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Yuri Plisetsky, Wildlife Ambassador Fic #1

Concept: Eight years after YoI, Yurio ends up becoming a spokesperson for bigcat conservation efforts and the World Wildlife Fund. His first fundraising initiative is a calendar featuring all the figure skaters dressed up like endangered species. Yuuri has mixed feelings about his own participation.

(Not posting this to AO3 until I figure out where the hell this is going!)

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Hi there! My name is Katsuki Yuuri. If you already know me, you’re probably wondering how I got talked into modelling for that nude calendar. If you don’t, let me give you the quick intro. At 30 years old, I’m married to one of the top figure skating coaches in the world, Viktor Nikiforov. He was my coach until I retired last year. He inspired me to skate programs that netted me the gold in the world figure skating championships three years running. These days though, I work alongside him as an assistant coach. We spend half the year training in my hometown of Hasetsu, and the other half Saint Petersburg, Russia, where Vitya grew up.

So far, we have a handful of students, most of them Japanese: my friend Yuuko’s three girls, who are in their junior debut this year, Sonidori Riou, who is debuting in seniors this year, and last, the person who talked me into the nude calendar in the first place, Yuri Plisetsky.

Yes, Yuri Plisetsky. The Yuri Plisetsky who, at age 15, looked more like one of the adorable novices than one of the Senior Mens Singles skaters, and would have thrashed anyone who mentioned it. The same Yuri Plisetsky who gagged every time Viktor kissed me, and couldn’t stand to be in the same room as Christophe Giacometti and his shameless flirtations more than two minutes. The Yuri Plisetsky lauded for skating to ‘On Love: Agape’ as ‘the bodiless embodied, an angel above worldly desire or need’. That Yuri.

I don’t think any of us who knew him back then could have predicted that he’d become an international sex icon. It doesn’t fit with his personality. Despite all the money to be made in sponsorships for more adult brands, he’s never leaned into the image the same way others like Chris Giacometti did. Yuri wears provocative outfits on the ice or to go clubbing, or sometimes to fluster his rival and best friend and on-again, off-again lover, Otabek Altin. He doesn’t wink at his fans or model for lingerie manufacturers like Viktor, and the most skin he’s ever shown in an ad until recently was in a cologne shoot featuring him and the members of a Finnish heavy metal band in leather and too much eyeshadow.

Which was why I was beyond shocked when he knocked on my door at 4 in the morning to tell Viktor and I that we needed to bare all for charity.

Let me back that up a bit though.

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It started back in March, at the end of the 2024 World Figure Skating Championships in Montréal, Canada.

“What was with that free leg? You need to tighten your core, you almost spun out on that triple axel--” Viktor demanded, picking apart every imperfect element of Yuri’s perfect performance with furious care.

Yuri, at fifteen, would have scowled and rolled his eyes and dismissed all this constructive criticism by pointing out that he had just won the World Championships after all, so did it really matter? At twenty-two, Yuri listened seriously, nodding to his coach and filing away the information somewhere in the back of his mind, probably to be applied when we went to practice next week.

We’ve all changed in the past seven years since that day Viktor swept into my life back in Hasetsu, but Yuri most of all. After winning the Grand Prix Final back in 2015, puberty caught up to him all at once. In the space of a year, he shot up from 5’4” to 5’11”, and now looked down at Viktor from a height of 6’0”. His shoulders and arms broadened, and his waifish physique seemed to rebuild itself along the lines of a Viking warrior. His voice dropped to a rumbling tenor.

His fanclub approved, and became even more rabidly enthusiastic, and I didn’t even think that was possible. The comment threads got longer and had more keysmashes every time a picture of Yura got posted.

There weren’t many pictures from that year—at least, not ones available to the public. Yakov had forced Yuri to take the year off from competitive skating until he’d adjusted to working with a body that had an entirely new centre of gravity. My friends the Nishigoris offered him a job at their rink back in Hasetsu. There, the Nishigori girls had enthusiastically photographed and videorecorded every waking moment of their idol in the first two weeks--right up to the point where Yuri resorted to bribing them with the promise to train them to crush their competition in the prelims on condition that they didn’t post any of the photos they took to social media. When Yuri emerged from Japan to retake the competitive circuit two years later, the eight-year-old Nishigori triplets were sweeping the podium, and Yuri himself was almost unrecognizable except for his animal print clothes.

He never grew out of those. Even now, under his Russia team jacket, his free skate costume was black tigerstriped with gold and red, a mask of red and black streaked across his eyes and the bridge of his nose like warpaint. The contrast made his eyes gleam out green as a cat’s. He’d skated to ‘Eye of the Tiger’ by Survivor, of course. We’d be sorting out the usual bags of plush cats and red and yellow roses when we got back to the hotel rooms, with maybe the odd poodle thrown in tribute to my husband.

Sure enough, when Vitya and I checked in on him a couple of hours later, there were a couple garbage bags full of plushies next to the bed, and a pile of gifts that had been left with the concierge at the desk. Yuri was still in the washroom.

“Yuri! Are you done yet in there? Come spend time with your coaches!”

“Start without me, I’m busy.”

“It’s been two hours—did you have a reaction to your make-up? I have a facial cleansing trick that will fix it—”

“No! Screw you! It’s not a reaction to my make-up!”

“If it is something to do with make-up, I can help—” and Vitya almost fell inward with the door as it opened, stumbling into Yura.

“Geez, old man, do you need a walker already?” Yura huffed, setting Viktor upright. He’d dressed up to check out Montreal’s club scene later with Otabek. The two of them had dated each other on and off for years now. I refused to bet on their relationship, but I knew Viktor and Mila had both gambled on the outcome.

He kept his hair in the dozens of small braids we’d plaited it into earlier this morning, and opted to just weave them all into a single, thick tail down his back. He’d gone simplistic—weathered jeans, white shirt, leather jacket with, yup, a cheetah print faux-fur collar.

“Let’s get this over with,” he groaned, slumping down on the floor. We’d be taking anything appropriate when we visited the Montreal Children’s Hospital with the Leroys tomorrow morning. Yuri used to never bother pre-sorting, but then there was incident of Christmas 2018. Yuri had chucked all the plushies in a Santa bag and pulled out gifts at random to hand to the children. Unfortunately, one of the ‘plushies’ was a bra flung by an overzealous fan.

The little boy loved it. His parents, who were videorecording it, loved it. They’d loved it so much, in fact, that they’d sent the video to the Russian news channels, who had contacted the FFKKR, who had spun the story that Yuri Plisetsky was such a sex symbol, that, sometimes, the people who sorted his gifts (Yuri himself, up until that point) couldn’t screen out all the ‘intimate gestures’. Somehow, the message made things worse. We started donating any bras in good condition to the local woman’s shelter.

So. That was why we were sorting, and also why we’d packed our younger skaters off to explore Montréal, despite the triplets’ eager offers to help.

Viktor happily dumped out the nearest garbage bag and started chucking the ‘loot’ into the appropriate piles.

“Plush cat, plush tiger, plush lion, plush cat—ooh, this one looks like Dima,” he enthused, holding up a black plush poodle that did indeed look like our dog.

“Don’t you have like a hundred of those by now?” groused Yuri.

“And now I have a hundred and one!” Vitya exclaimed.

I wordlessly chucked a pair of knickers into the trash, and then held up a mesh bra in disbelief. Yuri just looked disturbed. Vitya looked… intrigued.

Yuri intercepted his glance and immediately made a face. “No. Just—no. I don’t even want to THINK about what you or the Piggy in that.”

Vitya barked a laugh. “Yura,” he smiled, pulling the bra from my suddenly unsteady fingers and folding it tidily to be placed in the appropriate bag. “Don’t be silly.” Yuri looked at him with not relief, but justifiable suspicion. “As if I would ever get Yuuri lingerie from a department store!”

Eight years haven’t lessened my husband’s knack for making me want to die simultaneously from both sheer attraction and embarrassment.

“Vitya,” I whined.

Viktor smirked, and kissed me, and suddenly, I was almost as impatient as Yuri for this job to be done.

“You haven’t opened any of the big ones yet,” I pointed out, gesturing at the stack of parcels left on the table. Most of them were wrapped. Most were probably more plushies, but there was an absolutely massive parcel that looked like a badly wrapped sleeping bag.

“Yes, open them up!” enthused Viktor, grabbing the oversized package and chucking it at Yura. It fell open as it landed in his lap. A lion skin unrolled, the glass eyes in the stuffed head staring up at a stricken Yuri.

“What the hell!” he swore, flinging it away from him and scrambling up in disgust. “That’s not real, is it?”

Viktor felt the leathered underside and shrugged. “It’s real. My mother has one in her summer house in Venice. I wonder how much they paid for it?”

“How much they paid for it?” steamed Yuri.

“They must know you like cats,” Viktor mused, unhelpfully.

“Cats that are alive!” he screamed.

“There’s a note,” I interjected, before Viktor could antagonize his protegee any further. I handed the envelope to Yuri, giving him the choice whether or not to read it aloud.

“ ‘Dearest Yuri, I love your performances! You’re so inspiring—yada yada—I know you like big cats, so when I shot this lion on safari, I decided I would send it to you?” He clawed at the envelope, producing a picture of a girl in her early twenties posing by a dead and bloodied lion with a rifle in hand. “Oh no. FUCK NO.” He reached for his smartphone in his backpocket.

“Be careful,” Viktor warned. For all the appearance Viktor gave of being completely uninhibited, when it came to public image, he could be terrifying calculative. While he’d stopped curating his own brand so carefully when he’d flown halfway around the world to coach me, he hadn’t lost any of his skills. He’d simply started applying them to people other than himself, which was probably why I was spending half of my retirement modelling for athletic brands.

“Fuck careful,” Yuri spat. He tossed the rug on the floor at the most unattractive angle possible, and snapped a picture so that the head was glaring balefully from the foreground, lolling sideways on the crumpled mess of fur. He typed furiously on his phone, and we heard the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of the post uploading to Twitter and Instagram and Tumblr and Russian Facebook. I opened my phone, and scrolled down.

[Image of Lion]

No real fan of mine would kill this beautiful big cat and send me its corpse #fuckingmurderers #savethebigcats #wildlife #lions #figureskating

Actually, that response was pretty mild where Yuri was concerned, I thought, but I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The other shoe dropped later that night.

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We were startled out of a deep sleep at 4 in the morning by a sharp rapping on the door that could only be Yurio. I rolled onto my side and squinted blearily at the baleful red digits on the hotel alarm clock. Vitya wiggled closer to keep his arms about my shoulders.

“Just ignore him, moya lyubov,” he murmured drowsily, hooking his leg over mine and pressing himself against my back. “He’ll give up eventually.”

That didn’t sound like Yurio, but I was too tired to disagree. I closed my eyes.

The rapping got harder. “Open up, you morons!” came the muffled shouting from outside the door.

I groaned. Yurio had gotten drunk then. Since he’d grown, Viktor and Mila had impressed on him that behaviour and language that had been acceptable, even endearing, in a little boy with the face of an angel was liable to get him booked for assault as an adult man. In response, he’d become, at least publicly, quietly polite—modelling himself after my behaviour, Minako claimed. If he had more than two shots of vodka though, the hellion who’d learnt swearwords and sambo on the streets of Moscow made a reappearance. He really was upset about the lionskin. I was too.

“We’ll ask them tomorrow,” came the voice of reason, muffled through the door. I blessed Otabek Altin and all his ancestors for his good sense.

“It’s already tomorrow!” Yurio retorted. The door clicked open, and Yurio stomped into our room, cruelly turning on the lights and chucking one of our keycards on the table as he did so. “Rise and shine, old men,” he hollered.

I glared up at them, eyes all but shut against the sudden brightness. “It’s four in the morning,” I pointed out, unnecessarily. Viktor refused to acknowledge Yurio’s presence at all. He clung tight as a limpet, my long hair caught under his arms. He’d convinced me to grow it out since, “I can’t do the same with mine, Yuuri, because you know what’s happening,” he said, hushed, as though there were nothing more shameful than male-pattern baldness. “You have to do it for both of us. Do it for me, Yuura.”

(And what was I supposed to have done in response? I grew my hair, of course).

“Da. We skate at four in the morning all the time,” Yurio pointed out, coming to Viktor’s side of the bed and shoving him pitilessly. “Move over, old man.” Viktor barely moved, but Yurio crawled into bed alongside him anyways, disregarding his nudity. He’d spent too many off-seasons with us at the onsen to notice it or care. Otabek sat down in the chair by the bed, patiently waiting out his friend’s latest mood. “Look at this.”

He shoved his cellphone in front of my face, and I fumbled for my glasses, scrolling down the screen.

Over the past evening, the number of retweets and replies on Yurio’s post had exploded. He had thousands of new followers. Tens of thousands. I thumbed down. There were the usual posts from Yuri’s Angels, but intermingled with them, messages from the kind of people you almost never saw on a sports account.

Amelie Léoncoeur @PrLionheart

Support to @y_plisetsky for speaking out; end the barbaric killing of this vulnerable species! #wildlifeconservation #zoology #endtrophyhunting @UniofOxford

Retweet

PETA @peta

Not only is @y_plisetsky an international sex symbol, he’s signalling for change in our attitudes towards wildlife. Remember, real fur = real suffering #endtrophyhunting #wildlifeconservation #icetiger #animalrights

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Nekogrrl @nekogrrl

CANNOT get over how the whol world is suddenly realizing how PASSIONATE and SENSITIVE our yuri is like wow weve known for YRS he’s not jst a goldwinning sk8r hes also big into humane treatment of animals like he fosters KITTIES and asked fans to donate to animal shelters on his bday loving that everyones learning this now #icetiger #hottestmanalive #yurisangels #letmehaveyurbabies #liongate

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Retweet

World Wildlife Fund @World_wildlife

Olympic medalist @y_plisetsky speaks out against trophy-hunting!

icetiger #figure-skating #wildlifeconservation #endtrophyhunting #animalrights #icetiger

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Retweet

Lion Recovery Fund @LionRecovery

The #icetiger of Russia is standing up for other wildcats

#lions #wildlifeconservation #endtrophyhunting

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Emily O @AngelofPlisetsky

Our Yuri’s ALWAYS loved #bigcats! Remember when he did this back in novices?

[Link to Youtube video of eight-year-old Yuri skating to ‘I just can’t wait to be king’ from Disney’s ‘The Lion King’]

Go Yuri! Donated to WWF for you! XXOO

#liongate #icetiger #figure-skating #ffkkr

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Retweet

ISU Figure Skating @ISU_Figure

@y_plisetsky the #icetiger of Russia shows his passion for wildlife both on and off the ice! Check out his championship winning performance to ‘Eye of the Tiger’ here!

#figure-skating #Worldfigure #wildlifeconservation

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Yuuri goggled.

“Tell your son to go away,” Viktor grumbled, somehow cuddling even closer into Yuuri.

“He’s your son at this hour,” Yuuri huffed, shaking his head. “Vitya,” he rubbed his husband’s shoulder. “Come on. You’ll want to see this.”

Obligingly, Viktor pulled himself up.

“It’s good, da?” Yurio demanded as Viktor began to scroll over the texts, gaze sharpening as he considered them. “What did you think of the direct messages?”

“I didn’t read your DMs—”

“The WWF and its partners are asking if you and ‘some of your friends’ will model for their fundraising calendar!” Viktor said delightedly. “Some of its partners include Calvin Klein. And Burberry.”

“Da. Otabek’s in.”

“Then I accept!” Viktor said magnanimously. “For the big cats!”

“What? No. Who wants to look at your naked ass, old man? I wasn’t asking you to model Viktor, I was telling my coach I’m doing it. Whether he likes it or not!”

“I don’t like it, I love it!” Viktor enthused. He reached blindly and accurately across me to his night-table to grab his phone, tucked Yurio’s between us so it couldn’t be taken away, and started scrolling through his own notifications. “Calvin Klein already sent me an email asking if you’d be interested in launching a line of wildlife-inspired lingerie. I know you’ve turned down all their other offers, but they plan to give 10% of their profits to the WWF—”

Yurio grinned fiercely. “I’ll do it! Argue them up to 15% though, I’m worth that much.”

“Da,” Viktor grinned back. There’s little Viktor loves more than negotiating more money out of sponsors than they expected to spend. He turned over to me. “Yuuri,” he crooned, “you’ll help the big cats too, won’t you? For Yurio?”

Yurio pretend to gag, but for all that, he stared at me intently over Viktor’s shoulder. I knew if I didn’t say yes, he’d rage about it for weeks the way he always did when he was disappointed. I could already hear him.

(“Good, piggy! No one wants to see your ugly fat ass anyways! Get lost!”)

If I said yes though, the image of me wearing probably less than my briefs and looking provocatively at the camera would be immortalized for everyone to see. Mari. Minako. My parents. God. It wasn’t as though they hadn’t all seen me naked before, or seen me turning up the eros, but never both at the same time.

My friend and skater and the little brother I’d never had looked increasingly angry the longer I took to answer (and really, we needed to book him with a sports therapist again), Vitya, patient and accepting of whatever my answer would be. I reddened under the scrutiny, and my husband grinned, knowing what my answer would be before I gave it.

“Yeah,” I breathed. “Yeah. For the big cats.”

“For the big cats!” Yurio and Viktor exclaimed, Yurio pumping his fist in the air. The man reclaimed his phone from Viktor, rolling out of our bed and onto his feet with, well, the agility of a cat, despite being drunk. “Come on Otabek! We have to tell the others!”

“The others?” Otabek asked blankly, letting himself be towed along by his erstwhile partner.

“That manwhore Giacometti’s here commentating. His fanclub’s almost as big as mine. If he’s going to be a slut, he might as well use it for something that matters,” we heard Yurio explain as he went out the door.

Vitya turned his eyes to me sleepily. “You don’t need to do it, you know.” He knew how shy I was. I’d been turning down more risqué photoshoots for years, even while Playgirl and Torso had full feature articles on my husband, complete with pull-out posters.

“Mmm. I don’t need to,” I agreed. “But it’s not just for me, it’s for Yura. And the big cats.” I smiled, easing myself back into my husband’s arms, feeling the hard contours of his pectorals against my back, his muscled thigh between my gluts. “Besides,” I murmured, turning my head to look up at him through my lashes, “weren’t you just saying the other day that we should get some photos done professionally?” I raised my hand to stroke the underside of his lightly stubbled jaw. “Did you want to keep those just for yourself?”

Viktor’s eyes dilated, and the sudden pressure below my thighs demonstrated the exact effect of my words on him.

“Or did you want to show the world exactly what belongs to you?” I whispered. His grip tightened, and I smirked. “Hmm? You want them to see what Yuuri Nikiforov looks like, to see what none of them can ever possess… mmm,” I groaned, suddenly silenced by his kiss. He kissed me, long and deep, and then stared into my eyes, like I was the most precious and rare creation in all the world.

“Yes. Yes to all those things. You’re so beautiful, I always want everyone to see it. To worship it. I worship it. I love you, Katsuki Yuuri Nikiforov. I love you, I love you, I love you.”

#yuri on ice #yuri plisetsky #katsuki yuuri #victor nikiforov

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