aiko's otter den

from a compass rose - Katsuki Yuuri is never checking his phone again. He likes his past right where it is. Too bad it doesn’t give a hoot.

---

2. The Phone Call

Date: 02/26/2013 Time: 09:17

Everything had been perfect.

With Victor at his side, with his couples debut, they had won the hearts of the audience. The rink had managed to win his own heart all over again. He’d kept a brave face through the interviews, had worn his medals with pride.

Katsuki Yuuri had gone to bed with feeling content for the first time in years. Not only that, he’d gone to bed next to the man he had admired and fallen in love with, exhausted from the sport that he had loved since childhood and had torn him apart from the inside out. Katsuki Yuuri had done so much more than he had ever dreamed of doing from his first time on the ice.

He should have known.

He should have known he had been building too high, too big, too much! Everything was going to fall apart eventually, that was just how these things worked. But he’d… he’d deluded himself. It was just that simple.

Katsuki Yuuri woke up the morning after his paired skate, still a little sore. It was that good, comfortable kind of sore, where you’d worked hard and seen results and had something to be proud of. It was still absolutely painful all the same, but it was invigorating to see it go somewhere, anywhere. He woke up and stretched a little, things blurry without his glasses or even contacts. His hand brushed against soft hair. A smile filled his face, stretched his cheeks a little too wide but warm all the same.

Then Viktor snored and ruined what he was squinting at. It was no longer the peaceful face of a pro skater, his fiancee, beautiful in sleep, but a monster with a terrible loud sound that shook his mouth and made it go unnaturally wide. Then, Yuuri watched his robe pajamas slip and reveal a few grayer hairs on a toned torso, an ugly as hell necklace straight from his parents’ hot spring that ended with a katsudon shaped medal, and worst of all, the tattoo of a butterfly just under Viktor’s armpit.

Honestly, he was amazing and Yuuri clung to the fact that he was Yuuri’s alone to look at in quiet splendor in this fashion.

Or, mostly splendor. He was still snoring after all.

And honestly, Yuuri wanted to go back to sleep too.

His stomach growled.

Maybe after some toast and tea. Or some light breakfast. Just because they’d get a break for a few seconds didn’t mean it would last.

As Yuuri rose from into a sitting position, his phone began to buzz. Not loudly, and even if it had, he was sure Viktor would have slept through it anyway.

Makkachin boofed at the sound, of course, but he was comfortably on the couch, buried in the towels and pillows provided by fawning hotel staff who also love a dog. Yuuri smiled at his fluffy form as he picked up his glasses and then the phone.

The caller ID was very baffled, the number unfamiliar. He was tempted to ignore it. But against his better judgement, he did not. He moved away from the bed, pajama bottoms dangling loosely on his hips.

“Hello?”

There was silence at first. Sweat dripped down his spine, woke him up properly. “Hello?” Yuuri repeated, voice starting to quaver. Panic crept in his vision. Were they in danger? Was someone trying to threaten them for doing something no one and everyone dared to at—

“Yuuri?”

His heart dropped into his stomach to be digested. That voice. He’d heard it all kinds of ways, young and wispy, screeching delight, angry howls and broken sobs, and with a shaking fist trained on his childhood bully and best friend all at the same time—

“Leave him alone, you heaping toddler! What’s he done to you?”

And now aged, aged a thousand times.

“Maki?” he whispered, disbelieving.

Another pause, but this one accompanied by whooping shrieks a distance away and a low murmur that led to quiet. “Yeah,” she finally said. “It’s me. I… We saw you on television. Congratulations.”

Her voice sounded so, so tired. And he gaped at the air like a fish.

“It’s been over ten years,” he finally managed to say, trying not to look at Viktor, not to look at anything. “Why haven’t you, what’s happened, why now?”

She took a sharp, heaving exhale, too big for her body. “I… Remember—”

“Yes,” he said quickly because how could he let her finish that sentence? He had no idea what she could finish it with.

Remember when we were kids and saved the world? Remember when we made the best friends in the whole world and they abandoned us here without much of a goodbye at all? Remember when Bakumon died for no reason none at all and I was supposed to be fine with it? Do you remember that?

Because he did. God, he did. He remembered her howling and howling as they left her on a grey beach, sobbing and abandoned. He remembered finding her just back in the human world, sitting on a bench not talking. Not talking, barely eating. He remembered Zhuqiaomon’s great imperious eyes, not his Hawkmon’s really, so far removed from him as he spoke.

You’ve done enough. Rest now.

Only he hadn’t rested, he’d gone into anything that wasn’t that adventure, anything that wasn’t rich with foreign life and monsters. He focused on reality and reality had torn him apart and it hadn’t torn apart the others. Takeshi because he was really strong when he wanted to be and Yuuko because she was determined and went for what she really wanted without hesitation even if it changed and Daigo was—

Daigo was their optimistic moron of a leader where was he—

“What happened to Daigo?” he asked because he couldn’t bear to ask what happened to her not yet because it was probably awful and painful because the girl he’d known had been independence to the core, she wasn’t allowed to break—

“He’s dead.”

He heard, felt the sob in his bones that came from her, thinly restrained.

Yuuri dropped the phone. Makkachin woofed outright in worry.

And that was when Viktor had woken up.

He should never have answered that god damn phone.

---

It took a lot of explanations, mostly half-truths on Yuuri’s part, but he eventually managed to escape the hotel room. He’d found out something personal and needed more details but he had just been surprised and that was all it was.

Viktor likely hadn’t believed him, but he’d promised to tell him what he could when he had all the facts.

Thankfully Maki had hung up right after he’d dropped the phone. Or to be more precise from her text, someone had called her and forced her to hang up, but he could call her for another few hours.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to call her back. Daigo was dead. Impossible, hapless, devoted Daigo, who had stuck around when they’d left, who went into governmental degrees just because, and who understood computers if he blinked at them enough times—

Whose smile could light up a room just like Viktor’s. That Nishijima Daigo, one of his best friends in the world (some title that was), was dead.

“Mostly,” mused a voice just behind him. For a moment, Yuuri, pedaling down the nearly empty roads of (which he couldn’t wait to leave with the Russian ruler likely itching to shoot him full of lead and make him and his conveniently disappear) at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday, thought he’d just heard someone’s conversation. But then he heard the voice again, far deeper than he could remember.

“Mostly dead,” he heard right beside him. Floating next to his frantic wheels without a care. “Dying in the Digital World for a human is like dying in the human world for a digimon. It doesn’t go quite right. So I’m still here. Still searching for a way to do… something or other.

Daigo smiled at him, weary, satisfied. “Been a while Yuuri. Lookit you.”

His smile was immediately replaced with a terrified shout as Yuuri almost crashed his bike into the nearest lamp post. “Shit, you okay?”

I’m hallucinating. The thought made him shift and twitch a little, but he managed to say, “I’m fine.”

“Oh. Good. Great. Uh…” He shifted beside him as Yuuri did the smart thing and got off of the bike. “God what do I say now…?”

“I don’t know!” Yuuri heard the whine build up in his voice and couldn’t get himself to stop it. “I’m not the ghost here!”

Daigo laughed, and it wasn’t like Maki’s at all. It was happier, warmer, somehow. “Yeah, yeah you’re right, sorry. I just… I heard her, Hime-chan, call you and I, I couldn’t help myself, I wanted to talk to someone.”

“How can I even hear you?” Yuuri hissed. “Or see you? That was Hime’s thing, she was the all-seeing priestess one, not me!”

“You almost were,” Daigo reminded him as Yuuri started to pedal again. Maybe if he got far enough, the image would disappear and he could forget most of today and get back to the awful grieving for the man who was right beside him.

In a suit drenched in blood in the middle, white suit with red dried and crept up the sides. The jacket was wrapped tight around the middle failing to stem the tide.

Needed to think of something else. Preferably about not being second best to the girl that shone like a beacon.

“Anyway, you can hear me because I want you to. I don’t…” He trailed off, rubbed his shoulder in that old familiar aching way, from the injury he had gotten when he was so young and hadn’t healed properly despite it. And it never really would either.

“I’m not ready for Hime-chan to hear me yet, to see me, to feel… that again.” He shook his head and sighed, though Yuuri sincerely doubted the guy needed to breathe. “I… she’ll explain. She blames herself and it’s… a lot of it is her fault. But it’s mine too, and theirs and Yggdrasil’s.”

Yuuri slowed his pedaling. Now there was a name he hadn’t wanted to hear again, there in the dead of night three days after the end of their journey.

Three days after there had been a crying little girl, smaller than them by a head, sitting at his bed and weeping apologies because—

She lied to me, I had to stop her she lied she said she saved me she had lied to me I had to do this and I hurt you all now I’m sorry it was the only way I’m so sorry—

He had wished, still wished now sometimes that he’d been able to pat the girl on the head, tell her it wasn’t her fault, that she’d done the best that she could, but his hand had passed through her the moment he had tried.

She had smiled, sadly, very sadly. “Just a ghost, Katsuki Yuuri,” she had said and faded away like she hadn’t left water stains on his pillow. “Don’t mind me.”

He had, though, minded. Very much. No one else would.

“You need to talk to her then, especially if you don’t want to.” It sounded so hypocritical coming from him, who ran far and fast but what else was there really but that?

“I can’t,” Daigo repeated as he moved one hand towards where… Yuuri looked away, feeling nausea bubble on his throat.

Yuuri opened his mouth to shout at him, which would look weird since he was obviously talking to empty air, and before he could, Daigo was gone.

Yuuri stared blankly at the air. Then, with as much determination as he had used for the Grand Prix, he turned and pedaled on.

This was the worst day ever. And so far away from just yesterday.

---

Yuuri finds a private room in a library, one that Viktor had shown him his second time here but had never visited. They had private rooms, meant for studying and students and getting the ever loving hell out of the pit that every college student was thrown into from jump unless they were filthy rich or in a country with better priorities. A private room was good for meetings and phone calls and skype video chat.

Yuuri, checking his laptop had survived the cold, send the message out and waited. His sweat tumbled down his forehead, the weight of the past few hours making him hunch over as he caught his breath.

No tears were flowing and that scared him.

He was a crybaby and he knew it. Why wasn’t he crying? One of his childhood friends was a ghost and he didn’t know why but it was his other friend’s fault and none of them had reached out or helped or anything and—

Skype abruptly stopped beeping as a messy mop of brown hair and bright amber eyes stared out at him. They blinked, too large and baffled to be Maki’s eyes.

The person pulled away and turned their head. “Mom, that person’s blinking at me.”

Mom?

Nothing else appeared on screen at first, clutching a glass of juice. The girl took it eagerly in her small hands and sucked at the straw. The sofa in the background creaked as he made to sit down.

Oh god, oh god please no, please don’t tell me they—

Maki peered in from the corner of the screen. “Hello Yuuri,” she said, voice the same as it had been this morning, if a bit more worn out. “I see you’ve met my daughter.”

Oh dear god they had sex. More than once.

That was none of his business and now he definitely wasn’t going to forget it anytime soon.

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