Here is a list of all the things Victor loves indiscriminately:

1. the curve of his back

2. the way he shivers in his arms

3. the drape of his sleeve over his wrist

4. the way his fingers hesitate, over and over, but never lose the smoothness of their movement

5. the sweet curl of his hair behind his ear

6. the way he comes awake in the morning—huffing and puffing and then suddenly, inexplicably pliant once his eyes open

7. the exact fall of his lashes

8. the softness of his body versus the strict lines it makes when he dances

9. his mouth

10. sunlight bringing out the golden specks around his pupils

11. the way the sheets shape themselves around his hips

12. the gap between his shoulderblades, just enough for kisses between them to feel like something clandestine

13. the way his voice shivers and shakes, but never breaks

14. the space behind his knee, the way the tendons tighten and loosen against his shoulder

15. the sharpness of his jawline against the fullness of his cheeks

16. the way his lips tremble when he breathes in, long and restrained and still hitching in pleasure

17. how it looks almost cinematographic, almost designed in combination with the flutter of his eyelashes

(He has to stop here; stares at the letters until they make little sense and then freshens his ink. The quill is nearly as dry as his mouth.)

It begins, as most things in Victor's life are wont to, with two constants: his mother, and the Small Throne Room of Winter Palace. She's always loved it here, solitary and polished with its jade columns. Even now, she sweeps a cursory hand over one of them before turning to him. The throne stands on the opposite end of the room; she insists on never sitting on it in his presence alone. You will be Tsar eventually, she'd said. We must be equals, and the throne is a symbol of inequality.

It was an old lesson—much older than the grey he sees at her temples now. For some reason, Victor feels like he owes her a smile—and so he blinks and raises his brows and strains his lips.

"Mother," Victor greets. мама, he used to call her. "Why so glum?"

She huffs and smiles, just a little. "I always look like this, душенька."

The nickname, at least, hasn't changed. When she first called him that, he was six and storming into the kitchens to sneak some lemon pie and nearly had a table dropped on him for all his trouble.

Victor steps closer, the smile coming easier now. "Still," he says, quieter, "I can tell, you know."

She takes a minute, a few calm breaths. Then: "Your name day is coming, isn't it?"

Victor hums, "Mm, yes. Twenty-seventh—too old for blue sapphires now, no?"

"And old enough for other things, perhaps."

He looks at her sharply, smile faltering. "мама," he says slowly, "is the Council getting on your back again?"

"The Council is getting restless," she sighs and twists her mouth into a vicious frown, "and I am getting old."

"Don't be silly, you have plenty good years left in you—"

"No, Victor, you won't dismiss this like you have for the past three years," she cuts him off. "The Council members want to see you with a spouse before you ascend, and they won't take no for an answer this time."

He rubs the bridge of his nose, says under his breath, "I don't know why Father insisted on keeping those coots in power. You should've overruled them."

"You know I can't. I would," she pauses here, with a jagged suddenness so uncharacteristic that he has to stare, "I don't enjoy imposing this on you. But the Council—the people, the country, how long will they wait—?"

"However long it takes to find me a spouse, I imagine," he says dully. He takes a few unpleasant moments to fleet through the last three years—balls, banquets, invitations from the affluent. He thinks of all the men and women he danced with once upon a time, voluntarily or involuntarily. He thinks of the ones he took to his bed, and yet nothing stirs in him. He thinks of the few frequent ones he might have to give up. He thinks of Rus'kaya, finally, and its adoring, demanding masses.

In thought, his mother's silence takes a while to register. Victor stiffens.

"Mother," he says. The stern set of her features is unchanged but her rigid stillness betrays her.

"The Katsuki House," she says. "They have a son. A daughter too, but she is—estranged."

"Woguo," Victor recalls.

"Yes. The country is small but flourishing, and the nobles are as sincere as nobles can be."

He raises his brows. "I wouldn't know."

She purses her lips at him. "I realise you haven't been there since childhood, that you won't know anything about your spouse's homeland. But you can't—"

"I can't wave a hand in the air and magically get my way, yes, I know," he says, and lifts a hand to do precisely that.

"Royal marriages are never all or nothing, Victor. Remember that."

He gives her words a moment to linger, and then sighs, "Is it done then?"

She tightens the line of her lips. Nods—in all the manner befitting a Tsarina, for all her principles of keeping away from the throne.

Something in him seems to freeze at that nod, solidifies into permanence like blowing glass. He stretches his lips into a smile again—more, he thinks, brighter—and carefully curbs the bitterness at the back of his tongue when he speaks, "Well, not much we can do about it now, is there? Except work on grooming me into a good husband, if you'd be so kind, мама."

His mother looks oddly lost for a split-second. She recovers entirely but for the way her gaze shifts from his eyes to his nose.

Quietly, she says, "Of course. That's my job."

Your job, he repeats to himself. It rings hollow. His smile stretches wider.

Katsuki Yuuri is a man who relies on his diffidence for every impression he makes. He is diffident in the way he folds his hands in his lap, completely still. He is diffident in the way he wears his oversized hakama over a mon-tsuki kimono. He is diffident in the way he bows for slightly too long, in the way he keeps his posture perfect and his gaze firmly to the floor.

Victor comes to know of all these little things all at once. It takes a three-month journey to Woguo, twenty thousand rubles' worth of gifts, and ultimately a velvet-draped room that smells too strongly of incense.

He's tired, petulant, and not inclined to believe it was worth it.

Still—a prince is a prince (and more importantly, Victor Nikiforov will always be Victor Nikiforov), and so he kisses the air above Yuuri's hand and tells Toshiya-san how much he believes Yuuri will enjoy Rus'kaya, how he can't wait to whisk him away, how he'll make sure the wedding ceremony is deserving of him.

"That's wonderful, Your Highness," Toshiya says with the same placid smile, "but really, we just want Yuuri to be well taken care of."

Beside him, Yuuri goes rigid and then slack all at once. Some visceral part of Victor recognizes the reaction, flashes back to his mother's nod and that something frozen into him.

We'll be in this together, he wants to say, suddenly. We can make it work.

But Yuuri still won't look at him, and all Victor can manage is a parting smile and an, 'of course.'

Victor's retinue is good-humoured and indulgent after months at sea, and the voyage back to Rus'kaya passes in a pleasant blur of jokes and Brusquembille and the occasional bottle of wine. His betrothed is something of a spectre, sometimes stammering out a folk tale on the coaxing of his men and sometimes nowhere to be found.

Once—only once—Victor wanders onto the deck with his feet bare, eyes heavy with sleep and heart heavy with thoughts of the future. The sound of shuffling feet stops him, and there Yuuri is—Yuuri, still cocooned in layers upon layers of his kimono, still retaining that peculiar, hunched stillness. He has his back to Victor, staring out at the sea as if it will show him something it will show no one else. His hands close over the railing, gentle. They make aborted motions, half-formed flourishes, turns of the wrist, fingers stretching out and curling in. His feet stay where they are (restricted by the kimono, Victor assumes). No music.

It should have looked vaguely silly. Yet—

Victor slips back into his room. He doesn't know till when Yuuri stays outside.

The next day, he asks, "Do you dance?"

His men cleaned off their plates at lunch and promptly confined themselves to one side of the deck with a pack of cards. He and Yuuri are alone on the other side. It presented the perfect opportunity—an opportunity Victor hadn't meant to take advantage of, really, but the sunbeams were spilling over the side of Yuuri's face in almost exactly the same way as the starlight had, and it slipped out without permission.

Yuuri stiffens next to him. "E-excuse me?"

"Do you dance?" Victor repeats without pause.

Yuuri stares at him for what seems like minutes, vaguely suspicious and explicitly horrified. He says, "Why, um, why do you know that—?"

I think I saw you trying to dance last night and I'm just wondering how much better you could be if you weren't stuffed into fifty layers of clothing, is what he wants to say. Instead, he replies, "Your mother mentioned it."

A pause. "Oh," Yuuri breathes out. "Yes, she—she must have."

The words leave his lips in self-conscious murmurs, more to himself than to Victor. It's near-imperceptible, the way he turns his face away through a hairsbreadth of distance—but just enough to call attention to the pinched skin at the corner of his eye.

"You don't seem too happy with granting me that knowledge," Victor says.

Yuuri responds with a strangled noise in his throat. He wraps his arms around himself and starts, "No, I only—" then trails off. Victor watches. Faintly, Yuuri says, "You are a prince."

You are a prince, he says. As if Victor hasn't spent a couple of decades navigating the impact of that knowledge, all the sweet-tongued and starry-eyed intricacies the books will never tell you about. He conjures up the image of his mother. The throne on the opposite side of the room, untouched. The throne is a symbol of inequality.

"Yuuri," he begins, "I want us to be equals in this marriage."

Yuuri freezes. His fingers dig into the meat of his upper-arms for a flicker of a second, before he carefully unfolds them and holds onto the railing instead. He looks at Victor squarely—looks for something, perhaps, and with every passing moment he fails to find it, his eyes cloud over with disappointment.

Finally, he asks, "Are you making fun of me?"

Victor blinks. "What?"

Somehow, something in the span of that blink has transformed the disappointment into private indignation. Yuuri straightens his spine and breathes in. "Forgive me, Your Highness," he's wringing his hands together—notices, forces himself to stop, "but I feel as if you're making fun of me and my position."

"Your position," Victor repeats.

"Yes, my position. My position which dictates me to leave my homeland at mere months' notice and spend the rest of my life tending to your wishes over my own—"

Numbly, he says, "I would never ask you to—"

"It doesn't matter what you would ask. You—I don't presume to know how you will treat me, and I certainly don't envy your position either but there is a difference—" he hunches into himself again, "I'm not—brave, or extraordinary, but I still enjoyed the prospect of a choice to pursue whatever I wanted. And now," Yuuri pauses. Breathes. Gives himself the illusion of calm by spacing his words out, and yet looks almost in tears. "I know it's silly of me to want to keep some part of myself entirely my own. I'm sorry."

While Victor's mind scrambles to compute this strange transition from criticism to apology, Yuuri nearly trips over his own feet and hurries away with a mumbled, 'excuse me.'

"It's not," Victor says, long after Yuuri is gone and his only answer is the distant laughter of his men.

The rest of their conversations through the journey are sparse and stilted, Yuuri flushing and bowing out as soon as it's within the bounds of social propriety and Victor, while not precisely afraid, still feeling unprepared to navigate the landmines in Yuuri's mannerisms, in the highs and lows of his voice.

By the time they set foot on Rus'kayan soil, wedding preparations are well underway. His mother stands in the middle of it all, directing caterers and seamstresses and stonemasons. The sight of her signature Court dress—high-collared even in summer—soothes Victor with familiarity. He breathes out, slowly, into the childhood spaces between alabaster statues and inscribed bronze lanterns along the corridors.

He's obligated to escort his fiancée to his new chambers, and so he offers Yuuri his arm and a smile and they're on their way. Despite everything, Yuuri's grip is firm—almost anxious. Victor wonders if it's because of the maze-like walkways or the stares.

His room is part of the western wing, three doors down from Victor's own in the main hallway.

"I hope it's to your liking," Victor offers perfunctorily at the doorway.

"It's beautiful," Yuuri murmurs, casting his eyes over the modest shades of blue and dull gold. They linger at the curtains, pulled partly aside to lead into a balcony with a low stone balustrade.

"It must be bursting with the smell of rain right now," Victor muses.

"That sounds nice," Yuuri sighs. "May I...?"

"Oh, of course." He steps forward to unlatch the glass door.

"Thank you, Your Highness."

Victor waits until Yuuri loses some of his tension to the sight of rainflowers and rush daffodils, drawing in the petrichor on their soils with tentative breaths and unwinding with each one. He starts, "You know," makes sure to keep his tone idle, to watch Yuuri only from the corner of his eye, "do you think you could drop the title? I'd really much rather be called by name."

Yuuri goes rigid again—but he's fighting to keep his eyes trained on Victor's face. "Yes, of course, I—it must be strange, yes."

Victor huffs out a laugh. "Yes. Well, it's a relief to know you don't dislike me enough to withhold that, at least." Then he thinks, distantly, that was supposed to be a joke.

Yuuri's flinch embarrasses him more than his own awkward wariness; he wants to dismiss himself before he can do any more damage, but Yuuri says, "Wait, please, Your—Victor," and reaches for Victor's sleeve. He abandons the motion halfway. "I want to apologize. That day, on the ship, I was—it wasn't fair, everything I said to you. You're not—you wouldn't—" he struggles, withdraws the hand, clenches and unclenches it, "If I disrespected you, I want you to know I didn't mean it. I apologize, truly."

"Didn't you mean it, though?" Victor hears himself say. Yuuri stares at him, a deer in headlights. He tempers his voice—softer. "I wouldn't blame you for meaning it, Yuuri."

"I just," he says woodenly, "don't want you to think that I'm—that I would neglect my duties out of spite."

"Oh, Yuuri," my mother chose you for a reason, "I know you wouldn't. That was never my concern. But I can't expect you to work for this marriage if you don't want me."

Something in Yuuri's eyes flickers; a thing of perspicacity, a thing demanding to understand and be understood. He frowns and, with some hesitancy, asks, "How can you expect me to want you? Do you want me?"

Victor waves a hand through the air. "I'm sure I could come to."

"How?" Yuuri says, as if the prospect is absurd, as if he can't imagine it.

Victor considers the things he could say; I've wanted many people in life, what's one more? doesn't sound ideal for a man as timid as Yuuri. Perhaps something more reassuring, something more acknowledging of his charm?

"Your eyes are very large," he tries.

A beat. Yuuri's shoulders drop in slow, inch-by-inch increments. Again—that searching quality in his gaze, in his stillness. Victor knows, he knows—it's in the slope of his brows, the barely-there sigh, the way his eyes shift away and then back, suddenly stronger—Victor knows that whatever he says, it will be quiet and real and adamantine.

He says: "People don't just come to want other people, Victor."

Years and years later, Victor will not remember his wedding day. His knights and companions and successors will ask and his mind will only give him impressions of folk music, silken drapery, hands shaken and well-wishes accepted, mosaic tiles spinning under his dancing feet, the smell of round bread loaf and kournik, the burn of champagne down his throat—all of it aesthetic and unremarkable.

The only part he retains with clarity is the part he should have forgotten first—his head at its heaviest with wine, Yuuri nowhere to be seen, some beautiful man teasing his fingers along the inside of his palm and—he must've known that face, surely, must've known that touch once or twice before.

He's going to smile and pull away and casually mention Yuuri—but then he remembers Yuuri isn't here, Yuuri doesn't want to be anywhere near here, remembers that people don't just come to want other people. Wonders, with all the convolution of drunken logic, if this might make it easier for Yuuri to justify his ill feeling. Wonders, being pulled into a dark corner, if he would see it as an opportunity to pursue the things he so wanted without guilt.

This, he remembers.

His mother remembers too, unfortunately.

"It was your wedding night," she—isn't shouting, but it's a nigh thing. Victor's never seen the veins on her forehead bulge quite so prominently.

"Excuse me, was I to force myself on him?" he says, because he's too stubborn to admit to alcohol intolerance and broken pride.

"That doesn't give you free reign to go gallivanting off with whoever strikes your fancy," a wild gesture of her hand, but her voice is stone-steady, "and I know exactly who it was, mind you, and I'll burn my own crown before they step foot into this palace again."

He rubs hard circles into his temple. "I wouldn't stop Yuuri from doing the same if he ever mentioned—"

"Well, did he mention it? Did you talk about it?"

Victor presses his lips tightly together to repress a wince.

"No. You didn't. You never do. It's always just 'me, me, me' with you, Victor."

The stone wall of her demeanor cracks for one fierce moment, leaving Victor with—not his мама, not the Tsarina, only Yekaterina Nikiforova. Seeing the pinched skin between her eyebrows, the little dimple he used to love poking his finger into as a child twisted in frustration—it pulls him away from himself in one harsh tug.

Softly, he says, "I'll be careful." Pauses, and then: "Will an apology do any good?"

His voice fades into silence.

"Not to me," she says.

On the third day afterwards, a stroke of inspiration revisits him by dumb luck.

He's contemplating his pending apology to Yuuri, compartmentalising one moment and upending everything into a mess of regret and confusion the next. Lost in thought, he wanders into the great hall between the northern and eastern wings of the palace. It's nestled into a secluded corner, pristine white but for the onyx sculptures and austere, monochrome paintings, and Victor notices the shift in architecture with a start.

At the end of the hall lies Lilia Baranovskaya's personal training room. Victor remembers his own awe, watching the dances she'd danced—always from the front row, courtesy of her friendship with his mother. Paquita, he recalls in a burst of clarity, and Giselle, ou Les Wilis.

He peers in though a column of frosted glass, almost turns back—stops. The dance barre tickles a memory on the verge of being forgotten, and yet it opens in his mind now with serrated edges; gentle fingers around a railing, starlight over a cheekbone, a push-and-pull to music that could've been, perhaps, if not for the kimono around his feet. Victor waits. Considers.

He opens the door.

Victor dawdles away the next forty minutes in a confusing tangle of anticipation and high-strung nervosity. Finally, when he draws in a breath and goads himself into finishing the walk to their room, he finds it empty. The bed has been made and the curtains drawn, but the half-full cup of jasmine tea on Yuuri's desk is still warm. When Victor asks, Yuuri's manservant looks at him for a long, hard moment before catching himself and pointing Victor to the gardens.

The gardens of Winter Palace, much like the rest of it, sprawl into a series of interconnected passageways and hollows built into lofty walls. He finds Yuuri in one such alcove, sweeping his fingers through a rosebush. He strokes a petal from bud to tip in one smooth motion, and something about it reminds Victor of his arm drawing up into an arch. He looks upon the line of his body, loose shoulders and a straight spine, at home somehow despite its natural discipline. Victor is loath to interrupt him.

Alas, Victor is loud and conspicuous by nature, and his anticipation won't leave him be.

"Yuuri," he calls out. It comes out soft.

Something snaps apart in the way Yuuri was holding himself. He breathes in and rustles a few leaves, draws his hand back and turns to Victor, finally, with—not surprise, not really, but a tentativeness, knife-edged, cutting in its sensitivity.

"Victor," Yuuri says, beginning to stand, "did you need something—?"

"Please," Victor stops him, "I only—do you mind if I join you?"

Yuuri pauses. Sits back down, slowly. "No, of course not."

The tone of it, courteous and deferential and absolutely nothing else—it rankles him, compels him to say, "I implore you to tell me frankly," Victor forces firmness into his words, "If you don't want me here, I will go and I swear you'll hear nothing of it from anyone ever again."

Yuuri pins him with that same searching openness, giving and wanting in return a transparency Victor can only pray himself capable of; a second, two, three—Yuuri shakes his head. "Please," he murmurs. "Sit."

He sits. A hand's breadth of space between their knees, Victor measures carefully.

"Your manservant let me know of your whereabouts," he begins, "after trying to glare a hole through me, I imagine."

Yuuri covers his face with his palms. "Minami," he says, muffled.

"Gauging my intentions, maybe? I don't think he trusts me very much."

"No, no, Your High—Victor—Minami is just," he pauses, struggling, "loyal." He grimaces, after.

Victor wonders what to say to that. "You must inspire loyalty, then."

"I didn't mean—that isn't what I meant to imply, that you're," he cuts himself off with a bite to his lip. Quietly, he sighs, "This is difficult."

What will it take for you to be at ease with me? Victor wants to ask—but it's a selfish, irrational question, and so he asks only this: "Did you think I'd punish him? I don't blame him, you know. Neither do you, I don't think, and you shouldn't." When Yuuri says nothing, he continues, "I know I haven't been the most sensitive to your worries since you came here. I don't—presume to know what you want. But as your husband, I'm responsible for you."

Yuuri tries to interrupt here, but Victor steels his voice and ploughs on, "We're responsible for each other." Then—slowly, with his accent twisting around the syllables: "Sekininwotoru, you call it? Yes?"

Yuuri starts. The, "y-yes," spills out almost as a by-product of his surprise.

Victor shifts closer to him by a hairsbreadth. Says, "Will you let me make amends?"

The surprise changes his countenance in a different way, lines the roundness of his eyes and mouth with something closer to helplessness. Yuuri steadies himself in the handful of seconds it takes to unclench the fist in his lap, to bring his eyes to focus.

He says, "Yes," and only then does Victor allow himself to speak.

"Do you know of Lilia Baranovskaya?" he asks.

Yuuri furrows his brows. "Yes, I've heard of her. I haven't had the chance to go see her yet but I was hoping—" he stops, clears his throat. "I hear she's quite famous."

"She is. Lucky for you, she trains here at the palace."

"Lucky for me," Yuuri repeats with slow-dawning comprehension.

"She instructs some students from the ballet company here. If you'd like, you could—?"

"Could I, really?" Yuuri bursts out. "Would she let me?"

I've already spoken to her about you, he wants to say. But Yuuri touches his fingertips to his collarbone in a gesture so sweet and absent-minded, Victor has to settle for a brief, affectionate, "She certainly would."

"Victor, thank you, I can't even begin to tell you how much this means," he cuts himself off with a breathy laugh. "Just—thank you."

"Of course, Yuuri." He feels it clammering for attention then, another question at the back of his tongue. Victor looks at Yuuri, leaning forward in his excitement, and wills him to stay where he is. Stay, he thinks suddenly, and swipes his tongue across his dry lips and says, "I was wondering, Yuuri, if I could accompany you on the way there. Whether I stay or not is up to you but just walking you there everyday—if you would let me, I think it would be worth the opportunity."

Yuuri's expression falters. The corner of his mouth twists, then straightens out with an unsure quality, at odds with itself.

"This doesn't fix everything," Victor says quietly. Yuuri's head jerks up to look at him. He smiles. "I know this. I promise." You can say no.

Victor watches him relax in a manner of subtleties; muscles shifting underneath the skin, the little 'o' of his mouth coming to a close, brows losing their apprehensive set and eyes opening a little wider, a little softer. His harsh edges fade and he blends, almost too well, into a backdrop of rosebushes still growing and unobtrusive evening shadows.

"I," Yuuri begins, purses his lips, tries again, "Pardon me, while I appreciate the thought you've given to this, and I want nothing more than to reciprocate as fully, my dancing is—it isn't—not many have been privy to it, you see, simply because I am—I don't feel I'm—" he bites his lip in frustration.

"Comfortable?" Victor supplies.

"Um," he hesitates, "yes?" Yet, his eyes narrow as if it's not quite the right word.

Either way, Victor can accept this. He says, "No peeking in at your lessons, then."

Yuuri flushes. "P-peeking in is—I doubt it's worth that, really—?"

"But I can still join you on the way there?"

"Oh," Yuuri blinks, "Yes, yes, of course."

"Excellent," he says, and nothing more; nothing at all about how the sight of Yuuri stretching his arms out to a night-dark ocean wrenched itself from obscurity only an hour ago and already seems to have made its home in Victor's permanent memory, nothing about how it leaves him curious and wondering, his eyes and ears and limbs waiting for stardust in Lilia's little ballet studio.

Victor elects to keep it to himself, keeps sitting beside Yuuri. Some part of him is left dissatisfied—but it feels like a victory when Yuuri looks up at the sunbeams filtering through the leaves, then at Victor watching them, and smiles and says, "Komorebi."

Five years from now, Victor will look back at this monochrome hallway and think, this was it, it began here. Fifteen years, perhaps, and he will know better than to believe so staunchly in his own autonomy and self-awareness when it comes to Katsuki Yuuri.

For now, though—now, he is safe in his ignorance. Yuuri walks beside him, clad in a pair of leggings under his breeches and his ballet slippers hooked over his fingers. He'd insisted on carrying them himself. The line of his shoulders against the top of his spine, Victor marvels, remains picture-perfect even as he mumbles, "What if she tells me to never come back—?"

"She wouldn't dare," Victor argues.

Yuuri shoots him a sideways glance, unimpressed. "Because I'm your husband?" he says.

"Because I don't think you would let her," Victor says. He waits, lets the pause imbue the air with expectation, and then, "Would you?"

"Would I have a choice?" Yuuri murmurs—but Victor can hear it, can feel the instinctive changes in him coaxing the air to shift with them. It's in the way his footsteps fall lighter, how the angle between his neck and shoulder eases into a gentler slope, slotting into place with the rest of him in its softness. He'd assumed it was nervousness initially, but Yuuri's stride hasn't slowed and Victor realises—

"You're excited," he says.

This does, in fact, make Yuuri slow down. He cranes his neck to look at Victor, surprised at himself, at his own body—it's a laugh that skitters out of him then, a breathless, shivering thing.

"I suppose I am," he says, after. It transforms his voice somehow, the warmth and high sound of it an aftershock, and Victor—

—is left dazed, is caught in a profound sense of displacement, had bargained for a shooting star and gotten a meteor shower.

Thinks, oh, and nothing more.

Later, Lilia says to him, "He would have been exquisite."

Victor finds himself thoroughly unsurprised.

On the day of the fifth lesson, Yuuri asks him to carry his slippers.

They're soft and leathery and worn, and Victor cradles them with care bordering on paranoia. Yuuri watches, colour dusted high on his cheeks—everything about him is so soft, Victor thinks, you could toss him in a bed of cotton candy and he'd fit right in—and smiles. He'll take them back at the glass door and maybe, maybe the smile will turn from private to shy, to something more personally aimed at Victor. Maybe it will lose the shyness entirely, Victor imagines, or maybe Yuuri will duck his head and thank him in the crisp lilt of his own language.

But the end of the corridor is still a distance away and Yuuri, for now, only speaks of the lilacs on their balcony starting to wilt.

"Perhaps we should remove them?" Victor says, a suggestion made absently while he leans, just the slightest bit, into the low tones of Yuuri's voice.

An aborted noise, from the back of Yuuri's throat. "All of them?" he mumbles. The frown between his eyebrows has Victor chuckling.

"I meant, we could shift them away to the gardens," he explains. "They might just need more sunlight."

"Could we?"

The servants could, is what Victor had meant to imply. But he'd said it himself: your eyes are very large, in a room for big for two and too pleasant for what they had, and his own callousness seems determined to burnish itself with irony now to chastise him. Yuuri looks up at him, curious, hopeful, and he can do nothing but look back.

"Well," Victor begins.

"Well," he says, three days afterwards, "here we are."

The conversation finds them in the middle of a spread of green in the palace gardens, not quite as obscure as Yuuri's preferred alcoves but well away from the central fields. The trees and shrubs here are trimmed much less meticulously, growing out at the borders and entangling with each other to form something of an enclosure. Criss-cross patterns of morning light overlay chestnut leaves and dogwood, Gerbera daisies and grass growing up to their ankles.

Behind him, Yuuri surveys the ground and says, "I don't think I've been here before?"

"Mm, no, I didn't think you would have," ah, yes, the lilacs would look perfect next to the burgundy roses, "it's not really an integrated part of the main garden, you see."

"And so...?"

"And so, I thought we'd be a little more comfortable doing our work here. No one to judge us," he picks up a flowerpot, pats the side, "except for the lilacs."

"Except for the lilacs," Yuuri agrees with a dawning smile. He eyes the flowering patches of the garden, alternatively sunlit and shady, and says, "Will they get enough sunlight here, though?"

"The daisies seem to be doing fine," Victor says, then turns to Yuuri with wide-open eyes and a decidedly exaggerated tilt of his brows. "Why, Yuuri, don't you trust me? After I hauled all these lilacs out here as a testament to my dedication—"

"No, oh my god," Yuuri buries his face in his hands, "please stop—"

"To think—all this ache in my arms, for nothing! боже мой—!"

"They're not even that heavy!" Yuuri, in one deliberate stride, lifts another flowerpot and charges past Victor. "Let's just get to work, yes?" he says, sweet-sounding even in its hurry.

Victor, smiling still at the reddened shell of his ear, says, "Yes, Yuuri."

By the time all but the last few of their lilacs have been planted, high noon has come and gone. Victor, reveling in the cooling air of late afternoon, has foregone his boots and rolled his sleeves up to his elbows. Yuuri is in the same state, despite having protested for the first couple of hours. He looks a sight like this—all ruddy cheeks and messy hair, traces of mud dulling the jut of his ankle bones and the restraint in his fingers, a speck on the corner of his glasses where he'd pushed them up.

"Is that all?" he asks, standing.

"The servants will be absolutely scandalised," Victor says instead.

Yuuri grimaces down at him as if he can't decide between dismay and immediate panic. The intensity of his vacillation looks alarming and possibly painful, and Victor is quick to reassure: "We can avoid the servants, of course. Avoiding the servants is always possible. Who else would we avoid if not the servants? Of course we can avoid the servants."

"We can't avoid the servants," Yuuri says slowly. He sighs—no, breathes out, then breathes in again. Asks, hesitantly, "What would they say, Victor?"

It gives him pause. Victor fleets through the things he could say: one truth, one half-truth, six lies (most of them sympathetic and one of them bitter enough that he would never entertain it). He catalogues the nuances in Yuuri's expression, then in the way he holds his body, then in his gait on the way to Lilia's studio, then in are you making fun of me and people don't just come to want other people. None of the options fit.

What he says in the end is this: "Nothing that would effect us. Nothing that we couldn't hear, go back to our room, have some tea, and then go back out to do again."

"Oh," Yuuri says. It's small, breathy, unnecessary with the way he's staring down at Victor right now. "Yes. Yes, all right."

"You like chamomile tea, don't you?"

"Y-yes. It's," he swallows, "tea is traditional, in Woguo."

"The tea ceremony? Chanoyu?"

The sound of Yuuri's mother tongue always startles him in the best way. His eyes blink slower, his mouth smiles sweeter, his little sighs come soft and pleased.

His hands, Victor comes to know this day, also touch gentler.

There is no telltale pause-and-resume to the way Yuuri brushes away Victor's fringe. It's one smooth, engrossed gesture—minuscule, virtually insignificant given the number of times Victor has touched and been touched intimately.

And yet, he thinks, intensely focused and lost all the same. And yet.

"Oh, you had—sorry, it looked like it was getting into your eye," Yuuri draws back his hand tight against his chest, "I'm sorry, I just—moved."

"Yes," Victor says.

He looks at him oddly. "Should we get going?"

"Ah. Yes, of course."

Victor stands and stretches against the burn in his thighs, casting his gaze around for his boots. A light touch to his elbow brings him back to Yuuri.

"For the record," Yuuri says, and smiles, and Victor is caught unprepared again. "I do trust you."

Stop, he thinks, weakly.

Then Yuuri continues, "At least with the flowers."

"Yuuri!"

The slow, creeping nature of their relationship is terribly fitting, Victor will admit grudgingly. For all his propriety and stubborn reticence, the moments in which Yuuri opens to him are shots in the dark—resounding, spontaneous, Victor scrambling to catch the smoke trails they leave behind. It is secrecy of a different brand—honey-thick, heavier than any of the cat-and-mouse games he's ever played. Noticing the brief flutter of Yuuri's eyelashes feels like the most important thing he's ever done, some days.

Today is one of those days.

They can hear the tinkle of a music box. The notes burst in the hallway; muffled, faint, but they tilt its ambience, ever so subtly, towards something incongruous with the usual monochrome starkness.

(Again, there is Yuuri in his mind's eye—a cluster of straining arms, voicelessness, still feet on a rumbling deck, a starlit cheekbone, a supplication to the ocean—)

—And suddenly, the idea of sweeping Yuuri up and along the melody is unshakeable.

All it takes is the memory of his fingers brushing back Victor's hair, light as a feather against his skin, and—really, his hand more or less offers itself. He hears himself say, "Would you mind?"

Yuuri stares at it. "Um," is all he says.

Slowly, slowly, his hand inches towards Yuuri's. He says, "What do you say to a twirl around the ballroom?"

Yuuri doesn't move away but still squeaks, "This isn't a ballroom?"

"Semantics, Yuuri," he dismisses. "Do you want to?"

"I'll be late to Madam Lilia's lesson!"

"That isn't what I asked," he touches his fingertips to Yuuri's, leaves them there, "Please?"

Victor notices: the way he bites the inside of his cheek, and seals his lips tight, and swallows, and then his mouth relaxes. It all comes back to the spark in his eyes. Victor knows Yuuri is going to say yes even before he half-whispers, "Just one."

Of course, Madam Baranovskaya catches them three minutes later and effectively reduces Yuuri to a blubbering, apologetic mess with one raised eyebrow. But three minutes is enough to dance from one corner of the hallway to another in clumsy one-two-threes, to trip over each other's feet and pull each other closer and then blame it on the music.

And when Yuuri pulls away, their hands linger, and when he says, "I'll see you soon," he sounds on the verge of laughter.

Victor hopes his blush will last all day.

The next evening, too, he bids Yuuri goodbye and turns away at the glass door. Yuuri stops him.

His hand on Victor's arm is firm and warm even through the velveteen coat, but ultimately unneeded. The little twinkle in his eye arrests him well in place.

"Since you've already seen me dance," Yuuri says.

Then, he dances.

When Victor was little, his mother took him to see Swan Lake. Before he understood seduction or vulnerability or desperation, she said to him, "Look, душенька, don't they look the same to you?" They don't feel the same, he answered. His mother's smile was wistful and ghostly under the edges of stagelight. She said, "Sometimes they do, and it's like nothing you've ever seen." She said, "Look, it's the same ballerina, do you see?" She said, "You will meet your Odettes and Odiles, in one or several."

Look, he can feel her saying now. Look.

What would I look at, Victor thinks, if not this?

He wants to go back and ask his mother, twenty-nine and fresh-faced yet, how she could think he would do anything but look.

He wants to ask her why she didn't warn him when he could understand.

Although, he asks himself this time, watching Yuuri throw himself into a tour jeté, when would I have understood this at all?

All the spaces in Yuuri look unfinished, all his curvatures incomplete; his half-open mouth, the spaces between his fingers, the gap between his thighs, the hollow behind his collarbones, the dips above his hipbones. His eyes shouldn't have been one of those spaces—but they are the largest, the most overwhelming in their demand to be filled.

Victor is lost to the seconds passing into minutes, into hours (into days, years) when Yuuri settles, finally, with both feet on the floor. He looks to Victor with such earnest hope that he almost begs Lilia to nail his hands to his sides.

Alas, his hands are free for now, and so Victor's applause echoes loud and fervent in the bare ballet room. He wouldn't have it any other way.

"That was amazing, Yuuri!" he says. "If I knew you could dance so beautifully, I would have shoved you into Madam Baranovskaya's care your first day here!"

The way his words transform Yuuri's face is poetry; it begins with the softest inhalation at amazing, and the musky air seems to light some otherworldly flame behind his eyes because they flicker golden, his cheeks bursting with red. The smudge of it on the bridge of his nose, too, makes Victor want to take off his glasses and drop a kiss on it, to kiss all over his eyelids and adorable ears and his tremulous smile.

As it is, he settles for a quick kiss on the top of his head just outside the glass door.

Yuuri jerks his head up to stare wide-eyed, but Victor can't bring himself to stop smiling. His cheeks ache. Yuuri loosens—melts, almost. Bows his head again.

They don't speak of it.

Here are the facts: they're married. They share a room. They share a bed. They haven't slept together.

As per their positions, one of them sleeping in a different room or even on the floor wasn't really a conceivable option, given the rumours it would incite should a servant ever stumble upon them. Yuuri, awkward and painfully uncomfortable in the beginning days, would always huddle up at the very edge of the bed. He would slip in hours after Victor, face the corner, and gingerly deposit himself under the covers until they hid his eyes. Victor would wake up to find him in exactly the same position every morning.

As for himself—Victor has never been terribly self-conscious, awake or asleep. He spent the first few nights sprawled out over his half of the bed. The recent months—and their conversations and realisations—have made him heed Yuuri's discomfort, and it reflects onto himself more and more with each passing day.

Then, there are nights like this.

One more chime of the clock to midnight and he's wide awake under the covers. He replays Yuuri dipping into an arabesque penché, thinks of how his eyes were calling out to something far, far away. Thinks about the lax set of his mouth in that moment, the way he breathed, wanting to gulp it in but forcing it to follow the smooth, uncoiling grace of the rest of his body. He thinks, and thinks, and thinks.

Yuuri, as always, is settled at his desk with an oil lamp, a few parchments and a book apparently detailing the medicinal properties of turmeric. Victor turns under the duvet to watch him, the lamplight casting shadows over the side of his face, and there it is again—a restlessness he both knows the source of and doesn't, like stardust sprinkled into his eyes.

The noise alerts Yuuri. He twists in his chair to look back, says, "You're still awake? Is something wrong?"

"No, no, I just," want, he begins, and ends. Doesn't know where to start beyond the one word, doesn't know where to stop if he did, doesn't know why the want feels directionless and hopelessly tangled.

I just want. The thought is too big and too clear in his head.

"Throat's a bit dry," he says.

Winter Palace begins its preparations for Maslenitsa with the productivity and quiet fortitude Rus'kaya is famed for. Victor nearly forgets about the gala hosted every year in honour of it, and when his mother reminds him, the first thing he does is catch Yuuri outside the west library to inform him.

"What are we expected to do?" Yuuri asks. "Surely you must have specific responsibilities?"

"Welcoming the dignitaries, mainly. It's only a minor event."

He perks up, then wavers, saying, "Oh, are—do foreign delegations attend?"

"Smaller countries, yes, sometimes," Victor says, curious. "Ceylon, Siam, Kemet, perhaps Joseon this year."

"Siam, you said? Will members of the royal family attend?"

Victor hums, doesn't take his eyes off Yuuri when he says, "They should. Do you know them, Yuuri?"

"I know of all of them, yes, but Phi—Prince Chulanont is," he hesitates, "a friend."

"A close friend?"

Yuuri doesn't answer for a long while. When he speaks, it's with a fond little smile and nostalgia lacing his voice, "We've spent quite some time together. He's always been good to me."

"I see," Victor says, and wonders.

On the night of the gala, Yuuri emerges from the changing curtain in a fine-cut, navy-blue jacket. Amethysts and aquamarines glitter along its back, tracing over a subtly translucent strip of cloth pinching around his waist and narrowing towards the front button. The material looks snugly, decadently soft against his skin.

"Is it too much?" he asks, glancing at Victor from underneath his lashes—his very dark, very fluffy-looking lashes—?

"Did you put on kohl?" Victor blurts out. Are you trying to kill me? he doesn't say.

"Just a little bit. Smeared some of it on." He gently scratches a nail under the inner corner of his eye. "It's too much, isn't it?"

"It's not," he says woodenly.

"Oh my god, Victor—"

"Yuuri," he chokes out, somehow. Has to exhale out a forceful breath to relieve the lump in his throat.

But Yuuri's frown is deepening with every second, so Victor breathes in valiantly and says, "You look stunning. I'm almost afraid to let you walk out there looking so beautiful."

A blink and a blush and a slackening of his muscles, and he stutters, "I—really?"

"I swear," Victor laughs out weakly, and it sounds painfully sincere.

His hand twitches forward in search of Yuuri's—is almost halfway there before Victor notices and jerks it back. Yuuri, always full of surprises, reaches out and grasps it before it can retreat. His smile is bright and startling, and Victor can only squeeze back—tighter and tighter, hoping it might be half as comforting as Yuuri's gentle grip, hoping he won't have to let go.

The celebrations open with platters upon platters of blini and blinchik brought out from the kitchens, caviar and rich butter and sour cream hot on their heels. The more elaborate dishes, as per tradition, will be served after the initial appetizing. The decorations around the ballroom are tasteful and delicate, all filigree and lacework that shine instead of glitter. Once the dances extend into the late hours, people will start to trickle outside into the central garden.

The atmosphere is relaxed and merry; Victor finds that they can loiter at the banquet table or sway at the edge of the marble floor without much interruption.

Yuuri is regal beside him, straight-backed and sure-footed, and yet his eyes take in the celebrations with wonder sparkling in their depths, too visceral a part of him to hide. It gives Victor ample opportunity to look at him the same way.

The dimmed chandelier light casts a bluish sheen over Yuuri's hair, and his lashes have caught specks of gold from one of the gold-leafed wreaths. Victor wants so badly to press a thumb against his lips to see if he's smudged any carmine rogue over them or if it's just Victor's endless adoration playing tricks on his eyes. He's a fairytale summoned to life.

How could you have ever thought of him as ordinary? he laughs at himself. Feels like he could think of Yuuri on that age-old ship deck now and laugh and laugh and laugh until he cried.

"Yuuri!" he hears someone call out.

Prince Phichit arrives before them like a Siamese whirlwind. He offers Victor a half-nod, half-bow (which Victor returns). Yuuri tucks his hands at his sides and dips into the beginning of a bow as well, but Phichit stop him instantly.

"None of that," he says, the firmness of it belied by the mischief in his eyes. "I haven't seen you in so long, I deserve a proper greeting, no?"

For a moment, Yuuri seems lost for words. His uncertainty echoes the memory of a Yuuri new to the palace. Victor is struck with it unexpectedly, three months rusted into what feels like years.

The moment passes, and Yuuri smiles and says, "Of course. I've missed you, Phichit."

He barely finishes the sentence before Phichit throws his arms around his shoulders. It startles Victor, but Yuuri's smile only grows. He pats Phichit's back in response to his muffled, "I missed you too!" against his shoulder.

"Come now," Yuuri murmurs, his pats switching to little rubs.

"Your Imperial Highness," Phichit says suddenly, pushing away from Yuuri and turning to Victor. "May I borrow your husband for a dance?"

"Phichit—"

"Perhaps two dances?"

"Phichit—!"

"Please," Victor interjects. He smiles the way he's been taught. It feels like an exercise, after all this time with Yuuri. "You must want time to catch up."

Yuuri opens his mouth—closes it when Phichit starts to whisk him away. They're left with the seconds slipping away. Victor watches them pass under another golden wreath, thinks of Yuuri's eyes again, finds himself wanting again. Look back.

Yuuri does. He looks at Victor with burning promise, right before he and Phichit disappear amid the crowd. And all Victor can do is throw back a glass of grape wine and hope that it will tide him over.

He spots Christophe in the middle of a conversation with a Siamese merchant. Excusing himself with a promise to look into deepwater rice trade, he makes his way over to him and grins at Christophe's playful bow.

"Your Imperial Highness," he says, the lilt in his voice taking away from the typical respect of the address.

"Your Well Born," Victor greets the viscount through his smile. "I admit, I didn't expect to see you here."

"Nonsense," Christophe waves a breezy hand, "when do you recall me abandoning my oldest friend to occasions of abject boredom?"

"I recall you abandoning your oldest friend at such occasions for a pretty face."

"Please, it was more of us abandoning each other," he smiles slyly, "though I don't suppose we can do that anymore, can we?"

Victor's smile falters—he doesn't quite know how to tell Christophe that the thought of pretty faces doesn't even occur to him anymore, that he's losing sleep over a face and a mind and a smile and a voice that 'pretty' wouldn't do justice to.

Christophe seems to misinterpret his silence. Frowning, he leans in and says, "You don't seem all too happy, Victor. It's been months, I thought you and your husband would have sorted out some—?"

"No, Chris, that's not it," he stops him. Lightly touches his shoulder and steers him towards an empty corner near the banquet table. "Come, let's get some wine first."

"He must really be something if you need wine to talk about him," Christophe murmurs under his breath. Victor smiles despite himself. He is, he wants to say—but wine first.

Once they're both armed with full glasses, Christophe continues, "I'll admit—I saw your husband in passing tonight and I thought you ought to be plenty satisfied," his eyes twinkle, "I don't remember a time I've ever been more envious."

"Don't even think about it," Victor says. It's immediate, unfiltered.

Chris pauses in the middle of a sip. The look he pins Victor with over the brim is full of surprise, and then the surprise melts away into something more thoughtful.

"Oh, dear," he says slowly. "I thought you might be unhappy because you weren't getting along with your husband, but it seems to be the opposite."

"His name is Yuuri," Victor says, for lack of anything else to say.

"Victor," he says, his voice going soft and low, "what's going on here?"

Victor fumbles. Doesn't quite know where to begin, how to explain. Instinctively, his eyes rove over to the dancing crowd in hopes of catching a glimpse of Yuuri. When he can't, the longing takes him by so much surprise—it punches the air out of his lungs, opens a dam and suddenly the words are crowding atop each other in his throat.

"He's so beautiful, Chris," he says it almost like a prayer. "He's beautiful and I was a fool, and I wish I didn't have to feel so guilty about loving him."

The understanding that dawns in Chistophe's eyes is at once a relief and a heartache.

"Oh, Victor," he says, and the smile he gives him is the smallest and saddest Victor has ever seen him give.

Forty minutes of conversation later, Christophe pulls Victor to the dance floor because he 'feels compelled to relive some of the shenanigans of their youth.'

"We're not even thirty, Chris," Victor reminds him. "And I'm leading."

"You can lead me anytime." Chris winks.

They're promptly swept into the sway of dancing couples all around. Christophe goes on about how a baron packed away too many blini earlier and now seems to be ill, how the noblewoman to Victor's far right propositioned him only hours ago.

"Well, she seems quite cosy with her current partner," Victor says.

"Yes, well, good for her. She's lovely but I'm hardly partial to her gender."

"Not that you're too discriminating with—"

Victor stops. There, behind the couple in the centre—Yuuri, flitting in and out of view. He's flushed down to his neck, bright-eyed and disheveled. His eyes are clear, but the headiness of the song is enough to loosen up his smile until the corners of his eyes crinkle. A trace of his laugh floats over to Victor's ears, and he's gone.

Yuuri, something in him sounds. Yuuri, it thrashes in him. Yuuri, it calls out again. Again and again—Yuuri.

"Chris," he hears himself say. "We'll have to cut this short."

He hears a distant, sing-songed, "go on, lover boy," but he's already cutting across the floor. Phichit sees Victor coming first; he shoots him a mischievous grin and mouths 'he's all yours'. Just in time, Victor taps Yuuri's shoulder and says, "May I have my husband back, if he wouldn't mind?"

The smile Yuuri turns to him with could light up all of Rus'kaya, he wagers. Phichit departs with a quick whisper of, "he was waiting," into Victor's ear. Victor fits into his place so smoothly, his fingers curling around Yuuri's hand and waist like a key turning in a lock. But the ballroom isn't enough suddenly; the knowledge of other people around them becomes impossible to ignore.

"Will you come with me?" he asks Yuuri.

"Yes," Yuuri says, and it sounds like always.

By unspoken agreement, they find themselves in the clearing where they planted their lilacs. Darkness lends them courage. The flutes and violins of the ballroom are distant here. The whisper of grass under their footsteps, the lilacs in the corner of his vision, the vestiges of winter-cold burrowing under their skin; it all constitutes a new kind of intimacy. He takes Yuuri's hand in his.

"Hello," Victor says quietly. It's imperative that he be quiet, for some reason.

"Hello," Yuuri says. Lays a hand on Victor's shoulder.

"I can't believe I haven't danced with you yet."

His hand is on Yuuri's waist. They're moving. One-two-three.

"I wanted to go find you but," Yuuri falters, "you were with Viscount Giacometti, and I didn't want to interrupt you."

If only you knew what we were talking about, he thinks. Says, "Christophe wanted me to introduce you, you know," he pulls Yuuri closer, "said he was very jealous of me, when he saw you."

Yuuri gasps. It's soft beside Victor's ear. "He didn't say that, he can't have."

"He did," Victor hums. "In fact, I'm sure I caught at least three other nobles eyeing you up and down."

"Oh my god, don't say that," Yuuri's fingers dig into his shoulder, "Phichit told me the lady behind us was staring but I thought he was joking!"

"Why, your beauty is nothing to joke about, Yuuri."

"Stop it," Yuuri says weakly. He bows his head forward, hides it against Victor's shoulder in embarrassment. His neck is smooth and still flushed. What Victor wouldn't do for permission to kiss it, mouth against it, leave his lips there in drowsiness. He wonders how many others have been given the honour.

"Can I," Victor begins, "May I ask you a question?"

Yuuri makes a vague, questioning sound.

"Phichit," Victor says. "Did he ever—court you?"

Yuuri stays relaxed in his arms, but his feet step slower. He looks up at Victor with a question in his eyes. But the place they've made here, between the two of them and darkness and muffled song—it is not a place for whys, and so he doesn't voice it.

Yuuri hesitates. "Once," he says. "He asked, once. I said no."

"Is it because you didn't want to marry into royalty?" Victor asks quietly.

"Yes," he whispers. Victor doesn't doubt him. Dishonesty feels impossible here.

He only says, "And then you ended up stuck with me anyway. боже, I'm sorry, Yuuri."

"What? No, that isn't—that's not the point at all, Victor," Yuuri says. "You're not Phichit."

"Does it matter?" You didn't want this with him, and you don't want it with me.

Yuuri blinks, questioning rather than confused. The clarity in his eyes catches Victor off-guard; a familiar stillness, waiting for you to come awake to some transcendental reality, willing to wait forever. The hand on his shoulder shifts to touch the side of his neck, light but sure.

"It matters," Yuuri sighs. He's so beautiful, Victor remembers himself saying. "It matters so much, Victor. You don't even know."

A strand of his hair has come undone from the slicked-back style, hanging at his temple. Without thought, Victor reaches out and tucks it behind his ear. It curls so sweetly around it. Yuuri doesn't even flinch.

"Then tell me," Victor murmurs. It's a fight against himself, pulling his hand away from Yuuri's face. "If I don't know, tell me." Please, he wants to add—would mean so much more by it.

Something in Yuuri draws in on itself; it's a coiled point of intensity in his eyes when he looks at Victor, fragile and held together too tightly and searching inward.

"I don't think I can," he says. His voice is a helpless, vivid thing.

There are spaces in him, though, that Victor knows would cave in if he pushed. They're in the steadiness of his back when Victor slides his hand there from his waist, in the way his eyes don't blink, and in the way his fingers slot in between Victor's. But Victor has wasted twenty-three nights trying to pen down this strange, animal thing in his chest into neat words, and all it's done is spread to every other part of him. He's imagined, every time he looked at Yuuri upon waking, all the ways in which he could explain it to him, and never has it been more than lacklustre. He's pursed his lips and furrowed his brows in his frustration with himself—just like Yuuri is now.

So when he opens his mouth, Victor stops him. He puts a thumb to his bottom lip, drags down on it just the slightest bit.

Everything in Yuuri goes pliant.

It would be so easy to satisfy the restless energy at the tips of his fingers. He presses down—and his lip yields so beautifully to the beginnings of heat and wetness that Victor pulls it right back.

"The music stopped," he tries to say. Scrapes it out of his throat.

There's no carmine rogue on his thumb.

That night, he wakes up at some indeterminable hour to Yuuri shifting around and huffing and tugging at the bedcover. He sees Victor's eyes opening and stops.

Tentatively, he whispers, "Victor? Are you awake?"

"Mm," is all he can manage.

"Do you think I could—" he says. "C-can I come closer?"

"Yes," Victor breathes. He opens an arm.

Yuuri shuffles closer. Hesitates. Victor closes his eyes and lies back, and eventually Yuuri slides into place beside him. It's careful, a minute-by-minute progression. Victor forces himself to stay awake until he relaxes completely. He waits for twenty minutes, then curls the arm around him and burrows his nose into Yuuri's hair.

звездочка, he thinks, and sleeps.

He wakes up again with them wrapped around each other. Half of Yuuri's face is smushed against his chest, his eyelashes a soft, dark sweep against his collarbone. Victor's arms, too, have encircled him in sleep in a way they've been starved for in daylight. He can hardly tell their legs apart under the duvet. His tunic's hem has ridden up where the skin of his stomach is warm, its expansion and collapse with his breaths leaving Victor unreasonably fascinated. Every unconscious movement grants Victor another whiff of the wintergreen-scent of his hair.

The longing, thrashing, shrieking thing in him is silent. Tamed.

If I could just keep you here, he thinks fiercely, just like this, with me.

Amid jade pillars and the smoked scent of Lapsang Souchong, he says to his mother, "I thought you said royal marriages are never all or nothing."

"I also said all you ever thought about was 'me, me, me'," she sips at her tea, "and that turned out to be all wrong, didn't it?"

Here's what they don't tell you: when it's real, it only gets worse.

The space between them on the bed shrinks every night. Maybe in a week, you'll find them moulded to each other's forms front-to-back, or chest to chest, or maybe Victor will open his eyes at four in the morning with his lips touching Yuuri's neck, and he will kiss it soft and slow and go back to sleep. He wonders if imagining it is supposed to ache like this every time. The closeness, Victor had thought, should have made him brave instead of helpless.

Sometimes, it makes him both.

After Viscount Giacometti extends an invitation to them for lunch at his estate, Yuuri spends the prior evening working himself into a frenzy over first impressions and proper address (and his opinion on Yuuri at the gala, as per Victor—although he won't ever admit to this one).

Fifteen minutes past the time they were supposed to leave, Victor finally knocks on the bedroom door with two brisk raps. Yuuri answers with something harried and unintelligible from behind it and Victor, garbed and ready with, "he'll like you just fine, Yuuri, I promise," on his tongue, pushes the door open, and freezes.

Yuuri's hair isn't dripping with water from the baths anymore—but it's still damp and curling haphazardly all around his face. His face, too, looks oddly soft—likely a combination of the sugar the handmaids must have scrubbed it with and the way his eyes sit rounded and syrupy on his face, his bottom lip vivid-red where his teeth are biting into it.

His torso is bare, his zipun and kaftan laid out on the bed.

"I was—! My undershirt—I was looking for my undershirt, i-it's—" he tries to say, his voice climbing higher with every word he cuts off.

"The rubakha?" Victor hears someone say, only realises it was him by the lost, rumbling-low quality of it.

Yuuri pauses, then. Looks at him—unsure, expectant, reflective. Victor watches him swallow, finds the moment-long tremor of his lips, and it takes him over like the feel of Yuuri's sleep-warmed skin in the middle of a dissipating dream.

"Yes," Yuuri says faintly, "the rubakha, I think."

"Did you check the drawer chest on my side of the bed?" Victor's hand slips off the doorframe like an afterthought, his steps into the room clashing in their steadiness.

He walks in. One step, and another, and another. Says, "Do you want me to check for you?" and the heavy air dissolves it into nothing. Yuuri doesn't even bother to reply—he only stands still and stares, until Victor is behind him and he can't.

The curve of his back is even more defined like this, bare and perfectly still. It's almost statuesque, the dancer's posture ever-present. It slots right into the wholeness of Yuuri, always so stubborn in his discipline. Perhaps the only break in it is the occasional ripple in the line of his shoulders, or the single knob of his spine protruding a bit too much at the base of his neck when he bends it forward.

Victor touches it with a fingertip. He slides it down, pauses between his shoulderblades. They're more prominent than Victor imagined. He digs his finger in just a little, and the way Yuuri's back arches for a single hitch in his breath makes Victor feel like he could nestle in between them and build a home there. Further down, to the small of his back. He slows down towards the tailbone, like a dare, if only to watch Yuuri's hands clench in the material of the kaftan.

"Why are you doing this?" Yuuri whispers.

(And hears, behind him, a soft and steady exhalation of air, something like a sigh, something like reverence—)

"I'm," Victor begins. He removes his hand abruptly. Wants—no, tries to step back, but his feet are rooted to the ground. "It's nothing."

"It's not nothing," Yuuri says, the rise in his voice sudden. He sounds like he's going to cry and doesn't care. "I thought it was, at first, but—I'm sorry, Victor, I can't understand you at all."

"You can't understand me," Victor says, incredulity turning his voice flat. "Yuuri, my actions and feelings couldn't be any simpler when it comes to you."

Yuuri tenses for a long, oppressive moment. He turns around with a shuffle, so obviously forced it's pitiful, doesn't look at Victor when he speaks, "Are you making fun of me?"

Are you making fun of me, he says. Victor thinks of it in another time and place, with a white-knuckled grip on a ship railing and eyes deeply unafraid. Now, Yuuri looks afraid. He looks so afraid, and it throbs in Victor like a pain long-since ignored and now desperate to be acknowledged. His heart feels sick and swollen, burrowing into the tissue of his lungs. He can't breathe.

"No," he says, barely. "No, Yuuri, love, звездочка, how could I—? How could you not know—?"

"Because you're you, Victor, you plant flowers barefooted and ballroom dance to a music box and, and you're wonderful and now," his voice shakes but doesn't break, "you're stuck with me, of all people, and I keep wondering if—if you say and do all these things just to see if you can," he breaths out sharply, "Just—why do you keep doing this? Why do you keep pushing when you know I—"

"Yuuri," Victor says, and nothing else. It washes over them like a tide breaking, the sway and cadence of it. The if onlys and could bes. The you, you, you.

Carefully, he reaches out to hold Yuuri's face in his palms, to rest his forehead against his—and Yuuri lets him, even when his eyes are a storm and his mouth is a waiting, quivering thunderclap.

"I need you to be quiet, just for a minute," Victor murmurs. "Will you be quiet for me?"

"I'll be anything for you," Yuuri says, and it drives the breath out of him like a slow, forceful squeeze of his lungs. Yuuri, taken aback by his own boldness, gasps in the air Victor's exhaled. He chokes out, "Dear god, did I just—?"

"Don't take it back," Victor demands. He tilts Yuuri's head up, forcing their eyes to meet. "Don't you dare take it back. Did you mean it?"

The brown of his eyes ripples when he looks at Victor, like molasses. "I—"

"Please," Victor says, brimming with the transparency he'd prayed himself capable of eons ago. "Say it."

It's only a twitch of a movement, the smallest stretch of Yuuri's neck to bring him closer to Victor's mouth—but Victor's kissing him as soon as he sees it. He sighs against Yuuri's mouth, every little kiss an I waited for you, every longer one a finally. Just as he releases Yuuri's bottom lip from between his teeth, he leans back. Victor tries to follow, but Yuuri speaks before he can kiss him again.

"Do you mean it?" he breathes. "Victor, if you don't mean it—"

It's a strange thing to feel what he does, then. He feels as if he's loved Yuuri for years upon years, grew a garden in his mind with only memories of him for seeds. He's so sure that, if they picked apart his ribcage at any point in his life, Yuuri's name would be on the inside of it. It feels like something indisputable. And yet, he can't even say, "I loved you first."

But he can say, "I love you most." And, damn it all, he's right. Damn Phichit's sincerity and Christophe's envy and all the lies Victor's ever told, because he's right.

"I've never meant anything more," he promises. "I swear, Yuuri, I've never wanted anyone as much as I want you, nothing in the world compares, I swear to you—"

Yuuri cuts him off with a hard kiss, and the words go up in smoke on Victor's tongue. He brings his arms up around Yuuri, spreading out his hands on his back. He presses one into the space between his shoulderblades and it's perfect, perfect—the other arm snakes around his waist, pulling him flush against Victor.

He lives for Yuuri's soft hums and sly fingers, sneaking into Victor's hair and inside his high collar and under his skin. He remembers the yield of his bottom lip suddenly and feverishly. His fingers are clumsy when he brings them to his mouth, and maybe he presses a nail in too hard because Yuuri hisses, his lips bitten and sensitive, and Victor doesn't know why it sends his blood rushing the way it does. Gently, he hooks his thumb into the corner of his mouth.

"Open," he says, and Yuuri's lips part without a single sign of hesitation. Victor meets them with an open-mouthed kiss.

Yuuri kisses back with some dizzying combination of a shy tongue and persistent lips. Victor presses in hard—harder, opens Yuuri's mouth wider—and Yuuri goes pliant and shivery in his arms, the sweetness of it clouding Victor's mind like dessert wine.

"Can't believe you're mine," Yuuri murmurs when Victor moves down to his neck, kissing soft and hard and then sucking. He brushes the pad of his finger against Yuuri's nipple and he sighs like Victor's given him a gift.

I am, Victor thinks, and sinks to his knees.

After, when Victor's head is resting in Yuuri's lap and Yuuri's fingers are combing through his hair, Yuuri says, "What is it that you wanted from me?"

Victor thinks about what it means to want too much; wanting in the right way, wanting in the wrong way, wanting too many things in different directions. He thinks about feeling ugly for wanting something too beautiful. He thinks about picking a hundred threads apart and finding out they're joined at the centre.

"I don't know if you can give me all the things I want," he says.

Yuuri twists a piece of his hair between his fingers and says, "If not me, then who?"

Well, isn't that true, Victor thinks, the affection swallowing him whole.

"I want to marry you," he says suddenly, pushing his face into the soft of Yuuri's stomach.

"We're already married," he laughs. Victor sits up and makes a grab for his hand.

"If I could marry you again, I would," he kisses the pad of his thumb, "over," his index finger, "and over," his middle finger, "and over," his ring finger, finally. He looks at him and says, "Would you?"

Yuuri says, "Your mother would kill us," but squeezes his hand nonetheless.

"For me?"

He groans, "Victor—"

Victor sits up on his knees, the sheets rustling around him. He schools his face into regality—and what a scene that must make, between his tousled hair and rumpled undershirt and the little red lovebites all over his neck and shoulders. He clears his throat and says, "Katsuki Yuuri, will you do me the honour of becoming my husband," he breaks into a grin and holds out a hand, "second husband?"

Yuuri smiles—it's wide enough to show his teeth and his right eye is squinting a little more than the left one and Victor feels like he's fallen in love with the sun.

"I told you," he takes Victor's hand and says, frankly this time, "I'll be anything for you."