Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/ works/12478304. Rating: Explicit Archive Warning: Underage Category: M/M Fandom: Yuri!!!_on_Ice_(Anime) Relationship: Victor_Nikiforov/Yuri_Plisetsky Character: Victor_Nikiforov, Yuri_Plisetsky Additional Tags: Angst_and_Porn, Depressed_Victor_Nikiforov, Age_Difference, Unhealthy Relationships, bad_decisions_all_around, Pre-Canon, Mid-Canon, Alternate Universe_-_Canon_Divergence, Victor_and_Yuuri_never_met Stats: Published: 2017-10-24 Words: 2466 ****** Wild with Doubt ****** by larkscape Summary Victor looks up as the door closes behind him to see Yuri sprawled across the queen mattress, propped up on his elbows with his legs spread wide and wearing nothing but a gold medal and a nervous snarl, and he is both surprised and not surprised at all. Yuri is impulsive and makes foolish decisions, but Victor is the one who can't let go. Notes Takes place during the Sochi season, but this is an AU where Victor and Yuuri never met. I’ve handwaved the fact that juniors and seniors usually compete on different weekends so I can get Victor and Yuri at hotels together. Title and general inspiration from Third Eye Blind's Good_For_You.   Yuri is not quite fifteen the first time it happens. Victor won gold at Nationals and Yuri did, too, in the junior level, and now the press has finished their invasive needling and Victor’s mouth is one long trembling ache from maintaining his camera smile. They like to mention his age as if turning 27 is a minor marvel, barbed remarks that skirt the edge of propriety. No one wants to ask when he’s retiring but they’re all thinking about it. What he wants is to lie down. Tomorrow holds the promise of exhibition skates, and the banquet with its bottomless supply of champagne, and Christophe’s slightly jealous flirting, and he’s going to rise to the occasion like he always does. He decided ten minutes ago to change his EX program — reinvent yourself every season, every month, every hour —  and wring yet more gasping surprise from the audience. It’s what he does. For right now, though, he wants to lie down. But he can’t, because there is a naked fourteen-year-old in his bed. Victor looks up as the door closes behind him to see Yuri sprawled across the queen mattress, propped up on his elbows with his legs spread wide and wearing nothing but a gold medal and a nervous snarl, and he is both surprised and not surprised at all. Yuri is young, so young, in a way that Victor almost can’t remember being. And he’s so eager to cast off that youth. He wants to be taken seriously, and doesn’t seem to understand that Victor already does take him seriously. Victor can recognize talent. Like calls to like, after all, and they are far more alike than Yuri would ever admit. “Victor,” says Yuri in a voice like a growling engine. But Yuri doesn’t understand what it means to grow up in this life of theirs. Yakov still shields him from the worst excesses of the relentless press, though the pressure of competition is omnipresent even without paparazzi. He’s dedicated, driven, but he hasn’t been in as long as Victor has. He doesn’t know. “Victor,” more strident this time. “Aren’t you going to say anything?” “Should I?” asks Victor. “Isn’t that your job? You’re the one invading my hotel room.” “I won gold,” says Yuri, his nose lifted haughtily, and he acts confident but Victor can see the insecurity churning underneath. Ah, thinks Victor, he’s looking for approval. “Yes, you did. Congratulations.” “I’m claiming my victory prize.” His intent is obvious but he shifts his hips anyway, trying to draw Victor’s attention to the erection jutting from the thatch of curls at his crotch, flagging with his nervousness. The display is blatant and childish. Victor should send him away. Instead, Victor watches him neutrally, not moving from the entry. Aside from Yakov, Yuri may be the one person closest to knowing Victor. Yuri doesn’t take no for an answer and he doesn’t tolerate bullshit well. It makes him difficult to manage and a terror to run PR for, but it also means that he has no trouble calling Victor out. It’s refreshing in a way nothing else has been in years. Victor leans one shoulder on the wall and watches Yuri’s impatient squirming. Stammi Vicino is still running through his head. He almost regrets commissioning it; it’s a beautiful piece but sometimes it hits a little too close to home. Stay close to me, don’t go away; I’m afraid of losing you. Yuri is going to get broken at some point, irreparably, if he keeps on the path Victor has blazed for him. “Hey asshole, did you hear me?” Why not now? “Yes, I heard you.” Victor unbuckles his belt and sheds his clothes like snakeskin, barely listening to Yuri’s impatient muttering — Yuri’s trying to pretend he isn’t relieved, that he isn’t scared or excited or whatever foreign thing he’s feeling — and some mean urge in Victor bares its teeth and fires his blood. He wants to protect Yuri but he also wants to burn him, to ruin him, show him how awful this all is and scare him away. And he wants him to stay anyway. At least he thinks that’s what he wants. It can be hard to tell, these days, if he actually feels that desire or if he just thinks he should and has tricked himself into believing it’s real. Either way, he’ll take him. He’ll take Yuri, hissing and spitting like a furious cat, and he’ll fucking break him and then maybe someone else will finally get it. Misery loves company; isn’t that what they say? Not that Victor’s miserable. He climbs onto the bed, his cock hard and heavy between his legs, and crawls forward until he’s hanging over Yuri, who’s flipped onto his stomach with his ass up like he’s probably seen guys do in porn. Yuri’s prepared himself already. Victor can see the shine of lube all around his pretty hole, open and red from the stretch of fingers. “Say you want it, little Yura,” he whispers harshly, leaning forward. Blond hair tangles on his lips. Yuri glares at him over his shoulder. “I want it.” Victor lines up his cock and drives in. It’s messy and brutal and short. Victor doesn’t bother trying to make it good for Yuri, too busy trying to drown out the frantic chatter in his head, fourteen, he’s fourteen, do you remember what you were like at fourteen? Did you know what you wanted? You sure as hell thought you did but did you really? Enough to make this okay? The answer is no. No, he didn’t know what he wanted at fourteen. No, this isn’t okay. It’s happening anyway. It’s what Yuri wants; he said so. Yuri thrusts back, moaning, fucking into his own fist and pretending like Victor’s ruthless entry didn’t hurt. Victor knows it did. He doesn’t stop, and Yuri doesn’t either, not until he’s coming into the blankets and spasming around Victor’s cock like a spitted pig. Victor’s own release, when it comes, feels perfunctory and unsatisfying. After, Yuri dresses himself with sharp motions by the window. He keeps shooting drawn-brow glances over his shoulder at where Victor lounges on the bed, stretched out to display the long lines of his body. Victor knows he looks good naked. Yuri should stop scowling and appreciate it. He’s trying to remember what point he wanted to prove with all this, but his mind won’t settle enough to let him think. Once Yuri’s shoved his feet into leopard-print sneakers, he crosses to the side of the bed. “Mine,” he whispers vehemently, and bites Victor’s lip. Oh. Was he— was Victor being claimed? Is that what this was? Yuri trying to assert his dominance? Victor licks over the broken skin on the inside of his lip as Yuri stalks to the door without a backward glance, his thoughts perfectly still for the first time in he can’t remember how long.   Something has come unseated in his mind since then, something loose and clattering like a broken cog in a complicated mechanism. He feels unsettled. He skates his original exhibition program because swapping it out feels like one change too many in twenty-four hours, but that burns like failure, too. Victor feels like he’s at one of those public aquariums with a tunnel running through it, watching sharks swim above his head. An ocean’s worth of water restrained by a sheet of plastic. “You knew exactly what you were asking for,” he says to himself, to the Yuri in his mind accusing him. That’s just it, though; Yuri didn’t. He’s fourteen. Of course he didn’t know. But he asked anyway and that's Victor's justification, that's the impossibly thin acrylic holding back the many thousands of gallons waiting to drown him. Yuri wanted this.   It happens again at Euros, when Victor takes gold again and Yuri blows the rest of the junior division out of the water. He isn’t surprised at all this time when Yuri finds him in the hallway and stalks him to his room, stares hungrily as he unlocks the door and holds it open. “Take your fucking pants off,” says Yuri, shucking his shirt and backing Victor up to the bed. Victor does so. And later, when Yuri’s sinking his teeth into his own forearm and grasping at Victor’s thigh with desperate fingers while Victor fucks him with too little prep and no condom, again, he catches himself thinking next time, next time, next time. There shouldn’t be a next time. There will be a next time.   Yuri doesn’t ask for things, he demands them. “I’m not leaving until you teach me your quad flip,” and “Buy me coffee,” and “Harder, asshole, like you mean it,” the lattermost of which doesn’t even make sense. Victor means everything. Sincerity is his best skill. There was a time, thinks Victor, when Yuri did know how to ask for things. Buried in him is the ghost of a polite child. But he got turned down enough times, or disappointed, or whatever happened with his mother, and he stopped asking because it stopped working. It’s as if he heard the adage, ‘The best defense is a good offense,’ and then carved it into his very being. Yuri takes because he doesn’t trust that he’ll be given to. Which means that when he corners Victor in the banquet hall after Worlds (five time World Champion Victor Nikiforov, the press trumpets, and Victor smiles his camera smile and refuses to talk about next season) and tells him, “I’m coming to your room after this and I’m going to fuck you against the window,” Victor can’t do anything but give him what he wants. Yuri cups Victor’s ass like a gift, which it is; Victor may have forgotten what it feels like to be a real person but he knows his worth, he knows exactly what Vogue is willing to pay for the privilege of using his image. He was supposed to be scaring Yuri away from this, he thinks, somewhere underneath the pleasure of Yuri’s graceful fingers opening him up. Yuri shouldn’t have to measure himself purely in terms of number of gold medals or rubles per photoshoot. Not like Victor does. Victor tries to imagine what his next season will look like and comes up blank. He could go for a fire theme, a crucible in which to forge new shapes from old ones. Rebirth. Phoenixes, perhaps — yes, he can see it now, a black costume with red and orange feathers, elegant. Should he grow his hair out again? Would that be surprising or too much of a recycled thrill? Or— no. He needs something different. It’s all been done before. There’s nothing new under the sun. He is so tired. “Vitya, shut up,” says Yuri, nudging the tip of his cock inside Victor. “I didn’t say anything.” “Shut up anyway. You think too loud.” When Yuri thrusts in fully, Victor’s mind goes mercifully blank. The glass of the window is cold under his cheek and Yuri’s cock is pounding on that sweet spot inside him and when he comes, the whole world disappears. Yuri demands Victor’s attention, his awareness, his... everything. He isn’t sure there’s much left over after the ice has taken her due, but Yuri is welcome to whatever’s there. Victor’s certainly not using it.   “You shouldn’t be here.” Too little, too late. Victor should have said that the first time, the second time, the tenth time, but now it’s been half a year and Victor knows what Yuri’s cock tastes like and it’s far too little and far, far too late. Victor is weak. He knows. Stay close to me; don’t go away. “Fuck off, Vitya,” says Yuri, tactless and demanding like always. “I go wherever I want.” He throws his shirt over the side of the bed and bites his way up Victor’s abs, and Victor still wants to break him but he also wants to put him back together again. Except Yuri just will not break.   Victor announces his retirement a week and a half before the official start of the new season, on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday. Yakov, predictably, yells the rink down after the announcement. Yuri, unpredictably, stays quiet, his face unreadable. Maybe he’s learned something, after all. Always be unpredictable. It keeps them interested. Victor spends the next two days in his bedroom, contemplating this— whatever it is, this situation with Yuri. Yuri who is fifteen. He wants to hold a funeral for his own morals, a funeral for the polite fiction that he feels anything at all. He should put a stop to it. Yuri understands now, Victor thinks. Or maybe he doesn’t understand. Victor doesn’t know which he would prefer: a Yuri still unbowed by the weight of their positions, still driven, still fierce, or a Yuri broken, a Yuri laid out under the cairn alongside Victor and his fictions and his apathy. This is reality. There is nothing else but this, the dragging nameless weight that sinks him into the bed and leaves him staring at the ceiling until the night fades into morning. He’s thought it before: misery loves company. He doesn’t want Yuri to be miserable. He thinks he might be making Yuri miserable.   The morning of the third day — Saturday, he notes distantly, Yuri’s usual rest day — Yuri shows up at the apartment. “Vitya,” he says. “Get up.” “No.” “If you don’t get up, I won’t blow you.” “You are a tempting morsel of manhood, but even that won’t pry me out of this bed today.” “So that’s it, then?” asks Yuri, suddenly angry. “You retire and think you can just disappear?” “Can’t I?” says Victor, breezy and rhetorical. He feels unmoored. “What else is there? I’m done, Yura. Let me be done. You should be focusing on your own career. You’re going to take seniors by storm.” There is a long silence, and then the blankets lift as Yuri climbs in. “Scoot over, asshole, you’re hogging the whole damn bed.” Yuri shoves his way into Victor’s personal space until they’re wrapped around each other. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” asks Yuri eventually, and despite the profanity it sounds like a genuine question. Victor barks out a laugh that’s a little too close to a sob. “Don’t turn into me. Don’t— just, don’t.” “What— I’m not you, that should be obvious by now. Vitya. What the hell. You’re not an inevitability, okay? You’re not, like, the end state of all skaters everywhere.” He huffs out a breath into Victor’s hair, warm. “You’re just a washed-up old man with a superiority complex. Go to sleep. When you wake up, you’re helping me with the jump combos in my free skate.” Victor holds him, and shakes, and shakes.   Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed their work!