Fic rec - here's to the glory still to be

[sakura_no_miko]

Title: here’s to the glory still to be

Author: foxfireflamequeen

Fandom: Yuri!!! on Ice

Rating: R (maybe NC-17?)

Pairing: Victor/YuuriK, Victor/YuriP

Warnings: some sex (gay), sexting, temporary breakup

Other notes: de-aging fic, friendship, social media, sports and competition, art included, melancholy, magical realism

Length: 12k

Summary:

“Hi,” says Viktor, smile bright and camera-ready. His hand, when he extends it, is small and delicate. “I think you know who I am, but we haven’t met.”

His accent is very thick, very Russian in a way Yuri has never heard before. He looks from the offered hand to Viktor’s face, barely an inch higher, and tracks his hair, long and pale and spilling over his shoulders. He can’t be older than, well, Yuri.

“No,” says Yuri. “We haven’t.”

 

 

Actually, now that I’ve been thinking about Bakugou and Yuri, I think I’ll throw this fic to the top of the queue.

So. I, um, I rarely read tags. I sometimes search by tag, but by and large I read a summary first. I also have to admit, I’m not really into the tumblr-style chat tags. Like, if I see a big wall of tags, I skip straight down to the summary.

Oh. You know, I just got a flashback to how, back in the fanfiction.net days, it used to be stylish to write long author notes at the beginning or end of fics, sometimes made out of witty commentary, or chatting with characters, and looking back I feel such a wave of embarrassment. Ah, that’s what the tumblr tags remind me of. They’ve just moved from the author’s notes to the tags.

Anyway, though, I’m fairly lucky in that I don’t have any major triggers. I have squicks, sure, things that annoy me or displease me. But by and large, if I happen to stumble into a fic I don’t like, I just back right out. So my not-reading-the-tags hasn’t majorly bitten me in the ass.

In fact, sometimes I get really freaking surprised by a fic, because I skipped the tags.

Like, um, hey, in this de-age fic, the de-aged character…falls for someone who is not his husband.

Which I — I’m actually not sure I’ve seen before. The closest fic I can think of is a truth at the edge of hearing, a DC comics fic I read ages ago, where there is a character death, then some parallel universe shenanigans, and at the end of the series, the main character ends up realizing he’s moved on and fallen in love with someone else. I mean, certainly the concept of someone breaking up with someone else and moving on happens a lot. A character’s love interest dying and them moving on. I feel like I might have seen an amnesia fic or two where a love interest got changed. Brainwashing, various dub- and non-con changes, sure.  But — you know, usually you’re moving towards the permanent/endgame/true love partner. This is a rare fic where the character is already in love, married, and then just — stops. It’s not a meet-cute with the younger self, an “if only I’d known you when we were young.” It’s someone saying, you know, the me I was at 16 might want something different from a relationship than the me at 20, the me at 30, the me who’s changed and aged.  

Well, spoilers have to come up in this fic rec. If you’re someone who is okay with a messy, complicated emotional relationship where, well, technically multiple relationships get broken, but things are eventually forgiven, this fic is just amazing. It’s painful and lovely in all the right ways, to the point where you think, this can’t end well, and yet somehow I really hope everyone ends up okay. If you are a hardcore OTP type of person, you may not enjoy it so much.

Last note before spoilers: this fic is melancholy as all heck. Just this palpable melancholy. I wouldn’t advise reading if if you’re already feeling down, because that pain is just gonna get under your skin and into your stomach. Like, it’s not a torture fic, not a violent fic or an abusive fic, just one where everything hurts and that’s just the way things are.

 

Begin spoilers~

So, this is a fic where Victor gets de-aged, and ends up staying away from Yuuri, only to end up falling for Yuri. Once he goes back to being and adult, he goes back to being in love with Yuuri. My eyes just got progressively wider as I read this like, “wait. What?? No. No, he isn’t…no… I can’t be reading this right. I—Damn it, this kind of works, but. But. And then he — goes back?? But. Agh.”

I guess there’s a lot to be said about “what ifs.” Maybe you could have had a relationship, if you’d met under different circumstances. If you were older or younger. If you worked somewhere else. Studied something else. Lived somewhere else. Wait, I feel like I’ve written this before. Probably when I rec’ced from the threshold of the year to come.

It’s all very heartbreaking. I’m trying to think to myself, when I was 16 — what did I want when I was 16? I didn’t really have good relationships when I was 16.

And you know, the more I re-read this, the more it hit me that Victor and Yuri really don’t have a good relationship — in exactly the way I did when I was 16. Passionate, yes, full of sexual desire, some amount of possessiveness, but never to the point where I put someone else’s happiness above my own. I wasn’t as driven as Victor and Yuri, but, hey, my goal was to get into college and out of my hometown. I don’t think — even if any of my teenage relationships had lasted, I don’t think I’d have stayed for them. Changed for them.

It’s not a healthy relationship, but boy do I empathize with every moment of it. It’s exactly the sort of relationship you might have had as a teenager — very emotional, not particularly healthy, really painful when it ends, and yet, years later, you look back and go, you know, that really had a profound effect on me. It hurt horribly at the time, but I learned something. But at the same time — you probably wouldn’t want to go back for a re-do.

There are so many excellent lines in this fic that freaking cut deep into the characters and their insecurities, but this one, from towards the end:

He doesn’t tell Otabek that they—Viktor, and Yuri—they’re not very beautiful on the inside. That that’s why they need people like Katsuki and Otabek around them. He doesn’t think that would go over very well.

I’m not sure I had that level of self-awareness at 16. I regret some stuff I did back then, things I wasn’t really empathetic about. Broke a couple hearts, probably. Got my karmic retribution when someone else broke my heart. Casual teenage cruelty and all the melodrama. Don’t miss those days.

And the other fascinating thing is Victor and Yuuri’s relationship — which we never see, technically. They’re broken up for nearly the entire fic. We get a few glimpses of Yuuri being pretty depressed without Victor, and Victor seems utterly confused at his choice in future partner. Which — I can’t imagine that’s good for any relationship, yet alone one where I suspect Victor provides a lot of emotional support. Though — younger Victor is pretty pissy. Maybe Yuuri offers him more emotional support than immediately comes through the text. We see Yuuri wilting in the background, but now I’m wondering more about Victor. In canon, he mentioned he hadn’t been feeling alive or happy for a while before he met Yuuri. And I’m not entirely sure Yuri is providing much emotional support. Again, there’s that idea of the person you think you want — with all the emotional ups-and-downs — and the person you ultimately end up creating a long-term relationship with.

Also, the sequel/epilogue. It smashed my heart to bits. I can’t — if there was any reason I was procrastinating from this fic, it’s because I remembered the sequel.

This:

“And he’ll be happy about that tomorrow,” he says, looking for Yuri’s water bottle while Yuri wrestles with his clothes. “Tonight, silver hates gold, bronze hates gold and silver, and everyone else hates all three.”

“The first night is always the hardest,” Yuri recites, giving up on the shirt. He pulls the drawstring of his pants tight and holds out his hand for the water. Viktor sits on the empty bed and puts his chin in his hands.

Why that particular line breaks my heart, I don’t know, except that, again, Yuuri and Victor have something coming between them, even after the happy reunion. And, again, it’s just because that’s how things are. No personal failings, just crappy circumstances.

…you know I just noticed the author uses Viktor and I use Victor and apparently this is a major point of wank in YoI fandom. Sorry, this is apparently the point where I am no longer able to write functionally.

 

Now, for something completely different. Other fic recs.

Actually — okay, bear with me, this may seem like a strange rec, but the more I thought about “strange de-aging fics,” I suddenly remembered Perspective. It is an mpreg and omegaverse fic, neither of which is really my thing, but there’s a chapter where one of the characters gets de-aged to be about the same age as his own child, and it’s — interesting. Like, just imagining suddenly being like 10 and being confronted with your husband and child…so weird. Kind of car wreck levels of this is making me really uncomfortable and yet I can’t stop looking.

And that reminds me of another fic — the Ripple series from My Hero Academia. I can confidently say, I don’t ship these particular characters, since they are teacher and student — but then the fic has time travel and they end up being the same age and — and it works. It feels really freaking weird, but it works.

Apparently time travel gets me to feel things when I'm usually turned off by them. Magic.

Looking for more fic recs?

Originally posted on pillowfort on 01/25/19