#musicalau

Minako (Heidi Hansen) is a ballet dancer, but that means she’s always on trips, rarely home, and doesn’t bring much money home. Tries her best, and introduces Yuuri to ballet and eventually skating to deal with his anxiety along with his letters.

Yuuri (Evan Hansen) has his canon-typical anxiety, and no friends aside from the “family friend”, Phichit Chulanont. Honestly he and canon-Evan are basically the same, except instead of a closet tree nerd, Yuuri is a closet ice skating nerd who is actually really good at skating...he’s just never been able to skate in front of other people without his anxiety getting in the way and completely screwing him up.

Minako is childhood friends with the owner of the local rink (Hiroko Katsuki),  so she gives Yuuri a set of keys to the rink and he goes at random hours of the morning/night when no one else is there so he can skate alone.

Skating usually clears his mind and helps him relax, but one day, he’s just skating and thinking and skating and thinking and skating and thinking and in the middle of a jump, he’s thinking and he thinks: “what if I just...didn’t land right, and never got up again, wouldn’t everyone be better off? would someone come to get me? To help me? What if I―”

So he falls “on accident” and lays there dazed from his concussion and in pain from his broken arm and fantasizes about someone coming to help him for hours and hours until Hiroko comes in to open the rink in the morning and freaks out because he’s still lying on the ice, cold and alone, because when you’re falling in a forest an ice rink and nobody’s around, do you ever even crash, or even make a sound?

And of course he writes letters to himself on the advice of his therapist (Celestino, probably?), and they still come into play, but first:

Victor (Connor Murphy)  used to be the perfect student™ that everyone knew but never really knew. He used to get perfect grades and won all the academic competitions and figure skating competitions, but he never saw any point in all of it. Despite everything, he was never very close with his parents or his peers, and felt stagnant in everything from his grades to his competitions to, eventually, his personal hobby, ice skating. 

So once high school hit and even ice skating lost its appeal, he started dropping off the map and doing drugs and skipping school so by the time he commits suicide no one really knows him anymore and like typical high schoolers, no one really cares either (until the Victor Project of course).

The day he first talks to Yuuri in the computer lab isn’t the first time he’s seen him, but lord knows if Victor is ever going to admit that he broke into the local ice skating rink one day last summer and saw the most marvelous skater already there, skating his heart out to heartbreaking music. (He was skating to Waving Through a Window, and that song+Yuuri’s skating just about kills Victor but tbh who wouldn’t it kill). 

Near the end of the routine, the skater is on his final jump when suddenly he falls apart mid-jump, his limbs coming apart and going limp like he’s just...given up. Victor watches in silent horror as he crashes into the side of the rink, arm and head-first, slides a few feet on the ice, and goes still.

 Victor wants to help, but he panics and doesn’t know what to do (you know since he’s there illegally in the first place and being super stalkerish besides) so he just stays awkwardly until he sees Yuuri open his eyes, then leaves figuring that Yuuri can probably call someone to come help him.

So when he sees Yuuri in the hallway that first day, he panics and lashes out because he’s afraid that Yuuri knows he was there and didn’t help and hates him. In the computer lab, later, he decides to approach Yuuri a little more calmly with a VERY SUBTLE “So...how’d you break your arm?” (Nice going Nikiforov, very smooth, very subtle) and offers to sign his cast. Nevermind the stinging guilt when Victor hears that no one ended up coming to help Yuuri, and isn’t that just the saddest fucking thing he’s ever heard. It all goes swimmingly until he reads Yuuri’s letter.

Because you see, Yuuri has been wanting to talk to Yurio, Victor’s little brother for a very long time. Yurio is famous for being in the jazz band a very skilled figure skater, and Yuuri admires that even though he’s never actually talked to him. He had been inspired to start skating by a certain local figure skater a long time ago, after all, and since he never learned the skater’s name, he just assumed that it was Yurio, the only real publicly prominent figure skater in the area (Hint hint, it wasn’t Yurio). 

Yuuri  doesn’t have a crush on Yurio, but he wants to be his friend, and writes about him (in place of Zoe) in his letter.

And this piece of “mockery” combined with panic about Yuuri knowing combined with hopelessness because “Oh, he likes Yurio, not me.” is the last thing to tip Victor over the edge, and he leaves, the letter still in his pocket to...well, you know, to do what canon-Connor does at this point. He comes back as our resident dead gay son tho its ok

Yurio (Zoe Murphy) is Victor’s little brother, the self-proclaimed better skater/son, and he’s always resented Victor for being seemingly perfect and then throwing it all away. Yakov and Lilia (Larry and Cynthia Murphy) had always compared him to Victor, and Yurio feels Victor’s influence looming over him even in death.

 When Victor had been perfect, everyone told Yurio that he needed to “be more like his older brother,” but when Victor started crashing and burning, Yurio suddenly needed to “be better than his older brother” and he’s just so sick of being defined by his older brother that Victor’s suicide makes him even more bitter, because now he will never be able to surpass him and shed the shadow he left over his life. (Insert Requiem here) or as i like to call it in this AU, the “Victor Nikiforov is Dead” song.

So, when Yuuri comes out proclaiming that he was Victor’s best friend, Yurio is very very skeptical. Until it turns out that he knows Victor used to skate and he starts talking about an unmistakably real time they went skating together and Yuuri broke his arm trying a difficult jump, but Victor came to help him up (For Forever).

 And when Yurio, who has never been very close with his brother, but has always secretly wanted to be, asks Yuuri about why Victor would have written about him in his suicide note, Yuuri word-vomits everything he’s ever admired about Yurio’s (and by proxy, Victor’s) skating. (If I Could Tell Him).

The two of them end up bonding (platonically) and go skating together a lot because I’m a sucker for happy friendship.

Whenever he gets bored, Yurio scribbles stars cats on the cuffs of his jeans

Yuuri bonds with Yakov over skating, because Yuuri has never had a mentor for his skating (Minako helps, but she’s a ballet dancer, she doesn’t really understand). Yakov teaches Yuuri how “To Break in Skates” with a pair of old skates that he bought for Victor after Victor started drifting away (he doesn’t know that Victor never stopped skating).

Phichit (Jared Kleinman) and Yuuri used to be super close as kids, but their friendship kinda fell apart when Phichit started getting more social and Yuuri’s anxiety got in the way of any and all attempts at joining him and his friends.

Phichit gets enlisted to help write the emails and channels every shipping bone in his body into writing the gayest emails in existence, full of bad puns and as much sexual tension as Yuuri will allow him to slip in.

Yuuri also gets very attached to Victor while he’s “researching” for his faked emails. He finds a bunch of old videos of Victor in local skating competitions before he dropped off the map and falls in love with his skating all over again, realizing that Victor is the skater that inspired him to start figure skating, which leads him to base a lot of their “friendship” around skating.

Alright this is becoming a small novel, so I’m going to cut it there, but I have a bunch of sketches that aren’t finished yet, so definitely expect more from me on this AU!