YOI AU where everything is the same except Victor and Yuuri are so destined to be together that they spontaneously and single handedly spawn soulmates into existence. The universe or god or fate or all of the above sees these two losers find each other in nearly every possible version of reality and says “damn, they gotta hook up here too” and goes all out to make it happen. Victor and Yuuri both have multiple soulmate signifiers, but since soulmates didn’t exist until Victor (and later, Yuuri) was born, they have no idea what any of it means.
Victor is born colorblind with a small birthmark shaped like half a snowflake on his hip and the phrase “Be my coach Victor” scrawled along the inside of his thigh in shaky Japanese characters. His parents don’t recognize it as writing, and resolve to ignore their son’s weird birthmarks. They never even consider that it might be saying something. Victor, when he’s old enough to wonder and has a few years of international experience under his belt, copies down the characters as best he can and decides to get it translated the next time he’s in Japan. When he finds out his birthmark is actually a demand for coaching that identifies him by name, he’s very confused, and wonders if maybe his parents had it tattooed onto him when he was a baby? Perhaps they were drunk? They’re not around to ask anymore, of course, but that’s the only explanation he can think of. Surely this mark isn’t natural. Eventually, he chalks it up to yet another thing he’ll never know about his family, and does his best to put it out of his mind. Some days, though–his worst days–he can’t help absently rubbing the mark on his thigh. Whenever he does, he gets an odd, phantom weight deep within his chest. It feels like happiness and light and hope and everything beautiful and pure in the world. Later, when hope and happiness is sorely lacking in Victor’s life, that phantom weight is sometimes all that gets him through the day.
Yuuri is also born colorblind with a snowflake and words on his body, but that’s where the similarities end. Where Victor’s half snowflake is tiny and almost unnoticeable even against his pale skin, Yuuri’s takes up the entirety of his back. It’s loud and in your face and Yuuri spends most of his life trying to avoid situations where anybody might see it. His words, written in elegant Cyrillic, loop around his right wrist and trail up his arm. Unlike Victor’s parents, Yuuri’s are very curious and concerned about the strange markings on their newborn son. They also recognize the writing as letters, though they don’t quite fit the English letters they learned in school and mostly kept up with in case of any international tourists. They don’t have many resources, but eventually they find out it’s in Russian and get it translated. The words “A commemorative photo Sure” make absolutely no sense to them, and they begin to fear for their son. They never quite get over the way that mark in particular bothers them, and it’s something young Yuuri picks up on. Unconsciously, he tries his best to hide his words as best he can as well, and never mention them around his parents. When he gets older and discovers Victor and spends his tween years going through a Russia obsession phase, he notes the similarities between the flowing script on his wrist and the strange, almost-English-but-not-quite letters that adorn all the original versions of Victor’s posters and other assorted merchandise and marketing. He’s too scared to try and translate them, but he holds onto them tightly as a talisman that, maybe, this means he’ll meet Victor someday (which incidentally means he’s the first person in the world to come close to figuring out what soulmate marks are) and, for the first time in his life, he isn’t ashamed of them. He finds himself touching the words often, even if he’s sometimes brought to tears by a sense of deep, nearly soul crushing loneliness when he does. It’s a feeling he’s familiar with, but it’s also foreign, and sometimes when he’s having a particularly bad anxiety attack, focusing on a feeling that doesn’t feel like his own is enough to calm him down faster than he would be able to manage alone.
The first time Yuuri and Victor’s eyes meet isn’t the first time they speak, and the first time they speak (”A commemorative photo? Sure.”) isn’t the first time they both speak to each other (Be my coach, Victor!”), thereby thwarting, in one meeting, pretty much the entire point of every single one of their soulmate signifiers. Still, their destiny is to be together and nothing, not even the boys themselves, can stand in the way of that. Later on, when a drunk Yuuri stumbles up to Victor and looks him in the eyes, the world explodes with color for the first time. Victor is so surprised he almost misses the slurred words spilling from Yuuri’s mouth. Almost. He spends the rest of the night in awe of the sexy, drunken nymph who literally brought light into his world. He’s also, for the first time in his life (or at least since he was so young he can no longer remember) feels those phantom feelings without touching his words at all, though this time they finally feel natural, like they’re actually his. He’s not sure what it all means, but he’s not a stupid man. He knows it means something. And now that he’s found Yuuri, he never wants to let him go. When Yuuri disappears after the banquet, he’s devastated, and over the next few weeks the only thing that keeps him from falling into despair is touching his words. They still fill him with phantoms of happiness and light and hope, but they’re also a physical reminder that he’s supposed to meet Yuuri. That he was always supposed to meet Yuuri, even before the other man was born, which is slightly scary but even more reassuring. Yuuri is meant to be in his life. He refuses to believe he was born with these marks and made to live nearly three decades seeing the world in shades of grey just to have one drunken night dancing with his Yuuri. (Incidentally, this makes Victor the second person to come close to figuring out what soulmarks mean, though he’s much closer to the truth than Yuuri)
Yuuri, on the other hand, wakes up in his underwear in his hotel room and has absolutely no idea why he can suddenly see color. Eventually, once he’s done throwing up from a mix of sixteen glasses of champagne and suddenly seeing every color in the world after just over two decades of half-thinking colors were something people made up to mess with him, he decides that he must have smacked his head on something during his bender. It’s the only explanation that makes sense. Despite his shame at his FS, his grief over Vicchan, and his embarrassment at the thought that someone might have seen him before he managed to get back to his room and pass out, he can’t help spending his entire trip home scrolling through Victor’s Instagram and re-watching every Victor video he can find. Experiencing them in full living color is almost like discovering Victor for the first time all over again and, at least until he gets home and is once again reminded of Vicchan and his failure in Sochi, his entire body feels like it’s made of joy and wonder.
After Victor shows back up in Yuuri’s life, he very quickly makes the last connection: Yuuri has a snowflake that matches his perfectly, aside from the size, and those words on Yuuri’s wrist strike a chord and he remembers (with a small twinge of shame that he didn’t recognize this beautiful man in front of him as the skater whose musicality and step sequences had begun to waken corners of Victor’s soul he thought long since buried and gone as he watched his SP in Sochi) that those are the very first words he’d even spoken to Yuuri. He’s even more certain now that this means Yuuri is meant to be with him. Literally every single great mystery of his birth has the same answer: Yuuri. He has no idea why Yuuri refuses to mention the banquet, and he has a few moments of panic when he thinks, marks or no marks, Yuuri will never want him in the ways he’s coming to realize he needs Yuuri, but every time that happens Yuuri will say ( “I want you to stay who you are, Viktor!” ) or do (pulling him close, demanding his attention) something to renew and reaffirm Victor’s hope and conviction.
Yuuri, for his part, never actually sees any of Victor’s marks until after they kiss in China, mostly because he spends every second where Victor’s hips and thighs are exposed desperately trying not to look at those very areas, lest he explode (in every possible connotation of the word). Once he gives himself permission to look, he’s utterly floored. Victor shares his birthmark? And those words on his thigh written in what almost looks like his sloppy handwriting when he’s nervous or drunk… Be my coach, Victor. Did this mean that Victor had always wanted to be a coach? So much that he had the request tattooed into his skin? Or was this something he’d had since birth, like the Cyrillic on Yuuri’s wrist? (He still can’t bring himself to translate those words, now more than ever. What if they say that Victor hates him? What if they tell him to let him go? He can’t deal with that; with knowing they have real meaning to his life while also telling him to get rid of the one person who had always given his life meaning. Ironic, considering how close Yuuri almost comes to doing that very thing on his own anyway)
Once the’re finally together, and engaged (with rings that match their snowflakes, no less), and all misunderstandings are cleared up and they’re both looking forward to their future as skater and coach-and-skater and husband and husband (after he wins Victor his gold medal, of course, and oh how Victor will come to regret that particular bit of word vomit in the months to come), they finally talk about the marks. Victor shares what his meant to him over the years, and Yuuri does the same. Yuuri tells him that, even though he doesn’t remember asking, the feelings Victor describes when he touches Yuuri’s request on his skin sounds an awful lot like the way Victor’s skating had always made Yuuri feel mixed with how Yuuri feels when he’s drunk. Victor, in turn, opens up about the loneliness and isolation that were ingrained in his daily life when he so thoughtlessly offered Yuuri a photo with his empty smile. They come to the conclusion that, embedded within each of their words, are also the feelings that the other person was experiencing while saying them (when they said them, when they would say them). They also come to the conclusion that this means they were always meant to be together, that their shared marks and colorblindness was given to them so that they’d know when they finally met their other half. (Incidentally, this means that they both are the first people in the world to discover what soulmarks mean, though only a very select few will ever learn this and even fewer will believe it)
As they reaffirm their love for each other, the universe or god or fate or whatever looks on and thinks “this actually worked out pretty well for a beta test. With a bit of tweaking, I wonder what would happen if we did a full roll out?”
And so, on the day after Yuuri Katsuki and Victor Nikiforov discover soulmates together, the entire population of the world wake up either colorblind, with one half of a complete mark, or with the first words someone out there will ever speak to them somewhere on their body (along with a few other variations that get patched in later for variety), all of them completely unaware that the love between two silly male figure skaters was transcendent enough to will the entire concept of soulmates into existence.
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