Chapter Text
“Altin, what are you doing?” Otabek looks up. Yuri Plisetsky is standing over him again, a familiar look of horror on his face. He looks down, wondering, but his legs are straight and his grip on his toes is solid. It doesn’t even pull at his hamstrings anymore.
“You can call me Otabek.” He demurs, and goes back to stretching, pulling his chest towards his knees until he feels the burn in his legs. Yuri has openly disapproved of his routine every day since he got here.
Yuri flops down beside him, and starts his own stretches. “That’s the 400th time you’ve said that, and I still don’t give a shit.” They sit in silence for a while, gradually switching muscles and occasionally bumping legs, until Yuri finally cracks.
“Look, your foot is in completely the wrong position, you’re not stretching at all!” He snaps. Mila happens to walk past at exactly that moment.
“Hmmm.” She leans down, adjusts the angle of Otabek’s foot, and smiles. “There you go!” Otabek can feel the difference immediately. He nods his thanks, and Mila wanders off to start her own warm up on the ice.
Yuri is staring at him. He can feel the heat of it even before he turns to see him. The death glare is somewhat mitigated by the fact that Yuri is lying on his stomach, with his legs splayed out in a box split. Impressive, definitely. Intimidating, not so much.
“I’ve told you to correct that every single day, and you finally fucking listen to Mila?”
Otabek pretends not to notice that Yuri forgot to call Mila a hag. He only does that when he’s genuinely upset about something, and pointing it out is hardly going to improve that mood. He shifts position again.
“You didn’t tell me how.” He points out, which is perfectly true. Having someone tell you that you’re doing it wrong is completely useless if they don’t also tell you how to correct it. It was easier to just keep doing it wrong until Yuri figured that out.
Yuri can really move when he wants to. Like a tiger; fluid, fast and completely unpredictable. Otabek suddenly finds his back significantly closer to the floor than he’s ever managed on his own. Two solid hands press into his spine with much more pressure than he ever though Yuri was capable of.
It stings, but in a way that feels like success. After a moment of adjustment, he relaxes into it.
“Push harder.” He commands, straining his body towards the floor and into the burning. Yuri snorts at him.
“Don’t be an idiot. You’ve got to take it a step at a time or you’ll pull something.” Yuri is not used to being the voice of reason, but this is fine. Telling Otabek he’s a moron is an easy way to stop him hurting himself.
It’s not nagging.
It’s not fucking nagging, Altin’s an adult, but he’s also a moron who can’t be trusted not to push his body’s limits. It may have got him this far, but Yuri can’t believe he hasn’t had any major injuries yet, and he’s not about to let him start now.
“I can do more than this.” Otabek insists, sweat beading on his brow. Yuri rolls his eyes.
“Not today you can’t.” He lets go, as if to prove his point. “But I can do this for you every day until you can.” Otabek seems to mull that one over. For a second, Yuri thinks he’s going to tell him not to bother, but then he nods.
“Deal.” He rolls his shoulders out as he stands and heads towards the rink. Yuri watches him go. Mila manages to catch his expression of unrestrained shock on camera, but it only earns her a mild growl from Yuri. He’s been a lot milder recently. She doesn’t miss the shouting matches, obviously, but it makes him a lot less fun to wind up.
“What on earth did he say to you?” She teases, leaning over the rink to ruffle Yuri’s hair. He ducks out of the way, still staring at Otabek’s back.
“... he compromised.” He says, still sort of wondering what exactly it was that he’d said to make that one happen.
Mila actually, nearly, slips.
“He what?”
--
Otabek is aware that he has a reputation already. At first, the others were impressed by his dedication.
Yuri was the first one to notice that he didn’t know when to stop. Katsuki’s stamina was something that they were all used to, although envious of, and initially they just assumed Otabek was blessed with the same fitness.
That is, until the time Yuri dragged him off the ice on the point of collapse after just trying one too many quad toe loops.
Yuri tries not to notice that Mila, Georgi and Yakov are all watching him in varying degrees of surprise as he picks Otabek up off the ice and shoves him towards the locker room.
“How many did you even do?” he demands, bristling, as soon as he’s got Otabek sat down.
“I lost count after twenty.” The response is aimed at his boots. It’s not that he can’t look at Yuri, he just needs to concentrate to stop his vision blurring.
“Altin. Are you fucking insane?” He frames it like a question, but he’s not expecting a response.
He didn’t expect Yuri to be quite so upset with him.
“I have had to fight for this.” He responds, slowly undoing his laces. “I was not blessed with resources, or natural talent, but I had time and I had determination. I would not be here at all if I didn’t push myself.”
Yuri, for his part, is still getting used to Otabek’s absolute honesty. It’s a bit like a club to the face, sometimes. He’s so unused to people being so... open. It’s like it comes easy to him.
Yuri swats Otabek’s hands away from his feet and takes over, slipping the boots off as carefully as possible. Otabek watches him, his mind swimming. He’s exhausted. It’s not like he’s new to this feeling. It’s just that usually he can focus on the task of getting himself home, only Yuri seems to be doing it for him. He’s even taping his feet. Not only is that a disgusting job after a practice that long and gruelling, he’s doing it really, really well. Although in typical Yuri fashion, the surprising tenderness of his touch is accompanied by a continuous grumbling.
“...people don’t just say shit like that.” He finishes.
Otabek blinks, his brain suddenly catching up to
“It never occurred to me to lie about it.”
Yuri stares at him with a look of such incomprehension on his face that Otabek suddenly realises he was probably talking about something completely different. Then his expression softens somewhat, and he looks away.
“Of course it didn’t.” He sighs. Then the softness is gone, and his eyebrows are furrowed again. “Shit, I need to get back to practice.” He gripes, then turns to Otabek and nearly pokes him in the face with is finger. Otabek slowly goes cross eyed trying to look at it. Yuri has to fight back a smile and force the order in to his voice. “I’ll be half an hour, wait here until I’m done. I swear to god, if you try and get home by yourself and end up getting yourself killed I will fucking resurrect you just to kill you again myself.”
He stalks off, leaving Otabek to wonder what exactly he’s supposed to do with himself while he waits.
Mila ducks away from the doorway as Yuri walks towards it, the evidence of the encounter stored safely in her camera roll.
--
“Stretch properly, I swear to God if you break something I will flip my shit.” Otabek refrains from pointing out that he’s pretty much already doing so.
“I won’t benefit from doing the same thing every day.” He doesn’t rotate through the same sequence every day, partly because it would bore him, but partly because he knows more than one stretch for each muscle, and they all do slightly different things. Depending on his plan for that practice, he’ll choose the most appropriate ones.
“Yakov and Lilia gave me these exercises.” Yuri pouts, defensive. He’s sitting in box splits again, one foot up on each bench and his body pushed down inbetween them. Even with Yuri sitting on his back, Otabek is never going to achieve that level.
“I am not flexible. My stretches focus on different strengths.”
He turns back to what he’s doing. Yuri snorts at him.
“That one’s hardly a stretch. Plus, you look ridiculous doing it.” It’s a challenge, obviously, but Otabek wonders if it could also translate to something else. He’s getting better at reading Yuri’s evasive responses, enough to know that asking for something outright would be far too much for Yuri. He may demand things from people all the time instead, but he’s never demanded anything from him. He may be unique in that, he thinks. Either way, it leaves him with a lot of encrypted conversations.
“Are you saying you can’t do it?” It works. It’s so, so obvious, but it works.
Yuri is on his knees in a second, sharing the exercise matt instead of grabbing his own from a few metres away. Otabek relinquishes the space, if only to position Yuri’s hands properly.
“Keep your wrists directly below your shoulders. Knees under your hips.” He directs, gentle hands changing Yuri’s position where necessary. “Keep your hips forwards, pointing towards the floor. Now, stick your leg out at a ninety degree angle.” Yuri does so, smugly. Otabek grabs his hips and rotates them back to the front. Yuri flinches, but grumbling, concedes. “I told you to keep your hips facing the floor. Turn your leg out. Don’t let it slip backwards, keep it at a ninety degree angle from your body and your other leg. There.”
He moves back to stand in front of him. He does, actually, look ridiculous. Mostly it’s because of the shit-eating grin, though.
“This is piss easy.”
“Hold it there for thirty seconds.”
“Sure, whatever.” Otabek flicks out his watch and starts counting.
Fifteen seconds in, Yuri’s face is starting to go red. He doesn’t utter a sound right until Mila walks in.
“What on earth are you two doing?”
“Stretching.” Says Yuri, sounding strained, when it becomes clear that Otabek is not going to stop counting to respond.
“You look ridiculous.” Mila informs him, gleefully, and takes a picture. Yuri snarles, but holds still right up until the second Otabek reaches thirty. His face is puce now, as he springs to his feet to grab at Mila’s phone.
“Other leg.” Otabek reminds them casually, before they get too distracted by their fight. Yuri’s face collapses into horror. If Otabek had been the kind of person to say ‘I told you so’, in that moment Yuri might just have killed him.
Instead, he challenges Mila to join him. It’s actually a much better way of venting his frustration, because Mila is surprisingly crap at it too, and doesn’t even make it to thirty seconds.
Somehow, this leads to it becoming an all-out championship to see who can maintain the position for longer.
Otabek wins.
Mila posts the picture of he and Yuri at 45 seconds in on her Instagram in retribution. It’s not actually a bad one of him, but it’s the worst photo he’s ever seen of Yuri, which is saying a lot. It’s quite hard to look elegant when you’re straining to hold a single leg in the air and trying to put off your opponent by swearing at them at the same time. It’s even harder when you’re mid-collapse.
Yuri stops poking fun at his stretching routine.
--
Even he’ll admit that it’s not the most flattering position to be caught in.
Otabek’s not exactly sure what Yuri did to piss Mila off this time, but it must have been something pretty awful.
The one of Yuri sitting on his back while he does the splits is innocuous enough. Actually, after the amount of time it took him to manage it, it’s pretty nice to see the proof of the success. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer!” Mila captioned it, which seems odd of her. He and Yuri may have been jostling for the top spot for the past two seasons, but their friendship has never been based on rivalry. He wouldn't be in Russia if that were the case.
The ones of all three of them doing the stretches he taught Mila and Yuri are actually quite sweet. Well, except the one where he’s correcting the position of Yuri’s hips. Obviously, she’s captioned it with something flirty and entirely inappropriate.
The one where Yuri is taping his feet would be fine, if they didn’t happen to be in almost exactly the same pose as the one that Victor and Katsuki posted on Victor’s Instagram when they officially announced their engagement. They’re looking right at each other in that one as well, which makes it even harder to defend.
The last one, however, is definitely the worst.
One of Yuri’s most liked Instagram posts is the one of him leaning up against the edge of the rink on his phone, his legs held in a perfect split position.
One of Mila’s most popular posts is Otabek in the same position, but he’s not holding his leg up by himself. Yuri is stood behind him, pushing his right leg up in the air. They’re standing very, very close. Yuri is taller than him now, but their legs are practically the same length, which makes it... It's a very compromising position. Mila hasn’t even bothered to caption it with anything but a winky face. She has, pointedly, tagged them both in it though. None of the other photos; Just this one.
He glances over to where Yakov is trying to pry Yuri off Mila before he does any actual damage. There’s a lot of yelling and flailing going on. They seem distracted.
He saves some of the posts to his phone.
Almaty is going to seem very quiet when he gets home tomorrow.