This is not a prompt, but i thought about soulmate AU where songs that stuck in your head can be heard by your soulmate. yuuri is Suffering because Victor keeps getting bad ad jingles and bizarre euro synth at super inconvenient times (thanks timezone) and everytime Yuuri got something stuck inside his head Victor will enthusiastically replies with even more enthusiastic and godawful songs in either russian, french, or something he picked up somewhere, like nokia ringtones or what.
I like it, I like it. Especially Viktor’s enthusiastic replies!
I know you said it wasn’t a prompt, but… there’s a drabble under the cut. You put a soulmate AU in my askbox, friend, what did you expect?
Oh, if you’re a new follower and had no idea I was a soulmate-obsessed kiddo, this is all related to Drunk on You.
It starts when Viktor is sixteen. He’s been hearing the Japanese ad jingles and classical music on loop for years– but one day, the song stuck in his soulmate’s head has his name in it. He skates over to the side of the rink to listen closer, but it’s still all a jumble of Japanese, nothing comprehensible to it. His name, again, a sweet thing and utterly surprising. He asks Yakov about it.
“Focus on your program music, Vitya,” Yakov sighs. “The world does not revolve around you–they’re probably singing general songs.” Viktor pouts, and Yakov turns the music on the rink speakers up.
By the time Viktor is twenty-two, it is incredibly clear that the songs stuck in his soulmate’s head are, indeed, about him. The jingles from the commercials he’s been in, bits and pieces of his program music. Each time, he responds, listens to something poppy and ear-catching, something with I wanna get to know you, know you or a ringtone. So, so many ringtones, no words involved but the message clear: I want you to call me, I want to talk to you. When he’s twenty two the song comes in, quavery but clear:
Viktor and Yuuri, sitting in a tree~ K.I.S.S.I.N.G.
He leaves practice early. Yakov pulls at his hair and takes his coaching rage out by correcting the Juniors’ skaters forms. Viktor wants to know who Yuuri is. He turns on a playlist of sappy French and Russian love songs and listens to them on repeat until they’re rattling around his brain in his sleep.
There, he thinks, intentions announced.
When Viktor is twenty-three, music with a heavy, desirous beat starts getting stuck in his head on Wednesdays. Music someone could dance to– strip club music, rolling and crooning. Viktor really, really wants to know what his soulmate does on Wednesdays. He does not find out until he is twenty-seven, watching Katsuki Yuuri spin about a pole at a banquet, and the drunk stumbles over and mouths stammi vicino lyrics against the champion’s ear in perfect harmony with the echoes in Viktor’s mind. Viktor shudders. Viktor falls.
When he comes to Hasetsu, they’re not in sync anymore. All Viktor’s heard for the last few months are sad, disjointed pieces of Japanese music punctuated by the occasional rendition of stammi vicino, full of longing. If you’re so full of longing, Viktor had thought, why won’t you call?
But now Viktor is in Hasetsu, trading songs with a heartbreakingly stiff Yuuri. Every desperate love song Viktor plays on repeat seems to have no effect. Still, four months in and things are better, Yuuri closer. Viktor gets bolder.
The first time he starts humming along with the jingle from Yuuri’s mind and announces “I like this one, Yuuri, what product is it?” the other man drops his sponge in the sink, and streaks from the kitchen like he’s on fire.
Viktor follows him, of course. Viktor would follow him anywhere.
“All these years,” Yuuri groans, curled up in a ball on the floor of a Yu-topia spare room. “I thought my soulmate and I would have a good laugh, that I had such a huge crush on you before I met them, but you just– you must think I’m a freak. You heard everything.”
“I did hear,” Viktor agrees easily, crouching down beside him, hand light on his knee. “But weren’t you listening to me, too?”
Silly ringtones and love confessions in every language. Russian lullabies on days when a teenage Viktor heard music still, from Yuuri’s exhausted mind, when it was 2am in Japan. Stammi vicino.
“Oh,” Yuuri says, softly, and lets go of his ankles, unfurls. “So you…”
“Want to be your soulmate?” Viktor finishes. “Of course.” Yuuri pushes his face into his knees again. “Yuuri,” he complains.
“Viktor,” the Japanese man says, muffled, “I had to fall asleep to the blaring sound of Vitas and that Russian pop group Serebro for two years. TWO YEARS, Viktor.”
“What?” Viktor says, half offended and half baffled. “I tried to be quiet, when it was nighttime in Japan!” There is a pause. “…you lived in America.”
“Two. Years.” But his brown eyes are peeking up from beneath his arm now. “I got no sleep, you know.”
“I’m very sorry,” Viktor says. He is sorry. “It’s all soothing piano music and Yuri on Ice, from now on. I won’t keep you awake again.”
“Not with music, you won’t.”
“Ah,” Viktor realizes. They don’t get any sleep that night. Viktor is not sorry at all.
Because I’m apparently being active on Tumblr today, and Drunk on You got brought up, I guess have a preview?
Also, if you have no clue what I’m talking about, this is my YOI soulmate AU fic.
Viktor Nikiforov knows that he is beginning to find certain parts of figure skating monotonous.
Same banquets. Same cheers. Same rival skaters, sometimes with different faces and slightly different personalities, but most of them are the same. Sometimes he finds himself confused about what competition he’s winning, what fancy hotel he’s staying at this week, how long it’s been since he saw Christophe or his parents. The days bleed weakly into each other in pastel watercolor, until they’re dirty gray, gray, gray.
But even he notices the difference when he wakes the morning after the short program at the Sochi GPF and the blindingly red alarm clock at his bedside tells him it is, yet again, the day after the short program. Well, little machines break. His hotel room is flipped; the door and bathroom opposite where he’d believed. Well, he gets disoriented sometimes.
It’s impossible to reason out what happens at the mirror.
“Yakov!” He yelps when he catches a glimpse, and Yakov looks equally surprised to see him in the bathroom. When Viktor jumps away, so does Yakov.
Viktor looks at his hands. They’re large, too pink. Wrinkled. Every step he takes is so heavy, so different from dancing in his own lithe athlete’s body, only slightly past its prime. Yakov has arthritis in his knees, he notes painfully.
He’s sitting on the bed, wondering briefly at his own situation, when his mind brings forth tendrils of old conversations. Yakov had been obligated to give him every kind of talk when he turned fourteen, and after one where he was briefly instructed to never follow a fangirl to a private spot, there was another. Vitya, sometimes when soulmates meet they don’t do it… right. The universe gives them as many chances as it takes to perfect that encounter, throws them around in time until they work it out. But, he had emphasized, waving a finger in front of an enraptured younger Viktor’s face, sometimes it knows you can’t fix it on your own. A kiss is the only thing that’ll get you moving again.
Viktor had foolishly assumed he’d meet his soulmate the right way the first time.
He also had foolishly assumed he’d get to live that encounter from within his own body. Not as Yakov, not trapped in a time loop.
But now, this—
Is this too complicated? Whoops. Let me know your thoughts.
Anyway, sorry this chapter is taking so long. Please forgive me. I’m writing all the time. I’m just mostly writing my Masters thesis instead of fanfic, which is... sigh.
This fic is not dead. Or any of my other fanfic. I am dying, personally, but that’s school’s fault. Too de loo, friends!
