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The first thing Yuri heard as he walked down the hall towards his apartment was the shrill sound of a baby crying.
Yuri's shoulders tensed up instinctively. Please be something simple, he thought. Please be something obvious. He braced himself and opened the apartment door.
Otabek was pacing around the front room, bouncing Yuri's half-sister Nina up and down in his arms. The look he gave Yuri when he saw him was so haggard and desperate that Yuri instinctively held his arms out to take her. "I'm sorry," Otabek said, handing her over. "I have to pee so badly."
"It's fine, I've got her," Yuri said, and Otabek moved with wincingly slow steps towards the bathroom. "How long has she been crying?"
"Twenty minutes. I don't know what's wrong. It's none of the usual things on the list."
The list was a literal list they had taped to their fridge, cobbled together out of the eighty thousand parenting articles and videos they'd consumed in the last two weeks. Whenever Nina started crying, it was hard for either of them to think straight, so they just wrote down everything that could possibly be wrong and went down the list from top to bottom. Even though Yuri was sure Otabek had already checked most of the things on the list, he went over to the fridge and looked it over again.
Diaper. Yuri checked it and it was dry. Hungry. No, her last feeding was scheduled for an hour ago and there was an empty bottle on the counter. Needs to burp. Doubtful, there was a spit-up cloth crumpled next to the bottle. Yuri looked around the front room and saw an abandoned pacifier and crumpled swaddling blanket on the couch, so clearly Soother and Swaddle had done fuck-all.
Too hot or too cold. The apartment was a little warm, but all Nina was wearing was a lightweight onesie printed with little cartoon cats. Clothes itchy or uncomfortable. Extremely doubtful--the onesie was one of the ones Victor and Yuuri had bought for her, and it was made out of some artisanal cotton that was super-soft and probably cost more than Yuri's entire wardrobe.
Well, that was everything on the easy portion of the list. That left the scary portion of the list with all the illnesses. Yuri lifted Nina up in his arms so he could look at her more closely. She continued to wail, her little face red and crumpled, her cheeks wet with tears. It was only in the last week that she had started crying actual tears--apparently it took a while for babies to start making them--and it made both Yuri and Otabek feel ten times worse when she got upset now.
"Oh, cry, cry, cry," Yuri said, rocking her back and forth in his arms. "Your life is so hard, huh? You get to hang out with Beka while I have to go talk to accountants. I should make you go talk to accountants."
He was hoping the sound of his voice might distract her attention, but that was wishful thinking. She liked Otabek better than him, anyway, and hearing Otabek's voice hadn't been helping. "Shit," Yuri muttered under his breath, and looked over the list of illnesses for the ones that seemed the least scary. Gas/constipation. "Beka, has she pooped yet today?" Yuri called.
"Not while I've been with her. What about when she was with you?"
"No." Yuri hadn't had to change a dirty diaper since yesterday. "Maybe she's backed up."
"You should try that thing we saw in that video."
It was like the vaguest statement he could've made. They'd watched literally hundreds of videos. "What thing in what video?"
"Where you pedal their legs around like they're on a bike."
Oh, actually, Yuri did remember that one. He carried Nina over to her changing table, set her down, and got out his phone to watch it again. He always felt like a jerk when he had to leave her crying so he could watch something on his phone, but he had zero confidence in his ability to do anything baby-related without watching someone else do it first.
He watched the way the woman in the video did it, pedaling and stretching and scrunching the legs of a happily smiling baby. Yuri eyed his screaming, teary-eyed sister and felt kind of doubtful. "Okay," he said, setting the phone aside. "Let's try it."
He gingerly took her tiny, twitchy legs in his hands and started moving them in a pedaling motion. Then he stretched them out until they were straight, and then folded them up towards her stomach.
He heard a high-pitched but very distinct toot come from her diaper. Nina's crying dropped out for a second, and she made that weird, pop-eyed expression that she always got when she was surprised by something. Between the fart and her look of bewilderment, Yuri couldn't help but snicker. "Okay, that did something," he said. "Should we try it again?"
Nina's face went back into wet-wobbly-crying mode, so Yuri repeated the series of leg stretches, a little more confidently this time. Pedal, pedal, stretch, fold--another high-pitched toot came from her diaper, longer this time. "Holy shit, Beka, it's working!" Yuri called.
Yuri heard the toilet flush, the sound of the tap running, and then Otabek came back into the front room, wiping his wet hands on his sweatpants. "Really?"
Yuri demonstrated another round of stretches. Nina's full-throated crying had mellowed into normal fussiness now that the trapped gas was being released. "Good girl, Ninochka," Otabek said with relief, leaning down to press a kiss against the top of her head.
"Hey, I'm the one doing all the work here," Yuri complained. "Where's my praise?"
He was mostly just joking, but Otabek wrapped his arms around Yuri and gave him an extremely real and earnest side-hug. "Thank you," he said. "I was starting to panic right before you got here."
It's not like parenting was a competition, but Yuri still felt secretly pleased that he'd been the one to get her to stop crying this time. Usually Otabek was much better at it than he was. "Do you think I should just keep doing this until she goes?" Yuri asked, pedaling Nina's legs again.
"I think she might already be going," Otabek said, nodding at her. "She's got that look on her face."
Sure enough, Nina had that look of scrunched-face intensity that she always got when she pooped. "Oh, hell yeah," Yuri said triumphantly. Then he remembered the context of his triumph and felt a flash of embarrassment. "Fuck," he said. "How is baby shit suddenly the highlight of my day?"
"It always feels good to ace a new technical element," Otabek said. "That was definitely a +5 GOE to parenting."
Yuri snorted. "Okay," he said. "So which do you want to do, change her diaper or make dinner?"
"I'll make dinner," Otabek said. "That way you and her can have some bonding time."
Yuri was pretty fucking sure changing a filthy diaper didn't count as bonding time, but Otabek was the one who had been listening to her cry for the last twenty minutes. "Okay," Yuri said. He watched Otabek head with obvious relief towards the kitchen and silently awarded himself a +5 GOE to being good at relationships.
Nina was much calmer as Yuri changed her diaper, the tears drying her on her cheeks. When she was all cleaned up, he laid her down on the little play mat on the floor so she could gawp at the mobile dangling above it, then went into the kitchen to wash his hands. Otabek already had his earbuds in, tinny music leaking out, and his hip was twitching a little to the beat as he chopped up some carrots.
This really, really wasn't the life Yuri had envisioned when Otabek had moved to St. Petersburg eight weeks ago. But...they were doing okay at it. They were getting through it. Yuri sidled up alongside Otabek and kissed his cheek, and Otabek gave him a sidelong smile and bumped his hip against Yuri's twice to the rhythm of the tinny beat.
Yuri went back out into the front room and laid down on the floor next to Nina's play mat. Her arms and legs were moving like she was trying to do a butterfly stroke through the air, her blue eyes wide and staring at the slowly rotating mobile above her head.
Yuri gave it a tap to make it spin faster. "It's not so bad, right?" he said to her. He ran his finger over the curve of her chubby cheek. "I think we're figuring it out."
...
Otabek was generally an honest person. He didn't like lying, especially to the people he was close to; in uncomfortable moments, he usually chose between honesty and silence. It was a tendency that rubbed some people the wrong way, but it also meant he tended to befriend the kind of people who appreciated directness. Yuri, he knew, had always appreciated his directness.
So Otabek surprised himself later that evening by telling a blatant lie. It was Saturday, and he and Yuri were sitting on their bed with a laptop in between them, going through their now-weekly ritual of looking up every What to Expect from Your ____-Week Old video they could find. Nina was seven weeks old now, and according to various doctors and chipper vloggers, that meant her hearing was getting better and her eyes were able track movement. "Congratulations, you're officially smarter than a T-Rex now," Yuri told Nina, as her wide blue eyes followed his moving finger back and forth.
Otabek was very good at maintaining a poker face. He was confident that if Yuri looked at him, he wouldn't be able to tell that Otabek was currently dying inside from sentimentality. Yuri had his back against the headboard and his knees propped up in front of him, and he'd settled Nina in his lap with her back against his legs so she was facing him. The sight of the two of them together made Otabek's heart ache like an overinflated balloon. If he didn't keep calm, it might literally pop from love.
The vlogger they were watching was even more preternaturally chipper than most, an American woman with her long brown hair impeccably styled. "And don't forget the importance of tummy time!" she said, as the video switched to a clip of an angelic baby lying placidly on her stomach.
Yuri snickered, the way he always did when he heard the phrase tummy time. He and Otabek always said the phrase in English, to better preserve how stupid it sounded. "Look, she's doing it without crying," he told Nina. "What's your excuse?"
Nina hated doing tummy time. She never looked more like Yuri than when they set her on her stomach and her face screwed up into a furious, Plisetsky-esque scowl. Otabek had been trying unsuccessfully to get a picture of it for weeks, so he could compare it to a picture of Yuri. Yuri insisted that he couldn't see the resemblance, but of course Yuri didn't stare at his own face as much as Otabek did.
"And don't forget to love on your little ones!" the chipper American woman said, as the camera cut to a clip of her kissing and snuggling her unnaturally tolerant baby. "But I don't need to tell you that, do you? By Week 7, I know your love for your baby is deeper than oceans and brighter than sunshine! We really would do anything for them, wouldn't we?"
It was the kind of overwrought sentiment that American vloggers in particular seemed to love, and usually Yuri reacted to it by making jokes or puking sounds. But this time, Yuri reached over and jabbed at the spacebar to pause the video, looking irritated. "I hate when they do that," he said.
"Do what?"
"Like, assume they know what you're feeling," Yuri said. "They did it in the last video, too. They just assume you've had nine months of buildup and so of course you're slobbering with love for your baby."
Otabek pressed his lips together thoughtfully. Yuri poked at Nina's kicking feet with his forefingers. "Like, obviously I'd do anything to protect her," Yuri said. "She's a baby, you have to protect babies. But all that gooey love stuff, it's like...they expect us to be there already, and we've only had her for three weeks." He looked at Otabek. "I mean, right? You're not at sunshine and rainbows with her, right?"
Otabek had three options in that moment: to tell the truth, to stay silent, or to lie. Normally the choice would be easy. Yuri liked his directness, and Otabek had a very direct answer to that question.
Instead:
"Right," Otabek lied.
Yuri settled his back against the headboard again, looking vindicated. "It just bugs me," he said. Nina was wiggling her hands back and forth, and when Yuri pressed his finger against her open palm, she gripped onto it. "Maybe we should be looking for different types of videos to watch."
He reached out with his free hand, skated his finger across the laptop's trackpad, and advanced to the next video. This one was by a doctor, a gray-haired man in a lab coat, so you knew you could take him seriously. "It's Week 7 of your baby's development," he intoned. "Here are some of the developmental milestones you might be seeing as your baby continues to grow and..."
The sound faded out of Otabek's ears, drowned out by his own racing thoughts. He'd lied to Yuri. He hadn't even planned to lie: he just did it, the impulse coming from some crevice of his brain that apparently wasn't required to check in with him first. The truth was, Otabek was absolutely, positively, sunshine-and-rainbows in love with Nina. Just looking at her turned his heart into taffy. Seeing her and Yuri together turned his whole chest cavity into marshmallow fluff. Otabek loved both of them so much that it almost alarmed him with its intensity.
When Otabek moved to St. Petersburg two months ago, he and Yuri had agreed that they were just trying this living situation out, and it wasn't a permanent commitment. Sometimes people loved each other and also couldn't stand living in the same place. But now Otabek couldn't even fathom leaving. Even when things were tough with Nina, he still felt certain that this was exactly the way he wanted to be living his life.
But he knew it wasn't so easy for Yuri. When Otabek looked at Nina, he saw Yuri in her face, and that made it the easiest thing in the world to love her. But he knew when Yuri looked at Nina, he saw his mother, and that was a knot of rage and grief and frustration that would take more than three weeks to untangle.
Maybe that upstart crevice in Otabek's brain had been right to make him lie. If he told Yuri of course I love her, it's easy to love her, it would only make Yuri feel worse. Otabek knew Yuri was giving parenting his absolute maximum effort--he'd gone from knowing nothing about babies to having strong opinions about the Ferber method in barely two weeks--and it didn't seem right for Yuri to feel bad about having complicated emotions when all of his actions were on the right track.
Next to him, Yuri made a little scoffing sound, stirring Otabek from his thoughts. "Did you see that?" Yuri said, nodding at the laptop screen.
"No?"
"He just kissed that baby."
Otabek looked at the screen and saw the doctor in his lab coat had found a baby somewhere in the last two minutes and was now cradling it in his arms. "So?" he said.
"So it's not his baby," Yuri said. "He's a doctor, he shouldn't just be kissing random babies."
"Hmm," Otabek said. "Maybe it's more normal in America."
Yuri looked down at Nina, who had fixed her eyes on a spot on the wall above his head and seemed captivated by it. "I don't know," he said. "Is it weird that I don't kiss her? Like, am I stunting her growth or something? I mean, you kiss her all the time."
"Maybe that makes me the weird one," Otabek said.
"No, cuz you do it, like, on instinct," Yuri said. "I feel like I don't have the instinct."
"Well," Otabek said. "You don't need to have the instinct to do it. You could just...choose to do it."
Yuri stared at Nina. "It just feels weird," he said. "She's not..."
His voice trailed off. Otabek was pretty sure he'd been about to say she's not mine, even though, for all intents and purposes, she was. It was complicated. Choice and instinct were complicated topics to sort through on only four hours of sleep.
"Okay, I'll tell you what," Otabek said. "If you kiss her right now, I'll do the dinner dishes."
Yuri hated doing dishes almost as much as Nina hated tummy time. "Well, you heard him," Yuri immediately said to Nina, lifting her up from his lap. He brought her close to his face and pressed a kiss against her soft cheek.
Nina let out a loud, indignant squawking sound. Her little face screwed up into a scowl. "Yura!" Otabek exclaimed. "Look, her face. She's making your face."
Yuri pulled back, saw her snarly expression, and burst into laughter. "That's the face you make when I kiss you?" he said to her. "I'm trying to show how much I love you, you little jerk."
He leaned in and kissed her again, and this time she just made a resigned squeak and tried to kick Yuri in the chin. "Unbelievable," Yuri said, settling her back down in his lap. He was smiling. "And that's not my face, by the way. I don't know why you keep saying it is."
"It's your silver-medal face," Otabek said. "You always look like that when you come in second."
Yuri gave him an outraged look. "No I fucking don't!"
"Do a search for Yuri Plisetsky silver medal and say that to me again."
Yuri snatched up his phone from the bed and typed it in. Otabek saw a grid of images appear on the screen, and Yuri started scrolling through them. He was quiet for a little while. "Huh," he said at last.
Otabek crossed his arms behind his head in smug vindication. Yuri set his phone down and gave the side of Otabek's thigh a thwack. "All right, asshole, laugh it up," he said. "You're still the one who has to do the dishes."
"Should I go do them now?" Otabek asked. "Do you feel like we've watched enough videos for Week 7?"
Yuri pinched Nina's toes between his thumb and forefinger and made her legs wobble. "Nah, let's keep going," he said. "I'm having fun."
He reached over and started up the next video, and Otabek settled back against the headboard with a warm feeling in his chest.
Two months ago, this wouldn't have been his idea of fun, but right now he wouldn't change his life for anything in the world.