a silver splendour, a flame

Mabon (Autumn Equinox), 1017 II Age

Any other wedding held on any other day might’ve been followed by dancing; instead they followed the Mabon traditions and feasted, listening to several performances of rather evocative, solemn music. Yuuri watched Lilia’s fingers as they danced across the strings of a harp, nearly entranced, and he glanced up, startled, when he heard Viktor’s voice without the Prince having said a word at all.

Are you tired?

Viktor, who was now nestled into some part of his soul, the same way his own magic was; growing stronger there while the phoenix dwindled in fire and strength. … That obvious, huh?

Viktor turned to kiss his temple, the gesture somehow more poignant now that he could feel the echo of it in Viktor’s mind, open and fresh and new. The prince did not respond in words nor direct his thoughts back towards his lover, his husband, but he’d noticed that Yuuri’s temple was cool when it was usually so warm, and that his heartbeat, usually the faster of the two, was slower, and very subtly erratic. Instead he smiled deliberately, and offered Yuuri a hand up, moving them further away from the circle of elves and mages watching Lilia’s performance. “I just want you to myself,” he quipped, once they’d slipped away, but there was no mischief to Viktor’s statement, no predatory gleam in his sea-blue eyes, no bedroom intent.

Yuuri smiled, and then sagged into Viktor where they stood in the corridor, twisting his arms around his husband’s shoulders. Miraculous. That was a word for those two words, put together into a sentence.

What is it?

I … There were not sufficient words. Still, Yuuri tried, threading his fingers up into Viktor’s hair. I don’t think I’ve ever been as happy as I am today.

Viktor studied him with such a fond, steady gaze, lashes lowering as Yuuri’s fingers swept through long, platinum strands; felt Yuuri’s marvel, his gratitude. Me either, he confessed, tilting his forehead against Yuuri’s for a moment with a flicker of a smile. Then he reached back for Yuuri’s hands, studied the tips of his fingers. Yuuri’s hands were cold. Yuuri’s hands were so rarely cold.

Still, they were Yuuri’s hands. “You …” For a moment he allowed himself to replay the vows they’d made, the glorious surprise of Yuuri walking towards him in one of his mother’s cloaks, hair tousled and cheeks flushed. Yuuri laughed softly in response.

“Viktor,” he teased, lowly, which was rare: between the two of them, Viktor was the flirt. “I will wear whatever you want if it makes you feel like that again.”

It did strange things to his heart, made it feel curiously light, like it might fly away; constricted his chest. Your hands are cold. “Careful,” Viktor cautioned, and saw for himself how fond Yuuri was of the crooked edge of his own grin. “That sounds dangerous.”

Sorry, thought Yuuri, and for a moment a flicker of warmth buzzed, sporadic, around his fingertips; inconsistent, weak magic that Viktor propped up without a second thought, wrapping their joined hands in wisps of white.

“Is that better?” He asked, more seriously, though he felt it, the open danger of this: that the magic he used to fill the spaces couldn’t be properly reciprocated. Magic could be shared across bonds, used to stabilize and heal, the way Yuri and Otabek had done for him out in the desert until Yuuri had arrived with the magic of life itself. It was a premise built on reciprocity and restoration; that once whole again, the bond would stabilize itself. This was not a yawning abyss, but intuitively he understood the rift cut open, knew to tread carefully.

Yuuri, though, relaxed into him and the decision was made nonetheless. “… Gods, yes,” he admitted, momentarily unaware of the rattle in his chest, or the creak of his joints, or a dozen different indications for the way death was making its way into his marrow.

Viktor picked him up, awash in an aura of soft silver and white, carried him down the hall. “Good,” he murmured. Let’s get you to bed.

Let’s get us to bed, Yuuri agreed, with the same subtle impishness Viktor had recognized before, and for once the flush ran over the high bridge of Viktor’s nose, and he picked up the pace.

In the morning, Lilia left — back to Ast Petyriel, for a last look through the library, promising to return for Samhain — but both of them missed it. Twined up in Viktor’s arms exactly the way he’d fallen asleep, Yuuri was too comfortable to wake, and Viktor, drained from more than just an evening spent trying to determine whether or not there were places he hadn’t yet kissed, overslept too.

- - -

One Week after Mabon (Autumn Equinox), 1017 II Age

Yuri found it extremely irritating to watch Viktor be as happy as he was, and as exhausted as he was at the same time, only a single week into his idiot brother’s marriage. The Court at Mosciren had shifted to accommodate; the stewards held breakfast, or delivered it to Vitya’s suite, and it was commonplace now,  for their excursions to be brief, to catch Yuuri swathed in the new scarlet of his cloak and in subtle streaks of silver and white, which was all Viktor’s strength on loan.

He spent more of his time with Otabek, whose silent, stoic presence was calming, sparred until he’d exhausted all of his annoyance and then sat listening to the ban side’s steady heartbeat until he felt like talking. “Explain it to me, Beka.”

Otabek glanced over with a wry smile. “Could you be more specific?”

Yuri scowled, which only made the ranger’s smile widen at one corner, left the ban side looking at him with a glimmer of bemusement which was only tolerable because it came from Beka. “What Viktor’s doing right now. Is it dangerous?”

“I’m not sure I even know,” Otabek admitted, and when he caught the real hint of distress in Yuuri’s answering frown, he shifted closer. “Do you want to ask Seung-gil?”

“… Yes.” Seung-gil was more quiet than Otabek, unreadable and unknowable. Yuri was not sure he liked him. The dog familiar that followed his steps was unnerving. So was the idea that somehow, he and Yuuri — Yuuri whose thoughts sometimes came through on the family link now, gentle and open in comparison to the hard edges of the Northerners — were bound up in this together. “Is that okay?”

“Mm,” said Otabek, and he closed his eyes for a second, turned his head, and sang shortly and briefly into the wind, a strange, minor scale that was over nearly as soon as it began. Then he tilted his head to listen. “He’s coming,” he said after a moment, though Yuri had heard nothing more than the whistle of wind and still did not understand the mystery of it, these songs of the banshees.

Nonetheless Otabek was proven right, as was so often the case, and Seung-gil stood expressionless in front of them both. “You called?”

Sensing that Beka was waiting, this time, for him to speak, Yuri cleared his throat. “I was hoping you could tell me a little bit,” he said carefully, “about what it is that Viktor’s doing.”

Seung-gil glanced towards Otabek, waited for the Ranger’s subtle nod. “It’s not that different from what you did in the desert,” he said quietly. “Yuuri’s magic is fading. Viktor is supplementing it with his own.”

“What I did was temporary, it was an emergency, Beka was —“

“Yes.” Seung-gil glanced towards Otabek, raised his eyebrows. “Beka was stupid, too.”

Otabek didn’t deny it.

“But he can’t do it forever,” Yuri protested.

“He won’t have to,” Seung-gil reminded him, and Yuri wasn’t sure why that stung. Yuuri was Viktor’s problem, not his; he hadn’t gotten attached at all to this strange Viktor who smiled and who was soft, or to the gentleness the Halfling had introduced into their family, soft as the morning breeze out of the East.

Not at all.

“What if he —“ No. That sentence was too terrible to imagine and Yuri stopped himself before he could complete it, grateful for the way Otabek laid a hand between his shoulders, gave him some other point to focus on; something that didn’t end with his brother flinging himself into a battle with death that he couldn’t hope to win.

“It’s easing his passing, isn’t it?” Otabek inquired calmly, sweeping his fingers, steady and sure, across Yuri’s back, though his gaze remained steady and even on Seung-gil.

“Yes.” That much Seung-gil could agree with. “He’s making the unbearable bearable.”

Vitya …

- - -

30 days to Samhain, 1017 II Age

“Where are we going?”

It was Viktor’s idea, some post-lunch excursion while the autumn sun still had most of its strength. Above them the sky was clear and blue, and the mountain air crisp, a day beautiful enough that Yuuri completely forgot the turn of the months. Viktor had selected one of the strongest horses from the stables, a big draft horse strong enough to carry two, and it wasn’t comfortable, if he was being honest, to ride on the front of the saddle, but it was nice, leaning back against the plane of Viktor’s chest, balanced between his husband’s easy hold on the reins.

“It’s a surprise,” Viktor murmured, smiling as he dropped his chin onto Yuuri’s shoulder, thinner than it should have been, frailty where there’d once been strength. Yuuri chuckled in spite of himself.

From Viktor, this was the least surprising of all possible answers.

They rode steadily and carefully onwards for about an hour along a narrow mountain trail that Viktor clearly had memorized, though he took it with great care, climbing upwards while Viktor narrated old Northern fables in his thoughts; stories about ancient mountain giants who’d done battle and now lay sleeping in the great hills.

“Here we are,” Viktor murmured, and he stopped, dismounted with care, and helped Yuuri do the same. Can you walk for a little while?

Yeah.

“Good. Look this way.” Yuuri turned, and Yuuri looked, and there, spilling between the crevice of two of the mountains of the Mosciren range, lay the great glacier of the north, sparkling a cool white under the sun, stretching on for what looked like miles. Viktor looked upon it the way someone might’ve looked at an old friend, and Yuuri suddenly understood without asking that Viktor had been here countless times before, had climbed the glacier’s face, had strode out on its frozen, white surface, surrounded by ice for almost as far as the eye could see.

The beauty of it was so severe it rattled him, and he stopped to cough for a while, held up by Viktor, and a sudden, easing sweep of Viktor’s magic. Viktor smiled at him, but his eyes were a little sad. “This is one of my favorite places on earth,” he said.

Yuuri didn’t trust his voice. What are the others?

The moon pines in the forest of Ast Petyriel, Viktor answered, and a beach a few miles north of Hasetsuil, where I met you.

They did not stay for long; Viktor was too attentive, hyper-attuned to the shifts in Yuuri’s energy levels, and Yuuri looked back over his shoulder with a longing that must’ve been anything but subtle as they left. “We’ll come back someday,” Vitya promised, which made Yuuri smile, and relax back into Viktor’s chest, and let the clop-clop-clop of the horse’s hooves against the trail nearly put him to sleep.

- - -

Two weeks to Samhain, 1017 II Age

The cough got worse. His appetite dwindled. Yuuri didn’t dare look at himself too closely; knew well enough that sometimes Viktor traced his ribs, not just because it was a lover’s touch, but because now they could each be counted. At dinner he picked at his soup, drank the tea of healer’s herbs that Lilia had instructed the mages to provide, a bitter drink that nonetheless helped a little bit with his symptoms, even if it also made his head swim, made it difficult to write.

He had given Mari had a project; it was important to be able to think, to dictate…

Nevertheless, the night was horrible, spent racked with coughs, shivering with fever, and it was selfish, wasn’t it, to gasp in relief when Viktor pulled him roughly into his arms and flooded him with foreign but not unwelcome magic. Viktor’s magic felt cool and it swept into the crevices of his being, reminded him of morning tides at Hasetsuil, and yet he knew the cost of it, the way Viktor woke up with circles under his eyes and lagging energy, giving away all of his brightness so freely to this parasite he’d married.

“Vitya — stop, you’ll —“

You’re hurting yourself.

Viktor shivered but didn’t stop, and Yuuri was too relieved to protest, once again set momentarily free from aches and from pain. The vice around his lungs loosened; for a moment he could breathe more readily, avoid the coughs that left splatters of blood on handkerchiefs that were best thrown away. Viktor’s voice in the dark was rough and unsteady and it surprised him:

“Will you share each other’s pain and seek to alleviate it?”

It was one of their vows. Yuuri blinked back tears as Viktor turned him gently, cupped his face in both hands, tangled their legs together. I knew what I was getting into, Yuuri, he reminded him, settling into the knot they so often made as they slept, fond of the soft brush of Yuuri’s hair against his chin and the loose overlap of their arms. In love with the tickle of Yuuri’s breath against his throat: because it was Yuuri’s breath, and every brush of it defied the odds, was life in the face of death, still persisting.

I chose this when I chose you.

I don’t want you to suffer.

“Makes two of us,” Viktor joked gruffly, but his eyes were serious in the dark.

Loving you could never be something like suffering. Understand that.

Thank you for taking me up to the glacier today.

We’ll go back when you’re strong again.

Yuuri liked this, the rare times when Viktor let himself see further ahead than Samhain, when he let himself think of Springtime. “Where else?”

Hasetsuil with your family. He got the impression of a wicked smile. Make proper use of those springs. “We’ll go shopping in Shen-Osheth, and I’ll buy you rubies, topaz, anything that reflects the highlights of your eyes,” Viktor murmured. “Walk through fields of flowers going into harvest. You’ll teach me how to fly one of those eagles your people train —“

“You’ll have to get one first,” Yuuri mumbled, sleepy. “Like Vicchan…”

“You’ll teach me how to get an eagle,” Viktor corrected, all slow amusement. “Then I’ll learn how to fly it.”

“Mm.”

It sounded nice. This future. Something worth coming back for.

- - -

After that there was little to no exiting their room at all; Yuuri was too ill, and Viktor wouldn’t leave him.

Lilia returned three days before Samhain and did not need to say anything to tell her son what he already knew. The fall of her hand on his shoulder and the unusual softness in her eyes said enough: in the great library at Ast Petyriel, there was no cure.

- - -

The day of Samhain, 1017 II Age

Viktor’s suite, once lived in alone, had become an informal camp; Mari fell asleep in her chair one night and after that the prince had merely ordered a change of routine; three additional beds set up in his room for Yuuri’s parents and for his sister. Yuuri had stopped trying to talk; had been nothing but quiet endurance and gratitude in the echo of their bond. Seung-gil frequently lingered in the hallway, an unwelcome reminder, though nonetheless he periodically came to check on Yuuri with an uncharacteristic devotion, a duty Viktor could’ve almost respected if he didn’t hate its very existence with every fiber of his being. Yuri stole in from time to time to pick fights, the only way he knew of distracting his brother, but it was also Yuri who pulled the blankets up higher and who fluffed pillows when he thought nobody was looking.

Viktor woke long after morning, exhausted and completely unready to face this last day. Upon reckoning with the reality of the light streaming in through his window, well past mid-day, the sharp edge of Viktor’s grief was so severe that it steadily drew others: Yuri, who flew in first, dragging Otabek with him, and then Lilia, and finally Yakov, who lingered near the door with a stoic frown, his arms crossed.

Even Christophe, wandering nearby, had found himself unable to resist this nest of cares, though he remained closest to the doorway. The concern in the air was thick, so was pain, and grief, and all of the fragility of love with its sometimes shattered hopes, and it was terribly tempting to dispel all of it, to simply reach into these emotional wavelengths and change them.

It would have also been a great injustice. The ban side had taught him that. He resisted and endured, silent and unsmiling.

Viktor, though; Viktor was a mess, sitting against the headboard with his head pillowed atop Yuuri’s, the halfling between his legs, protected by his arms and by wild waves of white and silver and blue.

He had not been able to stop crying.

Vitya —

He did not know when, precisely, Yuuri had begun to use the nickname that came so easily to his family, to his Northerner friends, couldn’t remember it. It had happened so easily and without thinking, perhaps, that he’d failed to mark the moment. He should have. He had not paid enough attention. There had not been enough time.Yuuri —

“With your permission, your majesty,” Seung-gil said, carefully, ignoring Mari’s pointed sniffle or the way both Hiroko and Toshiya looked away. Around his ankles, magic swirled until the hellhound took shape, tilted its three heads over towards the sick figure on the bed, and whined.

“No. No, there has to be —“

I said I would fix it.

Seung-gil’s voice took on a hard edge: “Your magic is going to fail you and then he’s going to start to suffer,” he said sharply, and Yakov growled, muttering warnings about banshee insolence.

“I’m not ready,” Viktor said, stumbling over the words. He’d assumed he could do this. How could anyone do this?

Next to him Yuri shifted, white magic coming to life in his palms. Otabek’s eyes narrowed slightly, and Yuri shook his head softly, and climbed up onto the bed to sit on its edge, placed his hands on Viktor’s shoulders.

It was like touching a void, and then suddenly Beka was there, all smoke and shadow, the way he’d been in the desert: something else to anchor him away from that gaping darkness. “Vitya,” Yuri gasped in surprise, staring at his brother, whose face was wan and hard and still resolute. You’ve been facing this?

Yes. Viktor’s thoughts were brief, clipped. Yuri had the sense that if he’d had the energy, he might’ve added: worth it.

Yuri looked back at Otabek and saw what he had not seen on the Sunset Road, too preoccupied with Viktor’s state to notice how spectral Otabek looked, standing on the edge of this plummet into a magical abyss, and trying, with all the strength of the shadow wyvern, to hold everyone else back from it.

“This is not something you fix,” Seung-gil snapped. “This is not something you can just —“

Viktor’s blue eyes snapped upwards, positively alight with magic. “Wish away,” he finished fiercely, and suddenly he was pushing Yuri’s hands away, and the magic that had been pooling around Yuuri drew backwards, began to solidify near the bed into the outline of the stag. Viktor’s hands shook while he did it, this summoning; Yuri had never seen him so weak, so emptied of power. “Someone,” he begged, as Yuuri’s heartbeat began to weaken in his ears.

Sunset was coming and sunset was the start of Samhain. Viktor’s eyes tore through the room, tear-stained and wild. “Someone, anyone. Wish.”

Yakov pushed off of the wall and strode forward, only to be physically restrained by his wife, who gave a sharply worded wait on which her voice cracked, betraying the feelings Lilia so often preferred to keep obfuscated. The Katsukis hesitated. Yuri reached out to touch the stag, flickering in and out of corporeal form, and Seung-gil stepped forward, hound snapping into action, ready to intervene.

“This is the problem!” Shouted the banshee, furious. “This is the problem with all of you aes sidhe. This is the way the world is now. You've done enough. You don’t get to change it anymore. You have to learn to live in it.”

Viktor ignored him. Yura. Please.

Yuri still reached. Otabek caught his outstretched hand, laced their fingers together, gave him a look that begged for forgiveness. Before Yuri could argue with him, someone else gave their assent; perhaps the most unexpected voice in the entire room.

“I’ll do it.” Christophe. Christophe who was crying too; hadn’t been able to stop himself.

“Christophe,” Otabek warned, surprised, because Christophe knew, Christophe was handfasted to one of the rangers, Christophe —

“I said I’ll do it,” he snapped, and strode forward, summoning the python as Seung-gil stepped forward to block his way. Christophe’s eyes glowed a sharp purple and suddenly Seung-gil stepped back in terror, the single emotion Christophe had chosen for him to feel, because it got him out of the way.

Viktor stared at him, uncomprehending.

“You’re my best friend, Viktor.” Christophe murmured, kneeling next to the stag. He remembered it so well, the exact way it worked the last time. “I’d go to extraordinary lengths to save you from pain.”

“Please don’t do this. You know there could be consequences —”

“Shut up, Otabek.” Christophe knelt down, running a hand along the stag’s back, looked up at Viktor, tilted his head.

Vitya.

Yuuri’s voice in his heart, so weak, so very nearly gone. Vitya, don’t — Viktor was mad with it.

“I have one condition.”

“Anything.”

Before I do this,” Christophe said, looking up at Viktor, “I want you to ask yourself one question. Tell me now that you believe he’ll be precisely the same person you love, once the wish is made.”

Viktor stared at him, and this last wild hope of his shattered. He had been the subject of a wish once, had not been in control of himself for nearly a year, and Yuuri …

Yuuri who was fire and life, with all of the unpredictable flicker of both. Yuuri who was so gentle and yet so determined. Yuuri who’d accepted this terrible fate with open hands, and hadn’t come out of it with a broken, unwilling heart, had still been willing to share his secret, had opened up slowly and carefully as Hasetsuil's cherry trees, blooming in the springtime.

Eventually petals fell. 

It was what made the blossoming special in the first place.

Yuuri who was the physical reality of this new age, the miracle of life and the terror of death, embodied in this person who’d crossed paths with him and then returned Viktor to life. Yuuri who he looked at with such wonder. Even now. Especially now.

Yakov’s voice was distant thunder. “What are you doing, Vitya? Tell him to do it.” It was immaterial.

This was who Yuuri was.

Yuuri.

This was what it meant to choose him.

Vitya —

I don’t want you to go —

I’ll always come back.

What little there was left of him seemed to make a conscious effort to re-establish itself in Viktor’s thoughts. I have a wish, too. Not this kind of wish.

Do you?

Yes. I want you to know how much I love you. You’ll see it. Trust me.

“Seung-gil,” Viktor murmured, syllables choked by a sob, and Christophe released the ban side from his wave of terror as the stag disappeared. The ban side strode forward, resolute, and the hounds howled, as his terrible magic pooled in his hands, and death came swift and quick and painlessly.

The bond broke. The subtle, warm thing that had been Yuuri amongst the gathered minds of these two families disappeared. Yuri sank into Otabek with a gasp, buried his face into the coarse dark linen of the Ranger’s tunic, taking in giant gulps of breath in sharp heaves as Otabek covered him in shadow, kept him hidden from view.

Lilia reached for Yakov, let herself be pulled into the hard, stone circle of his ancient arms. It was a weakness they elected to tolerate. A momentary, passing need. Forgivable. Something to forget when the grief had passed.

On the bed, a weeping Viktor held onto a body steadily dissolving into gold, disappearing with the last rays of the setting sun, and it was Mari, Toshiya, and Hiroko who came to hold onto him, who cried with him, because with Yuuri gone from all of their thoughts, so too was their son-in-law.

Christophe left, raced out into the hallway, held a hand over his chest as he struggled to breathe, the collective grief too much to bear.

Even Seung-gil, who stepped out to follow him, looked solemn. “You did the right thing after all.”

Christophe reached up and punched him, because someone needed to be punished for this terrible reality and the reaper was convenient. Seung-gil could not be blamed for the misconception he’d held, that Christophe, who knew the consequences of playing with fortune magic better than anyone, would have willingly let Viktor make such a grave mistake while still wholly ignorant of its possible ramifications, let him gamble with his lover’s magic and the pieces of it entwined with Yuuri’s soul.

But it was so satisfying to do it, for this one selfish minute. “Of course I did,” he spat.

Later, at the rituals honoring the dead, traditional of Samhain and even more poignant now, a duet of ban side voices rose over Mosciren, and Christophe’s thoughts had been far, far away, racing after the rangers in the distance, to the lover he still got to feel in the deepest recesses of his heart and his soul while Viktor lay shattered and alone in one of Mosciren’s high towers.

It’s not fair.

Rafael. It’s not, he agreed, across the miles that lay between them. But it is the way of things, and Spring will come still. It hadn’t been particularly comforting, until the ranger promised: we will sing of him tonight. I’ll play it for you.

Yuri’s eyes hadn’t left Otabek, watching the Captain sing, glittering with tears and sometimes overrun in spite of his best efforts. “Do you know what they’re singing?”

“Yes,” Christophe murmured weakly. He loved Rafa’s songs, his sombre, melodic voice, had begged to understand the meaning of them. Now, listening to Otabek and Seung-gil, he could hear the answering echo of the clan on the ranges, monitoring the cauldron. Every so often he thought he was beginning to understand the way their songs carried on the willing winds, the wilder parts of the earth that his people had long since forgotten about.

Even in their songs of mourning they still sang to honor life; how rare and beautiful it truly is that we exist.

“But I haven’t the heart to translate it.”

It was Samhain.

Winter had come.