things we did before you got married
A/N: For @phichuuriweek day 7. Prompt: days in Detroit. Big thank you to the mods for handling this event! <3
After two years’ absence, it seems only right to return to Motor City behind the wheel.
“You know how to get to the hotel?”
Phichit’s fingers drum idly against the steering wheel in time to whatever’s playing on the radio in the rental car—the jingle, now, for some detergent ad. He punches the button for another station, thinks Should’ve brought an aux cord. “It’s not far now. Two streets away from our old building. We used to pass it on the way to school, remember?”
“I remember,” Yuuri answers, smiling. Then something new seems to come to him, some new worry, and his brow wrinkles up the way it’s always done, his glasses slipping down his nose. “And the church?”
“Already looked it up,” Phichit tells him. After a pause, dutifully, he answers the unasked question: “We’ll be fine.”
Their two tuxedos swing now inside their garment bags from the hook above the backseat. There’s a map attached to the wedding invitation in Yuuri’s backpack, tucked carefully between the pages of his planner so as not to crease the marble cardstock, disturb the handmade lace snowflakes glued across the front. They’d had a good laugh on the flight here from Tokyo—about how Laura from the rink must have done so well for herself these past two years, and now they had no choice but to step up their planning game.
(“If this wedding’s anything like the invite says it’ll be, she’s set the bar high. Don’t test me,” Phichit had warned. “Don’t test Victor.” Yuuri had cracked up and slumped low in his seat with his hands over his face, moaning about how he could already foresee being ganged up on by his best man and his fiancé.)
They pass a McDonald’s on their left, an art museum on their right. Yuuri has his nose pressed nearly to the glass as he scans the streets outside, reading the signs—Willis, Canfield E, Garfield, Forest Ave. Phichit wonders if they look foreign to him again, after so much time away. Or does he still recognize this place?
“Yuuri, we lived here. I know midtown as well as I know you.”
“I know that,” Yuuri murmurs. Phichit recognizes the look on his face when he turns away from the window, the lines still creasing his forehead, the crooked half-smile that says he’s embarrassed by his own nervousness. He’s seen exactly that look—exactly this image of Yuuri in the passenger seat—from the driver’s seat of a different car, many, many times. “I just wanted to be sure.”
Some things, Phichit thinks, never leave a person. Somehow, they’ve always known the way.
“Be sure,” he says, reaches across to scrunch Yuuri in the ribs—and laughs, loud and long at the next red light, when Yuuri catches his hand and doesn’t let go.
