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When Victor is twelve his mother gives him the talk, and he finds himself so confused as to why anyone would want to do something like that. His mother smiles and tells him it's because they love each other, and that Victor will understand someday.
Victor asks what it feels like to be in love, and his mother tells him it's the best feeling in the world. Like ice cream and days at the beach and skating all rolled up into one. Victor can't imagine enjoying anything more than skating, but he nods and smiles anyway.
*
Victor is fifteen when one of his friends from school (of which there are few, now, since skating has become so important) asks him if he thinks a girl in their class is hot. Victor laughs at first, thinking it's a joke, thinking they're too young to really consider that, before he realises that his friend is serious. He stumbles, fumbles with his words.
"I don't know," Victor says finally. "I suppose I've never really thought about it before."
His friend gives him a strange look, but goes over to the girl anyway. Months later, when they're dating, Victor wonders how they can enjoy kissing and touching so intimately. How they can trust each other so much.
Victor thinks about love, how it's supposed to be the best thing in the world. And he wonders why he's supposed to care.
*
He pours himself into his skating, the only love he's ever had, and wins medal after medal. He makes his parents proud. He makes his coach happy.
He feels nothing.
Victor chases happiness as if it's just out of reach, a dagger that he can see but not touch, but every time he wins it moves further away.
He grows out his hair. He creates routines about love, but doesn't understand it. He skates for others - for the heartbreak of his coach after his divorce, for the love of his parents. When reporters ask about his love life he deflects, talking instead about his friends (who keep drifting away) or the dog he's always wanted.
Other skaters joke or overshare about their sex lives and Victor forces himself to act like he cares. Act like he doesn't feel broken, empty, like he doesn't wish every day to be like everyone else.
He tries to feel something for someone else. He still feels empty.
*
He tries to fill himself with friends and colour, with drinks and nights out and kisses that don't go anywhere. It doesn't work.
He adopts a dog from a rescue shelter when he's twenty. She helps, a little. He distracts himself by taking care of her, walking her and feeding her, buying her a comfy bed (that she never uses) and toys (which she does).
Victor thinks about love, about how everyone else in the world seems to chase it. Love and sex. But he's never had any desire for either.
When he's with Makkachin, cuddling on the sofa or on his bed at night, he feels a little bit less empty. Less broken.
*
At twenty four Victor meets a boy with the bluest eyes he's ever seen and feels a spark. He chases it desperately, and for six months he thinks that he almost understands what his mother meant all those years ago.
Then his partner gets fed up with Victor's refusal to have sex, and how sometimes Victor doesn't feel comfortable enough to even hold hands.
Victor cuts himself off from the few friends he had left, throws himself into his skating, tries and tries and tries to replicate those brief feelings on the ice. It works for a while. He breaks his own records, becomes a legend, and all the while feels his hopes slipping.
After a while he starts faking the feelings, making up stories and acting them out on the ice. He cuts off his hair. He trains himself to be more masculine, to walk like he rules the world. Makkachin starts to look old.
Victor fools everyone into thinking he is okay and all the while he is falling, falling, falling.
*
Victor is twenty six and miserable when Yuri Plisetsky reminds him about his promise to choreograph Yuri's senior debut. He makes an offhand comment about Yuri using it to get the ladies.
(He has become so, so good at pretending to care that these comments almost come naturally. His stomach still twists at the thought of sex, though.)
"Huh?" Yuri asks, baffled, forgetting his angsty tone for a moment. "Victor, I'm ace."
Now Victor is confused and Yuri, seeing the look on his face, explains, "I'm asexual. As in, I don't experience sexual attraction. Seriously, it's not that hard to understand!"
Yuri skates off, leaving Victor by himself again.
Victor is shaking. Halfway through his walk home he realises that he's started to cry. There's a word, and there's other people like him.
Victor is ecstatic.
*
In the next year, Victor finds a whole community online. He discovers labels, and within those labels he finds that he identifies as a greyromantic sex-repulsed asexual.
It feels really, really good to know he's not alone.
Victor skates so well in the Grand Prix Final that year, at age twenty seven, but when he wins another gold he finds himself feeling lost again.
What's the point in knowing who he is if it changes nothing?
*
At the banquet Victor feels another spark, brighter and fiercer than the first ever was. The competitor who came last, Katsuki Yuuri, is confident and kind of shameless. But he doesn't push Victor to do anything he doesn't want, and at the end of the night he refuses to give Victor his number.
"Come find me," Yuuri says, "and coach me. I'll send you a sign when I'm ready."
*
When Victor sees the video of Yuuri skating his routine he's packed and ready to go within an hour, and Makkachin is ecstatic to go somewhere new with her owner.
Victor is going to try and chase his happy ending. As he sits on the plane to Japan, with a happy dog and a happier heart, he feels hopeful; just like he did all those years ago, when his mother promised him the best feeling in the world.
Victor is not in love, not yet anyway, but he understands and loves himself. And that makes all the difference.