Chapter Text
Yuuri shoves himself back from the table, heart in his throat. For a moment, the only thought in his head is to run.
Why did he think he could do this?
He unfocuses his eyes, and demands his body to breathe .
Exams are getting to him. He’s too in his head.
Just breathe.
He holds himself tightly coiled, desperate to stay quiet. He cannot sit in the middle of the library in broad daylight gripping the edge of the table for support. He cannot choke on panic in front of anyone, let alone a room of silent strangers, so he begs and bargains and reasons with his body to just, please, keep breathing.
Yuuri forcibly, manually overrides his lungs until the awful gasping feeling simmers down to nothing. It takes a long moment, but he steadies.
This happens sometimes. This jolt of panic. Adrenaline. Being thrown to his feet, ready to run for his life, but the threat is not something he can run from.
Yuuri doesn’t understand it, but it happens. He's becoming familiar with it.
He withers back into his seat, lowers his forehead to the edge of the table, grits his teeth, closes his eyes. He tries to picture the room. Where the shelves are, the other tables, the computer stalls in the middle, the line of windows.
Everywhere Yuuri goes in Detroit is too loud. Train horns and car stereos and rowdy college students. Its crowded, busy, noisey, too too too much all of the time.
He’s all static inside and he can only do his laundry or grocery shopping in the middle of the night when it's quiet enough he can make out the soft hum of fluresencts, the squeak of his sneakers over the tile, the rattle of his grocery cart.
In the library, the silence is enforced. No shouting or rushing or small talk. It’s the closest to comfortable he’s been since before he left home.
❄❅❆
It’s always dark when he leaves practice with Celestino, regardless of what time they wrap up. Winter here is draining. There’s hardly any daylight and he’s cold down to his bones on and off the ice.
He checks, sometimes, that he’s still alive. That blood still rushes to his cheeks if he holds his breath in the mirror. He feels like he’s haunting every space he takes up here, only half-real.
There’s a girl who Yuuri sees all over campus a few times a day. They sit together at the library when it’s a little crowded. Across the table from one another in the back corner of the fourth floor by the windows. She saves him a seat with her coat sometimes. She’s the closest thing he has to a friend here.
One day she nudges a peanut butter cup across the table to him and he takes it, grateful for her compassion, for her silence. He puts it in his pocket to bring home.
❄❅❆
Panic seizes him at all hours of the day. It rips him from dreams, from studying, from meals. This need to be in motion, even aimless motion, like figure eights tightening and loosening as he manipulates his way across the ice.
He leaps to his feet with a burst of fear, of how could I be so stupid , of what was I thinking , of I can’t do this.
Yuuri cannot believe himself. What could possibly have possessed him to move halfway around the world to America? All to pursue an outlandish, disillusioned pipe dream? What the fuck was he thinking?
But he keeps the circuit of it up. Because he hasn’t done anything yet. All in all, this is still early in the plan. So he spins around and around.
Dorm, library, class, rink.
The order changes, but the objectives do not.
Breathe normal, eat normal, focus. Remember why he chose this.
❄❅❆
Sometime during the first month of practicing with Coach Celestino, his coach had asked him, “Why did you come to train here?” “What do you hope to gain from this experience, Yuuri?” “Do you think you have it in you to win?”
And Yuuri knew the answers to give. The ones a coach might want to hear. But the truth of it is, he only came here to run from what he already knew wasn’t working for him.
Everything about his new life here in Detroit is terrifying in its newness, but pales in comparison to the ever watching eyes of his parents’ house, of his hometown.
He needed distance from his family because he suddenly can’t stand anyone looking at him anymore. They all watched him all the time even though they didn't necessarily understand him, what he was doing, why he might want this. And in that, somehow, his family became a part of the audience.
He fell in love and it changed the way his family treated him. And he’s been scared ever since of the things lost in finding something new. Yuuri had gone a different path entirely, and it is beautiful, it is the closest thing to magic that Yuuri has ever been witness to in his life, but it led him somewhere his family could not follow.
❄❅❆
Mari called.
It’s early in Detroit, but Yuuri is still up from the night before because she promised she’d let him video chat with the dog after she finished her work for the day. She had propped the phone up on a pile of books so Vicchan and Yuuri could see one another while she slouched on the floor next to it so she could, theoretically, talk to Yuuri, too, if either of them had anything to say.
They’ve only just hung up now, as the sun is starting to rise, and he’s glad that she called, but he also wants to block her number, a little. He wants to block everyone’s number. Throw his phone in the lake.
None of this feeling is Mari’s fault, of course. It’s Yuuri’s. It’s his own stupid fault, because Mari was right there and Yuuri couldn’t think of a single thing to say to her.
He evaded every question she asked him, and in turn asked very little about her life, the onsen, their parents. He spoke, in English, to his dog for two hours, and could hardly say a word to his own sister.
Worse than that, now that he’s hung up, it’s so suddenly clear to him that he was wrong. He should never have come here. He should be at home, helping his parents, like Mari. He made the wrong choice.
He spirals himself all the way down ( ungrateful, selfish, delusional ) until he finds himself right back in that stutter-step heartbeat and air sucked from his lungs, repeating what am I doing here, what have I done, in a loop in his head.
Every gasped attempt at drawing air stabs through his chest. Whatever this feeling is, this violent panic that tears at him, he hates it. He’s grateful it can only seem to find him when he’s been awake and alone for long stretches of time. When he feels too big for the space he takes up.
He left home in the first place because he was getting claustrophobic, he can’t get like this again here. He’s so far from any of the watching eyes: strangers with their expectations, his parents’ always meeting him with kindness even when they could not understand what he was doing or why he wanted it, Yuuko and Minnako and his coaches’ endless hours helping him practice.
There is no audience to perform for here, not in his day to day. No one to watch him struggle. No one to watch him fail. Running away was supposed to have been safer.
Because his family, his teachers, his friends were going to know how hard he worked, how he devoted himself, lost himself in his skating career, and they were going to know that it wasn’t enough, that he wasn’t good enough, if he’d stayed.
It’s a little late to be getting cold feet about the decision. He’s already here. He’s already doing it. Regret presses down on him from all sides, but the tension gives way eventually. He gets his breath back under control.
The hours and hours, miles and miles between himself and all that pressure were the only way he was going to be able to do this. He reminds himself that he made this decision on purpose. It wasn’t a whim, he came here in order to focus. He thought it over and figured he had the rest of his life to decide everything else– where he fits within his family, what kind of person he wanted to be.
His skating career is happening right now, though. The only way he could think to do this, to actually maybe win someday and prove that it was worth all the trouble, was to get as far away as possible.
America is very far from home. And he is so lonely. The world suddenly too huge and his place in it too meaningless. Inconsequential and empty.
Yuuri misses what it feels like to be loved.
❄❅❆
Yuuri pulls the blanket over his head to block out the sun’s descent across the sky at the unfair hour of 3:30p. Winter is being redefined for him the longer he stays, no longer wet and a little chilly, but instead grey, brutal, and enduring. The wind cuts down to bone, he’s been trying to shake this flu since October , and daylight seems to only flirt with this place, because he feels like it’s been days since he’s seen the sun.
He can stay in bed today. Or, for all the excuses he’s given himself– the cold and dark, the ache of it– it’s more that he can not allow himself to get out of bed.
He’s holding himself here in this bed until he knows the want to self-destruct has passed.
Because he does want that right now. Wants to fuck up his life, a little. And he wants it to hurt.
Except, it does already. It already hurts.
Yuuri is staying in bed because the way he sees it, he’s got three options.
One. Yuuri can make the pain worse.
He can give in to the desire. He can stand up out of bed, snap at the first person who doesn’t deserve it but who had the bad luck to run into him, spend what little money he already has to buy his weight in American junk food, lock himself into his miserable little dorm room, and eat.
He knows where that one leaves him in the end, though. He’s been here so many times.
Sure, he may feel a little better while it’s happening. Automated, detached. Just desperate to feel full, anything but this vast nothingness he keeps falling into. For a minute, it’ll be right.
But there is an end to that rightness. At some point, Yuuri will have to stop. He’ll stand up from what he has done and be disgusted. And he will be in pain, nauseous and deciding on whether or not to make himself sick. And before he left Hasetsu he’d sworn to himself that he wasn’t going to do that ever again. He’s only succeeded a handful of times, and it’s so painful, his body so reluctant to obey. He won’t do it anymore.
Not on purpose, anyway.
Two. Yuuri can ease the pain.
Though he doesn’t know how. He has no one to talk to, no interests or skills outside of ice skating, and very limited access to the rink here. All the obvious solutions that Yuuko or Mari normally suggest when he’s gotten too tangled up in himself aren’t available to him here. There is no studio, no shoulder, no one who loves him here. Which leaves him with the option he’s landed on.
Three. Yuuri can do nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Because, yes, the compulsion is there, and it feels so much like desire, but there is a part of him that is horrified by this. The same part of him that is willing to admit that really he’s just scared, and sad.
He’s been so good for so long, since he’s been in Detroit he hasn’t done it even once. Everything so new and different, he thought maybe the urge would just go away, maybe some part of it was tied to the version of him back home. Which, in his own head he knows is at least part bullshit because he’s been making allowances for this exact occurrence for months. He’s been dying for the chance. Yet, now that it’s here, some part of him doesn’t want any more pain.
So Yuuri is going to lie in bed and not do anything, because he really, really doesn’t want to hurt himself.
❄❅❆
After slogging through another brutal two hours of falling and falling and falling, Celestino tells Yuuri to get off the ice.
“Your head isn’t here, go home. Sleep. Bring your whole self to practice tomorrow morning.”
Yuuri cannot bring himself to look directly at Celestino. He nods to his own feet and gets off the ice.
He’s just getting his guards on to go to the locker room when the whole day catches up to him at once. Cheeks burning, Yuuri swipes away frustrated tears. The locker room doesn’t feel clean enough for it, but he’s sorely tempted to just lie down on the floor and sob.
To add insult to injury, he’s still crying when he runs back into Celestino, waiting in the lobby to return Yuuri’s glasses. Yuuri keeps his eyes glued to the floor, tries very hard to compose himself without touching his face. Maybe it wasn’t that noticeable.
Celestino doesn’t say a word about it.
“I’m sorry about practice today, Coach Celestino,” Yuuri blurts out, unable to keep himself from apologizing. “I really am taking all of this seriously. I’m sorry we had to stop early today.”
Celestino laughs. “There’s no mistaking your seriousness, Yuuri! Don’t worry so much!”
Yuuri shrugs, eyes still on his shoes. When the silence has gone on for too long to be comfortable, Yuuri bites the inside of his cheek before saying, “I’ll see you tomorrow, Coach. Thank you for your time.”
Celestino reaches out and claps his hand over Yuuri’s shoulder just as he turns to leave. “It’s alright to have a bad day sometimes,” he says, trying to reassure Yuuri.
And, impulsively, Yuuri mutters back, “They’re all bad days.”
But his words seem to grind the conversation to a halt. Celestino, who had been lifting his hand to let Yuuri go, grips his shoulder tighter at the words, applying just a hint of pressure to try to turn Yuuri back towards him.
He’s so stupid, how could he have said that!
“Yuuri?”
“Coach?” Yuuri dares to glance up for a moment, tries to quickly read his coach’s face because something about his tone was off... Almost, worried? And yeah, the tension around his eyes confirms it. Yuuri scrambles to cover his pain again, he hates his sweet, good-natured coach looking at him so wounded and perplexed. “It’s just, you know. I haven’t landed my triple flip yet and we’ve been working on that for weeks now. And I can’t do more than execute my step sequence, if I stop focusing on each movement for even a second, I’m on my ass, and that’s supposed to be my strong suit. I just, it’s– Every practice has been lacking. I’m just not, I’m not getting anything right.”
Celestino, still holding him out at arm’s length, looks him over as he speaks. Scans his eyes over every part of Yuuri from head to toe and Yuuri is so stunned by it he cannot do anything but watch in abject horror as it happens. It makes Yuuri feel, at once, too large and so small.
Celestino drops his hand and takes a step back, clearing his throat as if he were the uncomfortable party here. “Tell me what is wrong,” he says, as if that solved it.
“Nothing’s wrong. I just need to focus.”
“Are you having trouble focusing?”
And that’s a trap if Yuuri’s ever heard one. “No, no, I- uh. I just have to do better, is all.”
Celestino looks him over again, though this time much faster. “Nothing hurts?”
Yuuri wants to laugh, tight and nervous and just breaking on hysterical. “No, it’s- I’m fine.”
“Your grades are?”
“Fine.”
“So I’m hearing... you’re fine?”
“Yes, Coach.”
Celestino frowns, seemingly to himself, then schools his face into something upbeat and artificial. “Great, then! Get a good night’s rest. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Yuuri nods thanks and practically runs out of the building.
❄❅❆
The next morning, Yuuri is ever so slightly better rested, but his body still feels as though it’s made of lead. He’s worried so much about it that now it feels certain and true, today will be as bad as all the other days before it.
Celestino seems particularly chipper at their afternoon practice.
When Yuuri asks him about his strange, good mood, Celestino says, “I’ve just signed a new skater. New students are always exciting.”
Yuuri nods, because what else is there?
A few days later Celestino tells Yuuri to keep an eye out for a letter from the housing office, letting him know they will be moving him to off-campus housing over break.
“I want you and my other student living together, I think it will make the adjustment easier for him,” Celestino says throughout their practice, sounding more enthused about the idea after each time Yuuri flubs a jump. “He’s very young to be attending college, and I like to keep my international students together, if I can, so now I can see you both settled. It will put my mind at ease, please, Yuuri."
Yuuri doesn't say much about it, but as he and his coach part ways until morning, Celestino calls out, "It is a good change, Yuuri. Try not to worry so much!”