Chapter Text
"Yuuuuri! I'm home! And I brought vodka!"
Usually, Yuuri and his roommate walked home from the theater together. But Celestino had given Yuuri a mental health day after the . . . Incident. The Disaster. The Unqualified, Probably Career Ending, Catastrophe. He'd spent it lying sideways on the sofa, cocooned in every blanket that he and Phichit owned, and emerging only for cup noodle breaks and the occasional trip to the bathroom.
Yuuri hadn't even showered. Vodka was probably - definitely - a terrible idea, but he couldn’t help perking up anyway as Phichit dropped his bags on the coffee table and himself on the sofa next to Yuuri's tragic caterpillar impression.
"I also bought incense and dog treats." Phichit leaned forward to rustle through his bags. "I thought we could make an offering in front of Vicchan's photo, and you said he likes the liver ones - oh, Yuuri-"
The sob that broke out of Yuuri's exhausted throat brought a fresh crop of tears with it. Phichit threw an arm around his shoulder and drew him into a sideways hug. "My poor Yuuri-" he started, nuzzling sympathetically into Yuuri's unwashed hair, "-did you not shower today? Maybe we should start with that. You don't want Vicchan to worry about you."
That was true, so Yuuri grudgingly let Phichit dump him into a partly drawn bath and even tried his best to listen when Peach perched himself on the edge of the tub with his least suicidal hamster on one shoulder, babbling about whatever happened to be at the top of his feed.
Am I a suicide risk? Yuuri wondered. He didn’t think he was, but had he put the idea into Phichit’s head? Maybe he should make a few casual remarks about how his dream was to die of old age.
Yuuri didn't want to drown himself. Even if he’d like the idea of spending eternity as a sopping wet ghost, he would never choose to spend it haunting the tiny bathroom of an American apartment.
Peach hadn’t been able to buy the right kind of incense. It wasn’t his fault, anymore than it was his fault that Yuuri would have preferred to pay his respects (and beg for Vicchan’s forgiveness) privately.
He tried to be properly grateful for the gesture.
At least the dog treats were (almost) the right kind.
Phichit bowed and said something beyond Yuuri's kindergarten knowledge of Thai. He did catch his own name, and the words for ‘best friend’ and started to tear up a little.
Yuuri bowed and told Vicchan that he loved him, and that he was so, so sorry. They sat together on Yuuri's bed until the stick had burned itself out, and then Phichit's nearly saintly patience finally collapsed into a black hole that drew them both, inevitably, vodkawards.
"I can't believe they replaced you with Mickey!"
"It's not like Celestino had any choice, after I - after I -" Yuuri couldn't bring himself to put his failure into words. "Amway," he sniffled, "Mickey is-was my understudy. And he's over the moon. Dancing as Sara’s prince in Sleeping Beauty? It's his dream."
"He's probably been having the same one every night since he was twelve." Phichit wrinkled his nose. "But that doesn't mean he should get your spot. We all know that he's going to make the romance way too real and everyone's going to be super uncomfortable. Plus his spins are maybe, like, forty percent as good as yours. Let me top you off," he added, noticing that Yuuri had already drained his fourth shot.
Phichit had splurged on Viktor Nikiforov branded vodka. As soon as Yuuri noticed, had he'd burst into tears all over again, fogging up his already tear-smudged glasses crying about how he didn't deserve this friendship until Peach had cut him off by stuffing a pizza bite into his mouth.
"I'm going to crawl into a hole somewhere and die," Yuuri announced.
"Yuuri! Nooooo.”
"Then. Then. Then I'm going to eat all the pizza bites in Detroit, so I get too fat to dance, and no one will ever expect anything from me again."
"No one expects anything from you now," said Phichit, and then, "Yuuri, that's not what I meant, put the pillow down. Ouch!"
The following tussle was violent, but brief, and when it was over Phichit threw his arm around Yuuri, sipped a tiny sip of vodka, and confessed, in low, conspiratorial tones, that he had an Idea.
"I'm not really in the mood to watch The King and the Dancer, Peach."
"Not what I meant. This time." Phichit set his glass down and took both of Yuuri's hands in his. "Yuuri. Let's summon a demon."
Yuuri's eyes opened so wide that his glasses slid down his nose and nearly fell off his face. "What?"
"We should summon a demon! Don't make that face; it's a perfect idea. We summon a demon, and then Mickey 'Steal your role' Crispino gets food poisoning and Ciao Ciao gives you back your crown!"
"Phichet!" Yuuri hiccuped sadly. "That's so mean."
"Okay, okay, maybe Emil finally gets up the nerve to confess and they run off to elope. And then Celestino would really have to make you principal again! I mean, what else is he going to do? Sit and pray that J.J. comes back from Canada?"
"He could give the role to you," Yuuri suggested.
"I could never," Phichit said, seriously. "Swear on my hamsters. Unless Ciao Ciao asked really, really nicely."
Yuuri snorted.
"But I could ask the demon to get me my own principal role next season! C'mon, it's so easy." Phichit unlocked his phone and started scrolling. "I saw this girl on Youtube lay out all the steps last week, and then I found a circle on this weird old geocities site for demonologists - we just have to get chalk, and candles, and all the herbs are stuff we could raid from the community garden-"
"Peach," Yuuri groaned, "you don't need to make a pact with a demon to get principle roles. You're not the one who messed up a leap so badly that he demolished half the set."
"At least no one was hurt? Yuuri, if you really don't want to summon a demon, we could just drink some water and update our vision boards-"
"No, let's do it," said Yuuri, staring hard at the line-drawing of Viktor Nikiforov's beautiful face etched into the bottle of rapidly depleting vodka. "I don't want to poison Mickey, but . . . can you ask a demon for whatever you want? Do you think you’re allowed to pay in installments?"
"It says you have to trade something of equal value. That probably doesn't have to mean your immortal soul, right? And for this specific demon the wish has to be," Phichit squinted past all the flashing text and the glitter left behind by the animated mouse cursor, "related in some way to the artistic process. This is practically meditation, really. It’s probably like The Secret."
"All right," said Yuuri, standing up so fast that his roommate barely managed to save the last of the pizza backs from an ignominious ending. "What herbs do we need?"
"-and I know Mrs. Malinowski grows sage and thyme because she told me when she gave me the recipe for that chicken thing last month-"
"Sssh. And hold the flashlight steady, Phichit!"
"Sorry! Whoa, hold on, how many leaf points does that one have? I think it might be poisonous."
"What? Why would someone grow poison in the community garden?"
"I don't know! . . . They wouldn't, right?"
". . . we really should have brought gloves."
"Haha, whoops! Sorry, Yu-kun. Oh, there's some mint!"
"It's a good thing Mrs. Jiang doesn't let the kids bring chalk into their house."
"I can't believe we stole a child's chalk bucket for this," moaned Yuuri, sketching furiously.
"Borrowed," Phichit corrected. He pointed. "That line's crooked or something."
"Hmm?" Yuuri sat back on his heels and wiped a few drops of sweat from his brow, leaving behind a pasty streak of pink chalk. The ritual guide had recommended it as the demon's favorite color. "Oh, you're right."
Yuuri scooted over on the linoleum, smudged out the line, and painstakingly redrew it with his tongue between his teeth. "I never thought I'd have a reason to be grateful that our kitchen was retiled in landlord beige."
"I know, right? Oooh, do you think landlords like beige because it makes it easier to summon demons?"
“Probably." Yuuri sat back on his heels again. "How does that look?"
"Perfect! Now we just have to light the candles and make the offering."
" . . . there are still some pizza bites left?"
Phichit shook his head, frowning. "The offering has to be something of 'significant artistic merit'. Like a sketch, or a song, or a dance. I don't think overcooked pizza bites fit the bill. Maybe if we had a bowl of my dad's green curry-"
"I could do the consecutive entrechats from the second act of Giselle? Those don't take up much space-"
"Yuuri! That's so boring. I bet that's what every dancer picks. Don't you want this demon to think you're cool?"
" . . . yes?"
"Hell yeah, you do. Hmmm."
Phichit glanced vaguely (and still a little tipsily) around the room. They'd both sobered up during the midnight plant heist, and he'd been more careful than Yuuri in the first place, nursing his second shot for at least half-an-hour.
After all, Phichit still had a career.
Or maybe he just knew his limits better than Yuuri did.
It still took a few seconds of confused blinking before his eyes landed on the collapsible pole that Yuuri hadn't gotten around to putting away after his last practice session.
"Yuuri."
Following his gaze, Yuuri blanched. "Phichit. No."
"Yuuri, yes! Demons love pole dancing," Phichit added, sagely, and obviously trying not to giggle. "Everyone knows that."
"Absolutely not."
"Yuuri!" Phichit jumped down gracefully from his perch on their counter and grabbed Yuuri's face, squishing his cheeks in both hands. "You're so talented! And sexy! And demons are very into sexy things, so it'll probably give you a discount."
"More like pay me to stop."
Yuuri pushed himself to his feet and swayed his way over to where they'd left the vodka. Even more than half empty, the bottle had a good heft to it. It was a quality product (Viktor Nikiforov never lent his name to an inferior one) and expensive; Yuuri wondered if Celestino or maybe even Crispino had gone halfsies on it with Peach as a pity gift.
Or as part of Yuuri's severance package.
He took a good, hard look at the bottle as he unscrewed the cap. The etching was just as pretty as ever. Yuuri was pretty sure that his lips would just fit into the space carved out for Viktor's miniature forehead, and, if he'd been alone in the room, he might even have tested his theory.
Hypothesis. Hypotheory. Hippotheory?
Hypothekiss. Ha.
Instead, Yuuri did the civilized thing. He took a long chug of vodka, slammed down the bottle, and wiped his mouth with one hand while he tugged down the hem of his joggers with the other. "Let's do this."
"Woooo!"
"Oh my god!” Yuuri hissed. “Quiet hours."
"Wooooooo. Alexa! Play Sia's Chandelier."
". . ." Yuuri stared at his roommate from underneath the hem of the shirt he was pulling over his head. "We don't have Alexa, Peach."
"We don't have Alexa." Phichit pivoted towards his own room. "I'll get my speakers."
"-one, two, three, one, two, three, drink-"
Phichit tiptoed around the summoning circle, lighting candles, while Yuuri hung upside down, thigh muscles tight around the pole, and dizzily tried to remember what move came next in his practice routine.
After an eternity of agonizing amnesia (four seconds) his fellow student looked up from setting a match to his limited edition 'Pineapple Sunrise' candle (Phichit hoped the demon would appreciate his personal sacrifice, too), and called out, "This is the part with the spin!"
It was all a blur after that.
Before Yuuri knew it, it was over, and Phichit was dragging him over to sit cross-legged between a pair of lit candles and prompting him to follow along in something so garbled that it barely sounded like a real language. But he'd heard at least one fellow dancer say the same thing about Japanese, so what did Yuuri know?
For no reason at all, they both held their breath after the last syllable of the chant rattled out of them. They almost never ran the unit's unreliable air conditioner. The air outside the open window was warm and still.
There was very little logical reason for the flames of all five candles to gutter suddenly and violently in their respective pools of wax.
But they did.
And then both the overhead bulbs went out at once, leaving their wall-facing apartment in nearly total darkness.
And when the lights came back a few seconds later, they brought a demon with them.
No one with even slightly functional eyes could have mistaken it for an extremely agile burglar in an out-of-season Halloween costume. Not with the feathers - little black quills where anyone human would have had arm hairs, and long pinions along the bare upper arms and the thighs - actually poking themselves out of the pebbly black chicken skin. Or the rich, almost-but-not-quite-putrid smell that instantly filled the room with a memory of overripe fruit in the bin and chicken bones waiting on the counter to be dumped into the stock pot.
Or the actual bird’s feet, scraping at the linoleum and stretching halfway up the demon's calves.
The feathers were everywhere, even on the demon's face, where the soft-looking white down along the demon's cheekbones provided the kind of dazzlingly reflective surface the ice sheet in the Arctic offers up to the endless summer sky. And even higher up, instead of the peacock's crown that Yuuri was more than half expecting, the demon had a pair of velvety antlers just long enough for April.
No wings in sight, feathery or otherwise. Maybe the demon had politely tucked those away to keep from knocking over everything in their apartment's tiny kitchen.
"Okay," squeaked Phichit, in a voice at least two octaves higher than his usual Peach-pitch, "I did not expect that to work."
"Excuse me?" Yuuri hissed.
"I don't know! This was just supposed to be a fun project to get your mind off of everything! We're both terrible at crafts!"
"Phichit!"
"It's not my fault you can't knit!"
The demon cleared its throat.
Something about the exact shade of the chips of sapphire studding the base of its antlers, and the same shade of blue that spilled into every corner of the demon's pupilless eyes like a bucket of cerulean paint, had a fistful of Yuuri's synapses in its grip. It had just given them a very hard yank.
. . . Yuuri knew that shade of blue-
The burnished almost-black contour feathers along its neck and shoulders turned holographic with navy and turquoise as the demon took in the apartment with an unimpressed sniff of its pointed nose. The tip of the long tail curled around its legs dripped something that looked and hissed like poison onto the floor. "Not exactly the Winter Palace, is it?"
(They were never going to get their deposit back.)
There was something about the huff of its voice. There was something familiar about, well, about its everything, all the lines and curves of it that were human and not bird, the width of its shoulders and the flex of its thighs, but Yuuri couldn't quite-
"Your offering wasn't bad," conceded the demon, as it sniffed the air and made an incomprehensible face. "I would give it an eight out of ten," it continued, clearly distracted, "with a bonus point for originality, since everyone usually does solos from Bluebird or Swan Lake - Hello. What are you doing down there?"
It blinked down at where Yuuri was idiotically spread across the wax and chalk-stained floor. Phichit was behind the demon, and he was clearly using his momentary tactical reprieve to film Yuuri's last few moments of uneviscerated life with his phone.
"Uh."
One of the demon's hands landed on its hip, and it sighed again in a way that very clearly suggested that it didn't have all day. The feeling of familiarity prodding at Yuuri's prefrontal cortex squeezed a handful of neurons in frustration and started shrieking.
"Danseur," the demon said, confidently. Its tongue flicked out to taste the air of the apartment, and it added, "Disappointed danseur, even with those hips. Someone must have stolen a part clearly intended for you, da? Well, that's my-"
"Viktor Nikiforov?"
"Mm?" The demon actually choked, pressing its hand against its mouth. "Yes?" The demon blinked. "What?"
"What?"
"You first," said the demon. "I'm not the one who drew the summoning circle."
"V-Viktor Nik-Nikiforov," stuttered Yuuri. "I want Viktor Nikiforov-"
"-to break his ankle coming down from a cabriole?" suggested the demon, rolling its eyes. "Perhaps you'd like him to break his leg crossing the street, or humiliate himself at the next gala he attends, or to have a falling out with his company, or simply misspeak so disastrously in front of a reporter that-"
"No!" Yuuri burst out, horrified. Just thinking of anything . . . like any of that happening to Viktor made him feel sick to his stomach. "Viktor is my idol! He's the most beautiful dancer I've ever - I've looked up to him for my whole career - I only want-"
"Ah." The demon sounded bored, now. Disappointed. "You'd like me to make this paragon fall in love with you."
"What? No!" Yuuri squeaked, horrified all over again. Aghast 2, Electric Boogaloo. "That's - I'd never - I couldn't take advantage of him like that." Yuuri took a deep breath. "I just . . . if I could meet him, and tell him how much I admire him, and-" Yuuri's voice dwindled almost down to a whisper, "-dance on the same stage as him, just once . . ."
"You'd trade your immortal soul for that?" The demon flashed Yuuri a mouthful of pointed teeth. "How modest."
"Oh, um. Well. You came in exchange for a dance, so I thought-"
"You thought you could pay off your whole wish on the pole?" It sounded amused. "Hmph. Well. At least the first part is easy to grant," said the demon, and then it did.
It did something.
The candlelight flickered, and the demon smoothed a clawed hand through the white feathers down the back of its head, and they grew longer, and darker, and softer, and looser and all the down on its face and its limbs shrank away to reveal pale, human skin, and its horns retreated into its skull and the bright blue of its eyes shrank into a ring around a suddenly visible pupil and the fangs receded into his slight smile until he had perfectly normal teeth.
And a perfectly adorable nose.
A more ignorant amateur demonologist might have assumed that the demon had shapeshifted, or something, but Yuuri had stared at posters of his idol every night, and fallen asleep with visions of his dancing playing before his eyes.
He had watched all the interviews, cut out every advertisement, and tracked down bootleg copies on unmentionable parts of the internet of every performance Russia had made even slightly public, and now, with blinding, sobriety-inducing clarity, Yuuri understood why everything - the demon's eyes, its stance, his build, his expressions, his voice - had all seemed so amazingly, impossibly familiar.
"Ahem," coughed Viktor Nikiforov. "This is quite the coincidence, nyet?
Viktor Nikiforov was in his apartment.
Viktor Nikiforov was in Yuuri's apartment, and he was a demon, and he was wearing nothing but what the demon had been wearing: a sort of crossed-backed harness that barely covered anything but his nipples, and something a little like a fundoshi, except long in the front, and long down the back, and with both pieces linked unreliably by a pair of delicate gold chains that looked like they might fall apart at a touch instead of more wrapped-around cloth and maybe it wasn't actually anything like a fundoshi at all but Yuuri had no idea at the moment what it might be called in English because as desensitized as living in an onsen had made him to nudity this was Viktor Nikiforov and Yuuri had never seen so much of him before, at least not in the flesh, and all the blood had rushed away from his brain and Yuuri was going to pass out-
"Are you all right?" Viktor - the demon - whoever it was that looked and sounded and laughed like Yuuri's embarrassing celebrity crush, had dropped to his knees and was looking at Yuuri with a highly convincing imitation of concern. "Yuuri, you have to breathe-"
"Viktor Nikiforov is a demon." Phichit breathed out for him. He sounded surprised, but obviously the shock hadn’t been enough to make him forget how his phone camera worked. The shutter noise had gone off thirty times in the last two minutes. "This explains so much."
"P-Peach-" Yuuri managed to gasp. "You can't - without permission-"
"But, Yuuuu-kun-"
"It's fine." Viktor waved away Yuuri's concern. "I mean, thank you for defending me so gallantly - and breathe, please - but photographs I'd prefer not to be taken never turn out very well."
(There was an astonishingly small amount of paparazzi material on someone as famous as Viktor. Yuuri had always been torn between frustration and gratitude on Viktor’s behalf. The relief usually won out - it would have been nice to get the occasional candid shot of Makkachin, but Yuuri didn't really want to see pap shots of Viktor engaging in whatever steamy affairs The World's Most Attractive Bachelor undoubtedly engaged in.)
Viktor - the demon? - attempted to extend a hand, but the edge of the warding circle halted his movement with a shower of sparks, freezing his arm in place. He gave Yuuri a plaintive look that was more than half pout. "May I touch you?"
Without even pausing to consider how dangerous it might be to say yes, Yuuri nodded. And in the next instant he felt Viktor' Nikiforov's cool fingers stroking his very hot cheek. He cupped Yuuri's jaw. "What has you so upset, Yuuri? You've got the man of your dreams right in front of you."
His eyes really were a dizzying, hypnotic blue, and, until seven minutes ago, Yuuri would have assumed that was hyperbole. He could feel his staccato breathing starting to even out on its own.
"I-I-"
"He has anxiety," Phichit chimed in, helpfully.
"I see. Then this is all very understandable, Yuuri," Viktor Nikiforov said, seriously, almost as though he didn't think Yuuri was a detestable weakling, "but I don't want to make you feel anxious. I'm only here to give you whatever your heart desires.” He tilted Yuuri’s face up towards his, and smoothed back his hair. “But you have to ask me properly. Who do you want me to be to you? A rival? A father-figure?" Viktor winked. "A lover?"
"No! N-no." Yuuri shook his head, pushing his cheek into Viktor's hold. He could feel the tears welling up at the corners of his eyes, and he shamelessly pulled Viktor's hand away to press against his heart so that they could both feel the way it was fluttering like a frightened bird against the cage of his ribs.
"You don't have to change anything about who you already are. I don't want a - a performance." Yuuri flushed. "I mean, not that kind of performance." He met Viktor’s stunning gaze with his own inadequate one, and tried to steel himself. "I'll do anything. Please, just. Um. Just." Yuuri twiddled his thumbs, chewed his lip, and finally managed to burst out with, "Be my étoile, Viktor!"
Viktor's heart-shaped hyper-beam was nothing like his professional smile.
"Sure!"
"Now that that's settled," Viktor gestured at the summoning circle. "Would you mind?"
"Huh? Oh, of course! Uh, how do I-"
"Just smudge out the lines here, and here," Viktor pointed. His nails, Yuuri noticed, were painted a rosy, slightly shimmering pink. He was pretty sure that Viktor's favorite shade; he wore it at least fifteen percent more often than other polishes. Viktor smiled at him again, a tiny, conspiratorial grin, just between the two of them. "You do trust me, don't you, Yuuri?"
"Yes? Of course!" He was Viktor Nikiforov. Yuuri would have cheerfully offered him a kidney. Smudge out the chalk lines that were potentially the only thing stopping a demon from going on a deadly rampage across Detroit? He wouldn't even hesitate.
(Anyway, if all Viktor wanted was to fill the streets with blood, he could have done that back in St. Petersburg.)
Still. Yuuri glanced at Peach for confirmation (they were both on the lease) but Phichit was too busy with whatever he was trying to do on his phone to give Yuuri anything but a distracted nod.
A deep, ujjayi inhale filled Yuuri’s lungs and stomach. The runes had started to glow with a faint golden light after Viktor had appeared in the circle, but they still smeared away like normal chalk when he rubbed them out with his thumb
All his breath escaped at once in a sigh of relief. Some tiny, irrational part of Yuuri had been lightly terrified that he might have trapped ballet's greatest legend in his kitchen permanently.
"Now that that's taken care off-" Viktor crawled out of the circle and settled himself against Yuuri's side, tipping his head onto Yuuri's shoulder. Some of his hair drifted in front of Yuuri's mouth and he immediately stopped breathing again.
He couldn't breathe on Viktor's hair. It would be like going after it with a spray bottle of spit, vodka, and mediocrity. It would be some kind of sacrilege. Could you commit sacrilege against a demon?
Probably, if the demon was Viktor Nikiforov.
Viktor took Yuuri's hand in his, and pulled a cellphone out of thin air to fiddle with in the other. "There! But my flight doesn't leave until morning, and it's too late to check into a hotel - I know! Yuuri! Let's sleep together!"
His puppy eyes could have rivaled the late Vicchan's. It was only the terrible and forbidden knowledge that his bedroom contained seven official posters, three thumbtacked ads, and a bootleg plushie of Viktor dressed as Romeo and nestled next to his pillow had the power to stop Yuuri from dragging Viktor into it and using him as a living, breathing dakimakura.
"That's a bit. Can't you just-?" Yuuri gestured vaguely. "Poof? Back to Russia?" And away from my apartment, please, so that I can go scream into my pillow for the next week?
"Eh. If someone summoned me, sure." Viktor shrugged. "But no one there knows I'm a demon, you know. That's our little secret."
Viktor winked at him again.
"And it's so far . . . I don't really feel like going out for such a big meal at this hour. Besides, planes are fun! They never seem to run out of champagne. Do you like champagne, Yuuri?" Viktor tossed his phone back into an invisible space pocket and snuggled even closer against Yuuri's stiff, corpselike side. "I already know you like vodka. We even have the same favorite brand!"
"You two have so much in common. It really sounds like you should have a drink together." Phichit faked a giant yawn as he stood. "Not me, though. I'd better get to bed now if I don't want to be a zombie at morning call. Yuuri, you'll take good care of our guest, right?"
"I-"
Peach was already halfway across the room. "Okay, great! I love your work, Viktor! Don't do anything I wouldn't do!"
Viktor twisted like an especially graceful snake to look Yuuri right in the face. "What sort of things do you and Chulanont do together, Yuuri?"
"We, uh. We dance?"
Viktor pulled himself away from Yuuri's side and rose gracefully into the air. Then he extended an expectant hand back down. "Shall we?"
They danced without music, since Phichit was asleep. They danced with vodka, tangoing back and forth across the modest square footage of the Chulanont/Katsuki residence.
Eventually, even Viktor Nikiforov ran out of ways to slide them soundlessly across the wooden floors in a pair of borrowed socks (the fuzzy pink ones with the poodle faces embroidered on the toes that Yuuri had only bought in the first place because they'd reminded him of Viktor) and some borrowed sweatpants (if Yuuri actually seen Viktor dance in two strips of silk held up mainly out of habit, his nosebleed would have painted the walls).
That was when he drew them both down to the kitchen floor, which he repaired with a flick of his nails when Yuuri shyly mentioned their deposit, and invited Yuuri to talk with all the same elegance he might have used to invite a tsarina to tea.
"Tell me about yourself," Viktor suggested, and for some reason, Yuuri did. He told him about the onsen in Hatsetsu, about Phichit and Minako-san and his mother's katsudon. ("It's better than anything you can eat in Detroit"). He told Viktor about the kinds of music he warmed up to, his favorite movies and Phichit's favorite movie. ("Just the one movie?" "Sometimes you can bribe him into watching something else, but it's an uphill battle.") He told him about every cute dog he'd seen in the last month.
He told him about Vicchan.
He told Viktor about losing the part he'd worked so hard to win to Michele Crispino. ("-who will probably dance it better than me, anyway-") and about every other dancer in the company, and even about how he'd spent this entire conversation expecting Phichit to jump back out his room, camera at the ready and wearing a fake mustache.
"Phichit thinks we're going to kiss," Yuuri confided. They had finished off the vodka. ("No one ever wakes up with a hangover when they drink with me, Yuuri! At least, not anyone I like.")
"Not on a first date," Viktor said, primly, and then explained, with obvious pride, that he'd done the same thing to Phichit's memory that he'd done to his cellphone. His demonic powers had melted every recent memory of himself in Phichit's head ("It's perfectly safe!") into a kind of gray fuzz that would eventually resolve itself into something more innocuous, like a failed demon summoning, or just a night of drinking and watching sad movies so that Yuuri could cry about something that wasn’t his dog.
And then, Viktor said, he had made everything extra certain by turning himself selectively invisible, so that even if Peach did wander out of his room for a late night glass of water, all he would see would be Yuuri delivering a particularly lovestruck monologue to their refrigerator.
"It really is harmless, Yuuri. It's one of the first things demons learn to do! But it's still a pretty good trick, isn’t it? I can juggle, too, do you want to see?"
At some point, Yuuri stopped talking entirely to stare in amazed, adoring silence at Viktor's face, drinking in every pore, and crease, and nearly invisible freckle - all the details typically washed by stage lights or stage makeup or just a lot of unnecessary Photoshop, because Viktor's face was a masterpiece, actually-
"Thank you! I made it myself."
-and, at some point, right about the time that the sun started making coy overtures to their windowsill, Yuuri drifted off finally into an inescapable sleep. When he woke up a little past ten, facedown and drooling on a sofa cushion, with a blanket mostly bunched at his feet, the apartment didn’t have anyone in it other than Yuuri and a trio of sleeping hamsters.
There was absolutely nothing to show that Living Legend (and living-adjacent demon) Viktor Nikiforov had ever been there at all, except for a pair of missing socks and a note saying 'See you soon!' in Russian, with a tiny heart and a translation written underneath in barely legible hiragana. Yuuri never even saw it. It drifted facedown underneath the coffee table, and eventually ended up as part of the lining in Phichit's hamster habitat.
So, all things considered, it wasn't much of a challenge for Yuuri to convince himself that it had all been a strange (but wonderful) dream.