delicadenza:

Rating: General Audiences
Fandom: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Relationships: Jean-Jacques Leroy/Isabella Yang
Characters: Jean-Jacques Leroy, Isabella Yang, Otabek Altin, Emil Nekola
Additional Tags: Wedding Planning, Engagement, Flashbacks, Post-Canon
Word Count: 3,124

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Isabella wakes with the sun on Friday morning. The calendar
on her bedside table tells her she has twenty days, and it feels like there’s
still so much that needs accomplishing.

It’s always the easiest things first, the things closest at
hand. That’s how she’s kept sane this past year, pretty much, for every detail
she’s had to keep abreast of, every major planning decision she’s had to sign
off on, every voice clamoring in concert with so many others for her attention.
It’s all about teaching herself to move slowly. Little by little. A task at a
time, each one diligently crossed off a list whose length she doesn’t give
herself the leisure of pondering.

This morning’s agenda: Isabella puts the coffeepot on, and
reads Otabek’s messages. She’d gone to bed before midnight last night, probably
less than halfway through the bachelor party, but had woken up to a slew of
notifications that he’d promised to send and she’d only half-expected him to
deliver on—updates every hour, no gory details, just a JJ status report. He’s okay right now. He’s a little drunk.
He’s very drunk, but we’re taking care of him, don’t worry. Just got back to
the hotel. They’re all in bed now. Good night, Isabella.

The latest are timestamped only ten minutes ago: I’m up and heading to the drugstore.
Ibuprofen or aspirin?

Ibuprofen, he’s
allergic to aspirin. Maybe some juice too in case he doesn’t make it down to
the breakfast buffet. After a pause, she follows it up with a question: The rest still out cold?

Still out cold. Otabek
types like he talks, slow and deliberate, almost toneless unless you pay close
attention, but his second message is surprisingly good-humored for someone with
such a solemn disposition—and someone who’s probably only running on three or
four hours of sleep after what appears to have been, for all the sparseness of
his account, one of those quote-unquote wild nights: Don’t worry about it. I’ll have Emil make it up to me with breakfast.

As she pours herself a mug and watches the steam wind its
way up, following the single crooked filament of it with her eyes, Isabella
smiles. She remembers he’d been a surprising choice for a groomsman. Emil she’d
been able to understand—he had a loud voice and an easy laugh and fit right in
with Adam-from-high-school and Carter-from-the-Fraternity and most importantly
JJ himself, but there was probably no one alive that she could imagine less at
a stag party with those four than Otabek, physical resemblance to the groom
notwithstanding.

But maybe, with a little imagination, it kind of makes sense
now—JJ and Otabek Altin with the brick-wall face, shuttered behind a stalwart,
impenetrable quiet. Otabek’s is the sort of quiet that could disperse a storm;
Isabella thinks with no small measure of amusement of little Yuri Plisetsky,
that firework, the only other friend of his that she knows. Maybe this is kind
of the same thing.

Thanks for taking such
good care of him, she tells him, because it’s the least she can do. When he
answers Happy to be here for you both,
Isabella, she finds it’s not hard to believe it.

Continue on AO3.