“I’m Viktor Katsuki-Nikiforov!”
“And I’m Yuuri Katsuki Nikiforov!”
They turn to look at each other and grin, attempting to speak in unison.
“And this is the WIRED Autocomplete Interview.”
They’re a little off on the wording, but what is simultaneous is the way they break out into giggles right after saying ‘interview’. It’s only been a few seconds since the cameras have begun rolling, and Viktor is already feeling charmed by the pink tint staining his husband’s cheeks.
“Aww, and we even practiced that a few times!” Yuuri says, now donning a cute little pout.
“It was my fault,” Viktor automatically pipes up, before letting his heart-shaped smile take over his face. “I started speaking a half-beat too late because I was too busy admiring your pretty eyes, love.”
Giggles and hushed whispers immediately break out on the WIRED filming set, but Viktor only has eyes for the way Yuuri’s lips instantly morph, curving into a pleased, albeit shy smile.
“You’re sweet, Vitya,” he murmurs, before reaching over to hold his hand.
There’s not much space between them to begin with on the bench they’re seated on, but Yuuri closes that miniscule gap so that their thighs are pressed right up against each other. Viktor hopes the audience is grateful; the slight tension his love is now holding in his leg will give the cameras a nice view of his immaculate, muscular thighs, outfitted in the sleek trackpants that Mizuno specifically designed for him. (After some sleuthing, Phichit had informed the two of them that Kenjirou had gone ahead and bought four different pairs.)
Nyala – the WIRED production assistant in charge of this episode taping – then hands them the show’s distinctive looking question tableau. On it, are Google’s top ten most searched questions containing their names. They’re partially covered, which adds to the fun: they’ll be taking turns reading them aloud, while unpeeling the adhesive covering to reveal each query.
As they’d agreed earlier, he will read and answer the first question, so Yuuri holds the board steady.
“What did Yuuri and Viktor…”
Viktor pauses to draw out the suspense, and then whips off the adhesive in one rapid motion, his enthusiasm almost causing Yuuri to topple over.
“Oops! Sorry, Yuranya!” he exclaims, feeling a bit flustered as he helps his spouse right himself and presses a kiss to his temple.
Nyala’s eyes are glittering with amusement, so he aims a sheepish smile at her before facing forwards.
“What did Yuuri and Viktor do before they met?” he reads off, feeling quite pleased with this clear opportunity to extol Yuuri’s praises (and, additionally, to lambast certain International Skating Union officials for not recognizing how talented he was prior to that silver medal win at the Barcelona Grand Prix Final).
“Well, the short answer is that we were both competitive figure skaters, but the long answer is more interesting! Let’s start with my Yuuri, because my side of things is boring, not to mention quite sad,” he chirps, not even batting an eye when his husband begins to splutter in protest next to him (“Vitya! Five gold medals at World’s is not sad!”)
But Viktor feigns an inability to hear Yuuri’s counter, and whips his phone out.
One of the first things he’d done after they’d met at the banquet was to look up as many of Yuuri’s Senior division competitions as he could, hungry to expand his personal archives with any video or photos he could get his hands on. By now, his love is aware of his meticulous culling efforts, because he wears a pained expression as Viktor begins to talk and flip through his photo gallery.
“Where to even begin?” he says, allowing his voice to slide into that grandiose tone that Yurio claims “makes you seem even more punchable than normal”.
“Since we only have an hour for this taping, I will unfortunately have to limit myself to the year of Yuuri’s skating career before he and I met,” he continues on, making sure his annoyance is plain. “And, for those that don’t know, we met in December 2015 at the Sochi Grand Prix Final.”
It’s a testament to their many years of being together, because Yuuri doesn’t even tense at the mention of Sochi. He knows Viktor would never try to embarrass him by contextualizing the event in a way that makes him uncomfortable, and, besides, his spouse now shares the opinion that pole-dancing into your soulmate’s life is a pretty badass meet-cute. Even so, it had taken awhile to convince Yuuri’s anxiety of this, and Viktor owes a lot to their couples’ therapist for that mindset change.
“Look at this picture of my beautiful Yuuri on the podium at Four Continents’ in February 2015!” he exclaims in triumph, holding his phone up so that the camera operator gets a perfect view.
Taken in Seoul’s Mokdong Ice Rink is a photo of an adorable, 22-year-old Katsuki Yuuri, wearing a shy smile and holding a bronze medal. Next to him is an obviously ecstatic Celestino Cialdini.
“Now, no offense to anyone, but take it from me: my husband was severely underscored at that competition and should have been standing higher on that podium. Well before he ever broke my World’s winning streak, Yuuri was commanding audiences the world over with his stunning artistry. Particularly, his dazzling interpretation skills,” Viktor states declaratively, his tone brooking no argument.
Well, almost no argument.
Yuuri makes a barely perceptible noise of disagreement, but it’s enough to make him turn and bestow his most unimpressed expression onto him, as if daring him to issue a rebuttal.
“Something to say, Yusha?” Viktor prompts, a bit goadingly. “Do you wish to argue with “Living Legend” Viktor Katsuki-Nikiforov, who, I daresay, might know a little something or two about judging politics and biased scoring?”
His love gives him a light smack on the bicep, and when he replies, his tone is prim.
“If you want biased scoring to be the focus of this question, then I’ll have to bring up your European Championships score from 2013, where you were unfairly beat out for gold by our good friend, Christophe Giacometti.”
An “oooohing” sort of taunting sound ripples around the set, but far from flustering Yuuri, he just raises a brow and sets his jaw. (Viktor feels quite turned on at the look, as well as his protective instincts.)
“I know how the internet loves to spin things but there’s nothing to spin,” Yuuri continues, dryly. “Christophe, himself, made a big stir at the post-skate press conference about judging bias, and he still regularly tweets at the officials from that competition…so much so, that two of them have blocked him on Twitter.”
Viktor gasps with delight at the memory of this juicy event and his spouse’s answering smirk is all the permission he needs.
“Ok, let me set the scene for you all!” he eagerly volunteers, sitting up straighter on the bench.
He makes a big show of clearing his throat and Nyala – who, evidently, has the patience of a saint – hides her smile behind her hand. It’s a wonder that she hasn’t redirected their attention back to the question list, yet.
“January 2013: Zagreb, Croatia,” he continues on, in the grave “I’m narrating a documentary” tone that he knows will make Yuuri laugh. “Twenty-three-year old Viktor Nikiforov takes his starting position on the ice of Dom Sportova arena. Unlike present-day, his hair is much more lustrous, and he has not yet needed to start using thickening oil as part of his nightly primping regimen.”
Yuuri smacks his bicep a second time.
—
Okay, so this line?
Is not a direct translation.
It’s not wrong, I wouldn’t say - it’s just a different interpretation.
But the literal meaning is quite a bit darker.
Victor says 「自分の首を締める枷でもあった。」
“It also was a shackle closed around my neck.”
Like I said, the translation is not exactly wrong, but the original words make it clear that it made Victor feel like a prisoner, bound to his career/decisions against his will. You could even say that he felt like he was suffocating.
It paints a bit of a different picture, doesn’t it?
I’ll miss them forever
i cant wait for yuuri to be the son-in-law yakov’s always wanted..
anyway heres a bonus cause its christmas!
Guys I had so much fun doing this
I wanna talk about Viktor’s room at the Katsukis’ Onsen.
A room says a lot about you. I mean, just look at Yuuri’s room. We are made to understand right from the start who he is.
Yuuri’s room was designed to really hammer the point across that he’s the biggest Nikiforov fan out there. And let’s be honest, although we learn a lot about who Yuuri is, from his anxiety to his competitiveness, his developing relationship with Viktor is the heart of Yuri!!! On Ice.
Viktor has moved into his new room temporarily but he’s pretty damn extra and brought everything with him so there’s a lot in there to look at.
So essentially this is Viktor’s room. It’s pretty self-explanatory for the most part. We’ve got the lamps he clearly likes as we see them in his Russian apartment in ep 1. Matryoshka dolls, because he Russian duh, giant bed to share with Makka, books to read. Then there’s a large artsy painting of a woman and a, no doubt heavy af, stone sculpture. These two things show that Viktor’s got money, that he’s classy, and that he’s extra. All pretty straightforward.
So what really interests me about Viktor’s room is the photo frame. More specifically, the frame that holds a picture of himself.
Unlike painting and posters, photo frames are far more personal.
Yuuri has posters of his idol, okay yes there are a lot, but it’s still pretty regular behaviour. But something that I, and many others from what I’ve seen, found super endearing was that he had multiple framed photos of Viktor. That’s far more personal, and it really hinted at Yuuri’s stronger feelings.
So then we have Viktor’s room, and the only photo frame he brings with him holds a picture of himself.
At first, I thought damn isn’t that arrogant? So conceited, it’s actually a bit cringe even.
But then, this is Viktor. Yes he’s a legend, yes he knows it, but he’s never truly flaunted it. That doesn’t seem very in character to present him this way.
I wondered if maybe it was Yuuri who put it in there. After all, Yuuri clearly had the same poster–
– which we saw him take down from his room.
But then, that seems unlikely. That would defy the point of hiding the posters in the first place! Plus, look at Viktor moving in.
The room is completely bare, there wasn’t anything in there. Everything came from Viktor’s boxes. The frame had to have been his.
So, thinking of what I know of Viktor, one of the things that stands out the most about him was that skating was his everything. No life and love as he much later explained, but that was fair to assume even in ep 1, given that he was a legend. The sport clearly took up a lot of time!
If someone wanted to frame a picture, what would they pick? A picture of their family? A shot of them with their friends? A cute pic of them and their dog? It would be a picture close to them, something or someone that matters. And what does Viktor have?
A picture of himself skating.
Because his whole life has been his skating career, he pretty much knows nothing else. He even admitted that he rarely got to spend time with Makkachin before.
Looking at it that way, the picture is suddenly really sad.
When you move to another country, you’d want a reminder of the people you love, of home. Viktor brings a reminder of skating because it’s all he’s known, and it’s the thing he’s going to miss most.
Because, think about it. He skates and skates and skates, and now it stops. He knows that choosing to be a coach means putting skating aside. His skating is framed there on his table, because it’s like looking at a missed loved one for him.
But this is actually really beautiful. Because, throughout the entire series, we don’t really see a Viktor who mourns the fact that he’s not practicing a routine for himself. Yuuri doesn’t catch him skating by himself thoughtfully, missing having the ice all to himself. Not once do we see that on their journey! Viktor is completely engrossed in coaching Yuuri, and now he only skates to teach him. His devotion is so genuine. I knew that Viktor loved Yuuri to have put everything on hold like that for him, but I didn’t know it like this.
I really want to see Victor’s photo frame in season 2. My money’s on Yuuri being in that picture.
todays twitter dump is seungchuchu themed because they are the best boys!! dedicated to @llyn-on-ice because she showed me part of something she was writing and it inspired most of this and also she inspires me every day of my life
click through for captions
Yuuri pole dancing on his own wedding? yes.
does the world need another reverse au??? probably not but that hasnt stopped me from doing nothing but this on twitter lmao so heres a doodle dump.
Hi, I'm mae! I made this after re-watching the anime and crying over the movie and falling in love with reiya's rivals fic
214 posts