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Because Yuuri is never, ever lucky, of course Victor finds his poster stash.
The only slight silver lining is that Yuuri rolled up all the big ones into a shipping tube and stashed the tube in the cleaning closet, in the big vase that holds all the mops and brooms and things, where Victor will surely never, ever, ever ever look. But even while he did it, Yuuri was mourning the curl that was bound to develop in the paper from being rolled like a beautiful glossy cigar. He couldn’t bring himself to do that to all of them, so the smaller posters went into an oversized atlas which he buried among other books on his bedside bookshelf.
He didn’t count on becoming comfortable enough with Victor to allow him in his room. And because Yuuri is never lucky and also manages somehow to sabotage himself at every possible turn, one evening when Victor is in his room, in the course of idle conversation, Yuuri jokes that Hasetsu is so small it isn’t even on any maps.
“Really? I think you’re having a laugh at the foreigner’s expense,” says Victor, setting aside the keyboard he’s been toying with, “but let’s just see,” and he arrows right to the atlas and opens it. Page after page of slick paper adorned with his own face slides out right onto Victor’s lap.
Yuuri can only gape in horror. These smaller posters mostly come from earlier in Victor’s career, and it suddenly seems especially creepy to have a dozen posters of his coach as a teenager, swirls of long silver hair trailing him across the ice.
“Oh!” says Victor, unaccountably pleased. “Yuuko said you two used to collect these. You must have put them in the book to flatten them and forgot all about them.”
“Yes,” says Yuuri, “that. That is exactly. Yes.”
“I forgot about some of these,” Victor spreads some of the posters out. “Ha! I had them take this one because I was hoping to get a sponsorship with Gloria Jeans. But a few weeks later my team made a deal with Tommy Hilfiger, so this was retouched to take the Gloria logo off.”
“But you–” Yuuri snaps his mouth shut.
“I did an ad campaign for Gloria later! Yes. They came up with a good offer and I decided I would like to represent a Russian brand. But the next year Dolce & Gabbana wanted me to do their jeans and menswear and Gloria couldn’t compete with that. Oh, look at this one. I should never have let them paste those fake gems to my favorite skates. The stylist said they’d come right off, but the finish was never the same after that.”
Victor rambles his way through the stack– this photographer was so fun, those clothes were too big and the back side was just a mass of pins to make them look like they fit, that shoot was supposed to be outdoors but the weather was bad– and comes to one of the prizes of Yuuri’s collection, a magazine pull-out of Victor from early in the season of his Juniors debut. Victor misses a beat when he comes to that one.
“No story?” Yuuri can’t help but ask.
Victor flashes a smile in a way that Yuuri hasn’t seen in a while, bright like light glancing off a blade. “I didn’t like this one much.”
Yuuri frowns down at it. Young Victor’s face is turned nearly in profile, his expression serene, his hair cascading over his shoulders in streams of silver and lifting out behind him as he slowly glides, his eyes and eyelashes dramatically lit. “It’s beautiful.”
“It’s photoshopped,” says Victor flatly. “Of course they all are. But this one– well, it was early. I was young.”
Don’t ask, he obviously doesn’t want to talk about it, Yuuri tells himself, but his mouth is already saying, “Did it bother you?”
Victor tips his head, studying Yuuri briefly, and nods. “At the time. Yes. It made me self-conscious, and I never wanted to feel that way on the ice.” He smiles. “I got over it, obviously.”
Yuuri feels a prickle of nervous daring in his fingertips and at the back of his head. “What did they change?”
Holding up the photo next to his face, Victor asks, “What do you think?” It doesn’t sound like a challenge, but genuine curiosity.
“Well… it’s from a while ago,” says Yuuri. “Um. Did they clear up your skin?”
“A little, but that’s not the main thing.”
There’s nothing to do but be honest. “Your nose and chin look different, but I can’t tell if that’s Photoshop or just time.”
Victor lays down the poster with a little laugh. “It’s both. But yes, they airbrushed my nose. I think to make it less pointy?” He shakes his head. “I used to hate that, but then, I stopped minding. Do you know why?”
Yuuri shakes his head, even though it’s obviously a rhetorical question.
“Because it happened in so many photos in so many different ways.” Victor spreads out all the small posters and chooses a few, puts the others back in the atlas and rises to join Yuuri sitting on his bed, all in a few sweeping gestures. “Here, see? They changed me in all of these, but look.” He traces his features in two different photos. “Here: less pointy. Here: more. They narrowed it even more, see? Then in this one I almost look like one of those aliens, you know, the big eyes and nothing else? And here I think they must have defined my profile more with computers, or maybe it really was the light, but: look how different. I don’t even recognize myself.”
It’s not as if Yuuri really needs the tour through the details of the photos. There’s almost nothing in the world he’s more familiar with than these pictures of Victor. They were on his walls for years. He always thought it was amazing how different photographers could bring out different sides of Victor, new looks, changing moods: always a surprise.
“Let’s make this a coaching lesson, so it’s not completely narcissistic,” says Victor, bumping his shoulder against Yuuri’s companionably. “People will always try to frame you with their ideas of you. Shape you to fit the way they see you. There’s no getting away from that. But don’t let it limit you. You don’t have to accept it. Their image of you isn’t you.”
“I–- that’s a good lesson, but I’m never going to have to worry about that,” says Yuuri. “I’m never going to have clothes brands fighting over who gets to put me in their jeans.”
“You could,” says Victor. “But that kind of thing can wait til after the season, it would just be a distraction now. Anyway, even if you don’t go after modeling work, it’s already happening. Look.” He fishes his phone out of his pocket and calls up his photo gallery.
Yuuri’s stomach flips as Victor taps open a folder that’s nothing but photos of Yuuri. The first few dozen (dozen?) are from official photo shoots and action shots of his performances from sports websites. There are the Hasetsu tourism posters that plaster the walls of the train station. The few print ads Yuuri’s done for his sponsors. Mizuno, Pocari Sweat, Onitsuka Tiger shoes. Victor pauses on those.
“Here, good example,” says Victor. “Obviously the Hasetsu tourism board went for a hometown sweetheart theme. Look how young and cute you look! And here, the shoes and the sports drink, you look older–”
“That’s because I am older in those–-”
“Ah ah! But they don’t have to make you look older, do they? And look how they’ve dressed you to emphasize your shoulders and chose pictures where you look determined. Classic ‘young athlete taking on the world’ stuff.”
“I thought you just said I looked older?”
“English! Fine, here under the cherry tree you are boyish, here and here you’re a young man ready to take on the world, and now look at Mizuno: there you are, ready to take the world to bed.”
“What?!”
“What do you mean, what?” Victor swipes back to the Hasetsu tourism poster. “Sweet, innocent Yuuri.” He swipes forward to the Mizuno ad. “Cool, sexy Yuuri.”
He’s willing to believe they were trying for cool, maybe. They styled his hair differently (well, as in, they styled it) and had him lean back to show off the clothes. “That’s not. No.”
“Yuuuuri,” Victor draws out his name in exasperation. “They have you arching your back with bedroom eyes. Look how they lit your mouth! Is that lip gloss?”
“It’s just normal makeup for taking pictures! They weren’t trying to make me look sexy!”
“I can believe they didn’t have to try,” Victor smirks briefly. “But you are sexy.”
He’s looking right at Yuuri, unnervingly direct, and it’s such a matter-of-fact tone, with none of Victor’s usual over-the-top gestures or outrageous compliments. Yuuri’s ears feel hot. He swallows. “You were making this a coaching lesson.”
Victor studies him for a few more disconcerting moments, and suddenly shifts back to wrap his arm around Yuuri’s shoulders, holding his phone with both hands in front of Yuuri so that Yuuri can only look at the screen from within the circle of Victor’s arms. “You don’t really need my lesson, I think,” Victor murmurs. He backs out of the photos from the ads and scrolls through the album. There are over two hundred pictures of Yuuri here. Most of them are from performances, and he supposes he already knew that Victor had them, because sometimes Victor shows Yuuri a photo of his usual form to illustrate the advice he’s giving on how to improve.
But it’s something else to see them all here at once, and it’s not only skating photos, it’s the ads, it’s publicity photos and stills from interviews. The video of Yuuri performing Victor’s Stay Close To Me program is saved here too.
“I always want to hear anything you want to tell me,” says Yuuri, and it comes out embarrassingly breathy.
“Yes, but sometimes I think you want to hear it just so you’ll know what you’re ignoring.” Victor’s tone is kind, and his arms around Yuuri collapse into an embrace while Yuuri stiffens into his best impression of a PVC figure. “You have different reactions, that’s all. You have a hard time seeing yourself the way other people see you in the first place. So all this,” Victor glides through the photo gallery in a blur, “it doesn’t get to you the same way. In this case maybe that’s better.” Another squeeze, and he lets Yuuri go with a lingering drag across his shoulders that Yuuri feels like a brand on his skin for the rest of the day.
Because Yuuri is never, ever lucky, that’s not the last of the poster drama. Just a few weeks later, Victor insists on personally cleaning up mud that Makkachin tracked in, so Mari shows him where to find the mops and brooms: in the big vase in the cleaning closet. Of course Victor finds and opens the poster tube. Yuuri learns about this when he comes to his room to find the larger posters all spread out on his desk and weighted down at the corners to flatten out the curled paper.
Victor’s gold Sharpie signature adorns the top poster of the stack. When Yuuri first sees it, he’s equal parts mortified that Victor found the rest of his stash and upset that Victor wrote on them. But when he checks, he finds Victor only signed that top one. And it isn’t just signed, either.
Over his signature, Victor carefully lettered the hiragana for Ganba and the characters of Yuuri’s given name, the strokes clumsy but the effort enough to tighten Yuuri’s throat. In English, he wrote I’m so proud of you, and something else in a Cyrillic cursive scrawl that Yuuri can’t hope to decipher, above the characters of Victor’s name.
It’s terribly sweet, and Yuuri feels awful for his kneejerk annoyance. Especially when it registers that the poster Victor signed is the one Yuuri has three copies of, in this stash alone.
When Victor first arrived–- unannounced, unilaterally declaring himself to be Yuuri’s new coach and waiting expectantly for Yuuri to find space at the onsen for him and his boxes and bags and more boxes of stuff– it was easy to see him as inconsiderate and thoughtless.
But now, looking at the consideration that went into this gesture, and recalling the coaching lesson Victor tried to make from the poster collection, Yuuri wonders if Victor was never really thoughtless.
It’s more that his thoughts are so different from Yuuri’s that Yuuri only saw the absence of the expected, and missed the presence of other thoughts entirely: whatever it is Victor’s been thinking that led to his sudden total commitment to Yuuri’s career, the two hundred-plus photos of his Yuuri album, his visible satisfaction every time Yuuri allows him into his personal space or invites him into his room.
Yuuri leaves the stack where it is. He expects Victor to ask why he hasn’t put the signed poster up, but as always, Victor surprises him, and never mentions it.