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St. Petersburg was a beautiful place. Cold and merciless in the winter, yes, but utterly breathtaking. The view from their high rise apartment in the center of the once bustling city was something Yuuri could easily spend hours just taking in, the sunlight whispering through the glass warming the skin it hit as drowsy chocolate eyes took in the view. He lived for the times when Viktor would be roused from his slumber at Yuuri’s sudden disappearance and wander over to loop his arms around his lover’s shoulders, the cold tip of a nose brushing Yuuri’s neck as a soft greeting in the form of a hum was breathed against his skin.
Nothing needed to be said on those quiet mornings, the warmth they both shared speaking volumes even if their voices did not.
Viktor knew that Yuuri was an early riser, that he loved to watch the sun peek through the buildings and the tops of trees, knew that it had been a comfort for the younger man ever since he was a child. The kind of silence that blanketed the world as the sun rose and warmed the night chilled land brought immense peace to Yuuri and Viktor was more than happy to drag himself out of the warmth of their bed in order to share that tradition with his lover.
Now, though, they didn’t have the time for such luxuries.
“-ri? Yuuri, did you find anything?” A muffled voice from the room over shook Yuuri out of his thoughts, his chilled fingers fumbling with the empty can of beets he had been squeezing in his grasp as he lost himself in his thoughts. Bright Cyrillic letters glared at him as he whipped around just in time to see Viktor creep into the raided room, crowbar in a white knuckled grip as he quickly scanned the area for threats before relaxing. “We don’t have much time before it gets dark, so we have to find somewhere safe for tonight. We can check the rest of the rooms tomorrow.”
Yuuri could only blink as Makkachin came trotting into the room behind Viktor, the pack attached to her back filled with food and other little things that wouldn’t hinder her should she need to escape quickly. As always, she gifted Yuuri with a few excited shakes of her tail when they made eye contact, but it was obvious the cold and lack of food was getting to her. Whereas before she would have been all too happy to bound up to him and trot a circle around him to make sure he was in once piece, now all she could muster was a weak whine when Yuuri didn’t snap out of his daze.
When had she gotten so thin?
It wasn’t until a gloved hand cupped his cheek that he realized Viktor had moved while he had been too busy staring at Makkachin. Cloudy but beautiful baby blue eyes appraised him from beneath long lashes, tired and beaten but still breathtaking. The bags under his eyes were bruised looking, Yuuri noted with a terrifying nonchalance as he savored the touch to his face. Viktor’s hair was getting longer too, more of it falling into his face and obscuring his vision where the greasy chunks clung together and refused to stay tucked behind his ear. “Are you alright, zolotse?”
When Yuuri agreed to pack his things and move to St. Petersburg with Viktor, it was only the usual thoughts that kept him anxious as they settled in box by box. The reoccurring doubts he had learned to live with long ago, to coexist with, still resurfaced to plague him. They weren’t going away and neither was he.
Back then, Viktor tried his best to understand why Yuuri would suddenly go pale as a sheet and lose his breath at the smallest of things. Lord, did he try, and even though he couldn’t understand it fully, he was there to coax Yuuri into a safer state, voicing aloud more than once how he wished he could just rid the world of stressors for his betrothed.
Unfortunately, the biters were here to stay. Those monsters who had lost the light behind their eyes, the creatures who became more vicious and cunning as the sun went down.
The terrors who cost Yuuri the life he had carefully crafted with the man he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.
Trembling lips tinted a faint blue curled up into a fragile smile that Yuuri knew didn’t reach his exhausted eyes, but it was all he could manage to offer Viktor right then. “I’m alright, Vitya.” He replied in a fragile voice, guilt and sadness gnawing in his stomach as he saw Viktor scrutinize his face for a moment before his expression softened.
Yuuri could only sigh in relief that the man hadn’t tried to push further.
Viktor said the news was convinced the epidemic came from the West. Yuuri had no choice but to believe him when the virus swept the streets, the rapid chattering Russians on the television and radio speaking too quickly for him to pick out anything useful. That didn’t matter now, though.
Where it started, where it ended… those thoughts were nothing but a waste of time.
It wasn’t just himself he had to worry about. It was Viktor, too, with his pale complexion growing more ashen by the day, and Makkachin, who was so skittish now that any little noise could set her off.
It was the family he still hadn’t heard from back in Japan, their condition unknown to him. It was their mutual friends, their rivals, their teammates, all of whom they hadn’t run into since the nightmare began.
Yuuri wasn’t just surviving for himself; he was surviving to make sure their loved ones were still alive, to make sure Viktor and Makkachin were safe.
Gone were the days of training to win gold at the Grand Prix, of listening to Viktor tease Yurio about his quiet friend and listening to Mila and Georgi argue over pop songs. Gone were the times they spent not worrying whether they would get to eat that day, whether everyone they loved was safe from harm.
Whether or not he could do something to make sure they all stayed safe.
It was all he could think about anymore.
-
If winter during the day in Russia was frigid, after sundown it got ten times worse. The black night rolled in like a smothering tide that snuffed out all signs of natural life. The still air that surrounded the city filled Yuuri’s lungs with ice and burned on the way out, his breath painfully visible in the unforgiving darkness of the Russian streets.
Never in Hasetsu had Yuuri experienced this kind of bone deep chill, not even on the coldest days of the year when he bundled up under the kotatsu and warmed himself up from the inside out with hot food. Not when he and Viktor curled up on their couch in their apartment and watched pointless daytime television reruns, and not even on the nights when they both skated until the sun went down and were forced to walk home in the cold, the sweat from practice freezing on them like a second skin.
As the days went by and food and shelter became more scarce, Yuuri saw a side of Viktor he hadn’t ever wanted to see. It was as though who he was before the mess had been shoved into a corner of his psyche, only showing its fragile self when it was just the two of them holed up in some run down little shack off the edge of town, huddling together for warmth. Only then did he see fragments of the gentle and playful man he fell in love with, and Yuuri was too afraid to ask if that was the way his fiancé saw him now, too.
The kind of people they had become weren’t far from those soulless biters out roaming the streets and terrorizing the few left to face the brunt of the Russian winter. Viktor would argue otherwise, say that they survived this long because of their ability to adapt, but the sound of bones being crunched under the pipe Yuuri had pried off the side of a hotel would never stop making him dry heave.
It was a struggle to retain what had made them good people. Competitive ice skating had made them nimble and able to outrun many of the threats they faced on a daily basis during the day, while the threat of starvation and an untimely end at the gnashing teeth of one of those monsters turned them into survivors. Never in his life had Yuuri thought that he would grow to recognize the sound of far off screams and be able to discern whether they came from one of the few people left in the wreck of a world they were left to rot in, or whether they came from the undead.
Idly, Yuuri wondered whether the disease had reached Thailand, if Phichit was holed up somewhere with his hamsters or not. Would he still have service there? Was his family alright? Was Phichit thinking about him and Viktor and whether they were still alive or not?
The fact that he felt numb when considering if his best friend was still breathing scared him almost as much as the thought of going into the streets at night with nothing but a rusty pipe to keep him safe.
It didn’t matter how many weeks he and Viktor survived together. Raiding homes and finding little trinkets of life before the world was plunged into darkness just forced Yuuri to distance himself from reality, to retreat into himself when Viktor would come back to their hideout for the night with empty hands and frustration wetting his eyes.
It didn’t matter how many sleepless nights they had, listening to the hissing and far off screams in the streets below and carding their dirty fingers through Makkachin’s matted fur to keep her calm.
It didn’t matter how many times they kissed in joy when they found enough food to last them a week, how many times they sought comfort in each other’s bodies when reality became too much to bear, or how they clung to each other for warmth when their hideout for the night had a sunken roof and walls that allowed the whipping blizzard to come through.
It didn’t matter because as hard as they tried, each night came and left with a part of their humanity in its cruel clutches.
It was only a matter of time before what made them whole, made them human, was lost in the labyrinth of cold and decay.
And when what made them different from the biters and the bandits finally disappears, when they have to face themselves and accept what they are and who they had become…
What would that monster look like?