Chapter Text
Yuuri wakes up before Viktor, which is rare. Viktor sleeps so lightly and restlessly that Yuuri sometimes wonders if he even experiences REM cycles, or if, as with so many things with Viktor, he’s evolved past the point of needing them to operate.
Yuuri rolls over to face him, smiling at the way his hair flops down over his eyes, the way his mouth hangs a little open. Yuuri shifts, propping himself up on his elbow, but Viktor doesn't stir. His breathing is deep and even, and Yuuri remembers in a flash, before he can worry, that Viktor took one of his oft-neglected melatonin pills last night. He's supposed to take a low dose every night to help manage his sleep schedule, and Yuuri’s sure he sounds like a nag for all he reminds him, but he can't deny how satisfying it is to see Viktor actually sleeping well.
Yuuri tucks the duvet up over Viktor’s shoulders - bare but for the thin, satiny purple straps of his nightie - and although Viktor makes a little noise that’s almost Makkachin-esque, he doesn’t wake up. Yuuri settles next to him, shifting onto his back, and folds his arms over the swell of his belly under the blankets. He squeezes a handful of his stomach absently, just because it’s soft and there, and it makes him smile a little. Viktor has been spoiling him since he fell last week, and Yuuri would bristle, call it coddling, if it extended further than propping him up on pillows at the end of the day with an ice pack or heat pack on his hip and feeding him treats while they work their way through their Netflix queue. Yuuri’s put on another couple pounds since then, but he finds he doesn’t mind it. It’s getting easier to welcome the number on the scale.
He’s been keeping those comments from Instagram in the back of his mind, although it’s been weeks. His fans keep tagging him in tweets, asking him how he feels about the photo, his weight, his stretch marks. Does he like it? How does he stay so comfortable with his body? Is it hard being a skater and having a good relationship with his body?
He hasn’t replied to any of the tweets - he doesn’t know how he could answer those questions in 140 characters or less. He’s sure his silence isn’t making him look any less standoffish, and he does want to respond somehow, but he hasn’t found a good way to tell them how much those reactions meant to him, how the echoes of those comments have pushed him through the past few weeks, steadied him when his self-confidence faltered.
He doesn’t always like that he’s so reliant on other people’s opinions to prop him up, but it helps to have something to brace himself on when his own brain lies to him, kicks the legs out from underneath his precariously constructed self-esteem. He would love for his own opinions of his body to be enough to convince him entirely, but until he can find an anxiety medication or exercise that can make that possible, he settles for listening in the back of his mind for Viktor’s compliments or his fans’ adoring appreciations until he can find his way back to his own self-confidence.
“I don’t exactly look like a gold-medal figure skater anymore, do I?” he’d said to Viktor weeks ago, offhandedly. He’d been trying to figure out which pairs of jeans still fit him like this - Yuuri keeps three sizes in his closet to accommodate his in-season, off-season, and in-between figures.
Viktor had made a soft sound of disagreement. “You are a gold-medal figure skater,” he’d said, coming up behind Yuuri to slip his arms around his waist and tease at his underbelly. “You’re exactly what one looks like.”
Yuuri has hung onto that too, that reminder that even if his body looks a little different now, it’s still the same body, with the same abilities. This body belongs to one of the top figure skaters in the world, and no Instagram comment or magazine headline can take that from him.
He tries to fall back to sleep, but his mind is going now, trying to spin together a possible response he could post. He needs to give back somehow - most of his fans have stuck with him through the stages of his career Yuuri can only look at through his fingers; he owes it to them.
Viktor is still in a deep sleep, and it's Yuuri’s turn to make breakfast, so as gently as he can, he slips on his glasses, rolls out of bed, and grabs a pair of sweats from the basket of clean laundry he hasn't put away yet. His thighs jiggle a little as he bounces from one leg to the other to put them on, and he reminds himself that under the extra chub he's strong, that these thighs carried him to a gold medal at Worlds a few months ago.
He considers changing into one of Viktor’s shirts to surprise him when he finally wakes up, but the one he’s wearing now is large and cozy and his own, so he keeps it. The bottom of his belly falls out of most of Viktor’s shirts now anyway, and that little strip of exposed skin gets chilly.
He pads downstairs, and Makkachin follows a few moments later, when Yuuri pours some dry food into his dish.
Yuuri measures coffee into Viktor’s fancy French press - much fancier than the one Phichit kept in college, and unnecessarily so, Yuuri thinks - and while water is heating in the kettle, he takes out everything he'll need for pancakes. Viktor doesn't like making them, is too easily distracted, but he likes eating them, and Yuuri checks the fridge to make sure they have jam first - Viktor prefers it to maple syrup.
He adds the water to the coffee, and misjudges the distance between the edge of the counter and his bruised hip as he reaches for the press’s plunger across the countertop. He hisses as a sharp blue pain sparks down his hipbone, and as the coffee steeps, he heads to the bathroom down the hall, cursing himself, to see if he's given himself another bruise.
But when he rolls down the waistband of his sweatpants, there's just the shadow of the old bruise, almost all the way healed. He thumbs at it, wincing against his own touch, and then hikes his sweats back up.
He pauses for a moment, fixes his hair where it’s sleep-flat, and gives himself a bleary, owlish look. He wrinkles his nose at himself, and it’s just goofy enough to make him smile a little.
He drifts a hand down to his belly, then to the hem of his shirt. Slowly, he lifts his shirt until the whole of his belly is exposed: the wide dip of his navel, the soft bulges of his love handles, the zigzagging red stretch marks, the sag of tummy above the drawstrings of his sweats.
His smile widens, soft and fond, and it surprises him a little when he looks up to see it. He looks comfortable - he looks content. He looks the way Viktor has described him, warm and sweet and beautiful, but when the words come into his head, they’re spoken in his own voice, not Viktor’s.
He looks back into the mirror, squeezes a handful of chub, and slips a hand into the pocket of his sweats to grab his phone.
It takes him a while to find a good angle where his phone doesn’t get in the way of showing off his body, but when he finally snaps the photo, he’s pleased with it. He’s not looking at the camera, giving his body a shy little smile instead.
Thank you for your kind words and your comments! he types into the caption field. I really appreciate them and I have thought about them a lot over the past few weeks. It’s hard to find things that I like about myself sometimes. Viktor helps with that, but your support does too, it means even more knowing that you support me even when I don’t look like I do during the season. I like my body, and I like the way I look like this, and it’s taken a lot of work to get here, to say that. Thank you again for being here for me and for always cheering me on. Yuuri xx
He still turns circles around the kitchen as he waits for the inevitable flood of comments, but he doesn’t feel nearly as anxious as he did three weeks ago, putting himself through the same paces. Even if someone out on the internet doesn’t like the way he looks, he does, and that settles something in the pit of his stomach.
He makes coffee, and he makes pancakes. By the time Viktor wanders into the kitchen, sleepy-eyed and still shrugging into his teal silk bathrobe, there are 304 comments on Yuuri’s post, and not a single one of them has failed to make him smile.