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Dedication is a tatoo on his heart, art scribed into the strips of muscle that make up those aching chambers. They hammer mid-flight and thud with a jarring pound when he hits the ice, shards spraying in a flay of hopes and dreams. Everything is in these single moments: thousands of heartbeats of hard work culminating in the strength of a mere few hundred.
He skates on the frayed ends of a wish. Not like his blades are leaving their contrails carved into the ice, but like he's scrambling in someone else's cuts, struggling to keep up. Limbs flailing, heart racing, seeing a version of himself seconds from the present moment. Falling, stumbling, losing, but sometimes, sometimes — soaring. A plane leaving its jetpath in a blazing streak across brilliant blue.
He takes all of that, the pressure, the phasing between himself and his future self, and plows through the ambiguity and uncertainty and keeps trying.
He wakes up every morning, runs to the rink. Skates. Showers. Goes to school. Skates again. Showers.
It's not that Yuuri doesn't believe in living for something beyond skating.
He tells himself that at least. It’s just what he’s doing for now, a conscious effort, and not a terrifying rhythmless routine he's addicted to because he loves comfort. Loves chasing the same lines.
The lie is knocked out of him when he hits the ice at the GPF the first time and it isn't a spray of fractals and dreams, but a full body thud, and his world crashes like falling into the shower curtains and taking the rod down. The act is done and it's just himself, standing limp and loose and unrecognizable in front a long mirror in a public restroom fresh from crying, ripe from getting yelled at.
It's just him with a pounding headache the next day that still can't knock out the new crisp memory of himself. He wills the throb to beat the feeling on his flesh and blood into the fabric of the plane seats as he heads home, so that he will always be apart of something flying fearlessly and leaving a skid in its wake, but the plane lands and he's trapped by gravity again, the force he's always seeming to reckon with.
His heart feels slashed a thousand different ways. One cut for every moment he's squandered, every line he fell out of.
And still, dedication tolls through him. He thinks, one day, I will figure it out , and of course he cries at the question of how.
When Viktor finds him, he’s trying to find the lines of dedication in the ones he cuts into the ice, a scribe of a new story, and he almost finds something. Then he catches the mirage of his own reflection in the pallor of newly laid ice one day, stumbles on a jump, and it’s gone. It takes a moment on the beach when Yuuri realizes Viktor maybe hasn’t always known what he’s dedicated to, either, to realize Yuuri has a choice.
He always had a choice .
~
The revelation is the easy part, that first swig of a bubbly drink when you’re mid-swallow and it seems possible to down the whole world in alcohol and set it on fire; but reality catches up, and it’s just him, pulling off his skate guards and seeing double, two left feet, and a stomach that’s suddenly dropping through the floor. The crowd is a tidal wave of sound and it’s going to overtake him.
Until he looks up and Viktor is there, and he takes a breath and remembers the beach, that moment when his worries lifted high above and cried out over sea with the gulls — those crystal clear moments.
Right. He knows why he skates.
~
His dedication has many forms: sometimes it’s wicked stamina, sometimes it’s his time, sometimes it’s sheer stubbornness, and other times it’s a desperate will to not burst into tears. In Yuuri’s mind, he’s defined by all these facets as separate parts; he cuts himself up into sections for people depending on which will appease them most. Unfortunately, none of his pieces are much appeasing to begin with, but it’s all he has.
He trades off which parts Viktor sees, the entire time completely terrified that the constant exchanging of sections will tire Viktor faster.
And then the strangest thing — when Viktor throws himself into the air, crushes their lips together, and knocks them to the ground, Yuuri doesn’t hit the ice hard like so many of his other falls. Viktor cradles him just enough, and then he feels all his sections slamming into place like he finally, finally can be just one thing, himself, and that Viktor will know how to take care of all the quaking and breaking he threatens to do. Maybe they can hold him together.
~
If only the hardest part was starting to figure things out. When he has to wake up the next day and hold onto those previous revelations, he prays they’re not born from delusion. Viktor smiles and kisses him again before leaving for their flight (Yuuri can’t wait until they’ve kissed enough times he’s lost count), and it’s a nudge for Yuuri to hold tight to the belief he’s on the right track. Following the right cuts in the ice.
~
At the GPF again, somehow, the ice is new. Not like freshly-laid-down new, but he sees the colored distortion of his reflection and nothing else, no one’s tracks to trace, and for a moment he thinks another lie is about to be knocked out of him. The ice is so slippery with no pre-drawn paths, and when he falls onto it, everything he’s worked for quakes, and before his eyes flash all the people he’s about to disappoint and bring down with him.
All his pieces fall apart. It’d been so long since the shatter, since he remembered he’s glass that for some reason runs around on blades. Why did he think putting rings on fingers and kissing promises to lips would permit himself to amount to anything? For all he’d dedicated himself too, none of it means a thing if he fails.
~
During that final skate, the one that would determine everything, the ice is still that terrifying pale shade of new, but suddenly he’s moving, cutting his blades through the ice on his own, and scattered around him are all his shards. He picks them up as he skates: collecting his stories, his memories, his journey, one by one, because that’s what this song had meant to him. Here and there, piece by piece, he’d forgotten, but now he's wiping the ice clean to fill himself up with pride, and in his wake are beautiful cuts through the ice: his own, following in no one else’s, and the idea isn't even scary.
Clutching silver, when he hugs Viktor, he dedicates himself to even more. Because he knows for sure now, and he won't forget again, not now and not ever:
He skates for Viktor.
He skates for himself.
And he skates for love.
The best theme.