#[clasps my sweaty palms together] she has so much potential i swear here’s a list of headcanons to prove it

[duvewing]

[kiaronna]

Super happy to see you're working on the soulmates AU.9! I love this collection and 'With The Tides'. So hmm, I don't know if anything like this has already been suggested, but here's a potential soulmates prompt : red string of fate AU inspired by Ghibli's witches and detailed backgrounds. During a trip (school trip, maybe?), Yuuko drags Yuuri inside a trinket shop owned by an old woman who swears every customer exits with the thing they most need in life right this moment. Yuuko picks (1/2)

something practical, like lunch if she’s hungry. Yuuri thinksthe hag is a little crazy, but is drawn to a small red sewing thread. He buysthe stuff on an impulse even though he doesn’t sew. It’d be up to you how andwhen one end of the magical thread reaches Victor, as well as how and whenYuuri finally manages to find him. (2/2) 

What, that’s so sweet of you to say, and sweet of you to find meon here to say so! I’ll put this on my soulmate AU list, but as you canprobably tell it takes me like a month to write one of them. ANYWAY so youdon’t have to wait 9 years for me to write this, here’s a drabble for it:

Katsuki Yuuri has never put much faith into “fate.” If he leftthings to fate, rather than hard work and sweaty, gasping nights at the rinkand ballet studio, he’d be an even worse skater than he is already.

Still, the idea is sweet. When they get home from the trinketshop where they bought the bright red string from a mysterious old woman, Yuuriplays with the thread spool in his pocket on the train ride home until Yuukoasks to see it, cuts off a tiny bit of it and ties it to his pinky.

“It’s just like the old legend!” She proclaims. Yuuko loves allthings beautiful, and this means Viktor Nikiforov, axels, and romantic Japaneselore. “Where the red string of fate will lead you to your soulmate, where it’ssupposed to lead you to somebody that you’ll make history with.”

They smile and laugh about it. Yuuri forgets to take the little stringoff before he tumbles into bed at the end of the long day.

When he wakes in the morning, the string isn’t short anymore. Atfirst, in the drowsy haze Yuuri always wakes up to, this makes sense: it grewovernight, like hair. After he washes his face and clothes himself properly,this just makes him panic. It’s long, red as rubies, and extending tautlythrough the wall of his room. He tries to slide the string off his pinky, andhis fingers wave through it like a crimson beam of light.

He tries to calmly go talk to his mother about it. Mariintercepts him in the hallway first. There’s a red string hanging limp andloose from her pinky, dripping across the floors of the onsen.

So Yuuri does not calmly talk to his mother about it. He tellsno one at all. He has anxiety, he knows, and this must be it: he’s mentallybroken. Usually it takes a skating competition to do that, not a school fieldtrip to a trinket shop, but Yuuri isn’t going to question it too deeply. Nobodyelse can see the threads like he can. So he skates, he dances, and he waits forthe red strings that loop around everyone’s hands to disappear from his sight.

They don’t.

Viktor Nikiforov hates being able to see them. He likes beingsurprised as much as he like surprises, and suddenly it’s not surprising at allwhen two of his Russian rinkmates confess to a secret relationship. When Yakovand Lillia start having marriage problems, Viktor already knows—he sees the redthread fraying, darkening, long before Lillia starts taking longer and longertrips out of Saint Petersburg.

No, nothing much is exciting anymore. Golden medals feel like agaudy noose, tight.

The red string, at the Sochi GPF, feels it’s about to cut offhis pinky. It hurts. And then, at the banquet, when he’s trying todistract Yakov so Mila can sneak a bit more champagne, he feels it yank.

Viktor looks. The red string has always gone off, infinite andincomprehensible, into the distance. Now it’s short, tangible, and being tuggedon by a very, very drunk Japanese man. Knuckles white, he pulls on it again andagain as he totters, fluidly drunk, into several spins, champagne bottle as redas the string in his other hand. It’s dragging Viktor’s heart out his pinky throughhis veins, splintering them as it passes through.

Viktor goes to him.

“I didn’t know I could do this,” Katsuki whispers, punctuatingit with a giggle, “the thread’s never let me touch it before.” Viktorblinks.

“You can see it,” he realizes.

“You haven’t told me that I must be drunk,” Yuuri murmurs, eyeswidening and sparkling. “For saying that. Everyone else thinks I’m rambling.Rambling drunk.”

“You are drunk.” He’s drunk. He’s beautiful. He’s Viktor’s.

Yuuri tugs again, and Viktor stumbles forward withoutmuch thought about it.

“Dance with me?” Yuuri questions.

It should be predictable, that he falls in love while they dance,string vibrating and shortening to almost nothing as they clasp hands. Viktorhas seen this happen, with others in his life, with others connectedinextricably by the string. Viktor is surprised anyway.

 ———–

There’s a handsome foreigner in the onsen.

Yuuri runs, and runs, and the last thing he expects, besidesViktor standing naked in the onsen, is that his string leads straight to theother man, blinding blood red through the pearly steam of the hot springs.

He could just be looking for a distraction, Minako says. Yuuriagrees. Yuuri thinks that Viktor may even agree, may think he’s here to temporarilycoach a man who lets his anxiety strangle his already average skatingabilities. But the string—the red string of fate, weaving between them—it promisessomething else. A simple promise: they’ll make history together.

He keeps this promise to himself. He knows it’s crazy.

———

Months later, when they’re lying side by side in bed, Viktor’sbreaths even and deep in slumber, a sleepless Yuuri manages to wind the stringaround his finger and pull experimentally.

Viktor moans. “Stop that,” he scolds gently, “Not everybodyrolls out of bed at 10am. Some of us will be out running by seven and you’remaking it very difficult to get my beauty sleep.”

“You don’t need beauty sleep,” Yuuri responds automatically, andthen, with a shivering realization, throws his leg over Viktor’s hip, straddleshim and takes the champion’s face between his hands. Half lidded blue eyesgreet him. “You can see the threads too. Viktor.”

Viktor puts their palms together, the ones with the stringsattached, kisses Yuuri’s pinky tenderly. “I thought you already knew that,” hehums. “Now. Sleep, my nocturnal student.”

Yuuri does not sleep. He rolls over on the mattress, lets Viktorsleepily move to spoon him, and smiles helplessly into the dark.

 ————–

The cashier at the ring shop does not understand.

“We’ll take those,” Yuuri says firmly, pointing.

“They’re very small,” the cashier replies, baffled, “small, forwedding rings. Are you sure you…”

Yuuri lifts the hand, points at one gloved finger. “Theygo on our pinkies.” The cashier starts to wrap the bands up, to tap at theregister, and Yuuri feels a hand on his back. He can’t bear to look and see theexpression on the other man’s face, not yet. “I’m sure,” he says, quietly. Hefeels a tug, light and experimental and loving, humming through his fingertipand his veins up into his heart. “I’m sure.”