Work Text:
“You promised.”
Viktor stares at Yuri Plisetsky a little blankly. He’s grown up a bit from when Viktor first met him, but he’s still a little squirt. Viktor still has to bend down to look him square in the eyes. He does that.
Yuri flinches, before standing his ground defiantly. He tilts his chin up, and there is a green fire in his eyes.
Viktor likes that.
It’s true, anyhow. Now that Yuri has mentioned it, Viktor can remember that morning a few years ago: Viktor had walked into Yubileyny, and his skin had felt too small for him. Yakov hadn’t been there to yell. Mila had chirped out a greeting, and the rink had looked as it always had, and the screeches of metal against ice had echoed like they always did, and he had smiled at Mila before he walked straight back out and onto a plane.
Two hours later, he was in Saransk, and yet more hours had passed before he watched a twelve-year-old boy land a quad. He had leant forward into the railing, found his heart in his mouth. Felt ill-at-ease with this new emotion, a slow broil at the back of his throat.
But that was then. And now—
“I always keep my promises,” Viktor declares grandly, and he lets his smile broaden as Yuri snorts.
“You’re always full of shit. You completely forgot, didn’t you?” Yuri looks unimpressed. He scuffs his sneakers against the threshold, hands tucked deep in the pockets of his jacket. A sports bag hangs off his small frame — it’s Thursday night, and Thursday nights, Yuri spends with the spin coach. He came straight here from the rink, then.
“You’re here to collect, aren’t you? No loss for you, in any case.” Viktor flicks him on the nose, and, on cue, Yuri’s scowl deepens. “Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s go.”
Yuri stops abusing his footwear. “Wait, go where? It’s fucking nine o’clock!”
“What, so you came over for a sleepover?” Viktor grabs a coat and shrugs into it. He nods at Yuri’s bag. “Got all your stuff? Great.”
Viktor can tell that it’s Yuri’s first time breaking into Yubileyny, even though he’s been in St. Petersburg for— what? Has it been five years, already? Yuri’s eyes are wide and his steps are quiet and the shadows draw long in the half-light.
And it’s been awhile since Viktor’s done this himself; the illicit thrill steals across his spine. He laughs, and the tension in his shoulders dissipates. A little, not a lot, but it had been everpresent since Worlds. Maybe earlier. He feels — rather than sees — Yuri jump at his sudden noise, and the second laugh that he lets out echoes through the rink, just as the floodlights flicker on.
*
There’s something raw in him, something visceral, ugly, desperate. Viktor wants to reach out and touch it, whatever it is. Sculpt it into— well. As choreographer, Viktor can sculpt him into anything he pleases, can’t he? And what is even better: Yuri will let him. A willing sacrifice, of sorts.
Viktor smiles. The satisfaction feels fresh and cat-like.
“Stop smirking,” Yuri demands, “and start doing what you dragged me here for. What you promised to do.”
Viktor holds up a hand. “That’s not how it works, kitten.“ It’s really too good— Viktor watches as his words draw out an annoyed bristle. “You have to give me something.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? You—”
Viktor has never been one to pretend at propriety; now, he indulges his earlier impulse. He reaches a hand out, pauses in indecision, lets it fall onto Yuri’s wheat-yellow hair. Yuri’s indignant voice trails off as his hand makes contact with the junction between neck and shoulder. Viktor feels the muscle under the skin tense in sudden awareness.
There is doll-like shock in Yuri’s eyes. Viktor allows it to darken into murder. At the last possible moment before candescence, Viktor shrugs.
“Anything,” he says, breaking the silence as though there was no pause at all. “Your hopes. Dreams. What are you feeling? What do you want to be? I can’t make something out of nothing. Tell me your secrets.”
“You’re the choreographer.” Yuri stares back; brashness underpinned with uncertainty. “You’re in charge. You should be the one writing the story for me.”
“Fine, then. I’ll tell you a story.” Viktor keeps his hand unmoved: an unfamiliar intimacy he’s inclined to push at, like bruised flesh. “You want to win. You want to win so badly that you feel sick to your stomach with it.” It’s like pushing buttons. Cause, and effect. “It’s not for the glory. It’s for the fear. It swallows you up at night.” Yuri’s pulse is rabbit-quick under his skin. “You’re scared. You’re terrified of showing weakness. You never want to be not good enough.” Viktor is— enjoying himself, he distantly realises. “You would do anything, wouldn’t you?”
Yuri wrenches himself out of his grasp.
Viktor laughs, bright and sunny and fake. “Or something like that! But that’s not usually how I get started on my programs. Show me your quad salchow.”
Yuri whirls around and skates away from him. Then he circles back in a wide arc, and he sweeps his left leg back, and— there. Yuri lands it flawlessly with near-perfect posture, savage ferocity funnelled into violent precision, but Viktor can still see a twelve-year-old novice stepping out from a precarious landing. The chaotic spray of crushed ice, the hushed surprise of the spectators. He was so alive.
“Well?” Yuri says.
He’s still burning so brightly. Viktor was like that once, but he has long forgotten what it felt like.
“Now, you have to give me a part of you,” Viktor murmurs, “so that I can give you a part of me. If it’s my secrets that you’re after, then I might have a few to offer.”
*
The two arrangements each have their benefits and deficiencies. The coaches are always cautious: when in doubt, they tell you to stick to what you know. But Viktor did not achieve all that he has on the advice of others. He blinks innocently at Yakov and then works out the basic choreography for Eros and Agape in the same afternoon.
When the footsteps stomp into the rink, he doesn’t pause. He impulsively tacks on a layback Ina Bauer into the choreographic sequence, but stops at the muttered ‘show-off’.
“Oh?” Viktor enquires politely. “You have feedback for Agape?”
A pause. “Yeah, I do,” Yuri says. “It’s fucking stupid.”
“Is it.”
“You don’t know anything about love.” The honesty overrides the malice. “You’re the loneliest person I know.”
Viktor says, “That has nothing to do with love.”
“Whatever.” Yuri rolls his eyes. Shifts his weight from one foot to another. “You’ve got two short programs, and you still have nothing for me. What’s up with that?”
What is up with that, indeed. Just that it was like catching tadpoles in water, the larvae darting in and out of the mason jar, almost mindlessly. One moment ready to be caught and examined with a child’s curious eye. Gone, in the next. Viktor is not a patient person. He has never liked the mess of pondwater.
“Get on the ice,” he says. When Yuri opens his mouth in preparation for some retort, Viktor is struck with another thought. “No. Stay there.”
Viktor skates to the edge of the rink. He doesn’t break eye contact as he snaps on his skate guards. Then he takes a deliberate step on firm ground towards Yuri, and another, until Yuri is crowded onto the edge of a bench. He's leaning back. He can't recoil any further.
Viktor reaches for Yuri’s bag. Unzips it, pulls out Yuri’s skates.
“What are you doing,” Yuri says.
Viktor uses his height to push down lightly on Yuri’s shoulder; Yuri drops onto the bench almost abruptly. It's an acquiescence borne more out of surprise, than compliance.
“You need to trust me,” Viktor says, and now he ignores Yuri’s nonplussed expression.
He kneels down with intention, and pulls off Yuri’s ratty sneakers unceremoniously. Yuri’s socked feet feel small in his hands; they’re delicate, in contrast with the coiled potential with which he takes off on his jumps. They're well-made, perfectly designed for his craft. One deliberate twist now, and Yuri might well lose his livelihood. Maybe for weeks, maybe forever. It’s almost a distant, professional thoughtfulness: dollmaker to doll. The power is heady.
“Trust you,” Yuri repeats. His stare like a physical entity.
Viktor removes the soakers from each blade, and reaches for Yuri’s left foot. Even through the barrier of the fabric, Yuri’s whole leg jerks when Viktor first brushes his hand just above the ankle. Otherwise, Yuri doesn’t resist. His light breaths fill the silence, and Viktor would guess that Yuri isn’t even aware of the sounds he is making. But Viktor doesn’t let himself look at him; he focuses on the arch of the foot, how his hand fits over the calloused skin under the fabric, how to angle the boot so that it can be slipped on easily, just so.
And still, from the corner of his eye, he could see Yuri’s knuckles white to the bone, tension thrumming through his body like a live wire. Even as he lets himself be manipulated; easy, like a puppet.
Viktor twirls the laces around his finger, and pulls without mercy. There. Yuri makes a choked-off noise, and Viktor looks up with a mild smile.
“Looser?”
“Just let me do it myself.” It comes out as a growl, and Yuri moves to kick him away. Viktor places a hand on his knee and the other curled around his leg. The kick doesn't materialise; Yuri lets out a grunt of frustration as he realises that he is restrained.
A caged animal, as it seems.
“Tell me how tight you want it,” Viktor directs him. “And I promise I will do as you say.”
Yuri glares at him and tries to kick out again. Viktor doesn't relent, even as he keeps his face carefully blank with plastered neutrality. Eventually — as Viktor knew it would, sooner or later — Yuri's defiance gives with the grudging wariness of a wounded bird, and they get through the one boot, and then the other.
*
“I’m not a fucking girl,” Yuri declares.
“An astute observation,” Viktor says. He reins in his smile, and lets himself observe Yuri’s vehemence like a performance. Insect under magnifying glass. It’s almost fascinating.
“So we agree that Coppélia is fucking stupid.”
“Well.” Viktor hums tunelessly. “Not quite.”
“I’m done with your bullshit,” Yuri says. “I’m just going to get Lilia to do my short as well.”
It’s like tuning a musical instrument, abandon and fury singing out as dissonant harmonics. Viktor lets Yuri skate away, until he reaches the edge of the ice.
“Why are you still in this sport?” Viktor wonders out loud.
“You fucking know why,” Yuri snaps. Yes, Viktor supposes that he does. But what he also knows—
“You’re here because you don’t know how to be anything else. You’d sacrifice yourself for this, because you don’t know any better. Apart from this, there is nothing for you." Viktor pretends not to notice Yuri’s pause, mid-reach for his skate guards. “Quads at twelve years old? You should have listened to Yakov. Another coach would have let you fuck up your body, and for what? A few novice medals?”
The expletive is foreign on his lips, and he watches as Yuri turns around, almost involuntarily. Viktor finally lets himself smile.
“But this is the truth, Yuri: you’re in love with something that doesn’t exist. There’s something missing within us both,” Viktor says, “and no number of world titles will be enough to fill the void. But this is how we win, Yurochka. We pretend we’re alright. That we’re good enough. And we’re good enough at pretending to be something we’re not.”
Yuri stares back at him, eyes wide and toxic green, as though they’re artificial, as though they’re painted onto his face. Viktor can see the rise and fall of his chest. He’s really very skinny.
“Do we understand each other now?” Viktor murmurs. “Like this, you’re mine.”
“Don’t you ever,” Yuri says, “call me Yurochka again.”
*
Yuri bangs into the studio, mouth twisted into an ugly sneer.
“They’re saying that you're choosing Agape,” he says.
He watches Viktor’s reflection at the barre, watches as Viktor slowly lowers his working leg from the pitiful arabesque penché that he had attempted. He is not seven, or seventeen, but twenty-seven. His hips are open; he can't remember when that first became a necessity. His body screams in self-preservation and his mind screams in self-disgust.
Spirals aren’t required or rewarded in his discipline, but losing his flexibility is akin to the amputation of strings from a marionette. It's the ultimate betrayal of a danseur's body. Seeing what was once his in the younger generation— well. That brings an entirely different taste to his mouth.
Viktor thinks that Yuri must know this. His vicious glee is reminiscent of a cat pawing at a hurt: slow, deliberate, scrutinising. Yuri pounces over to the barre just as Viktor drops from à la hauteur.
“That was dumb, you know,” Yuri tells the Viktor in the mirror. “I would have chosen Eros.”
Viktor drops his hand from the barre, watches the action echoed by mirrors within mirrors. Yuri follows Viktor’s image as he moves about the room. The mirrors make it seem larger than it is.
“But I don’t know anything about passion,” Viktor says. He keeps his voice bland. Lets Yuri stare at him, wonder if he is being mocked. Lets himself pause directly behind Yuri's slight figure, staring at his own image. The superimposition like a vulture over prey.
Yuri is forced to look up to meet Viktor’s eye. “That’s a stupid lie,” he breathes. He watches as Viktor reaches for a strand of blond hair.
“Oh?” And another.
“You weren’t like this before." Viktor watches as he works to contain the wince as Viktor twirls a third handful around his fingers. He folds one section over another. Crosses the last section over the top. Add more hair. Repeat.
“What was I like before, then?”
Yuri is tense under his fingers. Viktor can see how much he wants to pull away. It’s in his shoulders. It’s in his eyes, large and delicate, like enamel.
“You were alive,” Yuri says. Viktor feels the smile freeze on his face. Yuri continues, “But you don’t care about anything, now. I’d rather die than to end up like you.”
Viktor forces his expression to relax into something more natural. “That’s where you’re wrong,” he says. His fingers work with a ruthless economy of action; muscle memory, even if those memories were not so recent. “The things you drop on your way up— well. You’ve always wanted to be exactly like me, haven’t you?”
Yuri’s bird-like wrist flies up, possibly to swat him away— Viktor grabs the limb and pulls his head to the side.
“What do you think?” he smiles at the braid in the reflection, at the pale skin of Yuri's exposed neck. It’s good for his ego, watching himself change some part of someone else. “I remember wearing this hairstyle once or twice, myself.”
And Yakov once said that Viktor’s narcissism would be his downfall: with a sudden effort, like a cat springing from a coil, Yuri twists around and pushes him away. They land hard on the wooden flooring — well, Viktor lands hard and Yuri is cushioned by his body — and slowly, slowly, Viktor’s smile grows wider.
“What do you want from me?” Yuri’s hair is in tousled disarray. His eyes dark. A little uncertain. A little young. His breath hitches as Viktor reaches up to tuck a strand of hair behind his ear.
Viktor doesn't say, 'My name is not ready to be retired, so you will carry my legacy.' He doesn't say, 'You are another once-in-a-generation talent, and I want your glory inseparable from mine.'
“As I recall,” Viktor says, feeling the corners of his lips tilt up further, “all this is a matter of what you wanted.”
*
It’s not easy, in the way that trying to get toothpaste back into the tube isn’t easy. Holding someone’s trust in the palm of his hand— that’s a new experience. Viktor has always been a lone wolf, but wild cats are solitary creatures. Yes, Viktor thinks. They deserve each other.
When Viktor finally notices the Frankensteinian monster he’s helped to create, Yuri is already in Beijing executing every element as though he is a character in a video game. Later, Viktor watches through the electronic screen as Yuri sticks out his tongue at Jean-Jacques Leroy from the top of the podium. Yakov comes back to St. Petersburg trying to hide his reluctant beam of pride, and Yuri comes back smirking.
“My second gold,” Yuri hisses into the tender skin below Viktor’s ear, after he launches himself at him. It tickles, like a physical touch. When Yuri finally comes back to himself, he lets go abruptly and glares into the air.
“Tell me your secrets.” Viktor leans down, smiles teasingly at him.
Yuri lunges forward, again, breathes some life into him, and then Viktor finds himself quite pre-occupied indeed.
Afterwards, mumbled into his skin, he thinks that he hears, “I needed to prove myself to you.”
“Hm?”
“I said, you realise — and you agree — how completely you belong to me now?” Yuri spits out. Decidedly unlike what Viktor heard, but Viktor leans back to regard the fiery eyes, the dishevelled hair. He runs his fingers against Yuri’s scalp. Watches the fine hair fall in fresh disorder.
“Oh?” Viktor eventually says. “And why do you say that?”
Yuri grabs at his hand and drags it down. “I’m your only chance for a decent challenge,” he tells him. “Don’t you think so?”
The arrogance, the nerve— this shocks a laugh out of Viktor. “You're an improbable person.”
“Fucking rich coming from you.”
Viktor inclines his head in acknowledgement. “I suppose we have that in common.”
“When are you leaving for NHK?”
“My flight is tomorrow,” Viktor says. “Will you be good for the coaches?”
“Hm,” Yuri replies, which Viktor realises, with a strange jolt, is probably a habit picked up from himself. Yuri reaches out his other hand, lets it hover above Viktor’s chest. Off-centre, slightly to the left, and when Viktor quirks a questioning eyebrow, he snatches it back as though from a hot flame. He tells him, “I don’t make promises I can’t keep.”
“Neither do I,” says Viktor, and he smiles faintly.