Somewhat Clear

Fandom: Yuri on ice
Pairing or characters: Yurij Pliseckij & Otabek Altin
Rating: SAFE
Warning: crack, dysfunctional family
Wordcount: 3159
Notes: partecipa fallendo alla maritombola di maridichallenge per il prompt [1] Santa hat, e per la seconda settimana del COWT7 per il prompt M1 VIAGGIO
Summary: In hindsight, it was probably the stupidest thing he had ever done in his life. He could’ve been run over by a car. He could’ve been picked up by a serial killer, or some pervert, or even by a regular, well meaning stranger, who just happened to be a lousy driver. It was way too easy to get in an accident, these days.

Yurij hitch-hikes to Santa's house to prove his mom a point, and he meets an interesting stranger on the road.


---
When Yurij had decided to hitch-hike the whole way to Velikij Ustyug, he hadn’t actually think it through. He didn’t think about the fact that it would’ve took almost a day of travel by car; he didn’t think about the fact that he didn’t have any money; he didn’t think about the fact that it was January and it was cold as balls; and he didn’t think that he was alone.

He couldn’t think, when he was angry. When he got angry at his mom, it was worse than usual. Now that he had calmed down he was painfully aware of how stupid the argument had been. He felt ashamed. It wasn’t really his mom’s fault. He knew he had been acting immaturely.

It sounded kind of silly to still believe that Santa was real at fifteen.

Most of the teasing of course came from other kids, but Yurij didn’t mind them. He didn’t really care if they thought he was strange; they already were suspicious of him because he preferred ice-skating over anything else. If anything, the new topic was a welcome change from the usual ‘ice fairy’ talk.

Ded Moroz - like Yurij’s grandpa called him - was real. It didn’t matter if grandpa and he were the only ones in their family to believe that it was Ded Moroz to leave the pile of gifts in their living room every Christmas. It didn’t matter that Yurij was the only one checking that all the windows were properly closed so that Baba Yaga couldn’t steal the presents. Yurij wanted to believe, and that made him real.

Like every year, he was happy to go home to Moscow for the holidays. After long months of training and studying, he felt like he could finally relax, act like there was nothing more important than snuggling with his grandpa and his mom curled up on the sofa with a mug of cinnamon flavored hot chocolate on Christmas’ eve, waiting for Ded Moroz.

“Yurochka, darling, Ded Moroz is not real,” his mom had said one evening a few days before Christmas, in a careless tone, setting her mug of spicy tea on the coffee table.

She was tapping away at her phone, not even paying attention to him. Something in Yurij had made a noise like cracked ice.

He had been the one who started the yelling, and his mom had started yelling right back. As usual, what started like a silly squabble had grown into a huge fight: he told her that she was ruining Christmas for everyone; she told him that he was going to become like his father- never knowing when it was time to stop dreaming and to start working.

He’d grabbed his parka and stormed off, running in the snowy night without looking back.

He had walked aimlessly for a while, the snow crackling under his boots with each step, until he found himself on a pretty busy road, full of cars and lights. Struck by an idea, he stuck out his thumb.

He was going to find Ded Moroz.

In hindsight, it was probably the stupidest thing he had ever done in his life. He could’ve been run over by a car. He could’ve been picked up by a serial killer, or some pervert, or even by a regular, well meaning stranger, who just happened to be a lousy driver. It was way too easy to get in an accident, these days.

A short time later, a guy on a motorcycle stopped on the sidewalk next to him. For a strange coincidence, he was going to Velikij Ustyug as well, and had offered to take him there. Yurij’s had noticed immediately the stranger’s eyes; in them there was something so compelling, that Yurij wouldn’t probably have been able to refuse even if he had another choice. So he had pulled the helmet on ( “Safety first,” the stranger had said, offering it to him. Given the situation, Yurij found it quite hilarious.), mounted on the bike, and they were off in the night.

*

A bike wasn’t the best way to travel, if you wanted to make conversation along the way, but apparently the stranger didn’t talk much even when he wasn’t on the seat. He was a good listener, though; while they were taking a break in Vladimir, he had insisted to buy coffee for both of them, and by the time they were seated with their drinks Yurij had somehow ended up telling him the whole story of his impromptu night trip.

“That’s where Ded Moroz lives, so you’re going in the right direction,” the stranger commented, a dead serious expression on his face.

Yurij stared at him, feeling himself blush. Was he joking? He couldn’t tell. “I guess,” he mumbled, sipping at his coffee.

He glanced at the guy. He hadn’t yet had the chance to take a good look at him, but in the light of the café, he looked much younger than Yurij had previously thought. He couldn’t be older than twenty, and he sported an undercut, which made him look cool and modern. He radiated the easy confidence of someone who was considered popular, but didn’t really care for it.

He was looking at Yurij, as if waiting for something. His dark eyes were really hard to read.

The silence was starting to feel uncomfortable. “Huh, what’s your name again?”

“Otabek.”

“Right. So, while I’m chasing a stupid fairytale- what are you doing, travelling at night and letting hitch-hikers like me get on your bike, Otabek?”

“I’m an Elf,” Otabek said casually, with that serious face of his. “I’m going North because the newest Ded Moroz and his trainer fell in love with each other and my boss is worried. He feels like there might be an actual risk for them to forget that they’re supposed to be wrapping presents for the kids, and not being wrapped in each other. I’m supposed to -quote, unquote- ‘go supervision them, and keep them on their toes’.”

“That’s-” Yurij started, but he actually didn’t know what he meant to say. “Are you mocking me?”

Otabek looked actually confused at that.

The café was really quiet. There was nobody else but them at that hour, so even if Yurij had tried to keep his voice down, it had resounded loudly in the empty space.

“I know it’s ridiculous that someone as old as me still believes in Santa Claus,” Yurij hissed. “But you have no right to make fun of me. You just met me. Who the hell do you think you are?”

Otabek pulled his cup of coffee closer before answering. “It’s not ridiculous,” he said, calmly, picking a few packets of sugar from the dispenser on the table. “It’s rare. These days, not even children believe in us anymore.” He ripped open one of the packets, poured the sugar in his cup and then picked up the spoon, twirling it gently between two fingers instead of using it. “It wasn’t my intention to offend you. I considered making something up, because my job is a strange thing, but- you said you’re a believer. Feeding you lies about the Winter Folk would’ve been rude of me.”

Yurij blinked. He didn’t actually think that Ded Moroz was real. Or did he?

“I know what you’re thinking,” Otabek said, with a slight smile. His eyes were warm. Yurij was more startled by that than by his tale.

“I don’t know what I’m thinking.”

“If you didn’t believe we wouldn’t have met. Magic has mysterious ways.” Otabek finally mixed his coffee and took a sip. “I wasn’t going to pass through Moscow, but I was compelled to take the long way through the city for a reason, and that reason was you.”

Yurij’s heart clenched. It reminded him of something his grandpa called the inevitable, but magic? That was on another level. He was having a hard time wrapping his mind around the concept, for someone who had insisted all his life that Santa was real.

“You have the eyes of a soldier, you know?” Otabek pulled him from his thoughts. He still had that slight, distracting smile on his lips. “You have the heart and the will to fight for the things you believe in. It’s something you don’t see often.”

Yurij shrugged, embarrassed, draining the last of his drink. He didn’t really know if it was supposed to be a compliment, but it made him feel warm inside anyway. Maybe it was the coffee.
He glanced outside the window. It had started to snow again. He shuddered, thinking of the cold, thinking about the long hours that still separated them from Velikij Ustyug.

Wait a second. “Can I ask you a question?” he asked, frowning.

“Sure.”

“If you’re an elf and magic is a thing, why the hell are we freezing our balls off on a stupid bike?”

Otabek laughed. Yurij’s stomach made a flip.

*

They were risking frostbite on a stupid bike, because the stupid bike was magic, apparently.

Before they left Vladimir, Otabek had explained that it worked with part of the same magic as Santa’s sleigh; they could virtually travel the whole world in one night, because they were affected by the flow of time, but the reality around them wasn’t. They weren’t going to feel the fatigue of traveling, and they weren’t going to feel the need to sleep, but they were going to reach Velikij Ustyug much earlier than they were supposed to, because the only time that was actually passing was the time they spent taking a break in the cafe.

“Are you telling me that it actually takes months to distribute the gifts, but only Santa and his helpers realize that?”

It didn’t take months, but only because the sleigh was much faster than a bike. And they did that more than once a year, because Christmas was celebrated on different dates in different countries.

“That sounds messy, and stupid,” was nonetheless Yuri’s final comment on the matter.

On the other hand, he had been relieved to know that, thanks to the bike’s magic, only a few hours had passed since he had left his house in Moscow. Hopefully his family wasn’t too worried about him. Guilt had started to gnaw at him long before their stop in Vladimir. He hadn’t meant to say the things he said, and he was sure that his mom was regretting her words, too. It wasn’t the first time they’d gotten into such a fight.

They always had trouble getting along. The holidays were the time of the year where they tried to act like a real family, but just because everyone was on their best behaviour it didn’t mean that the problems they had with each other were solved. Yurij was always going to feel like she had abandoned him; she was always going to see him as an extension of his father, someone who had come into her life to keep her from having the things she wanted.

Still, it didn’t mean they didn’t care for each other. Grandpa had made sure of that.

It’s inevitable, he’d told Yurij one night, after he and his mom had fought and made up for the millionth time. One day I’ll be gone, and you’ll need each other.

Yurij didn’t understand, exactly. He just knew that grandpa had always been there for both of them; he never allowed for them to get estranged, teaching them to count on each other even when the rage and the resentment was stronger than anything else. They still spent more time apart than together, but at the end of the day they could at least call themselves family.

The mature thing to do would’ve been to ask Otabek to turn the bike around and go home straight away, so that Yurij and his mom could apologize to each other, but Yurij wasn’t really mature. He might’ve been aware of what maturity entailed, he was fifteen years old.

He was fifteen, and he was angry, and he was going to sulk.

It was going to be a long night, and Yurij meant to take advantage of it at its fullest.

*

They stopped several times on the way, and each time Otabek would tell Yurij small things about what he had called ‘The Winter Folk”- even though it looked more like Yurij asking a million questions and Otabek calmly answering each and every of them.

He learned that ‘Ded Moroz’ wasn’t a name but a title; virtually every single person on Earth could become Ded Moroz, as long as they ‘fit the role’, whatever that meant. Otabek refused to give more details on that particular topic, but he’d shared a few stories about his favourites candidates for the job - a small girl, an old man, a weird young kid who refused to tell him their name, a middle aged business woman who couldn’t have been more perplexed by the whole ordeal.

“She constantly complained about the lack of efficiency,” Otabek laughed. “Chanda single-handedly re-worked the whole Elf system that Christmas, it was amazing. We beated every speed-record, that year.”

‘Elves’ weren’t actually supernatural creatures; like Ded Moroz, it was more a job description. They had a paycheck, and shifts, and more often than not they worked only a few months around the year. Some of them gathered the presents, others helped giving them around.

Yurij was shocked to find out that Otabek, when he wasn’t busy with the Christmas galore, attended university in Almaty, had gigs in clubs as a DJ, and skated.

“You’re a skater?”

“I was actually training to become a pro,” Otabek confessed. “But I never had time to train properly to enter competitions, because of the job.”

Yurij pictured him on the ice, skating gracefully around the rink before taking off in a powerful jump, dark eyes alight with intensity and fire; and then pictured his own rink, a crowd of unfriendly competitors and rink-mates parting to suddenly reveal Otabek and his slight smile.

“You’re still in time,” Yurij suddenly insisted. “You’re not going to be an Elf forever, aren’t you?”

Come and skate with me.

Otabek smiled. “Maybe not.”

*

In his stories, grandpa Plisetskij always described Ded Moroz as an old man with a white beard. He looked a bit like the western Santa, he would say, soft on the stomach and happy in the face. His robes were supposed to be blue, but he also had a red overcoat that changed into from time to time. Grandpa loved to talk about him while pointing at the illustrations in an old fairy tales book, and Yurij had loved listening to him and imagining the pictures coming to life.

The actual Ded Moroz - or at least the guy who currently detained the title - was soft on the stomach and happy in the face, but wasn't old, nor white, and he definitely didn't have a beard.
It was the middle of the night, when they finally got to Velikij Ustyug and pulled up next to the building that Otabek pointed out as Ded Moroz’s house. All the lights were on, but it looked like they had pulled Ded Moroz from his sleep. He’d come out of the front door wearing only a blue robe and no shoes (one of the perks of the job was being immune to the cold for the duration of the contract, but it still made Yurij wince), yawning.

“Otabek?” he called in the dark, squinting while he was polishing his glasses. “Weren’t you taking Christmas off, this year? I thought you and your family were going to celebrate together, this time.” His Russian had a weird accent, like he was actually speaking another language that happened to sound exactly like Russian.

Otabek helped Yurij get off the bike, and took his helmet off, smiling at Ded Moroz. “I was, but Yakov asked me to keep an eye on you and Viktor.”

“For fuck’s sake,” a voice came from inside. The man that came out had colouring closer to what Yurij had pictured when he thought of Ded Moroz, but he too looked way too young to be him. He looked as sleepy as Ded Moroz was, and pissed on top of that. “Yakov really needs to chill. He’s already made my birthday a nightmare, can’t he at least be quiet on Christmas?” he complained, putting his arm around Ded Moroz’s shoulders.

“Yuuri needs to work on Christmas, Viktor” Otabek reminded him. Viktor muttered something rude under his breath, and buried his face in Ded Moroz- no, Yuuri’s neck, who patted him awkwardly with an embarrassed smile.

Otabek chuckled at their antics (read: gross PDA), and then turned to Yurij.

“Welcome to Velikij Ustyug.”

*

It had stopped snowing, eventually. A thick frosty layer covered the street and the parked cars, and the air was cold and clear. A strange pinkish light colored every surface, making it look like something out of a fairy tale, but it was just same old Moscow, the same old street he had walked along thousands of times when coming home from school.

It almost felt weird being back. He’d spent basically a week on the road with Otabek, hopping from a service station to the other, and then a few hours at Ded Moroz’s house, joking and bickering with Viktor and Yuuri. The two of them had insisted he stayed the night, and then made sure that he was back home in time for the sunrise, taking them on the magic sleigh.

It was one of the most surreal experiences in Yurij’s life. He wasn’t sure he hadn’t been dreaming the whole time.

“Are you okay?” Otabek’s voice pulled him from his thoughts.

Yurij bit his lip, giving him the extra helmet he was still holding. “Yeah, it’s just- it feels like it’s been all a dream.”

Otabek smiled. “Was it a good dream, at least?”

Yurij cracked a smile and pushed him. “The best. But seriously-” he interrupted himself. He felt silly. He’d met Otabek only a week before- the night before, in real time. He couldn’t already feel like he was going to miss him, right? It was stupid. He couldn’t have grown so attached in such a short time. “I’ve had a great time.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Otabek answered. “Are you ready to go home?”

“Ugh,” Yurij huffed. “I will probably get a scolding, and they’ll want to know where have I been all night. I really can’t look forward to that. But I’ll be fine. They’re probably going to be relieved that I’m okay more than anything else, so…” Yurij couldn’t help it. “Will I see you again?”

Otabek smiled. “I’d like that,” he said, pulling on his helmet. “I really need to go now.”

Yurij smiled back. “Have a nice trip.”

Otabek gave him a thumbs up, and drove away in the pink dawn. Yurij looked at him go until he disappeared behind a corner, the smile lingering on his lips.

He had a feeling that their next encounter was going to be inevitable.