sleep in the same bedroom every night at school, he flew halfway across the world to 'mentor' you, whatever that means, and you brought him home to meet your family. It's not like what?"
"I thought you said you were going to university this semester," Yuuri said, changing the subject on purpose.
"Clearly I didn't," she told him shortly, taking a drag off her cigarette. "Anyway, I only came in to say hi. I'm going to bed. Night."
If she was anyone else, Yuuri would've thought she was mad at him, but that was just the way Mari was. She closed the door to his bedroom behind her. He watched the trail of smoke curl into the air and slowly dissipate as the sound of her footsteps disappeared down the hallway.
Yuuri ran into a problem a few days later when he realized that Christmas was approaching because he knew that it was Victor's birthday, but Victor had not actually told him that, so he felt like they were in a loop of him knowing and Victor probably knowing that he knew but not confirming that he knew he knew. They were past the appropriate time for Victor to have dropped a hint that his birthday was coming up, which would have given Yuuri an opportunity to buy him a present. Yuuri became increasingly concerned as the days passed that Victor's birthday was just going to slip by, seemingly unnoticed by anyone.
"Don't, uh...don't ask me how I know this," Yuuri finally said on Christmas Eve, when he couldn't stand it anymore. "But tomorrow is your birthday and you hadn't said anything about it so— "
"I don't really celebrate it," Victor said casually, thankfully glossing over the fact that Yuuri could only have memorized it before they'd even met.
"Why not?" Yuuri asked.
Victor shrugged.
"Can I buy you a present anyway?"
Victor smiled. "How about katsudon for dinner? And maybe we could spend the day together?"
"We were going to do that anyway," Yuuri said. "As far as spending the day together...I'm not sure how you're planning on shaking off Yurio, but..."
"Yeah, he's probably not going to like that," Victor agreed.
"But his break ends earlier than ours," Yuuri reminded him. "We get five days at the end after he goes back to school."
There really was no getting rid of Yurio the next day. But Victor did get his katsudon dinner, and some No-Maj sake to go with it.
"Care for some?" he asked Yuuri, bottle hovering over Yuuri's glass.
"No thanks," Yuuri told him. "I try not to drink too much."
Victor gave him a very strange, very confused expression. "More for me then," he said, shaking off whatever it was and smiling again.
Yuuri put on a No-Maj movie for them after dinner—an old classic that he felt nobody could dislike: Men in Black. He was glad they hadn't brought Yurio to the theater because he shouted advice at the characters on screen non-stop and looked extraordinarily alarmed when the movie ended.
"Where did they go?" he demanded to know, shaking the television. "Bring them back."
"Bring them back? I mean..." Yuuri hesitated, not sure whether he should tell Yurio but... "there's a sequel."
When Yuuri finally collapsed onto his futon after Men in Black II had ended, he flicked his wand at the light switch and was out in seconds.
Some time later, he wasn't sure how much, he felt shifting next to him and Victor crawled under the covers with him.
"Being here with you," Victor murmured in his ear, so sweetly it might've been a dream. "That's my birthday present."
Yuuri learned the next day that he might've made a mistake in showing Yurio the TV and the DVD player. He woke up early the next morning to Yurio storming into his room demanding more movies, which led to Yurio spending the rest of his time in Hasetsu bingeing on both okashi and Yuuri's entire collection of movies. Yuuri was very glad he hadn't gotten around to introducing Yurio to the internet—something told him that he'd have spent the rest of his long, wizarding life watching cat videos on YouTube if he had.
As soon as they'd organized Yurio's route home (two Portkeys, six Floo transfers, and a short broomstick ride back to Russia, then a ship to Durmstrang) and seen him off at his first Portkey, Victor turned to Yuuri and smiled.
"I guess it's just us for the next five days," he said, raising his eyebrows. "Any ideas of what you'd like to do?"
Unfortunately, not having Yurio as a paying guest to fawn over gave Yuuri's parents free rein to fawn over Yuuri. He realized that they didn't get to see him as often as they would've liked and he probably owed them his company, but all he kept hoping for was some quality time with Victor.
The last night before they were due back at Mahoutokoro, Victor got into bed with him again. Makkachin followed and plopped himself firmly in between them.
"Does Makkachin have any powers?" Yuuri asked as Makkachin began to drool on his pillow.
"No," Victor said fondly, scratching behind his ear. "I found him outside during a match when I was in the minor leagues. He must have wandered off from a No-Maj village nearby."
"Why not leave him at home with your parents then?" Yuuri asked. Victor spoke very, very little of his parents, and Yuuri was incredibly curious. He didn't want to pry, but apparently Victor was in the mood to share.
"They're not crazy about him," Victor admitted. "They told me they'd have been happy to find me a suitable magical pet but...when you meet someone you know you're meant to be with, you just have to go with it."
He smiled and looked into Yuuri's eyes over Makkachin's head.
"Yeah," Yuuri breathed. "I guess you do."
"That's my philosophy anyway."
"Tell me about your family," Yuuri whispered, as though saying it quietly would make it less rude to ask.
Victor furrowed his brows.
"Well, I'm an only child," he said. "My parents both come from a long line of proud wizarding families. They're not what you would call traditional 'blood supremacists' but they don't really care for No-Majs. They have a circle of influential friends, if you can call them friends. They're more like business associates. Yurio's mother is one of them. You'd think that since we're from Russia we'd have gone to Koldovstoretz instead of Durmstrang, but since Durmstrang is considered the more prestigious school and it only admits students from wizarding families, my parents made a generous donation and got me admitted. Yurio's mother did the same for him. I guess the best way to say it would be that we just have different priorities. They're supportive, but they don't always approve of everything I do."
"Do you think they'd approve of me?" Yuuri asked, before he could stop himself.
"Try to get some sleep," Victor responded. He reached over Makkachin to squeeze Yuuri's hand briefly. That's a no, then, Yuuri thought. But he found he didn't really care—he was good enough for Victor, apparently, and that was more than he could've dreamed of.