Chapters: 1/? Fandom: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime) Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Otabek Altin/Yuri Plisetsky, Otabek Altin/Jean-Jacques Leroy, Jean-Jacques Leroy/Yuri Plisetsky, Otabek Altin/Jean-Jacques Leroy/Yuri Plisetsky Characters: Otabek Altin, Jean-Jacques Leroy, Yuri Plisetsky, Victor Nikiforov, Katsuki Yuuri, Makkachin (Yuri!!! on Ice) Additional Tags: Alternate Universe – Witchcraft, Alternative Universe – Modern Fantasy, witch!Beka, familiar!JJ, familiar!Yuri, Witches, Familiars, Slow Burn, emotionally constipated idiots, JJ’s actually the smart one, Beka needs help, Polyamory, Other Additional Tags to Be Added Summary:
After the fall of the USSR, someone could count the number of living witches in Kazakhstan on one hand. So when Otabek Altin was born with powers that developed over time, he had to flee and hide how closely Magic kept him to its chest. Magic had other plans for the witch, and he finds himself suddenly bound to a familiar.
Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, a truly extraordinary woman.
Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk. Toads, too.
It used to be a problem.
There was an incident when I was young and cross and fed up parental expectations. My sister, who is the Good One, has gold fall from her lips, and since I could not be her, I had to go a different way.
So I got frogs. It happens.
“You’ll grow into it,” the fairy godmother said. “Some curses have cloth-of-gold linings.” She considered this, and her finger drifted to her lower lip, the way it did when she was forgetting things. “Mind you, some curses just grind you down and leave you broken. Some blessings do that too, though. Hmm. What was I saying?”
I spent a lot of time not talking. I got a slate and wrote things down. It was hard at first, but I hated to drop the frogs in the middle of the road. They got hit by cars, or dried out, miles away from their damp little homes.
Toads were easier. Toads are tough. After awhile, I learned to feel when a word was a toad and not a frog. I could roll the word around on my tongue and get the flavor before I spoke it. Toad words were drier. Desiccated is a toad word. So is crisp and crisis and obligation. So are elegant and matchstick.
Frog words were a bit more varied. Murky. Purple. Swinging. Jazz.
I practiced in the field behind the house, speaking words over and over, sending small creatures hopping into the evening. I learned to speak some words as either toads or frogs. It’s all in the delivery.
Love is a frog word, if spoken earnestly, and a toad word if spoken sarcastically. Frogs are not good at sarcasm.
Toads are masters of it.
I learned one day that the amphibians are going extinct all over the world, that some of them are vanishing. You go to ponds that should be full of frogs and find them silent. There are a hundred things responsible—fungus and pesticides and acid rain.
When I heard this, I cried “What!?” so loudly that an adult African bullfrog fell from my lips and I had to catch it. It weighed as much as a small cat. I took it to the pet store and spun them a lie in writing about my cousin going off to college and leaving the frog behind.
I brooded about frogs for weeks after that, and then eventually, I decided to do something about it.
I cannot fix the things that kill them. It would take an army of fairy godmothers, and mine retired long ago. Now she goes on long cruises and spreads her wings out across the deck chairs.
But I can make more.
I had to get a field guide at first. It was a long process. Say a word and catch it, check the field marks. Most words turn to bronze frogs if I am not paying attention.
Poison arrow frogs make my lips go numb. I can only do a few of those a day. I go through a lot of chapstick.
It is a holding action I am fighting, nothing more. I go to vernal pools and whisper sonnets that turn into wood frogs. I say the words squeak and squill and spring peepers skitter away into the trees. They begin singing almost the moment they emerge.
I read long legal documents to a growing audience of Fowler’s toads, who blink their goggling eyes up at me. (I wish I could do salamanders. I would read Clive Barker novels aloud and seed the streams with efts and hellbenders. I would fly to Mexico and read love poems in another language to restore the axolotl. Alas, it’s frogs and toads and nothing more. We make do.)
The woods behind my house are full of singing. The neighbors either learn to love it or move away.
My sister—the one who speaks gold and diamonds—funds my travels. She speaks less than I do, but for me and my amphibian friends, she will vomit rubies and sapphires. I am grateful.
I am practicing reading modernist revolutionary poetry aloud. My accent is atrocious. Still, a day will come when the Panamanian golden frog will tumble from my lips, and I will catch it and hold it, and whatever word I spoke, I’ll say again and again, until I stand at the center of a sea of yellow skins, and make from my curse at last a cloth of gold.
Terri Windling posted recently about the old fairy tale of frogs falling from a girl’s lips, and I started thinking about what I’d do if that happened to me, and…well…
!.
You know how if you go through years and years of “best science fiction short stories”, every so often you find some short story you’ve never heard of before, but it’s just amazing and brilliant and leaves you wondering why you never read stories with that plot before? This is one of those.
if you are reading this you are not in a coma, you are not dead or dreaming. your life is not a lie, your relationships are not a lie, your memories are not a lie. you are not a hallucination or glitch.
you exist.
you are alive.
the world around you exists and keeps turning.
if you can’t trust all of your senses pick one right now you consider the most reliable and stimulate that. for me this is touch and smell. splash water on yourself. eat something comforting. smell dirt outside. play your favourite song on repeat. stare at one panel of a comic book for a long time.
this world is real and so are you. you are real. so take care of yourself.
Ok so this seriously hit home with me and kinda startled me. Thank you.
gah thank you this is so helpful for people who dissociate regularly/have varying psychoses
Podcast idea: a D&D campaign with same characters, same story, same everything, but different comedians picking it up each week and trying to deal with what the players of the past week put their characters through
Working title: Roll Reversal
So there’s actually a really solid chance of this becoming a thing. Can you reblog this post if you’d have interest in listening to this?
The Archery Range 