Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Yuuri, there’s a foreigner to see you.

He’s in the onsen.

He sank into the hot water with a sigh. It was good, after a trip like that, to have a chance to soak. This wasn’t the first onsen he’d ever been in—you go to enough NHK Trophies, have enough Worlds and Grand Prix Finals and even Olympics in Japan, spending your whole day on the ice, and someone eventually points out to you that there’s a domestic tradition of really hot water that will undo some of the chill in your bones—but after a long two days of travel, it was definitely in competition for the best. Hasetsu was further out of the way than he’d originally thought when he’d booked the tickets. But if what he’d seen on that YouTube stream was real, it was all going to be worth it.

Yuuri Katsuki—or Katsuki Yuuri, he supposed, it was always a good idea to think of someone’s name the way they thought of it, if you wanted to do more than merely bark at them in passing—was worth it.

There had been no music on the video. That was, oddly, the first thing that he’d noticed. When you read the title, you assumed there would be music. How else could you tell that it was what it said it was: Japan’s Ace, Katsuki Yuuri, Tries To Skate Viktor Nikiforov’s Stammi Vicino FS? He’d expected to hear the by now not merely familiar but actively overdone strains of Italian opera assault his ear before watching Yuuri break into motion. When Yuri had…

Ugh, that was going to be annoying. Yuri Plisetsky, Katsuki Yuuri...he was going to have to figure out a way to differentiate them. Or at least he would if all of this went the way he was hoping it would.

When Plisetsky had shoved the phone in his face and demanded he watch it, it had been just one of the dozens of times that Yura had demanded something of him in the last days...weeks...years. Plisetsky had two settings, prickly indifference and active hostility, and that went for revered elders of the trade and younger rinkmates alike. This time, at least, there’d been a payoff. A rather large payoff. But he was getting ahead of himself.

When Plisetsky had demanded he watch it, he’d assumed there would be the kind of trappings he would have included if he were trying to put out a video that challenged the living legend of men’s singles figure skating—scratch that, of figure skating in general. Not that that was a situation he was ever likely to face, given the circumstances, but still, he’d assumed there would be fanfare, and music, and editing—maybe even trick editing, to cover up lapses in what was after all a very difficult program—and certainly at least commentary of some sort.

Instead there had been silence, and a constant camera angle from what was clearly the side boards of a small rink—not small in the sense that you couldn’t skate an ISU-standard routine on it, but small in the sense that his rink back in St. Petersburg was large: lacking all the amenities and all the additional space that went along with an internationally ranked figure skating program.

All the amenities that Celestino Cialdini in Detroit had, and that apparently Yuuri...Katsuki was not availing himself of at the moment. It wasn’t a huge surprise that they’d split; Cialdini was widely known to be arranging some kind of co-location agreement with Phichit Chulanont to grow the Thai skating community, which wouldn’t really be possible if he was also still coaching his other senior male singles skater as well.

But it was odd nonetheless that Katsuki had chosen to do this at a no-name rink that only reading the tags of the video itself had revealed to be in his hometown. Though to be fair, it wasn’t that strange to go home in the offseason, especially if a skater had just split from their coach…

Anyway, he’d been surprised by the silence, with only the breathing of whoever was filming and the slice of the skates on the ice breaking the stillness. If the video hadn’t had the title, he would have still recognized the routine after the first few motions—it was his after all—but it was still striking that there was no music.

Or rather, there was no music except for Katsuki himself, as he moved through the routine with a grace that had never been there before in any performance of the program, not the one that had just won gold at the Sochi Grand Prix Finals a couple months ago, not the one that had won the same gold at Russian Nationals a few weeks ago, not even in any of the practices leading up to those competitions in the final production of it that had just won gold (again) at the World Championships a few days ago.

He’d watched video after video of the Stammi Vichino free program, breaking down every element and every detail of the technical aspects, working to make it perfect.

He had never seen it performed like that.

He could hear the music through Katsuki’s skates; he could see the longing in Katsuki’s limbs; he could read the emotions in Katsuki’s every movement, even though he never made eye contact with the camera.

It wasn’t, actually, exactly the same. The step sequences were better: more fluid, perfectly timed to the music, almost hypnotic as Yuuri flowed across the ice reaching out to a love that passed tantalizingly out of reach. The jumps were a little worse—the quad flip was absent, downgraded to a triple, though as a triple it was high GOE, and there was a shaky landing both on the quad salchow at the end of the first jump combination—but he could not in all honesty say that he didn’t believe it was better overall. The PCS at Worlds had been high—chronic overscoring for the living legend, if you asked him, not that anyone did—but there would be no justification for this one not being higher, and it would have been an open question whether that would have counterbalanced by the downgraded jump.

Well, assuming it had been done by the “living legend” and not the skater who had just bombed both the Grand Prix Finals and then his own Japanese Nationals. Never let it be said that the judges were actually as blind to the reputation of the skaters as they were supposed to be. Usually to his benefit, but that was beside the point.

If all went well, it would be to Katsuki’s benefit as well, very soon.

Ah. A series of frantic footfalls suggesting someone running into the onsen. That would be him now. He let himself soak in the warmth of the onsen again for a last moment, before pressing down on the edge of the pool to lift himself up.

As Katsuki Yuuri burst into the room, chest heaving, he rose out of the water and extended a hand.

“Hello, Yuuri. My name is Yakov Feltsman. Starting today, I’m going to be your new coach.”

Chapter Text

Here was the thing: Yakov was tired. Not just tired from two days of travel, the kind of tired that would melt away in an onsen. Bone tired.

He wasn’t tired of winning. No, as much as he knew Viktor was having difficulty motivating himself (you didn’t raise a boy from a pre-teen into a twenty-seven-year-old skating genius without learning all of his tells), that wasn’t Yakov’s problem. He could keep filling up that trophy case with gold after gold won by his skaters without losing any of his competitive edge, thank you very much.

Nor was he actually tired of dealing with recalcitrant skaters, for all that he continually informed Viktor and now Plisetsky that he was going bald because of them. Skaters were temperamental. It came with the territory. If they weren’t brash and confrontational like Plisetsky or borderline insubordinate by virtue of self-confidence and diminishing motivation like Viktor, they were dramatic and emotional like Georgi or too interested in teasing their rinkmates to pay attention like Mila—or anxious like Katsuki, as he’d quickly gleaned from the short phone call he’d had with Cialdini from the airport after seeing the YouTube stream. At least that last one could be dealt with clinically, assuming the boy...no, the young man would see a sports psychologist. It was frustrating to deal with, but it was the background static of his life. Baldness was genetic, anyway.

No, what he was tired of was dumbing things down. Simplifying. Taking the skates he could design in his head and molding them onto the actual physical bodies of skaters who could produce the routines. He’d had to do it his entire career—and, to be fair, less so with his current crop than with his own frail body when he’d only been choreographing for himself in his less than fully distinguished time as a performer instead of a coach—and he was sick of it. His program emphasized technical skill because, without it, no one could even approach the routines he could see in his mind’s eye, but when you trained for that, you almost inevitably lost out on the artistry of it all: not just the steps and the turns that weren’t jumps but also the connection to the music.

Everything, in short, that he’d seen in Katsuki’s Stammi Vichino and not Viktor’s. It was closer to his Stammi Vichino, the one he’d seen unfold when Viktor first showed him the steps he’d tentatively choreographed (well, not tentatively, Viktor did nothing tentatively, but roughly, as a first draft). He’d nudged and poked Viktor in that direction, and he did seem to get the core expression of it all (which was not always the case with Viktor, though the judges rarely noticed anymore). But he’d always known it could be more than great. It could be spectacular.

And Katsuki...maybe Katsuki could be the one to do it.

Maybe he’d been taking the wrong way around from the start: Katsuki clearly had physical gifts he wasn’t using to the fullest—the way he’d hit the jumps when he thought no one was watching was proof of that—but perhaps Cialdini and his prior coaches had actually had the right idea by letting him develop his artistic sensibility first and foremost.

God, maybe Lilia had been right all along.

He’d have to figure out what training Katsuki had been doing, but there was no way it didn’t include ballet.

He was going to have to grovel if that was the case.

But that was for the future. Right now he had the skater he’d been dreaming of standing in front of him. No coach—he’d checked, Cialdini was no longer listed as his coach in the ISU and JSF databases—and all that latent talent. Not a Russian skater, true, but that was actually convenient, if you looked at it from the right angle. There were strict limits as part of the recent anti-doping regulations on how many senior Russian skaters he could train at a single rink under a single coach, but because WADA was basically incapable of writing a document without loopholes there was nothing in there about training skaters from multiple countries, as long as they weren’t eligible to skate for Russia. Some of his competitors (if you could stretch the term to its breaking point, given that none of their skaters had won anything in years) had brought in Belarussians, Georgians, Finns...he’d had his own eye on a Kazakh skater, Otabek Altin, though he had surprised everyone by moving from Canada to Almaty. No one had gone as far afield as Japan.

But there was no reason he couldn’t.

Likewise, he had a pot of money currently sitting unused from the fund that Viktor had established for indigent potential skaters after his controversial shift from Nike to Adidas tracksuit sponsorship had landed him with income that looked like rubles in dollars. Plisetsky was on some of it, but Viktor had been generous with the initial donation and no one else had ever taken advantage of it—skating wasn’t the sort of sport that people got into without money in the first place, unfortunately, so there was a perceived stigma about being on assistance even when one could use it.

Obviously, Katsuki had been paying Cialdini’s fees, so he could probably afford at least something, but whatever the difference was could easily be covered.

But first he had to find the boy, because while all this had flashed through his mind after sticking out his hand to shake—oy, they were in Japan, he should have bowed, even if the kid had been living in the US for years—Katsuki had disappeared.

Anxiety, he reminded himself. So much that Cialdini didn’t even wonder why he hadn’t heard from the kid after flying back to Japan. He snorted. Cialdini wasn’t a bad man, but if Viktor had flown home, even after leaving him, he’d have blown his stack if the boy didn’t at least call.

Speaking of Viktor...he should check in soon. He’d decided to stave off the five-time champion’s lack of motivation by having him help out with Plisetsky’s programs—Viktor might have forgotten he’d promised to choreograph for the younger boy after he won Juniors without quads, but Yuri and Yakov had not—and generally serve as a jump coach to the senior skaters. Let him see what life in retirement would actually look like (as if coaching were an actual retirement...but that was a different discussion entirely). And it let him leave Russia for a few days without feeling like he’d completely left everything in a shambles.

But calling home would have to wait. If Viktor had somehow imploded the rink and left its smoking ruins behind him, he’d have to find out later.

Right now, he had a skater to track down.

Again.

Chapter Text

The Katsukis were surprisingly forthcoming about where their wayward son might have fled to—or perhaps not surprisingly, since he had told them he was hoping to coach Yuuri next season and they clearly knew who he was—and so he found himself with a choice between a dance studio and an ice rink.

Ice rink it was. He believed them that it was a fifty-fifty proposition which one Yuuri would choose, but if he could delay going to the dance studio he would. Delay, not avoid: if Katsuki was indeed that dedicated to ballet, and if that dedication was what made him the skater Yakov wanted to recruit, he’d obviously have to go to the studio at some point, if only to observe his hopefully-future skater cross-training. But his therapist had been telling him to be kinder to himself, and while that was a ridiculous idea on the face of it (he didn’t get where he was by being kind to himself), that didn’t mean he had to shove his own face into his memories and his pain if there was another option.

Especially if that option was an ice rink.

Lilia would have said it was typical of him, to choose the ice rink instead of confronting his own difficulties, especially where a dance studio was concerned. But she wasn’t here. She wasn’t going to be here.

He wished she were, but that wasn’t the point.

The ice rink was better than he’d worried it would be. He could see why Katsuki had gone to Detroit with Cialdini, since unless another world-class skating coach happened to live here there wasn’t any actual benefit to skating here, but it was adequate to the occasional practice when visiting home. That was a relief; even half a day in Yu-topia Katsuki and a three-second interaction with Katsuki Yuuri had shown him that if he did succeed in recruiting this skater he’d need to make sure he recharged himself by visiting home more often.

Not that that would be difficult. Cialdini had said he’d never visited home in the five years he’d trained with him, and that was…

Well, it was coaching malpractice, was what it was. He’d thought Cialdini was better than that, though he supposed it could be Katsuki too.

In any case, it was good to know that when Katsuki was in Hasetsu, he’d have a decent rink to practice in. It was obviously the same one as the video had been shot in, so it was good enough for him to crush Stammi Vicino in, at any rate. A little faded, but then, once it was the home rink of a world champion…

Well, he was getting ahead of himself. Though if he could skate the way that video showed, and Yakov could craft routines for him the way he hoped...perhaps not too far ahead.

The young woman at the front desk gasped when she saw him, which suggested that Katsuki’s family were not the only skating obsessives in Hasetsu—not surprising given that she rank an ice rink—but insisted that she had not seen Katsuki. She let him check the ice—exactly as he remembered from the video—but either Katsuki had turned invisible or she was telling the truth.

Which left the dance studio.

It shouldn’t be that big a deal for him to go into a dance studio. There was one in his home rink complex, for goodness’ sake. All his skaters cross-trained at least one kind of dance, and both Plisetsky and Viktor did ballet—though since Viktor had started winning medals in a manner that could only be described as ‘consecutive,’ he’d let him get a bit lax at it.

Too lax, if you listened to Lilia, as he hadn’t until it was far too late.

Not that Viktor had lost, but he could already see the decreased flexibility in Viktor’s spins, not to mention the fact that Lilia had divorced him. Not over that, of course, or not only over that, but it certainly hadn’t helped.

Nothing had helped, by the end. That was what it meant to get divorced, he supposed. That nothing had helped; things hadn’t worked out.

And of course he’d thrown himself back into work twice as hard afterwards, which his therapist carefully didn’t say proved her point. Or maybe that was just Yakov’s own mind telling him it while the therapist kept his professional distance.

Either way, it was probably true.

So that was why the prospect of finding Katsuki in the dance studio was quite so terrifying: not because it was bad practice for the skater, or because it wasn’t a reasonable place for him to work off stress, but because it reminded him of her.

Well, there was no reason it had to. He could march into a dance studio without being overcome with memories. There was no reason on Earth that a dance studio had to remind him of Lilia just because she danced. That was...that was something Georgi would say.

With that thought in mind, Yakov squared his shoulders, marched down the streets of Hasetsu, and knocked on the door of the dance studio that the young woman—Nishigori Yuuko, his mind filed away in the place where it entered support staff and other professionals he might have need of in the future—had kindly given him directions to.

It turned out that he should have paid less attention to the directions and more to the name of the proprietor.

Honestly, he should have known better. Okukawa Minako was not ust a massively successful ballerina, the first non-European winner of the Benois de la Danse. If she had just been that, he should have recognized the name; Lilia had been a judge of the competition more times than he could count, and she would have been horrified if he had not been paying enough attention to know the names of the kinds of ballerinas who were in consideration for the award, just as he would have been horrified to find out she did not know the names Christophe Giacometti or Cao Bin.

But Okukawa Minako was not that.

No, Okukawa Minako was Lilia’s friend. Her protege. A prior occupant of the same room in their house (no, his house, she had kept the apartment next to the Mariinsky and left him the giant echoing halls of their four bedroom to himself) that Plisetsky was staying in right now, for a year before she found her own place. Not just a name but a face he recognized now that it was staring at him through the glass of a closed dance studio that probably contained his best hope at being able to choreograph a routine without being limited by the physical capabilities and artistic merit of the skater.

So yes, he should be able to walk into a dance studio without thinking about Lilia and all that had gone wrong between them.

But perhaps not this particular dance studio after all.

Chapter Text

“Feltsman.” Minako’s arms were crossed, but the door was technically open, even if she was filling it with her body, so he would count that as a qualified win. “I take it you’re the reason I have a dancer at the barre right now?”

“If it’s Katsuki, then yes.” He always liked Minako, but of course he also knew she and Lilia had remained in contact over the years, so he shouldn’t have been surprised that he got something less than the most enthusiastic welcome. Still, he remembered watching videos on the flight over from Russia of Katsuki’s junior competitions with Minako in the kiss and cry (no, he hadn’t paid for internet: he just had thousands of skating competitions on external drives, because there was no telling when he’d need to watch film of a competitor for one of his skaters—or a potential recruit). That had to mean she had some investment in Katsuki as a skater, not just a dancer.

If he remembered properly, she’d always been one to go for a direct approach. “I’m trying to recruit him.”

“Yuuri?” Minako’s eyebrows arched and her hips turned slightly, grounding her more solidly in his way. “What makes you think you would be a good coach for Yuuri?”

Ah yes. If she’d stayed in touch with Lilia, she’d know about the fights they’d had.

“Because I think he can beat Viktor.” It wasn’t what he’d expected himself to say, but then Okukawa Minako had always brought out surprises in everyone around her. She and Viktor would get along, which made him wonder whether Katsuki and Viktor would get along if Viktor could stop moaning about whatever had happened after he’d left the Sochi banquet.

“With you coaching him?” Minako snorted. “Yuuri isn’t one of your Russians, Yakov,” At least he was Yakov again. “Yelling at him doesn’t make him jump any better. And he won’t skip barre time for the ice.”

Yes, she’d definitely been talking to Lilia.

“I wouldn’t want him to.” He grimaced. “And I wasn’t planning on yelling.” Her face reflected outright disbelief and he raised a conciliatory hand. “Not as much yelling.”

“Hm.” She relaxed into something more of a lean—still blocking the doorway but not aggressively so.

“I know about the anxiety. I’d get him a jump coach. And a sports psychologist.” He shrugged. “I want to give the boy the routines he deserves. I don’t want to break him.”

“The routines he deserves?” She paused for a moment, then gestured for him to go on. “What does he deserve, Yakov? Enlighten me.”

“Hard step sequences.” If he’d thought Katsuki’s Stammi Vicino was good, some of his junior programs, with Minako in the kiss and cry (as his coach? He still wasn’t sure about that), had had movements almost as difficult, which was insane for a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old. “Direct transitions.” Viktor had struggled with the entry into the triple axel from the spread eagle; Katsuki had made it look like he was just dancing for himself, without effort or intensity. “Jumps at the end.” He was clearly out of competition weight, but he’d barely been breathing hard at the end of a routine that took peak Viktor to the end of his breath and beyond.

She didn’t move.

“What else?” He asked in frustration. “I need this skater,” God, what was the honorific Lilia had insisted he learn, “Okukawa-san. What else do you think he needs?”

“Harder jumps.” She surprised him again. “He gets in his head with the easier ones, and once he falls, he gets out of sequence. Keep him in his body, and he’ll surprise you.”

“I expect him to beat Viktor. What more do you think he’s capable of?”

“That would be telling.” She moved out of the doorway and he almost stumbled in his haste to follow her. “First door on your left.” She put a hand on his arm as he moved past her. “If you ruin my dancer, Yakov, I will tell Lilia.”

He shook his head. “I’m not an idiot, Okukawa-san. If he comes with me, he’ll still cross-train at the barre.”

“With Lilia?”

“With you, if you’ll come. With Lilia, if you won’t.”

For once, it seemed, he had surprised her, instead of the other way around. Her hand fell away and he walked down the hall to the door she’d indicated.

It was already cracked open, and he looked through the open door to see, in one sense, exactly what he’d expected: Katsuki Yuuri, moving through a string of moves that would have made even Plisetsky, still imbued with the flexibility of a prepubescent, wince.

In another sense, he had not been fully prepared for what that looked like. It was beautiful. No, he wasn’t like Viktor; this wasn’t a sense of erotic or romantic appreciation. But he had lived with Lilia long enough, looked at Lilia often enough, to have an aesthetic appreciation of true beauty in ballet, the lines that ought to be drawn with a body, rather than the ones that so often were, because even the flesh of highly trained ballerinas and danseurs was weaker than their souls. Katsuki was not merely flexible. He knew how to apply that flexibility to move his body in a way that made music out of silence not just on the ice, but in the studio as well.

Forget Minako’s threats. She wouldn’t have to tell Lilia if he ruined this dancer. She’d feel the disturbance from halfway across the world and come and murder him herself.

God, he missed her.

And what a way to discover that she had been right all along, that the skaters he had convinced to spend more time on the ice were weaker for spending less time in the studio. Or perhaps it was just Katsuki who could make it work, who could elevate himself in both places so that there was no doubt in Yakov’s mind that he could skate any program but also none that if he let this boy within ten feet of Lilia without ice skates firmly strapped to his feet she’d whisk him away to the Mariinsky and put him onstage before he could blink.

Perhaps it was not so much that Lilia was right about all skaters as that she was right about the paragon of skating that he had always sought. After all, his methods had brought him fame and his skaters gold medals (not just Viktor, but of course Viktor above all). He had no dearth of evidence that what he did brought results. But this was beyond the logical weighing of evidence and statistical proof. This was art. This was the pinnacle of human achievement, and he and his skaters, like Sisyphus, sought the summit but could never truly reach it.

But he could not help but believe that Katsuki Yuuri could, and that meant that whatever other proof he could try to offer, Lilia was right.

And he would be more than happy to admit it as long as he could get him into his rink.

This reverie lasted until Katsuki finished whatever routine he had been working through and glanced up into the mirrored wall of the studio, at which point he saw Yakov standing there, yelped, and tripped over his own two feet.

Right.

The pinnacle of human achievement with anxiety.

Well, at least that meant he was unlikely to run away again.

Chapter Text

Once he was back on his feet, it turned out Katsuki Yuuri was much as he remembered from their glancing interactions in the Grand Prix series: quiet but not quite calm, and determinedly unwilling to accept his own skill. He flashed back to a press conference after Katsuki had qualified for the Final this year, when he’d been been shocked to see one of the competitors he was scouting for their upcoming competition against Viktor refuse to acknowledge that he had skated well. Katsuki had sat there with a silver medal on his chest and called himself a “dime a dozen” skater with the kind of casual ease which spoke not of humility, real or feigned, but of a surprising lack of awareness of his own skill.

By now it wasn’t surprising, but it was frustrating, and he suddenly understood why Cialdini drank quite so much when competitions were over.

“I don’t understand, sir.” Katsuki was polite, he’d give him that. “Why are you here?” He looked up suddenly, fear filling the eyes behind the glasses that made Yakov wonder if he could actually see anything on the ice. “Oh God, are you here to sue me because I skated Viktor’s routine? I promise, I didn’t expect anyone to film it!”

“What?” He didn’t have to feign his confusion. “No, I’m not here for that, why would I fly to Japan personally for something like that?” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I am here because I would like to be your coach.”

“My coach?” Katsuki looked around like there was another skater in the room.

“Yes. Yours.” He sighed. “Katsuki Yuuri, age 23, Grand Prix Finalist at Sochi this year, who just skated the hardest routine I’ve ever choreographed better than my five-time champion. You.”

“Why?”

He swallowed the urge to bellow “what did I just say?” and ran a hand through his rapidly thinning hair. “Because I was under the impression you might be coachable, unlike some of my skaters.” Katsuki blinked at him, clearly not getting the joke. Maybe he had to take Minako’s advice here, and get the kid out of his head. He risked reaching out and putting a hand on his shoulder. Fortunately he didn’t run away, or flinch, or anything like that. “Katsuki, do me a favor.”

The boy blinked again, then nodded.

“When you skated Stammi Vicino, you changed a couple of the step sequences.” He could feel Katsuki’s shoulder start to move, like he was going to fold in on himself, and pushed outwards to keep him steady. “No. Don’t apologize, don’t say whatever it was you were about to say. Just show me.” He jerked his head towards the door. “Your friend Yuuko at the ice rink says it’s quiet. Come show me what you did, and we’ll talk about why I want to coach you.”

“Uh…” Katsuki blinked again and then shrugged. “Sure, why not.” He could almost see a dialogue bubble pop up over the boy’s head like in one of Georgi’s stupid mobile games that he was always playing around the rink, saying something like then he’ll realize all of this was stupid and let me go, but he could deal with Katsuki’s self-esteem issues later. Right now, he needed to get the boy skating. He steered him to the door, letting him go only to grab a bag sitting in the corner.

“Katsuki’s going to show me something at the Ice Castle. Do you want to come?” He asked Minako as she raised an eyebrow at the two of them walking back to the door. “If you’re going to consider my offer to train him in St. Petersburg, you might want to see what you have to work with.”

“I already know what I have to work with. I’ve been training him since he was three.” But Minako followed them out the door and locked it behind them. “But I never turn down the chance to see Yuuri skate.”

“Minako-sensei,” Katsuki whined, almost as if he’d expected her to get him out of Yakov’s clutches. Then the words he had actually used seemed to penetrate. “Wait, Minako-sensei, you’d be coming with?”

“Perhaps.” She shoved her hands deep in the pockets of a coat that he vaguely remembered her having had all those years ago when she’d lived in Russia with them. “It depends on whether this old geezer makes it worth my while.” She shot Yakov a look that he met with deliberately blank look, covering his realization that this was as good as a yes. “Besides, I didn’t realize you’d already decided to go, Yuuri.”

The boy flushed. “I haven’t. I mean, I’m not…” He trailed off.

He decided to take pity on him. “We’ll talk about it after you skate.”

The walk to Ice Castle seemed to take less time than the walk to Minako’s studio had taken, though that was always the nature of trips in an unfamiliar place. Goodness knew he’d been in enough of those, between all the new skating arenas that were always being built and the shifting locations of things like Skate America, Skate Canada, and the other Grand Prix locations. At least Rostelecom was usually in the same place, though there had been days in the past when it had been in St. Petersburg and there were rumors it might go to Sochi someday.

Bah.

Anyway, they were back to the Ice Castle in no time, and it turned out Katsuki was the sort of skater whose bag always contained his skates—a good sign—so they were laced up and ready to go extremely rapidly.

“Warm up,” he directed. “I don’t want you going into the sequences cold.” He held up a hand when it looked like Katsuki would object. “I don’t care how warmed you were on the barre, we walked over here and the ice is different from the studio.”

“Yes, sir.”

Well, in some ways at least he was less of a headache than Viktor or Plisetsky, even if you had to balance that against the fact that Yakov was currently standing in a relatively small town thousands of miles away from home—so what exactly was a headache anyway?

Perhaps his head had just always ached, so he didn’t know the difference anymore.

Katsuki went into a series of figures, which was interesting. He always had to yell at skaters to do their figures; it was the one thing he and Lilia had always agreed on: “foundations are foundations. Don’t let me catch you trying to build castles in the air.”

Maybe that was what had gone wrong with their marriage. What was the foundation? Had they ever really worked on it?

After a flawless series of figure 8s that looked like a single figure on ice, Katsuki skated up to him at the boards.

“Show me the routine,” he directed, gesturing to get Katsuki’s head up and make him make direct eye contact. “Not like Viktor did it. Like you did it. Mark the jumps; I don’t care about those now. Show me the step sequences. Show me the spins.”

“Yes, Coach.” Something changed in Katsuki’s eyes, and he skated to center ice.

Somehow Yakov knew he wasn’t going to need to hear the music to follow along.

Chapter Text

Katsuki’s step sequences were as he remembered them, which was to say excellent, in the literal sense of excelling what he had worked out for Viktor. Minor changes, minor tweaks, such that a casual fan of the sport would probably not even notice them, but every one of them made the routine look harder, skate easier (or at least more fluidly), and fit into the theme more clearly. The PCS on it would have been through the roof if it had been a real performance—and if the judges didn’t come at it with the assumption that Katsuki deserved lower PCS than Viktor did. Well, that was his problem to fix; the imprimatur of his skating club would go a long way towards that.

“Katsuki!” he yelled across the ice. “How did that feel?”

“Good?” The skater seemed confused. “I mean, you had me mark the jumps, so it wasn’t that difficult.”

“Wasn’t that difficult…” he muttered to Minako, who had come to the railing beside him. “Does the boy even hear himself?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “Fine! Then do it with the jumps.” He remembered something Minako had said to him earlier about needing to get the boy out of his head. “But don’t you dare downgrade any of them! I want to see it with the quads.”

He saw Katsuki suck in a deep breath and his shoulders start to shrink in. The anxiety again. Oy vey iz mir. Soft handling was not his forte, especially if he was right and it wasn’t a lack of soft handling, like Cialdini had given him, that was the problem, but some kind of narrow band of appropriateness. “Katsuki!” he shouted again. “This isn’t your routine, understand? You don’t skate Stammi Vicino. Viktor does. Skate it like Viktor.” He’d seen enough Viktor in Katsuki’s performances over the years to know he could do it. “Let’s say I’m homesick. Make me feel like I’m in St. Petersburg again.”

“Yes, Coach!” This time the shoulders were back, not hunched. Katsuki settled into the familiar pose he’d seen Viktor assume a hundred, two hundred times. “Just watch me, sir.”

And watch he did.

It wasn’t like watching Viktor. It wasn’t like watching a parody of Viktor, as it would be if he asked Plisetsky to skate like Viktor, all deliberate imitations and overly precise detail. It was like watching Viktor take over Katsuki’s body, or maybe the other way around; it was Stammi Vicino, but it was also Katsuki’s own free programs over the years, and all of Viktor’s history infused into it as well.

He didn’t think Katsuki even realized when he hit the quad flip, a jump no one else but Viktor had even ratified in competition. He knew Katsuki didn’t realize when he nailed the quad-triple combination that Katsuki had never dared to even attempt in a competition before either (or maybe, a little voice in his head whispered, just maybe Cialdini had never dared to ask him to), because it came perfectly in flow with nary a wobble.

And he knew one more thing too: Viktor had never beaten his own earlier records with Stammi Vicino. For all he poured his heart into the loneliness it conveyed, the very loneliness itself stopped him from truly reaching out with the music the way the aria demanded. But if Katsuki had skated the routine he’d just done—back to back with another iteration of the same routine, albeit without the jumps, when he ought to have been exhausted—and a fair panel of judges scored it, he would have.

And all this with a routine that wasn’t even choreographed for him, and that he’d clearly been practicing on his own in secret and without supervision from an experienced coach.

Speaking of which…

“Katsuki!” He didn’t think the boy was going to decide on his own to come with him to St. Petersburg just based on doing the routine again. “Keep your elbows in!” He could feel Minako’s glare from beside him, even though his eyes stayed on Katsuki, so he modulated his voice down a little bit from the yell he used with Viktor, Plisetsky, Mila...actually with all the Russian skaters. “And stop looking at your feet when you land. Your feet already know what to do. Let them do their job.”

“But, sir…” Katsuki’s face scrunched up like he didn’t agree, but he didn’t say anything more.

“What?” he barked. “Did you or did you not just land a quad flip, Katsuki? Do you think you could do that if your feet didn’t know what to do?”

“I…” Katsuki blinked and met his eyes for the first time since he’d finished the routine. “I did?”

He snorted. “You skated it like Viktor does. Does Viktor do a quad flip?”

Katsuki nodded, slowly.

“So you did a quad flip. And if you did it here, with no training except whatever tom-fool practicing you’ve been doing in private, I think you can make it a consistent part of your routines if you pay actual attention to it. Which we will do, if you come train with me.” He humphed. “So tell me, Katsuki: do you still not understand why I think it would be to both our benefits if you come to St. Petersburg?”

To his surprise, Katsuki hadn’t looked away while he was speaking. Now he squared his shoulders and, to Yakov’s surprised, bowed once.

“Please be my coach, Coach Feltsman.”

“Call me Yakov. Everyone else does.”

He thought he heard Minako mutter something like “except the people who call you asshole,” but he ignored it. Besides, she was right, doubly so since Plisetsky had come to train with them.

Instead he turned to her. “What about you? If Katsuki is coming to St. Petersburg to train, will you come with him?” He cocked an eyebrow at her. “I’m fairly sure you could find somewhere to stay.” He’d never been to Lilia’s new apartment, but he knew it had a guest room.

She ignored him completely.

“Yuuri, are you sure about this?”

His skater nodded. “Yes, Minako-sensei.”

“Then I will come with you.” She turned to him and nodded. “I’m in.” She extended a hand, a clear concession to his non-Japanese manners. “At least until Lilia’s ready to train him herself.”

He did his best not to flinch at that. “I’m glad to have you.”

She laughed. “You’re glad to have him. I’m just along for the ride.”

He let her believe what she wanted. He didn’t know what else he could have said, anyway.

“How long do you need to get ready?” He left it ambiguous which of them he was addressing, but it was Minako who answered.

“A week.” She and Katsuki seemed to have some kind of silent conversation and he nodded. “Give us a week.”

Chapter Text

It turned out that the rink manager—Yuuko, the back of his mind supplied—was watching as Katsuki did the programs, and he took advantage of her coming down to gush at the skater to go make a few calls, now that he had thing settled with Katsuki. Though before he could get fully away, he heard something about ‘not being sorry anymore that the triplets filmed you’ that made him suspect he owed the rink manager his thanks for getting him to Hasetsu in the first place.

Also he overheard a teasing reference to “the posters,” which probably meant the giant, larger-than-life depictions of his newest skater in the Hasetsu terminal that had greeted him upon arrival. He smirked. There were even larger ones of Viktor in the St. Petersburg airport.

His own rink manager picked up on the first ring “Zhenya. I’m bringing another skater back. Japanese Federation. Get the paperwork we’ll need to get the payments set up through Viktor’s fund, and arrange rink times for him starting in a week.” He tapped his fingers against his side. “He can share with anyone but Plisetsky, they have the same first name and I don’t want to have to explain which Yuuri I’m talking to.”

Zhenya was efficient. He wouldn’t have to repeat himself twice. Speaking of efficient—or rather it’s opposite—he might as well get the other call over at the same time. “Go get Viktor, while you’re up.”

“Yes, Yakov.” It suddenly struck him as amusing that his own employees called him by his first name, but the Japanese Yuuri had called him Coach and sir before he had even accepted his offer.

“Yakov!” Oh no. The upbeat tone of Viktor’s voice told him to brace himself. “How lovely of you to call!”

“Vitya.” He sighed. “What happened?”

“Yakov, I’m in love!”

“Who are you, Georgi?” He scoffed. “Why is this my problem?” Well, it was his problem because Viktor might not have his name in his patronymic but he might as well be his son anyway. But he really didn’t have time for this. Viktor wasn’t actually like Georgi—that wasn’t fair to either of them in different ways—but he also wasn’t the sort of person to actually have a real, serious conversation about that kind of thing over the phone, so they weren’t going to try. Maybe in his house, after hours, with a bottle of vodka between them. Not now and not here.

“But Yaaaaaaaaaaakov!” If Viktor had really wanted to have the conversation, he’d have ignored him. Since he was pouting, he also didn’t want to talk about it right now. “Don’t you want to know who it is?”

“Unless you’re going to skate your next season to the theme of heartbreak, I don’t care.” He thought for a moment. “Actually, since Georgi already claimed that theme, I don’t care either way.”

“Fine.” Viktor pouted but let it go, which meant they could deal with it later.

“Vitya. Report. You were supposed to be coaching the others!”

“Yuri hates me!” Viktor’s dramatic nature was a benefit on the ice, he reminded himself as he breathed heavily through his nose. He’d been missing it a little this season, he said to himself as he curled his fist into a ball. It was a good thing that his best student and nonbiological unadopted son was being ridiculous again. “And Mila won’t stop talking about how if Sara Crispino can do a triple axel consistently, she has to do one too!”

“THAT IS WHAT YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE TEACHING HER.”

“Oh, right.” Viktor laughed. “Well, then, I guess that went well. She’s up to eight out of ten times now.”

“Good.” He humphed. “And Yuri?”

“I gave our little Yurotchka the best program I’ve ever designed and he cruelly rejected it, Yakov!”

“The best program you’ve ever designed.” Yakov kept his tone flat, so that Viktor would know he didn’t believe him.

“I’m serious, Yakov.” For once, Viktor didn’t actually sound like he was joking. “On Love: Agape has the potential to be twice as good as Lilac Fairy was for me. And you know how well that went.”

“And you think Plisetsky should skate it?” He couldn’t keep the skepticism out of his mouth. “What about you, Viktor?”

“I’m fine.” Oh, no. Oh very much not. Viktor never said he was fine when he was fine.

“We will talk when I am back.”

“Sure!” The false note was stronger again.

“Viktor, have you not choreographed yourself a new routine?”

“Oh, would you look at the time…” and the line went dead. Vitya. Well, there would be time to deal with that when he got back. He quickly called his travel agent—he wasn’t going to organize his own travel, not when he could be doing better things—and made sure he’d arrange to get him back in time to get everything ready for when Katsuki joined them in a week. Then he turned his steps to Yu-topia Katsuki.

There he found his new choreographer(? Ballet instructor? Assistant coach? Whatever Minako was going to be) drinking at the bar and his new skater hiding in his bedroom. He exchanged gruff (on his end) and hurried (on the proprietors’ end, given that this was apparently their dinner rush) greetings with the older Katsukis, then at their direction headed upstairs towards Yuuri’s room. They might have come to an agreement, but they still had to actually get some paperwork signed and submitted to the JSF and the ISU (and possibly the FFKKR too).

He knocked on the door and then pushed it open.

Ah.

So these were the posters Yuuko had been talking about.

Chapter Text

Fortunately, the posters of Viktor were apparently so familiar to Yuuri that he didn’t seem to notice that Yakov was looking up at his own champion skater from...sixteen? seventeen? different angles, including poses that he would have sworn were never turned into a poster outside of domestic Russian advertisements.

Ah. So he was a fan.

Well, he could work with that. If the boy was a fan of Viktor’s, no doubt skating on the same ice as his idol would be a motivating factor. And since he knew in advance, he could take measures to make sure that Viktor never became aware of it. Heaven knew he had enough trouble keeping Viktor’s ego in check as it was. Adding another skater who idolized him wouldn’t help with that.

Viktor was a problem for another day, though—a massive headache, as always, the foolish boy, and now he thought he’d fallen in love, so that would be enough to spontaneously generate a second head for him to ache, but his headache, so much that he wasn’t sure what he’d have done with himself if the boy had stopped being a fool—and Katsuki didn’t realize he was a problem yet, so that was all right. What he was going to do when Katsuki realized that Viktor Nikiforov wasn’t Viktor Nikiforov in the ice rink, but just Viktor the idiot—well, that would be another problem for another time. He could start, he supposed, by preparing for it now.

“Katsuki.” They’d gotten the preliminary paperwork done, all the things that didn’t actually involve money or where anyone would sleep, so it was time to get down to brass tacks. “How much were you paying Cialdini in Detroit?”

Katsuki gulped and named...actually a quite reasonable number. Cialdini hadn’t been ripping him off, and he hadn’t taken the boy on as a charity case either. His sponsorships should have covered it all anyway—the giant posters in the terminal weren’t the only Yuuri-Katsuki-branded merchandise he’d seen around Hasetsu, and now that he had Katsuki on the brain he remembered a giant billboard from the company that made his skates from the last time he’d attended the NHK Trophy. So it wasn’t just local pride in the hometown, but a solid presence in Japanese advertising that brought Katsuki’s face to the fore.

“Did that include room and board?” Katsuki shook his head.

“Celestino helped me find a place, and I roomed with Phichit—Chulanont” he added, as if Yakov didn’t know the name of Cialdini’s other international men’s skater, “—but the rent wasn’t included in his rates.”

He nodded. “I think we can work with that.” He slid paperwork across the table—technically a dining room table in the inn, but after hours no one seemed to be occupying the space—and indicated the number. “We’re asking about the same, because we’ve dipped into the Nikiforov fund, but room and board will be included.”

“What? Why?”

“Because you’re living in a new country where you don’t speak the language.” Minako appeared out of nowhere and slung an arm around the skater, who barely flinched. “It’s what Yakov does—or at least what he did—for anyone he thinks would benefit from having a roof over their head and someone to help them transition into life in St. Petersburg.”

She should know. He and Lilia had offered her the same on the same terms. He fought back the memories with a cough.

“Well, indeed.” He nodded. “We’ll figure out the details later, but you’ll definitely be living with at least one Russian-speaker, associated with the rink.”

“He means himself,” Minako said, jabbing Katsuki in the ribs with the elbow. “Not Viktor.” Katsuki turned pink.

“Definitely not Viktor.” Yakov shook his head. “I know you’re a fan of his…”

“Ohmygod the posters.” Katsuki’s forehead would have hit the table if Minako hadn’t grabbed him and stopped him. “You saw the posters.”

“A good collection. I have more, of course,” he shrugged, “but then again, as his coach I keep a portfolio of all of Viktor’s commercial engagements, including posters.” He gave Katsuki a moment to recover. “You will not be the first fan of Viktor’s to skate with me. Nor the last. Just don’t let it distract you from what you’re there for.”

“What am I there for?”

He met Minako’s eyes and sighed. “You’re there to beat him, Katsuki. I already told you this.” She shook her head slightly and he tried again. “Or at least, you’re there to push him. Viktor’s getting bored, Katsuki. He doesn’t need another worshipper. He needs someone who can do what he can do, who can make him do more than he does right now.”

“Bored?” Of course Katsuki had grabbed onto that word.

“Maybe not bored, but...not entirely not bored, either.” He shrugged. “Either way, you’re not living with him, because I want him to be surprised when you show him what you can do. He’s not going to be surprised if he’s around you every day.”

Surprisingly, Katsuki seemed relieved to learn he wouldn’t be spending as much time with Viktor as he might reasonably have expected from becoming his rinkmate. “I don’t have to train with him?”

“Sometimes you will, sometimes you won’t.” Zhenya was making the schedule while they spoke, so he supposed it was wiser to err on the side of caution. “But I don’t want you to think of him as the living legend, Viktor Nikiforov. To you, like me, he has to be just Viktor, the man who is equally obsessed about the quad flip and the size of his forehead.”

“His forehead is perfect!” Katsuki blushed deep red and actually tried to hide behind Minako.

“You’ll be fine, Yuuri.” The ballet teacher hauled him back to his seat and patted his shoulder. “I’ll be there, remember?”

“Yes, I also have forms for you.” He handed her a stack. “Let me know if there are any questions.”

She rolled her eyes, but she took them, so he considered that a win.

Katsuki, meanwhile, had apparently taken refuge in the forms. “Wait...you said this is cheaper because of the Nikiforov fund?”

“Viktor isn’t paying for your skating, if that’s what you’re thinking. Well, not directly.” He sighed again. “He put away some of his winnings into a fund for skaters who need support—it’s been sitting mostly untouched since he began winning the Grand Prix.”

“But I can afford…”

“Who knows what you can afford?” He didn’t mean to bark, but some instincts were hard to put aside. “That reminds me, I’ll need a portfolio from you by the time you arrive in St. Petersburg: who is sponsoring you, what you do for them, how much. Ask Cialdini’s team for it if you don’t have it yourself. Minako can show you how to arrange it.” He knew Lilia had always used the same forms, though outside of Russia he didn’t think her dancers got as many sponsorships as some of skaters did. He stood. “Tomorrow, we will practice again. The next day, I will return to Russia, and a week later you will join me.” He almost held out his hand, and then remembered where he was. Instead, he sketched a bow. It was probably the wrong depth, but it felt right to do anyway. “I am glad to have you with us, Katsuki Yuuri. Please try to believe me when I tell you that I believe you will go far.”

Chapter Text

He was in Narita airport, in between two transfers and sitting in a well-apportioned airline lounge, when a wave of cold dread passed over him.

He had to call Lilia.

He hadn’t called Lilia.

And he was about to bring another prima in to teach one of his skaters ballet.

He didn’t actually expect her to object to Minako’s presence. In fact, since he suspected strongly that the two of them were still in contact, she might well know about Minako’s impending presence already. But that would not excuse him from having told her—especially if he wanted to ask her to continue to work with Plisetsky. Minako was there for Katsuki, but he knew that Plisetsky already had the proper respect for and fear of Lilia from her summer dance camps. It wasn’t worth trying to reinstill that in the boy for another ballerina while he was in the midst of his angsty teenager phase.

Or at least what Yakov hoped was a phase.

He wasn’t entirely sure if her number had changed. He’d continued to be in contact with her after the divorce, of course. They were still professional colleagues, in certain ways, and while he had few hopes that she would reconsider any other element of their relationship, he could not deny that those skaters she worked with were better than the ones she turned her nose up at. Not to mention that...well, best not to mention it at all. His feelings were his own business. But he’d mostly called the studio line, or emailed her, or seen her in person (few times, but enough). He hoped she hadn’t changed her number, but it was—he checked his watch—exactly in that midtime when it was late enough that even she would not be working at the studio (a prima must know when to cease as well as when to work, she always said). And yet it was still not quite too late to call. 13 hours was a ridiculous time difference, but it was in his favor this time.

“Yakov.” Her voice was clipped and businesslike, just as he remembered it. “Is this about Yuuri? It’s about time.”

“What?” He’d always thought she had an uncanny ability to tell what he was thinking—not that that had saved their marriage, in the end—but this was ridiculous. She must have been in closer communication with Minako than he thought.

“Yakov.” The flat disapproval in her voice cut through his bafflement. “Why am I hearing from Zhenya that you want me to train this Yuuri of yours?”

“What?” But Zhenya knew he was bringing Minako with him...what was going on?

“At least that boy knows how to be polite, unlike some people.” She sniffed. “Honestly, Yakov, a call from your rink manager about my availability to train a skater? If it weren’t Zhenya, I would have hung up the phone.” She had trained Zhenya before he flamed out in juniors, he recalled, and the two had always been close. “He did have the good grace to let me inform him of the schedule I would accept, rather than trying to set times for me, like some people.” He’d tried that exactly once, in the first year of their marriage, but evidently even divorce wasn’t enough to free him from that particular memory. Though he was still confused: why had Zhenya been trying to arrange time for her with Yuuri?

“I’ll be glad to have the chance to shape the boy before you ruin him, anyway,” she continued. Which he supposed was the same sort of thing Minako had said, though it seemed rather unfair given that he was bringing Minako to train Katsuki precisely so he wouldn’t ruin him. Or he would, if he could get a word in edgewise to this conversation.

But then again, conversations with Lilia were often monologues more than dialogues.

“The boy is flexible,” she mused, and he wondered when she’d had a chance to watch Katsuki skate. Though since he was Minako’s protege, perhaps she had been aware of him as a potential student longer than Yakov had—Minako might have mentioned him earlier in his career, back when (he had discovered from the ballet teacher after a few drinks) he had seriously considered dance. “I think he will do well, if he does not end up like our Viktor.” She sighed—he was surprised she still thought of Viktor as hers, but they both knew that Viktor’s spectacular career was no substitute, in her eyes, for what he could have been if he hadn’t been, in her words, ‘so obsessed with those ridiculous jumps’ and had actually dedicated himself to ballet forms. “But I suppose there is still time.”

“Time?” Katsuki was flexible and talented, but time was not on his side, even if Viktor was still skating at championship level at four years older.

“Fifteen is a bit older than I would prefer, but since he already has a background in my techniques, I would not consider it hopeless.”

Suddenly a series of pieces clicked into place.

“Oh, Plisetsky.”

“Yes, Yuri Plisetsky, what are you on about, old man?” Lilia hated nothing more than wasting her time, and he knew that even though she had been doing most of the talking she was more than capable of berating him for doing just that if this call went south.

“I recently recruited another skater named Yuuri,” he hastened to clarify. “Katsuki. Out of Japan.”

“Minako’s student?” He was right, they had been in touch.

“Exactly. I’m sorry Zhenya bothered you. He should have known better, but I appreciate your willingness to help Plisetsky. He needs it, and I will see to it that he is properly grateful.” It was important to get those points in before Lilia decided he had forgotten any of them.

“See that you do.” She sniffed again. “Now, tell me about Katsuki. You will be asking me to train both of them? In addition to our prodigal son?” He didn’t have time to examine what the repeated reference to Viktor did to his heart.

“No. That is actually why I called: I invited Minako to continue training her student in St. Petersburg.” He threw himself into the slight gap of silence on the other end. “I was actually hoping you could possibly see your way to having her stay with you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Lilia snapped. “Obviously you will put her into her old room.”

“But I thought, your apartment…” it had definitely had two bedrooms when she’d bought it. She’d been very clear that it had to.

“Has a bedroom and a studio. Surely you are not suggesting I put a valued guest like Okukawa Minako in my studio?” Oh.

“Certainly not. You’re right, she’ll stay with me. In the usual room.” He began calculating what he could do with Yuri, who definitely wasn’t ready to live on his own as a fifteen-year-old.

“Good. I am glad to see you are capable of seeing a solution when it is presented to you on a silver platter. I will be coming over for tea on Thursdays.”

Thursdays had been their day for tea every week when Minako had lived with them.

“Of course.”

“Now you may thank me again for training your ridiculous skater and for solving your housing problem with Minako, and then you will hang up and let me go to sleep.” God, she was so direct and to the point. He missed it, being surrounded by dramatic skaters on the one hand and sponsors and ISU officials on the other.

“Thank you, Madame Baranovskaya.” Sometimes when Lilia was in a mood, it was good to be formal and flattering.

“Hmph. I told you thirty-five years ago to call me Lilia. I do not recall informing you you were allowed to call me anything else.”

And then she hung up.

Chapter Text

He had really only been in Hasetsu for a couple of days—the travel time was arguably longer, if you counted the time waiting around at the airport, which he firmly believed you should—but it was already becoming a blessed memory that he held onto while in St. Petersburg, particularly at trying times.

Like right now, as Viktor insisted on skating a short program routine to “On Love: Eros” while babbling on and on about some unnamed person he’d fallen in love with while Yakov wasn’t paying attention. Apparently he’d gone on and on about this person so much that Plisetsky and Mila had banded together to ban him from saying their actual name in the rink space, so now he just moaned about how “he” was so beautiful, all while making rather distressing hip motions during his step sequences. The routine would work for someone as flexible as Christophe Giacometti or either of the Yuris; for Viktor, who was blessed with every attribute a skater could desire except smooth hip transitions, it looked vaguely pornographic because of the unnecessary jerks of his hips at key moments in the music.

It would still score as highly as anything he’d done since he set the world record, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that Yakov was finding himself in the uncomfortable situation of agreeing with Plisetsky about something, in this case that Viktor was being gross and needed to get over himself.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t happy for him. Viktor actually rarely talked about his personal life, and while Yakov had already known that his beloved idiotic psuedoson was gay, it had been a long time since he’d actually mooned over a man.

Actually, come to think of it, it had been a long time since he’d had to drag Viktor out of a strange hotel room (or eject a stranger from Viktor’s) in order to make a flight, or a practice, or an ice show. Viktor never imperiled actual competition skates with that sort of thing, but back in the day it had happened relatively frequently on other occasions. His skater had insisted he was being safe, and honestly Yakov suspected that most of the time it was nothing more than drunken cuddling, because he had burst in on exactly that more times than he could count (and never, oddly, on anything more sexual) but whatever Viktor used to get up to, it had been at least a full season.

Hm.

Perhaps that was related to the other changes in Viktor he’d been noticing. And perhaps that made this slightly more bearable to watch, since if Viktor was being “disgusting, right in front of my salad” as Plisetsky put it (not that he ate enough salads) at least he was coming back into himself.

And again, the routine, while somewhat distressing to watch from Yakov’s perspective, was an excellent one.

Viktor had also thrown himself fully into the role of jump coach, which was a relief. Zhenya had arranged rink times so that Viktor had a little more downtime—which was probably good for a skater of his age, with all the miles on his hips and ankles—and that downtime was while Yuri and Mila were practicing. He supposed that made sense, in the grand scheme of things, and it certainly meant that Yuri and Mila were benefiting from Viktor’s eye for jump quality. Mila’s triple axel was almost flawless now, and the remaining errors were through overconfidence, not fear of the jump; Plisetsky had worked through his angst about not using quads in juniors a little, meaning he no longer felt the need to quad every salchow and toe loop every practice, and was actually working on a variety of jumps.

If it wouldn’t go to Viktor’s head, in fact, he would have called him a miracle worker.

He got back into the swing of things quickly, so it was almost a surprise when he realized that Katsuki and Minako would be arriving the next day.

He informed Plisetsky of the changed arrangements with his rooming situation—that he would be rooming with the Katsuki, in a two bedroom apartment Zhenya had found next door to the rink—and to his surprise, the boy had put up no resistance at all. He had merely asked if he could bring Potya from his grandfather’s now that he would be living on his own, and whether his bedroom would have a lock. Hearing a yes on both counts, he’d buried his nose back in his phone with a surly “sure, whatever” that, in Plisetsky-speak, was practically glowing excitement.

Yakov hadn’t known that living with him was so awful, but if it meant no temper tantrum from Plisetsky, he was willing to accept the realization.

He didn’t have time to clear out more than one seat in his own car—somehow things like skate bags and snacks and thick binders of coaching notes spontaneously generated in the back, like some kind of living ecosystem—so he arranged for Georgi to also come around with his compact. Georgi’s own apartment was in the same building as the one Katsuki and Plisetsky would be sharing, so it made sense, especially as he could then convey Minako to his guest room without stranding Katsuki.

Georgi was late, though, and Yakov found his fingers tapping on the bench as he sat at arrivals waiting for the Japanese contingent to make their way through passport control and customs. Where was that boy? Heaven help him if he’d gotten into another loop of mourning Anya’s “betrayal” (read: completely reasonable decision not to deal with Georgi’s ridiculousness one minute longer, though Yakov would never actually say that to his skater’s face) and forgotten to come.

There was a flash of silver in the distance and a subtle motion of the crowd, as if a magnet had been been placed down by a pile of iron filings. Yakov put his face in his hands.

Please, no.

Please let him be mistaken.

Please, don’t let Georgi have passed the task on to Viktor.

There was a reason he hadn’t asked Viktor for help, and it was because of this. Wherever Viktor went outside of the rink and his own apartment, people noticed.

And if there was one thing Katsuki didn’t need when arriving in a new country for a new coach with serious anxiety that was going to already be on edge from the journey and the magnitude of the decision, it was a crowd.

“Yakov!” His personal nemesis, who was also his favorite person in the whole world (though he would only admit to the first if asked) beamed down at him and somehow found a way through the adoring fans to plop (no, to slide, Viktor-in-public never did anything so gauche as plopping) onto the bench beside him. “Tell me! Who are we going to meet? Who is this new skater? You’ve been so secretive! It’s unlike you!”

“Maybe it’s just not your business, Vitya, did you ever think of that?” He sighed. “And what are you doing here? You don’t look a bit like Georgi Popovich.”

“Why thank you, Yakov!” Viktor grinned at him and he sighed again. “Georgi had...what did he call it?...a ‘love emergency,’ and I couldn’t let my favorite coach wait for a new skater all alone, so here I am!”

“Vitya.” He kept his voice flat.

“What? So maybe I was also a little bit curious about who this new skater is. I know he can’t be Russian…” Viktor tapped his finger on his lips. “I know! Did you finally convinced Chris that he’s wasted on Josef?”

“Vitya.”

“Ooh, is it that Canadian? Jo-Jo Johnson, or whatever it was? I know he’s already changed coaches once.”

“Vitya.”

“Maybe it’s…” but who else Viktor would have guessed it was would forever remain unknown, because at that moment Minako strode up to the bench, Katsuki trailing behind in her wake.

Chapter Text

“Katsuki.” He greeted the skater, who was swaying, almost dead on his feet. He was glad he’d only scheduled him to drop off his bags at the new apartment and get some groceries, and not for any actual rink activities. Katsuki and Minako had spent more than a full day traveling, when you included getting out of Hasetsu in the first place, so that was fair. He stood to offer Katsuki his hand in greeting when, to his utter surprise, he was practically pushed out of the way.

“Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuri!” Viktor went from lazily teasing him about who he could have brought in from another federation to what he privately thought of as “the full Viktor experience” in less than a second. “Yakov, you should have told me it was Yuuri you were recruiting! I could have helped!” He wrapped the younger skater, who still hadn’t moved since Viktor had said his name, in a bear hug and danced him over towards Yakov. “Have you seen him skate?” Viktor somehow managed to say this with the lack of self-reflection of someone speaking to a coach about the skater who had most recently signed with them, not to mention the fact that Yakov had, of course, been Viktor’s coach for multiple seasons where Katsuki was a competitor, culminating in the most recently Grand Prix Final, where they had watched Katsuki skate together from rinkside, more than once. “He’s glorious!”

Well, at least Viktor had one thing right.

“I am aware of Katsuki’s strengths, Vitya. However, I do not believe that breathing without his air passages is one of them.” He gently reached out and untangled Katsuki from Viktor’s somewhat octopodal embrace. “I take it your flight was uneventful, if too long?” He addressed this last to Minako, since it seemed like Katsuki had gone into some kind of fugue state from which he hoped he would emerge in time to bundle him into a car. Which car was now somewhat in question, given that Viktor seemed rather too eager to see Katsuki, and Katsuki did not seem to return the sentiment. Not that he was necessarily capable of any sentiment at this particular moment.

“It was.” Minako was looking between Katsuki and Viktor with a positively alarming smile spreading across her face. “Yuuri, why don’t you let Viktor Nikiforov take your bags, and we can see what kind of place you’ll be staying in.”

“Uh, yes, Minako-sensei.” Good. At least the animal part of Katsuki’s brain that had learned never to ignore or contradict his ballet instructor was still functioning. “...Viktor?” It sounded somehow as if Katsuki had never said the name before, which was ridiculous if Yakov was even half-correctly remembering the number of posters in that bedroom back in Hasetsu.

“Yuuuuuuri!” Viktor sounded like Georgi saying Anya’s name, back before the breakup, and the realization was enough to send Yakov back onto the bench, his butt landing with a thump on the hard material.

Viktor was in love with someone.

Someone he’d only encountered recently.

And he was clinging to Katsuki Yuuri like a drowned man—yes, he’d managed to re-establish physical contact since Yakov had pried him off—and saying his name that way.

And Yakov had just invited Katsuki to train with them for an entire season.

He was never going to survive this.

With a feeling of dread, he thought back to the training schedule Zhenya had presented him with, the one he’d approved a week ago without really thinking about it. Zhenya knew his stuff, and Katsuki’s name wasn’t on it because they were keeping his presence a secret until they formally announced their coaching relationship at the beginning of the season—probably with one of those lower-level Japanese regional skates, since Katsuki’s bomb at Japanese Nationals would mean he’d need to requalify for the Grand Prix if he was going to win it.

Yakov didn’t need a phone or a notebook or anything else to remember that schedule. Like the names of rink staff or the beats of each of his skaters’ most recent routine, it was firmly ensconced in his memory banks for reference whenever he needed.

And on it, Viktor was scheduled to skate alone three days a week—except those “alone” dates were all secret stand-ins for a shared rink with their new skater (just as Plisetsky’s were the other non-rest days).

That is to say, shared rink days with Katsuki Yuuri.

He couldn’t even blame Zhenya, because he’d signed off on it himself.

He was an idiot.

“Come one. Let’s get you both to your new homes.” He buried his frustration in business, as he did everything else. Yes, he knew he was doing it. Yes, his therapist said it was unhealthy. But it was probably healthier than screaming out loud in the middle of a crowded airport, and so it was the better option available to him right then.

Three days a week of full-Viktor.

And that was without considering the effect Viktor seemed to have on Katsuki, who hadn’t said another word and was carefully not meeting the senior skater’s eyes. Hopefully that was just jetlag—but if Katsuki was too intimidated by Viktor now, sharing the ice…

He’d manage it. He always managed.

“Minako, you’ll be staying with me, if that’s all right. The old room.” He set off at a rapid pace, so that Viktor would at least have to keep up and stop mooning at Katsuki like a calf. “Lilia said to tell you to expect her for tea at the usual time, as well.”

“Mm.” Minako hummed an acknowledgement, her attention also clearly on their two skaters. Viktor was trying to flirt with Katsuki—or what passed for flirting from Viktor, who was substantially more effective at it, Yakov had learned involuntarily over the years, if he didn’t say anything at all, but also constitutionally incapable of shutting up—and Katsuki was walking like he was still rolling his suitcase even though Viktor had it.

Neither of them was looking where they were going, so it was a minor miracle no one had run into anyone. At least manic-Viktor managed to look a little less like himself (or rather, the public version of himself) than usual, so they hadn’t been stopped by any fans yet. He grumbled and pulled an old hat out of one of the pockets in his coat, jamming it down over Viktor’s ears.

“There. At least no one will recognize you while you’re making a fool of yourself.” He almost put an arm around Katsuki’s shoulders, then remembered the skater didn’t exactly love being touched. “Katsuki, you’ll be with Yura—Yuri Plisetsky that is—in a two bedroom by the rink. How about we all go down there and get you settled in, hm?”

“Excellent idea.” Minako had clearly come to the same conclusion he had, though he wasn’t sure if it was for the same reason, if the gleam in her eye was to be trusted. “Come on Yuuri.”

And so they ended up caravaning towards the rink, Katsuki carefully shoved into Yakov’s passenger seat while a pouting Viktor couldn’t find an excuse to say no to driving Minako, who immediately started saying something Yakov couldn’t hear when the door clicked closed.

Chapter Text

They were halfway to the apartment complex when Katsuki finally spoke.

“That was Viktor Nikiforov.”

Yakov chuckled despite himself. “Yes.”

Katsuki pinched his own thigh, hard. “I’m not asleep on the plane.”

“That’s right.” He vaguely remembered something Minako had mentioned in passing in Hasetsu: “he wakes up very slowly in the mornings. Sometimes he’d be halfway through a routine at the studio before the lights came on fully.” Apparently that was true after sleeping on plane flights too, he supposed. Though he’d have to get better about it if he was going to hit his rink times. He must have managed something in Detroit. Maybe he’d ask Cialdini if it became a problem.

“Viktor Nikiforov knows who I am.”

“Rather more than that.” There was no doubt in his mind that Katsuki was not only the man Viktor had been pining for, but had been taking up an inordinate amount of his champion skater’s attention even before he made the declaration—thinking back on it, some of the step sequences Viktor had been toying with even back before Worlds had been clearly inspired by Katsuki. He hadn’t noticed at the time because Katsuki was so clearly inspired by Viktor that the sequences had just looked like Viktor pushing himself to do better; now he knew better, he could see in his memories the influence flowing back the other way.

“Why does he know my name?”

Yakov snorted. “Katsuki, why did I invite you to train with me?” He raised one hand off the steering wheel to hold off any objection. “Why did I say I invited you to train with me? None of your self-deprecating nonsense, I don’t take skaters on for no reason and I’ll thank you to remember that.”

Katsuki sighed and recited like a child repeating a warning they had never quite understood but learned line by line. “So that I can challenge Viktor because apparently I can perform at his level if I get out of my own way.”

“Exactly.” Or more or less at least. He guessed Minako was probably behind some of the rephrasing, or maybe just Katsuki’s own anxiety. “Now, how can you challenge Viktor if he doesn’t know who you are?”

“I suppose…”

“Besides, what kind of coach do you take me for?” He raised an eyebrow to Katsuki before looking back at the road and continuing. “Do you think I let my skater come to the Grand Prix Final unaware of the identity of one of his six competitors? A competitor, by the way, who was on track for the podium after the short program?”

“I was in fourth!”

“And your typical free skate that season would have put you in third.” He slammed a hand on the steering wheel. “Katsuki, that routine was miles below your skills, and you still would have placed on the podium if you had landed your jumps instead of falling five times.” He breathed heavily through his nose. Katsuki had anxiety. Anxious people do not respond well to yelling. Yelling would not help. “I know you did fall five times. I know you are worried that you will continue to fall, like you did at Japanese Nationals. But I am here to make sure you do not fall, and to give you the routines you need so that if you do not fall Vitya will have to watch you from the step below you on the podium. So of course Vitya knows who you are. If Vitya did not know who you were, he and I would have words.”

“He didn’t know who I was in Sochi.” Katsuki’s voice sounded distant, like he was speaking over a telephone. “He asked if I wanted a commemorative photo.”

“Because you were at your first Grand Prix Final, and Vitya is obsessed with commemorating firsts.” Yakov thought back to the time Viktor, then only seventeen, had insisted on Yakov taking a picture every time he ate a new food at the farmers market they had visited as part of planning his new diet regimen. They had used up a whole roll of film, because it was before they had had digital cameras for anything but expensive setups at the rink to capture practices. “Seriously obsessed.”

“Oh.” Katsuki seemed to fold in on himself. “But...even if he didn’t mean it like that, there’s no reason he ought to know who I am. I’m no challenger, not really. I’m weak. I did fall five times. And five more at Japanese Nationals.” If he curled up any further he’d slip out of the seatbelt. “I should have been able to skate through it.”

“Skate through what?” This was the first time he’d heard that there might actually be a reason that Katuski fell—an injury? Surely Celestino would have said something—and he couldn’t resist the chance to find out what.

“My dog died. Back in Hasetsu. I found out just before…” Katsuki trailed off, staring out the window.

“Just before the free skate.” He could fill in the blanks, he thought grimly as he pulled into the parking space next to the apartment complex, across from the rink. He hopped out of the car and practically pulled Katsuki out of the passenger side and up the steps.

Plisetsky was standing on the front stoop, holding the door open.

“Hey, Yakov, who the hell is my oh-so-secret roomma…” Plisetsky fell silent for what felt like the first time since he had taken him on as a pre-novice skater. It didn’t last. “You!”

“Yura.” He already knew that Plisetsky knew Katsuki—he’d been the one to show him the video after all—but he had more important things to deal with right now. “Go get Potya.”

“Why the hell should I do that?” But Yura was incapable of not showing his cat off, so he went into the apartment anyway, reemerging only seconds later with the fluffball cuddled in his arms.

“Katsuki, this is Potya. I assume you’ve met Yura before, but Potya here is his cat.”

“It’s short for Puma Tiger Scorpion!” Plisetsky was always insistent that everyone know the full name.

“Right. Now, Yura, what would you do if something happened to Potya?”

Plisetsky’s face went white and then red. “I would burn this apartment complex down and then the rink, then murder you all.”

A bit violent, but then, he had asked Yuri Plisetsky. “And how would you skate?”

“SKATE?” Plisetsky roared—or at least he probably assumed he was roaring, since he thought of himself as a tiger. It was more of a kitten squeak, but you couldn’t tell him that. “The only skating I would do would be with my knife shoes on the face of whoever did something to Potya.”

“Thank you. Nothing is going to happen to Potya. Go back inside.” He turned to Katsuki, still standing by the car in what looked like a state of shock. Plisetsky had that effect on people. So did he, sometimes, he had to admit. The other car drove up, and Viktor hopped out. Before he could launch himself at Katsuki, Yakov barked at him.

“Vitya! What would you do if something happened to Makkachin?”

“Makkachin? Nooooooooo!” Viktor’s eyes looked around frantically. “Why, Yakov? Why????”

“It’s a hypothetical, you idiot.” Secure in the knowledge that he too had already been asked this—and, of course, not going inside like he’d been asked, because when did he actually do anything Yakov asked?—Plisetsky yelled at Viktor. “He wants to know if you’d keep skating when something bad happened to Makkachin, dumbass.”

“Yakov! Don’t do anything to my Makkachin!”

“Just answer his question, old man!”

“No, I wouldn’t skate! How could you ask me to do that? Yakov, don’t you know how much she means to me?”

“Of course I do, Vitya.” He resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “Now, show Katsuki your dog pictures while I talk to him.” Viktor brightened right back up and pulled out his phone, and Yakov took advantage of the moment to direct Katsuki’s attention back to him for the moment. “So, Katsuki. Don’t ever let me hear you call yourself weak for skating after your dog died.”

“Your dog died?” He wasn’t sure which of his Russian skaters yelled louder, but they both sprung into action, and somehow Katsuki ended up on the ground, Viktor’s phone in his hand with an album of Makkachin pictures pulled up, while Potya was unceremoniously dumped in his lap by Plisetsky, who immediately tried to act as if he had no idea how his cat had gotten there.

“I think they’ll be occupied for a while.” Minako made her way over to his side. “Thank you,” she added quietly. “I tried to tell him, but…” she shrugged. “Somehow I think he got it into his head that a real ice skater wouldn’t tell him to let it go even if his ballet teacher did.”

“Hmph. Was he seeing a therapist?”

She shook her head. “Not in Hasetsu, at any rate.”

“Hmph.”

“Exactly.”

Chapter Text

After about ten minutes, he gave up on prying Viktor off of Katsuki and left the three skaters to move Plisetsky’s luggage into the apartment. He knew Plisetsky took no...guff from Viktor anyway, so it was unlikely that he would allow the older skater to overwhelm the Japanese man too much. Or at least so he hoped.

“I’ll be back in an hour,” he shouted as he took Viktor’s keys from his inattentive hand (well, inattentive to anything but Katsuki and the pictures of Makkachin he was showing off—this one had her in the little bow that Yakov had given her for her last birthday, and he nodded with satisfaction. It did look good on her). Minako’s stuff was in Viktor’s trunk, and he didn’t feel like moving it. And more importantly, if he took Viktor’s car he had a much higher chance that the skaters would all still be there when he came back and not on some harebrained adventure.

He and Minako drove the fairly short distance to his own home in silence. Not an uncomfortable silence, like he often felt it was with Katsuki, but silence nonetheless.

“It, uh, hasn’t changed much.” He felt the urge to rub the back of his neck for some reason but suppressed it. “The room is in the same place. The bathroom is in the same place. The kitchen…”

“Is in the same place?” Minako raised an eyebrow and he nodded.

“Exactly.”

“Is it still covered in file folders and old VHSes?”

“Yes.” He couldn’t deny it. If anything, his tendency not to clean up any of the mess he left from studying up on his skaters and the competition had gotten worse when Lilia moved out. “Well, the VHSes are DVDs now. Mostly. Some flash drives. Some VHSes, still.” You didn’t get rid of classic routines, after all, and Zhenya had only been able to do so much conversion of old VHS skates to digital formats before he had grumpily waved him away and popped in the 1988 Olympic free skate again. Eventually that player would break, and then maybe he’d convert the rest.

“Fewer point shoes?” He supposed this was Minako’s way of asking about the divorce.

“No.” He’d cleaned up a little in anticipation of her visit, but he still hadn’t been able to bring himself to get rid of the little bits of Lilia stuck in the corners. Plisetsky hadn’t cared, and no one else had been there anyway.

He didn’t have to look at Minako’s face to know how judgmental it was going to be, but he did anyway.

“Fine.” They’d arrived, and he pulled open the doorway and ushered her inside. “The guest room is clean, anyway. I made Yura clean it up before he left. You can get yourself settled and I’ll…” He glanced at the living room and sighed. “I’ll get to work.”

He pulled out a big bag for trash and sat down on one of the few empty surfaces: a patch of floor. He’d let himself think that Plisetsky’s whining about pointless clutter was just the same sort of thing as his yelling about stupid senior skaters who couldn’t find waterproof mascara (though now that he thought about it, Georgi really should know better, so maybe Plisetsky had been right about that too). But Minako was staying with him now, and Lilia would be over on Thursday and…

Well, she already knew he could be a pathetic mess, the arguments before the divorce would have shown her that if nothing else had, but he had some pride. He shoved a pile of freehand notes on Zhenya’s Rostelecom free skate from seven years ago into the bag and pulled over a big suitcase for the things he didn’t actually want to let go of. This needed doing, and it needed doing now.

“Yakov?” He glanced up to see Minako, clearly freshly showered and changed into new clothes that hadn’t been on for 20 hours peering down at him with a strange look in her eyes. “You told the boys you’d be back in an hour. It’s been almost two.” He glanced up at the clock with alarm. She wasn’t wrong. Then he looked down and noticed the bag of trash was almost full—and the suitcase still had a lot of space left.

“Huh.” He stood up and stretched. Sitting on the floor wasn’t good for him. But as he stretched he noticed that he wouldn’t have to sit on the floor next time: somehow he’d cleared off both the couches and the wide armchair as well. “Well, let’s get going then.”

Minako smirked. “Fine, but I’m driving.” She held out her hand. “I’ve always wanted to drive a pink convertible anyway.”

He shuddered. He’d managed to drive the entire way over to his house without thinking about the monstrosity of a vehicle that Viktor had saddled himself with on one of those weekends where Yakov hadn’t been paying him enough attention. “Be my guest.”

Minako swiped the keys and grinned. “Aren’t I already?” She bounced towards the door. “Catch up, Yakov!”

He’d forgotten what excited, high-energy Okukawa Minako was like.

And she was going to be staying with him for an undefined amount of time.

Maybe he could just switch with Lilia for the duration. Then he might be able to get some rest.

But probably not.

They drove back to the Yu(u)ri house, this time not in silence but with the top down, and Minako commenting on almost every single thing they passed. It was very different, but strangely just as companionable.

He was distinctly unsurprised that despite his instructions to stay put, none of the skaters were visible when they arrived back—although to be fair, he supposed he was (shudder) late.

God, Viktor and Yura were never going to let him hear the end of that.

But first, he had to find them.

No sooner had he thought the words than Plisetsky slammed the door open and shouted.

“Yakov! Get in here! Make them stop!”

Chapter Text

Worries flashed before his eyes as he pushed past Plisetsky into the skaters’ apartment. What were Viktor and Katsuki doing that had the younger skater riled up to the point of actually asking for help instead of just pushing them away himself? He didn’t really think he would walk in on them having sex, or even particularly necking heavily—Viktor would be willing, he had no doubt, but Katsuki was not only in no place to do that but seemed cautious to a fault most of the time—but he was trying to come up with some other explanation. Drug use? Unlikely, but it would probably produce that response. Some kind of keepaway with Potya? The cat was calm enough for it (a marked contrast with her master) and Plisetsky would get distressed by it, but again, neither Katsuki nor Viktor would actually do something like that. Whatever it was, he thought as he barreled through the door of the apartment, it had to be serious if Plisetsky was this willing to ask for assistance.

Or not.

“Yurtle the Turtle!” Viktor yelled, as a red-haired head it took him almost a half-second to recognize as Mila Babicheva, his ace women’s singles skater, turned to a white board and marked the words down on a list. Apparently when he’d taken Viktor’s car in order to make sure the skaters wouldn’t leave, he’d underestimated the chance that instead of leaving they’d just call his other skaters over to them. Now that he thought about it, that was Mila’s Vespa in the parking lot next to his car.

So that explained some of Plisetsky’s attitude; Mila always teased him and he was powerless against it, so he had a tendency to go to Yakov for support. It was by far the least worrisome reason that Plisetsky would demand his attention, so he felt relief wash over him. But what were they doing, if nothing dangerous or sexually explicit?

“Eureka!” Georgi—when had Georgi gotten here? Didn’t Viktor say he’d had some kind of emergency? What was going on?—contributed from across the room, and when Mila looked skeptically at him repeated himself slowly, drawing out the first syllable.

“Got it!” Viktor grabbed the pen from Mila and scrawled “Yureka” on the whiteboard, followed by a long, drawn-out “ooooh” from the other.

He looked at the whiteboard more closely. There were about twelve words and phrases, if you could really call them that, scribbled on it, all variants of the “Yur-” prefix.

“Yakov!” Viktor cried, finally noticing his entrance.

“We can’t call either of them Yakov, it’ll just make things more confusing, that would defeat the whole point,” Mila groaned, and then glanced over and saw him too. “Oh! Yakov!”

“Hello, coach.” Katsuki was sitting in the middle of the couch with his head in his hands, but he looked up when Viktor and Mila yelled Yakov’s name. “Hi, Minako-sensei.” He stood up. “Did you get settled in all right?”

“Yes, thank you, Yuuri.” Minako brushed past him—he’d forgotten she was there, honestly—and stopped in front of the board. “What’s all this?”

“I...uh...that is…” Katsuki stuttered and Viktor swooped in to take control of the conversation, throwing an arm around Katsuki in the process.

“We’re coming up for nicknames for Yuri! The other Yuri. Not this Yuuri. This is a good Yuuri. He can stay Yuuri.” Katsuki was turning redder and redder as Viktor went on and didn’t let go.

“I’ve been here longer! He should be the one with the nickname!” Plisetsky had apparently come back in, judging by his sudden interruption. “And hey! I’m a perfectly good Yuri! I’m the best Yuri! Shut up, old man!”

“But he’s a senior skater!”

“I’m going into seniors this year too!”

“Hush, Yurotchka, the grown-ups are talking.” Even Viktor knew he’d gone too far at that, and he hid behind Katsuki as Plisetsky rushed at him. To Yakov’s surprise, Plisetsky didn’t bowl Katsuki over to get at Viktor but tried to launch himself around the other skater, leading to the two Russians chasing each other around the Japanese skater in a farcically small circle.

“Oh, give me that.” Minako picked up the pen from where Viktor had dropped it and wrote on the whiteboard herself. “There. Yurio. After Mari’s favorite, right Yuuri?” A look passed between her and Katsuki and he suddenly nodded, pulling out his phone and showing a picture to Mila in the small gaps between each of Viktor and Plisetsky running between them, the latter still shouting threats at the former that everyone just ignored.

Then he showed it to Yakov, who had to admit that the photo looked surprisingly like a Japanese boy band version of Yuri Plisetsky—a terrifying thought if he’d ever had one.

“Yurio it is.” Mila grabbed the phone and tossed it to Georgi, who gave a thumbs up and handed it back.

“What was wrong with just Katsuki and Plisetsky?” Yakov pinched the bridge of his nose.

“That’s so boring, Yakov!” Viktor stopped on a dime, causing Plisetsky to slam into him hard and bounce off, right into Mila’s waiting arms. She held him back from doing further violence to Viktor while they both tried to pretend they weren’t dizzy. “Don’t you think our two Yuris deserve better than just their family names?”

“Technically, it’s pretty normal to call me Katsuki,” Katsuki Yuuri tried to inject, but Viktor took that as an invitation to give him another hug, which seemed to rob the younger skater of the power of speech again.

“Nonsense! We’re all family here: a great big Russian, er, Russo-Japanese skating family!” Viktor laughed. “Yakov’s the zeyde, Mila’s the cool aunt, Georgi’s the enabling uncle, Yurio there is the spoiled grandson...how could we be so informal as to resort to family names?”

A cacophony of voices broke out in response.

“Does that make you and Yuuri brothers?” Mila smirked.

“That’s not my name!” Plisetsky yelled.

“What about me?” Minako inquired, with a raised eyebrow.

“There can be two cool aunts,” Viktor said.

“Sure! Welcome to the family, uh…”

“Minako-sensei.” Katsuki interjected. He still hadn’t pushed Viktor off his shoulder, and his face was beyond beet-red into colors Yakov had only seen in the sunsets over the ocean at certain Grand Prix events. “She’s my ballet teacher from Japan, and recipient of the Benois de la Dance.”

“And one of Lilia’s proteges.” Yakov decided it was time to take a little control over the situation. “She will be training Katsuki—“

“Yuuri!” Viktor corrected.

“—at least until the end of the season, and may be coordinating with Lilia on training some of the rest of you lot if you can show you deserve it. And now, since apparently all of you have copious spare time to sit around and come up with ridiculous nicknames, I’m expecting you all to come to practice tomorrow with fully sketched out versions of both routines for next year.” He paused at Katsuki’s stricken look. “Obviously not you, Katsuki, focus on getting settled in.”

“But Viktor hasn’t…”

“Plisetsky. As Katsuki’s roommate, you will of course help him get settled in, but I will expect to see you come in with him for his rink tour in the afternoon and practice your quad toe loop with Viktor, who will come and show me both of your routines.” He glanced around the room. “Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, Yakov,” came the chorus, with one lone “yes, coach” telling him that Katsuki was also on board.

“Very good. Now, Georgi. Since apparently your little emergency that stopped you from helping me this morning is over, I’m sure you wouldn’t mind placing an order for dinner for all of us.” He sat down on the couch and leaned back. “Make sure it’s something in all of your diet plans, and put some pork in it. Katsuki’s favorite meal is a pork cutlet bowl, and he’s had a very long day.”

Chapter Text

The next day was Katsuki’s first day at the actual rink, and Yakov was prepared for it to be what someone more interested in such things would have called exciting. Viktor had only left the party the night before when Yurio had almost thrown something at his head and yelled “this is my apartment too,” which everyone agreed was actually rather restrained for him, and while Katsuki didn’t actually have ice time with Viktor that first day, that didn’t mean that everyone didn’t expect him to do his level best to crowd in on the Japanese skater anyway. Yakov felt a little annoyed at his more junior skaters who had not bothered to tell him that the object of Viktor’s obsession was another skater, and one he was recruiting at that, but to be fair he’d kept Katsuki’s identity as the new skater under wraps so how could they have known?

That didn’t stop him from bellowing at them about it when they complained about Viktor being distracted during practice, but he kept it to a mild shout to be nice about it.

But to his surprise, Viktor’s distraction was the only real effect of Katsuki’s presence at the rink, or at least the only negative. It turned out that Katsuki on or near the ice was someone different than Katsuki anywhere else—something he could have guessed if he really thought about it, given the remarkable development the boy had achieved with little training before Cialdini’s coaching and the success he’d had despite rampant anxiety attacks even after—and so he firmly went about his business with little to no space for anything else, or anyone else.

Even Viktor, though he was fairly certain that the pink in Katsuki’s face after he finished running through his last season’s programs for Yakov, Minako, and the training staff was less due to exertion and more due to Viktor’s having coincidentally taken a break from the adjacent rink where he was supposed to be working Mila’s triple axel and watching.

But since Katsuki had hit every jump and element, he couldn’t even yell at full volume at Viktor for that (not that he didn’t yell a little—Viktor would have worried about him otherwise).

Katsuki’s off-ice routine was even more rigorous, which was not a surprise since he’d let Minako have free reign on most of it and she knew the skater best. Yakov watched as Katsuki put his leg places he shouldn’t even have been able to conceive of putting it, landed leaps in the padded floor of the studio that he would have thought impossible if he hadn’t been married to Lilia for years (and that were going to leave her drooling to steal his skater away when Minako told her about them on Thursday), and did a split that had no purpose on the ice but was impressive nonetheless.

On other days, he’d of course let Minako simply do her work with Katsuki, but for the day of on-boarding, it was crucial that he see it for himself to make sure he didn’t schedule something inappropriate that could lead to injury, like a heavy jump practice right after a jump session in the studio.

Zhenya walked the day with them too, doublechecking that the rink schedule he’d worked out would be amenable to both Katsuki and the coaches, though his head was mostly down in his cellphone coordinating other events.

It did come up, though, when Katsuki did the split, and the cellphone almost dropped on the floor as well.

Katsuki had that effect on people.

He didn’t seem to notice, though, only looking up at Minako with a hopeful smile as he finished the work she asked of him.

“Good work.” She nodded. “Your plant leg was a little wobbly halfway through…” Yakov let the familiar routine of listening to a critique wash over him and thought about what Katuski was demonstrating as a ballet dancer that he was not using on the ice.

It was a remarkable amount.

Cialdini wasn’t a bad coach. He had to remember that. Some of what he knew about Katsuki was only because Cialdini had an observant and sympathetic eye, and was willing to share what he’d noticed. Most of Katsuki’s success, where it wasn’t due simply to hard work and talent, was rooted in Cialdini’s ability to coax him into the mental and physical place he needed to be to achieve results that, while nowhere near Viktor or even Christophe Giacometti, were otherwise remarkable.

But while Cialdini was a good coach, Yakov was becoming more and more convinced that he had been the wrong coach for Katsuki. Or to be more fair, and since he’d continue working alongside the Italian-American for the rest of their careers he should endeavor to be as fair as possible, a developmental coach for Katsuki. Katsuki’s confidence and skills had needed Cialdini—just looking at the difference between senior-Grand-Prix-final-qualifying Katsuki and juniors Katsuki showed that, even if he’d done well in juniors—but the last two seasons he’d plateaued a little, and the routines he’d been working on had been below his talent level.

He imagined it was a reaction to Katsuki’s nerves, and he had gotten to the Grand Prix Final, though that was more a case of doing bad routines well than having good routines. But Minako’s words about challenging Katsuki kept coming back into his mind, and the way she got results from him in the studio proved that she knew what she was talking about.

If Katsuki was this flexible, there were entries to jumps and spins that he choreographed for Mila that would work for Katsuki—ones that no senior men were currently using because no senior men could currently use, except maybe Yurio (who was eight years Katsuki’s junior and had the blessing of not having fully hit puberty yet). If Katsuki could do this much ballet after performing both of his routines from last year and still look anything but winded, he could push more of his jumps into the second half, and do more combinations. And if Katsuki could leap that high…

Viktor could do a quad flip.

Katsuki off-ice could outjump him any day of the week and literally twice on Sundays given that stamina. And on-ice that same stamina and those same muscles could do miracles if Katsuki could put it all together.

He couldn’t get ahead of himself, but there was no reason Katsuki couldn’t at least do as well as Viktor on a quad flip. He had, in Hasetsu, that time he hadn’t been focused on himself.

Well.

There was a reason that Katsuki’s last stop (and the one Yakov did not accompany him for) was a sports psychologist.

And if he didn’t bond with this one, well, they’d just find another.

Katsuki Yuuri deserved help for his own sake—living with anxiety must be awful—but Yakov couldn’t help but also think that it would be a blessing for them all to see him skate the way he’d be able to once he got out of his own way.

Chapter Text

Now that Katsuki had come on board, the days quickly resolved themselves into a routine. Of course they did; just because he had a new, non-Russian skater didn’t mean that suddenly all his other obligations ceased. Nor did having Minako staying with him actually change all that much about his routine either. She had a key, and quickly became the owner of a new-to-her Vespa-like contraption that carried her to and fro as she pleased. He was usually awake, poring over old skate videos or planning new work, whenever she came in, and he didn’t ask where she’d been. Other than the absence of Lilia doing her own planning in at the dining room table with a cup of cold tea (not intentionally cold, just chilled by the length of time since she’d poured it and then forgotten about it), it could have been a time capsule of the time when Minako had lived with them back then. She had always been the more social one of the three—he supposed that was why she owned a bar, back in Hasetsu, as well as a studio—and so it was merely natural.

Thursdays were the only reminder that it was not natural, because on Thursdays Lilia came by. Which meant on Thursdays Lilia was back in the space, and it was only really truly then that he realized how empty it was when she was gone.

Usually, it didn’t much matter to him. Usually, he was so focused on the step sequences from the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics and how to recreate the effect with the new scoring, or on how to make it so that Viktor’s quad flip came as a surprise to the audience even though they’d all been waiting for it, that he didn’t notice that his position on the couch was not mirrored at the table, or that the teapot was growing dust bunnies in its spare time (he drank coffee, because Lilia had liked different tea and it had been easier to just start both devices at once instead of waiting).

But with Lilia coming over on Thursdays, the teapot got a cleaning (Minako liked alcohol, pretty much exclusively, because apparently Russian teas were just “wrong,” so it was still on indefinite non-Thursday hiatus). And the table got uncovered—and so did the couch and the coffee table, because Thursday tea was not a dining table situation.

It was good to see her again.

He didn’t actually have to contribute much to the conversation. Minako and Lilia were generally content to whisk it away into terms and mutual acquaintances he didn’t remember well enough to track (though he was vaguely aware that in some cases he probably should), and he knew both their voices well enough to know when they were edging towards something they expected him to weigh in on.

It was mostly Katsuki, and he could fortunately echo Minako’s considered opinion that he was coming along well. He’d gone through three psychologists in four weeks, but the third seemed to be sticking. He had entertained the possibility that Katsuki simply felt that saying yet another one didn’t connect would be too ‘difficult,’ and was just making do, but there were visible effects on the ice that he couldn’t deny.

Not that Katsuki has ceased to be nervous. Far from it. If anything, the nerves were more visible. Minako believed, and he had to agree, that this was actually a very positive sign. Katsuki hated being an inconvenience. He’d seen that again and again: the boy would try to shrink out of the way, make himself smaller, let others go by. First he’d noticed it at the rink, and then he’d gone back and watched film again—both skates and especially the Kiss and Cry and the interviews—and traced it all through Katsuki’s career. So if Katsuki was willing to admit that he was nervous, to take up the space that being nervous made him take up—to worry others with his nerves and accept that they were right to be concerned, to care about what was going on in his head—then it was a step in the right direction.

Once, Katsuki had even told him he was nervous, in so many words.

He’d almost hugged him.

He hadn’t, of course. Not only was Katsuki generally touch-averse, but Yakov himself was not exactly the touchy-feely type. Viktor might as well have been his biological child and they hugged on average twice a year.

But he thought about it.

Even more impressive, Katsuki had stopped fleeing the room every time Viktor gave him the time of day. This was particularly important because Viktor kept trying to give Katsuki the time of day, or rather more than that, and so for the first week or two it had been a real inconvenience to have the new skater clam up and flee the room when the champion did so much as speak to him.

Viktor had helped: he’d actually toned things down a little bit, which made Yakov feel as if maybe he wasn’t cursed with a second Georgi after all.

Not that “toned-down Viktor” was anything like calm, but it was an improvement anyway. It meant that Katsuki wasn’t blushing every five minutes and actually fully listened to his feedback.

That wasn’t fair. Katsuki always listened. Katsuki in fact perhaps listened too much. He was used to yelling at his skaters repeatedly to get their attention and make them focus. He had already tried to tone down the yelling at Katsuki, since it didn’t mix well with anxiety, but he’d forgotten that the repetitions probably didn’t either.

Apparently, he realized as Katsuki practiced his quad salchow again during what was supposed to be his cool-down time, when he told Katsuki that he needed to land it once, he took it as a note, but when he told him more than once, he took it as a criticism of his entire skating career and future.

Which was why he now had a skater who had done more salchows in an afternoon than Viktor had done all last season (an exaggeration, but less of one than he would have liked). Which, yes, was impressive stamina, but was not helpful either.

So he decided to do something about it.

The next day Katsuki showed an inclination to try to do that again, so he went ahead with his backup plan.

“Katsuki!” He didn’t need to shout; Katsuki stopped immediately.

“Yes, Coach?” Somehow he still heard the capital letter.

“Meet your new jump coach.” Though ‘meet’ was of course a generous term as they were already quite well-acquainted.

“What the hell am I doing here?” Plisetsky was usually off-ice during Katsuki’s ice work on these days, so it was only fair that he be confused—except that Yakov had literally just told him. “Why do I have to teach this loser?”

“You have to teach Katsuki so that you’ll have something to hold over his head when you beg him on your knees to show you how to do that spin you’ve been drooling about every practice.” He gestured towards Katsuki out on the ice. “Or did you want to crash into the wall with dizziness every practice when you have a resource right here?”

“Ugh, fine. Come on, idiot, let’s sort out these salchows.” Yurio’s skates were already on, so evidently he wasn’t as confused as he wanted to pretend to be about why he was here. “Your stupid feet need to get with the program, OK? I don’t have all day to waste watching you fall on your ass!”

“Yakoooooov!” Only one person drew out the vowels in his name that way and he sighed as he turned.

“Yes, Vitya?”

“I’m the jump coach here, why are you letting Yurio teach Yuuri the jump?” Viktor was visibly pouting.

“Because you would just spend the entire time flirting, old man!” Yurio was apparently still in earshot.

“Yurio!”

“Not my name!”

“But Yakov says we can use it! Or would you prefer Yurtle the Turtle!”

“Do you want to die!”

He considered letting the two just argue, but Katsuki was edging away on the ice. “Vitya! Stop bothering Yurio and get back in the weight room! Don’t you have a fitness class right now?”

“But Yakov…”

“But nothing!”

Ah, yes. Just because he couldn’t yell at Katsuki didn’t mean he didn’t have plenty of skaters to yell at.

Chapter Text

He should have known what Katsuki was like.

It was obvious, if he had ever really thought about it. He had a skater who was known for having anxiety (or at least, who he knew had anxiety). A skater who drilled the same thing over and over in order to learn it, of course, but also as a method of relaxation, of becoming comfortable on the ice. Katsuki skated figures like he was Dick Button or Ulrich Salchow, carving them into the ice with deep edges and crisp turns that seemed to cover only a single blade’s worth of ice no matter how often he went over the same spots. Of course he would bring the same compulsive, near-obsessive drive to any other skating he did to relax—just as he did to his own routines, but with the lessened pressure of doing it because he wanted to, not because anyone was watching.

And the other element of it all that was obvious was the role that Viktor’s skating took in all of this. After all, wasn’t it Viktor’s routine that Yakov had first seen him skate, the one that had taken Katsuki from “a good competitor if he could get out of his own head but no real danger to the Russian team” to “the skater above all others that Yakov had to recruit”? Yet somehow he had never asked Katsuki how he came to be so skilled at Stammi Vichino, nor had Katsuki volunteered the information. Somehow it had never occurred to him that such brilliance at such a technically difficult routine could only have come from the same incessant practice regimen that produced Katsuki’s own programs—only this time done not necessarily in secret but without the prying eyes of a coaching staff or a trainer.

Katsuki skated Viktor’s routines because he loved Viktor’s skating, and so skating them brought him out of his head and into the reason he began to skate in the first place.

What else were the posters for? What else was Katsuki’s blushing inability to fully concentrate when he realized Viktor was in the room (unless, oddly enough, Plisetsky was there too—that rooming situation had certainly been a stroke of genius for all it had been entirely accidental) about? Well, that might have been Viktor’s incessant flirting as well, but it had its roots in Katsuki’s own Viktor craze.

So no, it should not have been the surprise it was to come into the rink early one morning to see Katsuki standing in center ice on an empty rink (because no one was scheduled this early), Zhenya lazing at the rink wall (which explained how he had gotten in), and the first strains of On Love: Eros blaring not from the rink’s own speakers as it did in Viktor’s solo practices but from Katsuki’s phone, propped up on the edge of the wall.

He didn’t say a word. He didn’t breathe. He knew how Katsuki got when he realized there were eyes on him, much less critical eyes that could judge his skating, so he kept silent, only stepping far enough out into the stands to get a full view of the action.

Viktor was slowly sanding off the edges of Eros, taking it from the awkward hip-thrusting it had begun as into something that could legitimately (with a great deal of additional work) become the record-busting routine that Agape was clearly also going to be in Plisetsky’s hands (or skates). If Yakov squinted, he could see where a change in line here, a half-turn there, a shift of that jump a moment earlier or later, could put it all perfectly in time with the music and take Eros to new heights.

But it was immediately clear, the second Katsuki lifted off for the first quad in the routine and landed it with his hands running down his sides seductively, that while Viktor was polishing the routine, Katsuki was perfecting it.

Yakov had not yet choreographed a routine for Katsuki. For the free program, Katsuki had commissioned something from someone back in Detroit that he said would provide him the closure he needed on his American work, and so they were waiting to hear back from the composer before doing anything more than sketching out a series of jumps (as heavily backweighted as possible—Yakov had not recruited a skater with ridiculous stamina to waste it). The step sequences and spins would all fall into place once they knew how it sounded—even the jumps were only placeholders, since one could never tell when an axel would just have to replace a toe loop, the change in half-rotations fitting the tempo—so they didn’t have a full routine.

The short program had actually been a sticking point. He’d wanted to show off Katsuki’s skills without psyching his new protege out, and they had been unable to decide on classical (which would keep Katsuki where he liked to be in the traditional world of historical figure skating—he would have loved the pre-1967 emphasis on figures) or rock (which would allow him to truly showcase his stamina by keeping the tempo up throughout). Yakov had been thinking they would compromise on the Viennese waltz style or something similar—maybe a tango without a partner—but now he found himself in the difficult position of choreographing something—anything—with the sure and certain knowledge in his head that Katsuki had already found his short program.

It was just someone else’s already.

Or so he thought as the last notes wound down and Zhenya started applauding from rinkside. Katsuki startled, as if he’d forgotten he had an audience—and then fell flat on his butt as he turned around when a second set of hands started clapping alongside the first.

Yakov glanced down for a moment to make sure they weren’t his hands—no, he had not gone into a fugue state, though it was a close-run thing with the beauty of Katsuki’s presentation of Viktor’s program, again—and then up across the rink towards the source of the sound.

“Yuuuuuuuuuuri!” Viktor called out. “Are you OK? That was amazing!” He rushed down to rinkside as Katsuki pulled himself up off the ice, clapping excitedly all the way. He was practically skipping; when was the last time Yakov had seen Viktor skip? He might have been eleven.

“You have to take Eros off my hands! I made it for you, anyway!” Viktor was gushing, and when Viktor gushed all inhibitions flowed away.

“I...I couldn’t! It’s your routine! I’m so sorry, Viktor, I didn’t mean…” Katsuki was stumbling over his words, though thankfully no longer over his feet, as he pulled up and snapped on his skate guards.

“Nonsense! Yakov, he was amazing, wasn’t he?” Viktor apparently had already known he was there, as he found himself roped in to the conversation. “Come on, Yakov, you can’t tell me you don’t want to see Katsuki skate that at the Grand Prix Finals and knock them all dead.”

“Vitya.” He wasn’t going to deny it, but you also couldn’t force someone to take a routine, no matter how beautifully they skated it.

“WHAT?” Katsuki exclaimed. “Me? In the Grand Prix Finals?”

“Why not? You made it last year.” Viktor was right, so Yakov said so.

“But what would you do?” Katsuki almost looked like he was pleading with Viktor, who just laughed.

“Choreograph another routine, of course! Yakov, you’ll help me, right? I’m thinking..not love this time. What can we do to surprise everyone? Maybe a Japanese folk song? You could help too, Yuuri! It’ll be like a fun project! We can work together!”

Yakov let Viktor run on until he ran out of steam. He was right; they could find something for Viktor, since they had already been planning to find something for Katsuki.

And there could be no doubt that Katsuki would do full justice to On Love: Eros.

Technically, he supposed, it was better to have two skaters with half their programs done than one completely bored and one with nothing.

Chapter Text

Apparently having a routine to practice was helpful to Katsuki, which he should have realized, if he’d thought it through, and so the next week was marked by nothing but progress: Katsuki, with Plisetsky’s help, was actually hitting the quad salchow eight out of ten times, and Plisetsky’s turns and spins were getting tighter every day. More remarkably, it seemed to be having a knock-on effect on his other skaters: Mila’s triple axel was looking more and more like Katsuki’s (which was a compliment she surprised him by squealing at when he handed it out) and even Georgi was toning down some of the more emotionally extreme elements of his routines to focus on actually hitting the notes of the music with his moves. One time he even suggested on his own that one of his dramatic poses should be cut “because the music is up-tempo there and I’m standing still,” an observation that Yakov had made a dozen times but that Georgi had always ignored. He’d seen Katsuki counting time with Georgi right before, though, so he had his suspicions of where it might be coming from.

The biggest change, however, was undoubtedly in Viktor.

Viktor Nikiforov. Vitya. The boy he’d taken into his home and his heart over a decade ago and who had filled that home with gold medals and (when he had been actually staying there) a fine layer of dill-flavored potato chip crumbs. He knew Viktor well—better than any of his other skaters, and better, he thought, than anyone else knew Viktor.

He’d seen Viktor enthusiastic before. The year he’d cut his hair he’d decided that only a full overhaul of his entire public persona could justify the momentary whim that had led him to the hair salon that fateful day, and he’d thrown himself into it with the mania of a young man discovering that nothing was impossible as long as he put his whole soul into the attempt. Most people stopped when they failed or fell; Viktor had led a charmed life in that regard, and his insane attempt at a quad flip that he was still only hitting two out of ten times in practice—and in the middle of the Grand Prix Finals of all things—had ended not with a torn anterior cruciate ligament or a concussion from a collision with the ice but with a new signature move and another gold medal.

Viktor had loved that, had bounced on his toes and spun a grumbling Yakov around in a circle in the Kiss and Cry before sitting down.

This was not that kind of enthusiasm, but it was definitely the most enthusiastic he’d seen Viktor about his skating since then. It wasn’t the bouncy energy of youth, doing its best to find its way out of his body at any angle and any speed it could. It wasn’t even the smaller, more contained moments of excitement he’d seen in Viktor in the years since: bursts of inspiration that infused each year’s programs with just enough staying power to still dominate the competition, even if he wasn’t actually loving the routines or the ice itself (and Yakov could tell. He didn’t mention it to Viktor, because when he tried the younger man just blew him off, but he could tell).

No, it was something entirely different. Before, Viktor had thrown himself headlong into whatever was his current enthusiasm, even if that momentum burnt itself out more and more rapidly each year. He’d seen inklings of this behavior in Viktor this year: if it had been Viktor, rather than him, to whom Yuri had shown that video, he had no doubt that his next phone call from Viktor would have been from Hasetsu.

Not that he was one to talk, given that he had done the same.

But that wasn’t the point. The point was that at the start—at the airport, for instance, or when they’d gone to the apartment the first time—Viktor had been throwing himself at Katsuki, at the whole situation, like a madman, or rather like he always did.

Yakov had braced himself for the end of the enthusiasm: for the moment when Viktor went back to his old cold gray ways and stopped being infatuated with Katsuki, or with his skating, or whatever it was about the situation that had captivated him however temporarily.

He’d been prepared for a repeat of the Eros routine, with its frantic thrusts (in Viktor’s version at any rate) and obviously unsustainable (for Viktor, again) emotional pace.

But since he’d handed over Eros to Katsuki (for whose stamina it was perfect, and who had tamed the frantic thrusts into something that didn’t look like Christophe Giacometti at an exhibition but rather like a salsa dancer who just happened to be wearing ice skates), something new had come over Viktor.

Something almost like the determination that he sometimes saw in Katsuki’s eyes when challenged. Where before Viktor’s eyes had had three states—laughing, empty, and tired, with the first coming up less and less over the years—he had rediscovered the fourth: fierce. He would call it rediscovery because now that he thought about it he had in fact seen that expression in Viktor’s eyes before, back when he was a junior skater and in his first few years in seniors. It had been what he had looked like when he had had something to prove, not just something to hang onto.

It was exactly what he had hoped Katsuki would bring to the ice, but it was far faster than he had expected. Katsuki had barely skated with them, let alone pushed Viktor off a podium.

But he was not going to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially if that horse had a good chance of snapping his nose off (well, Plisetsky was even more likely to, but Viktor could do it too if he gave him the chance).

Instead, he just watched as Viktor rebuilt himself a short program in the course of a week. A routine that he had in fact based around a Japanese folk song. And indeed, as he had suggested he would, he had asked Katsuki for help with it. But contrary to Yakov’s expectation, he hadn’t pestered the younger skater into it. Instead, he’d just started skating it every time they shared the ice, and Katsuki had somehow come to him about it.

He suspected that Katsuki felt he owed Viktor for the use of his short program, but neither of them seemed to have a problem right now, so he was going to let that go.

Katsuki, apparently, had strong feelings not just about Viktor’s skating (they all knew that by now; Georgi had even unearthed an interview from five years ago where Katsuki had defended Viktor’s choice of music for a controversial exhibition and spent the whole day moaning about true love, fortunately not where Katsuki could hear) but also about Japanese folk music and its proper translation into skating. Evidently Nishigori Yuuko (rink manager, his mind supplied, but apparently also former women’s singles competitor) had worked on a routine based on the same song in juniors, and Katsuki had opinions.

Viktor incorporated every one. And Yakov couldn’t even fully yell at him about it because it was gorgeous. It flowed, and it swept, and even though no one in a Russian audience but Katsuki and Minako would understand any of the words or the musicality, it just felt...right. Like every one of Katsuki’s suggestions had reached into Viktor’s soul and shown him something about the music that came out through his skates.

It was mesmerizing.

It was fantastic.

It was...still probably not as good as Eros or Agape.

And Viktor knew it.

Which explained the determination.

Oh, this season was going to be very interesting indeed.

Chapter Text

He wasn’t sure exactly how it happened, but he came in one Monday morning to find Minako and Lilia both putting Katsuki Yuuri through his paces, with Yuri Plisetsky doing his level teenaged best to keep up.

“Hmm. More extension.” Lilia hummed to herself and Katsuki moved his leg slightly. “Not you!” she snapped. “Yurio, you are fifteen. Katsuki here is an old man compared to you. If your body cannot stretch any further than this, there is no hope for you.”

To his shock, Plisetsky did not mouth off. “Yes, Madame.” His posture improved and his leg—yes, his leg stretched further out.

“Acceptable. Marginally.”

Minako walked up to Katsuki and pushed him back from the stretch he’d gone into before. “You, on the other hand, need to know your limits. You have ice time later. If you stretch like this now, you’ll fall on the flip.”

Yakov stood in the doorway, since it seemed they hadn’t noticed him. It was good to know that Minako was making sure that Katsuki didn’t overdo it; from what he’d seen of his newest skater, he had no internal regulator to tell him that, no willingness or even ability to say “that’s enough,” unless you counted anxiety attacks, which were not the same thing in any way shape or form but did stop him from skating. He’d only had one since starting at the ice rink, that Yakov knew of, but that had been enough for him to kick Katsuki out of the rink for a day to go explore St. Petersburg—with Viktor, because apparently he couldn’t stop his star from joining in.

He believed Plisetsky had gone as well, since he had already had a free day then, so at least the older skaters had had a chaperone. Not that he worried that Katsuki would make a move—but Viktor was another thing entirely. And if Katsuki was going to recover from a panic attack, he didn’t need Viktor jumping his bones.

Not yet anyway. Yakov wasn’t an idiot, he could see that the two of them were eventually likely to get together, but it wasn’t his problem as long as the two of them didn’t make it his problem. And if they did, it would be Viktor’s fault and he would make it Viktor’s problem.

Anyway.

Katsuki was not good at taking breaks, or stopping, or generally taking care of himself. It was good to see Minako had that well in hand, and from the very fact that Lilia didn’t object when Minako gave Katsuki slightly easier work to do for a few minutes he could tell that she felt the same way.

So, to his surprise, did Plisetsky. Or at least, that seemed to be the gist of the profanity-laden rant (seriously, was Nikolia a former sailor? Because he had no idea where the kid got half this stuff) that Plisetsky uncorked when Katsuki tried to slip in one more rep of an exercise that Minako had told him he was done with.

That seemed like time for Yakov to stop lingering in the door and actually come in.

“Katsuki. Are you a ballet dancer or an ice skater?” He did his best not to snap it, which meant he thought it came out more as a growl. Oh well. He was who he was.

“Ahh...an ice skater?” It came out like a question.

Lilia definitely noticed. “Hmph. You could have been a ballet dancer, but you are not one now.” From Lilia this was high praise, and Minako definitely noticed—but Katsuki seemed to deflate a little. Then his shoulders squared up again and he nodded.

“Yes. I am an ice skater.”

“Then why are you risking injury in this ballet studio?” Yakov nodded to Plisetsky. “Yurio is right. You need to take care of your knees if you want to beat Viktor.”

“He’s not going to beat Viktor! I’m going to beat Viktor!” Plisetsky interrupted, then flushed red. “I mean...you can beat Viktor too! He can have bronze, I guess.”

“A podium sweep would be acceptable.” He kept his voice flat. “But a podium sweep is only possible if you remember that cross-training is just that. Cross-training. If you hurt yourself cross-training, you won’t skate. If I think you’re even likely to hurt yourself cross-training, you won’t cross-train or you won’t skate. So listen to your coach, and listen to your ballet teacher. If we say you’re done, you’re done.”

“Yes, coach.” Katsuki bowed his head, and Minako flicked him on the forehead.

“He’s saying this because he cares about you.” She made eye contact with Yakov and dared him to deny it. He didn’t say anything. “It’s not a punishment, Yuuri.”

“Yeah, you get out of ballet!” Yurio gulped. “I mean…”

“Do the routine again.” Lilia’s voice snapped out. “And then get out of my studio, if you’re so eager to get out of ballet.”

“Yes, Madame.” If he’d been surprised when Plisetsky didn’t yell at Lilia earlier, he was downright shocked to hear him back down. “Sorry, Madame.”

“Hmph.” But she didn’t tear Plisetsky a new one, so she must have been relatively pleased with his performance before that.

“Katsuki. Plisetsky.” He waited for both skaters to shift their attention fully to him. “After you’re done here, come to my office. We have to discuss competitions. Neither of you is automatically qualified in to two Grand Prix events, so we will have to find you competitions that qualify you. Think about where you want to skate, and when you’ll be ready.” Katsuki’s music had only just come in, so that was a legitimate concern.

“Yes, coach.” Katsuki elbowed Plisetsky.

“Yes, Yakov,” the younger skater sighed.

“Good.” He turned on his heel and walked out of the room, pausing in the doorway. “And thank your ballet instructors. Not only do they have jobs to do, they have to deal with the two of you while they do them.”

“Yes, coach. Thank you, Minako-sensei, Baranovskaya-sensei.”

“...Thanks. I guess.”

Chapter Text

One of the difficulties with having four senior-level male skaters was that sometimes things slipped through the cracks. He was not inexperienced at juggling multiple top-level talents, of course. But this time two of them were new: Katsuki to the rink (and, he strongly suspected, to actually thinking he might win anything, for all he’d made the Grand Prix Final last year) and Plisetsky to the senior division. That meant that Georgi and Viktor got less attention—and the way that Georgi’s pining would flare up at inconvenient times meant the squeaky wheel got the grease and after Viktor’s short program was set he didn’t really pay him as much attention as the words “five-time champion” would imply.

God, what had his world become when Viktor Nikiforov was the calm, easy skater?

Anyway, that was how it came about that he realized quite late in the day that he had actually never checked in about Viktor’s free program music. He’d seen him skate sections of it, of course, and he knew the jump composition and the step sequences, and he was aware that the piece was sufficiently traditional that they hadn’t had to get rights permissions to use it. But one of the assistants had okayed it in his absence, technically pending his formal approval—and he’d never actually checked in about it again.

He’d been in Japan at the time, but that was no real excuse.

And somehow, Viktor had just never practiced it with the music while he, Yakov, was evaluating his skates. He’d worked through individual sections without the music, and he’d practiced the jump combinations to death, but he hadn’t actually performed the full routine. He didn’t need to: unlike Katsuki and Plisetsky, he didn’t need an additional qualifier to make his Grand Prix slots appear, and so his schedule was pushed back.

Which was how, two weeks before the minor Russian regional competition that Plisetsky was set to use to qualify for a second Grand Prix slot (having obtained his first by virtue of his junior performances), Yakov was able to be surprised by walking into the rink on one of Viktor’s mornings and hearing the unmistakable strains of Bolero of all things blasting from the rink speakers.

He watched Viktor skate a full bullfighting routine—so that’s what his hands were doing in those sequences!—in training pants and a light shirt, ending sprawled on the ice as if he had lost the battle. He waited until the skater popped back up and mimed bows to the non-existent audience before making his presence known.

“So why haven’t I gotten a requisition from Katya for the bullfighter costume yet, Vitya?” Yekaterina Dashkova, former prima ballerina under Lilia, had gone into costume design after an unfortunate knee injury twenty years ago, and designed all of their costumes, under a budget Yakov oversaw.

“Yakov! I was thinking I could use Georgi’s from three years ago, with a few alterations!” Georgi had spent that entire year pining after a woman who he’d seen briefly in a cafe window, and the bullfight had, in his words, been a “metaphor for the way she had stabbed his heart.” Georgi and Viktor had very different colorations but not fundamentally different builds, but…

“Why?”

“It’s for my theme!” Viktor had not put much work into his themes the last few years (though the skates had still been excellent, of course, so he hadn’t needed to) so it surprised Yakov to have his skater bring up the issue of a theme unprompted, instead of Yakov having to drag one out of him the day before the press releases were due to the printer. “Rejuvenation!”

Yakov raised an eyebrow.

“No, seriously, Yakov!” Viktor bounced over (which was impressive in skates) and leaned against the rink wall. “I’m breathing new life into classic Japanese folk music in the short, and then I’m taking the default song for a free skate and making it my own! If I visibly recycle Georgi’s costume, it’s like I’m bringing the 2010s back too!” He pouted. “Gosha agreed, if you’re worried.”

“Of course he did.” One of the odd things about Georgi Popovich, for all that he would mourn the loss of a short relationship—or even a non-relationship, like that stupid bullfighting routine—was that once he did move on he was entirely moved on. Yakov had no doubt at all in his mind that Georgi would have agreed to give up the costume in a heartbeat. That heartbreak was gone, replaced by newer and more exciting heartbreaks.

“Besides, Yuuri wanted to wear one of my costumes for Eros! So it would be like a...a meta-theme! An overarching theme! A link between all us rinkmates, all passing costumes left and right!”

“Mhm.” Sometimes you just had to let Viktor say his piece, get it all out.

“So what did you think?” And in that moment Yakov saw the vulnerability that his child of everything but flesh and blood tried to hide behind brash self-confidence and beaming smiles. In that moment he saw the little Vitya that he had taken on as a small child, a little too gangly for his own limbs, staring up at him after he landed his first double jump and asking the same question, with the same vulnerable look in his eyes. “What did you think” of it? Of me?

Back then, Yakov hadn’t known what to do with that.

Now he did, but only because he always did the same thing he’d done that time.

“It needs work. The quad flip feels shoehorned in, because of course you shoehorned it in, because you’re Viktor Nikiforov. Work with Katsuki on the step sequences, especially the one that ends with the fall: if it doesn’t look entirely intentional and yet completely realistic it’ll lose you points. Move the triple-triple to after the spin; it’ll edge into the second half and get you more points.”

This was their shared love language, started with that double jump and carried through to today: the critique.

As he watched Viktor skate back to the center and wave to Zhenya to cue up the music again, he smiled.

Bolero was over-overdone, of course—but if there was one last surprise Viktor could spring on the audience, it would be to do the most unsurprising thing of all.

Chapter Text

It seemed like a blink of an eye before they were at Yurio’s first qualifier. And yet they had achieved so much in those few weeks: Yurio polished both of his routines under the watchful eyes of Lilia, Minako, and Yakov himself; the whole rink finally got used to their consistent day-in-day-out schedule; and Katsuki’s free program finally (finally) came together, though (in an ironic reversal of his situation with Viktor’s Bolero) they were still ironing out the jumps even though they had the music and the musicality of it. It was an ode to the forces that had shaped Katsuki into the skater he was today—Yakov was doing his best to make it a slightly more aggressive claim that those forces had made Katsuki great, but getting Katsuki to acknowledge that his own past was worth remembering at all was a step forward—and you could see Minako’s touch on every step sequence, every spin, every twitch of Katsuki’s body on the ice.

And they were all intentional. That was the most ridiculous thing of all the ridiculous things that Katsuki Yuuri could do, he had found. While in his best skates Katsuki went into a kind of a zone where his body took over and his mind stopped questioning itself, still somehow every single motion, from the impulses throwing him high into the air for quads to the smallest curl of his pinky finger, felt like it was carefully planned and implemented. Or not planned. Viktor’s skates were planned, Plisetsky’s skates were planned. But in being planned, they lost some of their soul. It was worth the tradeoff, of course. He hadn’t coached Viktor to five straight championships because it didn’t work. It worked just fine.

But for someone like Katsuki, it wasn’t necessary, and that was a thing of beauty all its own.

Mila and Georgi had a certain quality to them, a quality that Viktor and Yurio could never recreate (though again, they didn’t necessarily need it—they were doing just fine without it). That quality was hard to describe. It wasn’t quite unpredictability: Viktor was famous for surprising the audience. It wasn’t quite recklessness: Yurio threw himself into jumps with a recklessness that practically defined the word. But there was a sense whenever Mila or Georgi skated that they chose, every moment, whether to do what they had planned to do or throw it all away for some emotional reason that mattered more to them than to the watching audience. Mila reined this in effectively; perhaps it was more her coloration and her personality that made it seem like she might change her mind at any moment, because she never actually did.

That was why she too was likely to become a champion, if not this year (Sara Crispino was still stronger on her sequences, though Mila had been getting better of late) then next.

Georgi, on the other hand, was a ticking time bomb who could seemingly go off the rails at any time—when he was heartbroken. And since outsiders didn’t always know when he was heartbroken, Yakov had built a lot of Georgi’s routines around that very uncertainty. Those at the rink, of course, knew all too well, so he’d also had a lot of fights with the other skaters about his willingness to play into Georgi’s somewhat over the top personality, but it had gotten Georgi to a Grand Prix Final and made him the second-best men’s singles skater in Russia for years, so no one could really argue with results.

Fine, Georgi was the third-best skater in Russian men’s singles now, but that was the fault of one Yuri(o) Plisetsky, and not Yakov.

Or maybe both of them together, but then again he was responsible for much of Georgi’s success too—and you could blame him for Viktor as well if you felt like it.

Anyway, the reason he pondered this at this particular stage in the season was that Katsuki somehow, implausibly, had that same feeling about him. Not in the way that he would have insisted he did. No one but him was watching and waiting for him to fail all his jumps like he had in Sochi, or again in All-Japan afterwards. Those had been horrifying trainwreck programs precisely because no one expected Katsuki Yuuri, Japan’s Ace, to miss those jumps. With a lesser skater, the audience would have simply seen the disaster coming and hoped the skater would get through without injury. With Katsuki, even after four or five falls, they still expected him to hit the next jump.

Because Katsuki Yuuri always looked as if his every single move was a deliberate choice, one he had probably planned in advance (he wasn’t the chaos that Georgi embodied) but that he chose, every single moment, to conform to. His leg lifted to there, exactly there, no further and no less because he willed it. His body spun at exactly the speed he wished, and when he lifted up for a jump there was no doubt in anyone’s mind, no matter how much the evidence of their eyes should have told them otherwise, that he was going to rotate exactly as often as he wished and land cleanly on the right skate at the right angle.

Every time he failed to do so—and no, he was not as perfect as Viktor—it was a fresh surprise.

It was as if the audience—and even his coaches—lived in the opposite world from Katsuki. His was a universe in which he was a dime-a-dozen skater who failed all the time and no one expected much from because he was so obviously incapable of being worth it (and yet, somehow, everyone was also constantly disappointed in him, even though there was no reason to have any expectations at all: anxiety was a hell of a drug). Everyone else’s was a world in which Katsuki Yuuri was only held back by the difficulty of his routines (too low), the occasional wobble on his quad salchow (a matter of confidence and practice), and his own self-belief (also too low). They were not disappointed in him, but devastated for him when things went wrong.

He had an entire country that he thought was on his shoulders, but was actually behind his back, rooting him on.

And now he had Yakov’s whole rink as well.

He pretended to himself sometimes that he didn’t know why Yurio suddenly seemed to connect more clearly to Agape than he had at the start of the practice season (and that he didn’t know why Yurio had gone on a ‘spontaneous’ trip to visit Nikolai in Moscow two weeks ago). He pretended that he didn’t know how Mila’s triple axel or her step sequences had both tightened up. Not even he could pretend that Viktor’s changes were something to do with Katsuki—for God’s sake, one of them needed to say something instead of just practicing each other’s routines when they thought he wasn’t watching!—but he could and did sometimes pretend that it was just Viktor’s crush or infatuation or whatever it was that had changed him, and not the way that Katsuki mirrored back his best skating and showed him it could be better.

But...Katsuki had taken Stammi Vicino and made it better than Viktor’s gold medal had.

But...Katsuki stood by the boards whenever he could as Viktor practiced his short program and would say nothing, but the angle at which he leaned over the wall would tell everyone watching which sections were working—and Viktor always ended up drilling the sections where Katsuki was anything other than hanging halfway onto the ice.

But...Viktor had taken the quad flip out of the program because he couldn’t make it fit musically. The quad flip was his signature jump but also his hardest, and there were only so many entries he could take into it, none of which worked with the medley.

And Viktor Nikiforov had taken it out because he’d finally found someone whose version of a PCS score he cared more about than the technical elements.

And...well...it was the right choice. With the quad flip, its technical difficulty was equal to Eros or Agape, but there was no way Viktor was going to get PCS scores to match either Yu(u)ri (in a fair world—as the five-time champion, he could probably have gotten away with it, but Viktor was better than that). Without it, it fell a couple of points short, but elevated in a way it couldn’t do with the flip.

So as they drove to the rink in St. Petersburg that hosted the small regional competition for Plisetsky’s qualifier (not their home rink, but it was still an advantage to let Plisetsky sleep in his own bed in the shared apartment before the competition), Yakov found himself admitting something he hadn’t considered when he’d selfishly wanted to bring Katsuki Yuuri into his team so that he could choreograph beautiful routines: Katsuki wasn’t just getting better himself. He was making the entire team better.

God help all the other skaters out there, because Yakov’s team certainly wouldn’t.

Chapter Text

It had obviously made sense to have Plisetsky skate at the St. Petersburg regional, even though it was so small that usually Yakov’s skaters didn’t participate, going to the larger Moscow regionals when they needed to and generally qualifying without any regional competition at all. With the need to fly to Katsuki’s regional two weeks later, there was a positive need to reduce other disruptions, including travel time, time away from the home rink, and all the uncertainties that attended upon any time taken away from the normal routine of the everyday and every week practices. Yes, of course, the actual competition was already a break from those, but minimizing the degree and duration of their imposition on the life of not just Plisetsky but the entire rink system was important.

Yakov kept reminding himself of this as he watched the entire event spiral not out of control but out of proportion.

First, of course, Viktor had to come, because wherever Plisetsky went for a competition Viktor would come, because Yakov, in his infinite fallibility within his infinite wisdom had made the one the other’s jump coach. No, a jump coach didn’t technically have to travel with the skater (he could watch video, he could Skype, he could do any of a million options to help from a distance) but with a recently promoted senior skater like Plisetsky (were there really any like Plisetsky?) it was Yakov’s practice to keep everything as familiar and as comfortable for the skater as possible in and around the massive crunch time of competition. Even if the St. Petersburg Men’s Regional was actually smaller than small potatoes (maybe potato seeds? Did potatoes even have seeds? Yakov didn’t bother much with potatoes other than to eat them when others prepared them, stick them into soups, and once a year grate them into latkes himself, but he felt he should know this) and Plisetsky had been competing in, and won, Junior Worlds last year, there was still a difference of kind, not just of degree. Even Junior Worlds bore with it the constant reminder of its junior-ness: yes, there would be a Wikipedia entry for winning it, but it wouldn’t even be in the main body of the entry for a skater who actually did well.

Obviously, the same was true in spades for the St. Petersburg regional: Plisetsky would probably spit on him for real if he suggested that would headline his Wikipedia article (yes, he already had one; yes, he had crowed about it for two days until Mila had pointed out that all of them had them). But Junior Worlds was the culmination of a process; there was no further point, no growth, and yet even then it was still inherently secondary (at least to someone with the mindset of one of Yakov’s skaters—he himself actually remembered being rather impressed with it the first time he’d gone, but he didn’t mention that to anyone anymore. Lilia knew, but probably no one else he was in regular contact with anymore, now that he thought about it, unless you counted saying yahrzeit as contact, though he wasn’t too regular about that either). St. Petersburg regional, though, could become (should become) the Grand Prix, could become the final, could become Nationals, Worlds, the Olympics eventually.

It was the difference between the first step of a tall ladder and the top rung of a short one; yes, Junior Worlds was higher, but the St. Petersburg regional was important.

So Viktor came.

Lilia too; she’d agreed to take on Plisetsky, so she would be there, come hell or high water. He wasn’t stupid enough to question it.

And then, since it was in town, what was the harm in bringing Katsuki? There were a lot of reasons for it. Katsuki hadn’t experienced Yakov-at-a-competition before; he didn’t know the flow that Yakov and his team always insisted on for a skater’s days during competition time, beyond the spreadsheet and itinerary that he’d been handed for his own competition, and this was an easy way to make it real instead of theoretical for him. Not to mention that he might not officially be Plisetsky’s coach but he was having more of an impact on his spins and step sequences than anyone shy of Lilia. And they were roommates, which wasn’t the kind of thing that would actually tilt the balance for Yakov but wasn’t nothing either.

How Mila invited herself along he couldn’t quite say, but once Mila was coming Georgi was inevitable, since he would pine if left without any of the others. Viktor’s Makkachin was better at being alone, and she was a dog, with the concomitant pack instinct.

Once the skaters were all on board, it felt silly not to invite Minako, since Lilia was going to be there and someone had to keep her company. Besides, she’d been working with Yurio too, so...

So the whole team was packed into the bus to the rink, even though they were all sleeping in their own beds tonight. Viktor had somehow gotten himself into the seat next to Katsuki and was chattering away—Katsuki’s body language wasn’t closed off, his arm was actually touching Viktor’s without flinching, so Yakov didn’t intervene—while Georgi had the back of the bus, including all the support staff, singing some old ballad about the sea that seemed to ultimately be about lost love, of course, but was a little bit catchy and not nearly as sad as usual.

Plisetsky, unusually, didn’t shout at Georgi to stop, just shoving his headphones in and ignoring the older skater. He was clearly nervous.

When they got to the rink, Yakov dismissed the auxiliary crew (everyone but him, Lilia, Viktor, and Yurio—though somehow Katsuki ended up with Yurio’s bag so he was with them too) and got to work. They registered Yurio, got him out on the ice for practice, gave him his critiques.

It was just like any other day, except for all the differences.

Yakov kept an eye on the competition. No one they knew, except a few skaters who had been in juniors for a few years and aged out. No one whose practice seemed like a threat.

“Pick a quad,” he barked at Plisetsky as he came off the ice for preliminary warmups.

“Salchow,” he said with a smirk at Katsuki, who was sitting nearby pretending to watch intently while also pretending to ignore that Viktor’s hand was hovering just by his lower back. Of course. Plisetsky had to tease Katsuki, and Katsuki and Viktor had...whatever it was going on. His life was never simple.

“Fine. Keep the quad salchow. All the others are triples today, Yurio, do you hear me?” He caught the flash of dismay followed by anger across Plisetsky’s face and held up a finger. “One quad. You beat the juniors without quads, as part of my and Viktor’s conditions, so I will allow you one quad in this competition even though you do not need it to win. But this competition is not the competition you need your quads for, and I will not risk your health or your scores on meaningless showboating.”

Plisetsky huffed, but didn’t curse. “One quad in each program,” he insisted. Yakov nodded, and the boy huffed again. “Fine.”

“Good.” He nodded sharply at the young skater. “Now, your step sequences: remember Katsuki, Minako, and Lilia are all watching you. Do not let them down.”

“What about you?”

He clapped the skater on the back. “Yurio, every day you do not make me tear my hair out like Viktor does is a day you do not let me down.”

Thinking about it after, the boy probably took that as a challenge, not a reassurance.

Oh well.

Chapter Text

To his utter shock and surprise, Yuri Plisetsky actually did as he was told. He skated the modified Agape with only quad salchow, taking out the quad toe loop and not adding in the one flip he’d been begging Viktor to teach him and Yakov to include. Yakov had grudgingly agreed that once he was hitting it fifty percent of the time in practice that it could become part of the supercharged version of the routine if Plisetsky needed it, replacing the triple axel—in the Grand Prix finals, Worlds, that sort of thing—although he was still only at twenty percent, so he shouldn’t have had to worry. But with Plisetsky, you never knew.

Of course, because Yurio did as he was told, he complained about it all through the kiss-and-cry and the wait for the other skaters to finish, because he only scored 93.72 and obviously if Yakov had let him skate his program properly he’d have smashed 100 and maybe broken Viktor’s record.

The fact that it was a personal best and also broke the competition record at the St. Petersburg regional was apparently insignificant to him. To be fair, the competition record at the St. Petersburg regional competition was not necessarily the highest bar of competition that Plisetsky had ever fought against, but it wasn’t nothing. And a personal best should have been an achievement, but of course all Plisetsky could see was “I skated with quads, of course my score was higher.”

Still, he could deal with a grumbling skater, especially one who was grumbling because he wanted to do better. He had dealt with grumbling skaters all his life, and knowing the way of the world as well as he did he fully expected to be dealing with grumbling skaters in the world to which this world was but an anteroom, assuming there was one given the Almighty’s sense of humor.

Honestly, it was one of the ways in which his disbelief in such an afterlife was comforting. One go around with the kiss-and-cry routine in one life was enough.

“Yuri! That was great!” There was only one member of the massive entourage he’d ended up bringing with him that called Plisetsky that, so he didn’t even have to turn.

“Katsuki. Tell this boy what you thought of his footwork.” Plisetsky had been so focused on not jumping the quad toe loop that he’d skimped on the sequence and the three spins, marking through them in a manner that was more than adequate to smoke the competition at a little event like this, but that would get him in real trouble when the judges were out for blood. He wouldn’t listen to Yakov on this, but he was justly aware that Katsuki’s eye was good for it.

“I...well…you did great!” Katsuki fumbled over his words and Yakov could hear Plistetsky’s eyes roll in his voice.

“Come on, Katsudon!” At some point, Plisetsky had forced Katsuki (and Minako, who had clearly gone along because Katsuki needed the support) to take the skaters on a tour of the Japanese restaurants of St. Petersburg in search of a good one. Yakov had come along because he didn’t put it past Plisetsky to make Katsuki pay for all of them, and if Yakov came it was an official fraternizing event and could go on the company credit card. Somewhere in there –maybe the third restaurant they’d gone to, every week on Tuesdays—Plisetsky had learned that Katsuki’s favorite dish was a pork cutlet bowl. He’d promptly declared that “if I have to have a nickname, so does he!” and started calling Katsuki Katsudon, after the meal. The fact that it hadn’t caught on at all with anyone else hadn’t dissuaded him, because he was Yuri Plisetsky.

“What? You were good!” Katsuki defended himself and Yakov turned to see Plisetsky grab Katsuki by the face and pull him down to his level (it was an endless frustration to Plisetsky that he was the shortest in the group, even shorter than Mila, who could actually lift him above her head).

“Katsudon. I know I messed up the steps. I felt the tempo go off. I didn’t even hit the sequence at full speed. Don’t patronize me. Tell me what you thought.”

“Er…” Katsuki gulped. “They...need work?”

“Too right they do!” Plisetsky let go of Katsuki. “Viktor! Tell me about my jumps!”

Yakov tuned out Viktor’s loving critique of the exact way in which Plistesky had over-rotated the triple toe in combination with the quad salchow, and focused on Katsuki.

“You need to give Yurio honest critiques,” he said as calmly as he could as they walked towards the interview area where Plistesky would get to crow about his massive advantage over second place and (if he knew his skater) complain about how he should be competing against Viktor. “That’s why I got you rinkside access. He respects your step sequences. If you tell him what to do, he’ll do it. If you don’t, he’ll stagnate.”

“But...why me?”

“Didn’t I just say he respects your step sequences?”

“But...why?”

“Katsuki.”

Katsuki took a deep breath. “Right. My step sequences are beautiful. Minako wouldn’t let me out of the studio otherwise. I am perfectly qualified to advice Yuri Plisetsky about step sequences.” It sounded rehearsed, because it was. These were the phrases Katsuki had been using to quell his impostor syndrome after a long talk with his sports psychologist about helping Plisetsky. It didn’t do everything, of course, but Yakov had noticed it helping. “Thank you, Coach.”

“Yuuuuri! It’s your turn!” Viktor swung an arm around Katsuki’s shoulders and slid around him to push him closer to Plisetsky—though he didn’t release his arm afterwards. “Come on! I know you didn’t love that camel spin!”

“Well…”

Katsuki didn’t exactly launch into an evisceration of that change-foot camel spin in the way that either Yakov or Viktor would have, but he did make some actual specific critiques of the way Plisetsky had entered and exited the spin, which seemed ironically to mollify the grumpiness of the younger skater.

Yakov did not comment on the fact that Viktor’s arm stayed around Katsuki’s shoulders the entire time.

Chapter Text

The time between the short program and the free was more difficult, ironically, for a competition where they weren’t traveling. With travel came control: a hotel room, a strange city, a focus on the rink. With staying home, it was difficult to know what to do with themselves on the rest day: they banned Plisetsky from the rink, of course, but what about Yakov? He would usually be traveling too, so the skaters would be on the own, or with their assistants, or whatever specialty coaches they might have.

But now he was sleeping in his own bed. Should he go in to work? How could he live with himself if he didn’t? Usually he wouldn’t spend his whole day going over film or critiquing streamed video of his skaters. He would visit with other coaches. He would relax (for whatever value of relax he could). He would harangue his skater a little. But he wouldn’t work in the same way he did at home.

But could he do that for a local competition?

He tried to meet up with the other coaches, even dragging Plisetsky with him to a lunch for skaters and coaches together, but no one would talk to him. Well, not that they snubbed him, but they didn’t seem to have anything to say, not like Cialdini or Karpisek or his other usual colleagues, with whom he could swap skater anecdotes and complaints for hours.

Not to mention that Plisetsky acted like the spoiled fifteen-year-old he still was in many ways and almost started a fight.

So the rest of the day felt very strange. He banished Plisetsky back to his apartment to play with Potya, and wandered down by the Neva. It had been too long since he’d actually done anything tourist-like in St. Petersburg. It was home, of course, it would always be home, they would bury him here and (if he was lucky) someone would say yahrzeit for him in the little synagogue down the street here (maybe Viktor, if he remembered). But when had he last gone anywhere but the rink, his house, a restaurant or two, and the airport or train station?

Back when he was married to Lilia, of course, but even then it had been a shamefully long time. Perhaps if it hadn’t things would be different—but it had, and they weren’t.

He still found himself outside the Mariinsky, his feet betraying his thoughts into the world, but he didn’t go in.

After all, ballet practices were like work too.

The next day, though, he felt strangely refreshed, as if the odd and confusing time he’d experienced had actually been good for him somehow. Plisetsky, too, was focused, though he rather suspected from some of what the skater muttered under his breath that this had less to do with the day off at home and more to do with the skater he’d had the argument with the night before (Grigori Zhakarov, 21, bad triple axel, passable triple lutz, moderate musicality, his memory filled in. Third after the short.). Apparently he’d said something about little kids having an easier time landing jumps, referencing some of the women’s skaters and the search for a quad, and Plisetsky wasn’t mature enough yet to laugh off how wrong it was. Instead he had gotten offended. Oddly enough, he seemed to be offended more on Mila’s account than his own, but then again Plisetsky ran on offense, pirozhky, and teen anger, so it worked for him.

Anyway, he’d marched into the rink that day telling Yakov he was going to beat this bunch of idiots without triples.

Yakov had run the numbers in his head and...yes, that was actually possible. The lead Plisetsky had, and the base values of his jumps, meant that it was possible.

He still told him no.

“Ignore them.” He plowed on through Plisetsky’s angry squawk. “You aren’t just competing against them. You’re competing for the judges. You’re competing for the fans. You’re competing most of all for you. And while you’ll feel good if you can crush them without the jumps, will you feel good when you get to the Grand Prix and you haven’t landed quads and triples in live competition? Will you feel confident in the program if you haven’t actually run it through, and will you give the performance you should, that it deserves, if you spend your time here squashing every person who doesn’t know when to shut up? Beat them. Destroy them. But do it while performing your own routines, not some parody of them that lets you get back at some idiot who was stupid over borscht.”

Plisetsky’s back was ramrod straight and Yakov thought that the look he was getting from the young skater might be the first time he’d ever actually listened to him with respect.

“Yes, Coach. I’ll cram my quads down their throats!”

That wasn’t exactly what he’d said, but he’d take it.

Plisetsky won gold, of course. He won gold by a Viktor-like margin, though the competition was hardly the level that Viktor had been skating against. He hit every jump, timed every spin—even Viktor and Katsuki only had good things to say about it. He didn’t break 200—he still didn’t put in the quad toe loop, because for all that Yakov wanted him to perform the routine for itself, he also wanted to keep his skater free of danger by minimizing the quads—but his total was very comfortable.

Well, comfortable for anyone but Plisetsky.

“Why does no one have anything to say to me?” he grumbled at the rink the next day. “Come on, Katsudon, you told me what was wrong with the camel spin in the short!”

“But there wasn’t anything wrong with it?” Somehow that came out as a question from Katsuki warming up next to him. “I mean, you could try to feel the music more, but technically…”

“AHA!” Plisetsky shouted loud enough to make everyone on the ice turn, and that was given the automatic discount they always gave to how loud Plisetsky was usually. “I knew there was something! Show me how to feel the music!”

Somehow this ended up with Katsuki, Plisetsky and (inevitably) Viktor decamping for the Plisetsky-Katsuki apartment after practice for a...music appreciation class, led by Minako.

What on earth had happened to his rink?

Well, it wasn’t anything to complain about, he supposed. Still, it was very strange. Katsuki Yuuri was an odd influence indeed.

Chapter Text

By contrast with Plisetsky’s regional, which had been in a sense a collective holiday, Katsuki’s regional was a major operation. He had planned and prepared for this, of course; you didn’t recruit a Japanese skater without knowing that you would be returning to Japan for critical skates. He had made sure that Katsuki himself did not get to book the tickets (though of course he was consulted in terms of dates and times) because he knew that, given the choice, Katsuki took up as little space as possible—sometimes metaphorically, but in terms of a plane that would be literal as well: economy class because it was cheaper and literally less space.

Yakov wasn’t someone to luxuriate in excess, but he was aware that most-of-the-day flight to and from Japan could throw the best skaters and the most thoughtful coaches out of tune; there was no need to layer on additional discomfort that was not necessary. So a first-class flight, and an extra day earlier than Katsuki had initially asked for: no reason to be jet-lagged for the first practice.

He would be accompanying the skater, of course. Katsuki had tried to beg off, suggesting that maybe Minako could go with him, or his friend Yuuko could come up from Hasetsu. This was, as he informed him in no uncertain terms, ridiculous. They couldn’t bring everyone who had ever helped Katsuki, since the work of the rink did need to continue in their absence. But the St. Petersburg skaters had survived Yakov coming and recruiting Katsuki; they would survive him accompanying him to a regional competition. They had all done that for each others’ competitions for years, too; Viktor in the NHK would mean exactly as much disruption as Katsuki in the Chugoku, Shikoku, and Kyushu Championship.

He had explained this multiple times to Katsuki, but he wasn’t sure that it had sunk in. Still, he was his coach, so he’d accepted it.

It was the first time in a long time that it had just been the two of them. Minako had declared that she would simply take the time to visit more with Lilia—“Yuuri, you don’t need me there to practice at the barre, do you? Are you telling me that you haven’t learned anything about maintaining your fitness from me in all these years? That’s what I thought”—and Yakov had banned both Viktor and Yurio from coming along. A week off from skating wouldn’t destroy either of their practice regimens, but it would seriously disrupt them, and now that they were both qualified for the Grand Prix series, it was vital to keep them on track.

That didn’t stop Viktor from insisting on driving them to the airport—and since their flight was a 5am, he could hardly refuse—and somehow Yurio hopped in the car as well when they picked up Katsuki. Viktor and Plisetsky’s bickering kept both him and Katsuki awake as they drove to the airport and checked in. They were able to leave them behind at the security gate, which was a relief as he’d worried until the last moment that Viktor or Yurio would pull out a spare boarding pass and follow them on through.

They boarded the plane and Katsuki promptly fell asleep—not a surprise, since getting him up in the first place had been Plisetsky’s excuse for accompanying them to the airport, “in case Katsudon tries to curl up in his luggage and misses the plane.”

He didn’t wake up until they were over...well, it was still Russia, because Russia was large, but it was the part that was nearer Mongolia than Finland.

Then he promptly fell asleep again after eating the bad in-flight meal.

It was fine; Yakov wasn’t the kind of person who needed someone to chatter to on a long flight. He pulled out a binder and started going through what he had on Katsuki’s Japanese competition. Then he pulled out his laptop and tried to find more information: what they had was pretty sketchy and minimal. While he didn’t speak Japanese, he could use Google Translate to find names, and the ice was a universal translator.

Omiki Yuuto had decent triples and musicality, but his spins and step sequences were low-level. Not a threat, but exactly the sort of skater Katsuki would think was a threat, because he couldn’t see his own skills as valuable.

Fujiwara Hikaru’s jumps were shaky, but he made up for it with the other elements; he was, in fact, the dime-a-dozen skater that Katsuki thought he was, though calling anyone who could hit a triple jump (even if inconsistently) “dime a dozen” truly underestimated modern inflation and the difficulty of figure skating.

Kenjirou Minami...was interesting. Oh, no challenge to Katsuki, of course, for all that he’d done better in last year’s Nationals. But he was young, painfully so, much like Plisetsky in fact; that meant that if he could solidify his skating as he went through his growth spurt, he had a real chance of blooming into someone worth watching. No, that was unfair. Kenjirou was already worth watching. Yakov could see Katsuki’s moves in him, the way he moved, the choices of costumes and music. But unlike Katsuki, he loved the attention; Kenjirou Minami was a performer. His music was similar to Katsuki’s, except that if there was an arrangement of that music that bopped, bounced, and swung, Kenjirou would take it, amp the clap-ability of it by 200%, and go from there. His routines were hard to follow, even when he fell or otherwise made a major mistake, because he brought the audience with him every time. Katsuki did too, but he didn’t know it; Kenjirou reveled in it.

But he also had no serious quads and you could tell that his background wasn’t as firmly settled into ballet and other dance as Katsuki’s was. He was one to keep an eye on, and he was obviously a fan of Katsuki’s, but he was no competition for this year.

No, there was only one competitor whose skates revealed him as a real threat to Katsuki Yuuri’s potential victory at the Chugoku, Shikoku, and Kyushu Championship, and that was the skater he spent most of his time watching film of: Katsuki Yuuri himself.

Chapter Text

Once they landed, he made a few calls, then let Katsuki guide him through the morass of the airport and the hotel. He had noticed that Katsuki calmed down substantially when he was asked to operate on someone else’s behalf and not his own; that was why his rooming situation with Plisetsky had actually worked out, to everyone’s surprise. Being the adult in the room seemed to calm him, or perhaps it was simply a matter of having something to focus on that was not his own needs, desires, and fears.

Whatever it was, Yakov did not mention that he had a functional grasp of Japanese (how else did Katsuki think he had found his way to Hasetsu in the first place?) from having lived with Minako and competed in Japan for so many years. Obviously he wasn’t going to pass an actual Japanese exam, but for the things they were doing today—the default things around a skating competition, for heaven’s sake—he was able to get by. But Katsuki didn’t think about it, and so he let him talk to the clerks and get them checked in and their bags moved to their rooms and so on.

They were there a day earlier than strictly necessary, and he knew already exactly what he was going to do with Katsuki in the interim.

When they met up after several hours to decompress—a nap for him, since he hadn’t slept the whole plane ride through; a call with his family, he thought, for Katsuki—he took charge.

“Let’s go to the rink.”

Katsuki gulped but followed him, and they made their way into the ice complex that was hosting this regional championship. It was no Ice Palace, and you could see that it would never host a cup like the NHK Trophy, but it was certainly larger than what Hasetsu had, and there was more than one surface available.

It was one of the things he’d arranged from the airport, actually. He rather suspected that the organizers were somewhere between confused, terrified, and thrilled to have a capital-N Name like Yakov Feltsman coaching a skater at their local competition, and while he wouldn’t abuse the leeway that gave him, arranging for space at one of the many rinks in the complex for his skater was not abuse. It was practical, especially as they were coming from out of the country.

“So...Eros?” Katsuki asked as he skated out onto the pristine ice. His voice was a full register higher than usual, and Yakov wondered whether he had ruined the calm Katsuki had achieved through competence at the hotel by bringing him to the ice. Oh well; it wasn’t as if the ice was avoidable on this, their trip to a literal skating competition.

“No.” He knew that was a bad idea. “Figures first.” Katsuki hadn’t stopped skating figures since he came to St. Petersburg, and Yakov had no intention of trying to get him to do so. “Just get to know the ice.”

Katsuki looked surprised, but started skating, so that was a win.

He looked at his skater as he moved, noticing the change from anxiety to the sort of calm that usually came immediately before Yurio somehow managed to blow something up (metaphorically or literally).

“What now?” Katsuki skated closer to the boards.

“Skate Bolero.” He knew he had to keep Katsuki off his own routines but on the ice, and there was no better way than Viktor’s routines. “Mark the jumps, you don’t want tired legs for the real practice tomorrow.”

“Yes, Coach.” That was the thing about Katsuki. No matter what he told him to do, it was ‘yes, coach’ unless his anxiety got to him. It was even rubbing off on some of the other skaters, which was actually quite eerie but not in a way he was actually going to complain about.

Katsuki stuck in his earbuds and skated to center ice. He took his pose—or rather, Viktor’s—and began to move.

Yakov kept a careful eye on the routine. Yes, it was not Katsuki’s own, but he knew that Katsuki would be disappointed if he didn’t have critiques. Katsuki wanted to skate on the same ice as Viktor—and now he did, every other day—but he also wanted to skate Viktor’s programs right. And—as with Stammi Vicino and Eros—there were ways, he was discovering, in which watching Katsuki do Viktor’s programs made him realize how Viktor could do them better as well (though of course Eros had ended up in Katsuki’s hands in the end anyway).

Speaking of which, he kept his camera steady as well. Viktor would scream if he knew Katsuki was skating his Bolero and he didn’t get to see. And he had a plan that required Viktor’s help, so he knew he had to trade something for it—the ungrateful brat.

There was something different about how Katsuki skated the bullfight than Viktor did. Where Viktor teased the bull, dodging away at the last minute, seeming to almost linger too long in the moment before dashing away again, Katsuki interpreted the same moments, the same motions, the same steps in a completely different manner. If Viktor was the daredevil matador, flirting with death, Katsuki seemed almost sad for the bull; his hesitation came not from the desire to demonstrate how he could tease the bull but from regret over the knowledge that he would, in the end, be expected to kill it.

The aggressive, repetitive, incessant nature of the music, then, ceased to be about the triumph of the matador but about how Katsuki the matador could not avoid eventually bringing about the coup de grace. The music that, for Viktor, was an ally and a coconspirator, almost winking along with him at the audience with every iteration of the main theme, was an insistent, demanding audience of its own to Katsuki, calling on him again and again to go through with the final act he could not quite go through with.

And the final pose—exactly the same as Viktor’s and yet somehow imbued with an entirely different sentiment—was the culmination of the difference. Viktor fell to the ice, admitting his defeat as he finally could not evade the bull; Katsuki lay there too, but from him it signified his willingness to let the bull trample him rather than to be the one to kill it.

Yakov ended the recording and called quietly to his skater.

“Katsuki...I think that’s enough.”

Katsuki took a moment to stand, but then pushed himself to his feet.

“Yes, coach.”

“Let’s go to dinner.” And if he could manage it, he was going to find Katsuki katsudon. He expected the skater to fight him about it, but there was no doubt in his mind that that routine was a triumph as much as the gold medal he expected from him in four days would be.

Chapter Text

The short program had gone well, he thought. Honestly, he’d expected Katsuki to freak out when Kenjirou Minami had come up to him and chattered away about how excited he was to be skating on the same ice with him, but he hadn’t. He hadn’t dealt with it all that well, to be honest—the wan smile and muttered thanks were not how one was supposed to deal with a fan, let alone a fellow competitor, but they could work on media management before the Grand Prix itself—but he hadn’t let it get into his own head, and so Yakov would take it.

Instead of getting all interior about Kenjirou’s respect for his skating, in fact, Katsuki had pestered him, Yakov, with questions. Most of them had been variants on “why” and “how” and “no, seriously, why me?” but those were all questions he could answer, so that was fine.

“If Plisetsky looks up to you, why shouldn’t Kenjirou? You’re fellow countrymen. He’s clearly been watching you skate. I’m sure he’d appreciate the kind of attention you give Plisetsky: a hint about his spins or sequences, and he’d probably thank you forever.”

“But…” Katsuki looked like he was going to object but then Yakov saw him stop, take a breath, and redirect. “What does he want from me?”

“Didn’t I just say that?”

“No. I mean, yes, you did. But what does he want from me…” Katsuki gestured broadly “after this?”

“Probably for you to remember his name.” Yakov snorted. “Tell me, what did you want from Viktor?”

“But that’s Viktor.”

“And you’re Katsuki Yuuri. Japan’s Ace.” He rolled his eyes. “And before you tell me that title’s ridiculous and undeserved, it’s still the context he has for you.” He pulled out his phone and opened a page he’d had bookmarked since he’d first seen that video...was it only a few months ago? “You bombed nationals last year, true, but how did you do the year before?”

“First.” Katsuki hunched his shoulders. “But that was a fluke.”

“The year before that?”

“Second. But only because Oda slipped and fell on his quad combination in the free.”

“Or, arguably, only because you touched down on the quad toe in both programs. Takahashi only had two and a half points on you.”

“But touching down was because I was off-kilter; it killed my GOE too.”

“Exactly.” He wondered if Katsuki could hear himself. “If you’d skated clean, you’d have won.”

“But…”

“No buts. Is there a reason Kenjirou Minami shouldn’t look up to a skater who won All-Japan the year after almost winning it?”

“But I always choke! I did it at the Grand Prix, I did it at nationals, and I’m going to do it again!”

Well, at least they’d gotten to the root of it, he thought. Apparently being back in Japan and about to skate was the exact situation that brought this out of Katsuki—or maybe it was just having someone look up to him.

“Katsuki. Yuuri.” He sighed. “Tell me: what’s the difference in technical base values between you and the other skaters here?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think you do.” He had absolutely no doubt that Katsuki had looked up his competition, because he knew that Yurio had looked up Katsuki’s competition and there was no way the younger skater hadn’t pushed the phone with their routines playing right up in his roommate’s nose. Well, maybe he hadn’t seen it because it was too close for his glasses to focus—but otherwise, he’d definitely seen it.

“Fine. Ten points.”

“More like twenty if you skate clean. For each program. Twenty-five to thirty if they don’t.” And they wouldn’t. “So tell me, Yuuri: are you planning to fall so often that you lose twenty points in deductions for each skate?”

“I did at nationals.”

“You did. Are you planning to do it again?”

“No, Coach.”

“Good. Do you remember what I told Plisetsky before his skate?”

“You told him to...pick a quad?”

“Exactly. Do you know why I told him that?”

As usual, Katsuki had an easier time when he was answering about someone else, and not himself. It was like having an outside reference let him sidestep the anxiety. “Because his base values were so high that it was better to make sure he won than to show off.”

“And?”

“And because he still needed to practice a quad, since he would need it against stiffer competition.”

“Good.” He nodded. “So, Katsuki: I’m not going to ask you to pick a quad.”

“No?” He looked confused, and maybe a little disappointed. Hm...Minako had said something about challenges being what Katsuki needed. He filed that away for later: for this competition, all he had to do was make sure Katsuki kept it together, not make him blow everyone else away and break a record. After all, Katsuki was the kind of skater who needed a challenge not a microscope: getting his best out of him this early would just put a target on his back and there would be a real chance he’d crumble under the perception of attention.

“No. Unlike Plisetsky, you’ve hit quads in competition before. So I’m going to tell you which quad to keep.”

“Oh.” Katsuki’s face hardened into determination. “Which quad, Coach?”

“The salchow.” He clapped a hand on Katsuki’s shoulder. “They’ve seen you land the toe loop at All-Japan: even the year you touched down, you rotated it, and you landed it. I want you to show them something new. Surprise them like Viktor does. Salchows only; save the toe loops for the Grand Prix.”

Katsuki swallowed—he suspected he was literally swallowing the words ‘what if I don’t qualify for the Grand Prix’ or ‘what if they don’t assign me,’ but whatever it was he didn’t say it—and nodded. “Yes, Coach. I’ll do the salchow.”

“You’re up first.” Katsuki had reacted as if this was awful luck, but Yakov believed firmly that it was actually fate. Without anyone else’s score to compare to, Katsuki could skate without a number in his head. Especially a low number like these kids were likely to put up. “Warm up. No jumps until it’s real.”

“Yes, Coach.”

“Make me proud, Katsuki.”

“Yes, Coach.”

And he truly did. Katsuki came out of the short program in the 94s, having landed everything safely (though tripling the toe loop) and done his usual ridiculously skilled PCS. He’d stood by the side and clapped politely for the others, and surprised Yakov by shouting encouragement to Kenjirou as he took the ice. The youngster had brightened and taken that energy into the performance, setting a personal best in the 66s.

And that put him in third, two points behind second and twenty-eight behind Katsuk in first.

Katsuki seemed gently confused by it, but at least he congratulated Kenjirou on the score.

Now he just had to keep him focused for another two days, and they could move on to the Grand Prix.

Fortunately, he just might have some help with that.

Chapter Text

Before they could get to his strategy for keeping Katsuki out of his own head before the free skate, however, they had to go through the gauntlet that was the Japanese media.

The Russian media had been easy enough to handle. They knew him from years of working in parallel, him training the skaters and them interviewing them. They knew him as Viktor’s coach, the most successful coach in Russian history just as Viktor was the most successful skater, and they knew that access to the St. Petersburg skaters was highly conditioned on not pissing him off. That meant that while there had been some off-the-record comments about how it was strange to see Russia’s star coach bringing in an outside skater and training him against Viktor and the up-and-coming Yuri Plisetsky, he’d been able to fob them off with comments about how Viktor liked the challenge of having other nations’ champions to train with, and how Katsuki was a grounding influence on Plisetsky. These had the benefit of being true, but of course they weren’t complete—yet none of the Russian media were going to call him on it, and they hadn’t yet gotten to the point of international competition when other nations’ reporters, with fewer ties to his rink, would get their chance.

The Japanese media, however, was his first taste of it, and they had no such compunctions. Oh, they were polite enough in their language, but they asked publicly the questions the Russians had only asked privately, and they had cameras rolling.

“Skater Katsuki, why did you suddenly decide to switch coaches and go with Coach Feltsman?”

“Coach Feltsman, why are you the right coach for Japan’s Ace? Aren’t you already focused on your three Russian senior men’s singles skaters?”

“Coach Feltsman, where do you see Skater Katsuki fitting into the hierarchy in your rink?”

“Skater Katsuki, do you feel you have had enough of Coach Feltsman’s time?”

Katsuki, of course, was not in a position to answer any of these questions, not in his frame of mind, though at least he wasn’t being asked about his own actual skating. That, however, left Yakov to fend them off himself.

“I visited Katsuki personally to ask him to join me. I believe that competition drives skaters to be their best, Katsuki included, and having him train alongside Vitya, Gosha, and Yura will only make them all better. Each of my skaters gets ample time with me and my assistant coaches. Thank you.”

“Yakov-sensei has been a major help to me and my skating.” Apparently Katsuki had found his voice, to Yakov’s immense surprise. “The performance you just saw would not have been possible before now. I’m sure you saw it was a personal best.” Katsuki looked down at his fingers on the table. “I would like to thank Celestino-sensei for the last five years. We parted on nothing but good terms and I wish him and my former rinkmates nothing but the best. But I needed to come to St. Petersburg.”

“Skater Katsuki, can you tell us why you needed to go to St. Petersburg?” This was from a reporter in the front row, one he recognized from earlier interviews with Katsuki—Morooka Hisashi, that was the name—who said it in calm tones that spoke volumes about his familiarity with what would get Katsuki to talk instead of clamming up.

“All my life, I’ve wanted to skate on the same ice as Viktor Nikiforov. I did it in Sochi, but it didn’t mean what I wanted it to mean.” Katsuki took a deep breath. “Training with Yakov-sensei, with Viktor-san—it means I’m where I need to be. Where I want to be.” He bowed slightly, impeded by the table in front of him. “Please continue watching me and supporting me. I hope to make you all proud.”

He expected the reporters to explode with questions—that was what would have happened in Russia, for sure—but Morooka just nodded. “Thank you, Skater Katsuki. We look forward to seeing what you do in the free program.”

“Good job out there.” He refrained from touching Katsuki, who usually didn’t like that much, but if it were Viktor or Plisetsky or even Georgi he’d have clapped him on the shoulder. “Well said.”

“It’s just the truth.” Katsuki shrugged, as if saying the truth in front of a bank of TV cameras wasn’t a difficult thing that most skaters—especially skaters with anxiety—struggled with every time.

“Nevertheless. Get some rest, Katsuki. Tomorrow is a rest day—I expect you to take that seriously. Watch the pairs and ice dance if you need to, but no ice.”

“Yes, Coach.”

They parted ways at the door to Katsuki’s room—his own was one further down from the elevator—and he made a few additional calls.

Everything was falling into place.

The next day he hardly saw Katsuki, which was exactly what he wanted. They texted—yes, he knew how to text, Yurio would have been the death of him if he’d always had to call because he never picked up the phone unless it was his grandfather—throughout the day, and he knew that Katsuki was already familiar with the town, so he had no real concerns. He got a few pictures of street food, and one of a Katsuki Yuuri poster on the wall of a shop advertising Mizuno skates. It was just captioned “what?”

He snorted. As if Katsuki didn’t know that he had posed for the poster. Knowing him, he’d probably assumed they were just being polite and never intended to use it.

Brands didn’t do that, of course. They only sponsored people they intended to use, and Katsuki Yuuri was about as marketable as figure skaters got—if only he realized it. He was a household name in more of Japan than he thought—Yakov had done some basic Googling, thank you very much—and doubly so for those who actually might buy figure skates.

Still, it was just like Katsuki not to notice any of that and to wonder why he was seeing his face around town.

The next day was the men’s free skate, but it was in the evening, so they had the morning for practice—not in the main rink, which had the women’s free going on, but in an adjacent building.

It was time for his deal with Viktor to pay off.

Chapter Text

As he had expected, Katsuki was practically hyper-ventilating the morning before the free skate.

No matter the math of it—no matter that he could literally not skate the last minute or two of his program and still win, given his usual PCS scores and the enormous lead he held over second place—no matter that there was very little chance that the other skaters would actually skate clean either, so even if he did screw up he was likely to win—the ghosts of the past were strong, and the anxiety of the present was stronger, so Katsuki Yuuri was definitively freaked out.

Yes, he had placed behind some of these same skaters at nationals last year, but the only way that had happened was that he had screwed up both skates so badly that he had entered the free program already in the middle of the pack, and fallen to the bottom (or not actually the bottom—Japan had more than 11 male senior singles skaters, though you wouldn’t know it to ask Katsuki how he’d done) because of the same issues in the free. Now that he’d skated a personal best in the short program, the odds of him failing the same way were beyond astronomical, like the dark matter lurking in the corners of the telescopes that no one could actually detect.

Unfortunately, Katsuki was also a damn genius who had just graduated from college including an elective astrophysics course and so could tell you that dark matter was supposed to make up most of the universe, and so would not be reassured by the comparison.

But he’d expected it. He’d known it was coming. Minako had warned him, even Cialdini had alluded to it lightly when they’d last spoken. He’d seen it for himself, gleaning little looks at Katsuki’s warm-ups in the background of recordings he’d gone through in preparation for training the skater.

So he’d taken steps to deal with it.

He’d already noticed that Katsuki skated better when he was imitating Viktor than when he was skating on his own. Alhough…calling it imitating was unfair, it was more like the way you could see Petrarch lingering behind Shakespeare’s sonnets, or Michelangelo hiding in a Raphael: both masterpieces, even if one influenced the other. But for Katsuki, it was imitation, even if to the audience it was inspiration, and that meant it seemed to disengage some of his more serious worries and concerns. After all, Viktor could break records with his routines; that meant that Katsuki could at least do well with them (the fact that, in Yakov’s professional opinion, Katsuki could also break records with them was true, but not actually helpful to Katsuki’s anxiety since it placed the pressure back on him).

Enter: the video.

In exchange for the video of Katsuki skating Bolero, which had forced Yakov to read far, far too many differently-colored hearts from his champion skater, who seemed to forget that it was Yakov and not Katsuki who was on the receiving end of the texts, he had gotten his ace in the hole.

“Katsuki!”

“Yes, Coach?” Even with his hands shaking slightly and his color paler than usual, Katsuki was still respectful. He liked that. It showed that Katsuki was used to masking anxiety, which meant that he had to pay more attention to than he did to someone like Plisetsky to make sure they were OK, but it was useful in times like this.
“Today, I don’t want you to skate your Yuuri on Ice.” Katsuki blinked. Yakov considered what he’d said and admitted that perhaps that might be a bit confusing. Eh. Not his problem. “I want you to skate this instead.”

He pushed his phone into Katsuki’s hands. His Japanese skater almost dropped it before gripping it close into his palms, his fingers avoiding the screen so as to not stop the video that had begun playing.

Yakov didn’t need to see the video; he’d already watched it enough times to make sure that it did what he needed it to do. It wasn’t as good as Katsuki actually skating Yuuri on Ice the way he was truly capable of, but it would do to get him over this first hump. After all, this was Katsuki’s first competition with the new program but more importantly it was his first program since the disaster that had been All-Japan last year, after the disaster that had been the Grand Prix free skate. Anything that would get him through it was worth it, and this counted.

Still, he peered over Katsuki’s shoulder to watch, just in order to be able to see what his skater was responding to.

It was Viktor, skating to center ice. He had clearly recorded this himself, for once responsive to Yakov’s request that he not involve any of the other skaters so they wouldn’t know about it in advance. Perhaps Katsuki was rubbing off on him—he had demanded the video of Katsuki in exchange, but he hadn’t, to Yakov’s knowledge, done anything he’d asked him not to. Progress.

“I’m not skating one of Viktor’s free skates! That would be wrong!” Katsuki protested, seeming to deflate. Ah. Perhaps he should have expected this reaction—it really did take Viktor a long time to get into position, so Katsuki could be forgiven for thinking that’s what this was.

“I won’t ask you to. Keep watching.”

Viktor’s hands came up towards his face and he took a step.

That was all it took; Katsuki took a deep breath and clutched the phone harder. “This is…”

“Keep watching.”

There was something mesmerizing, even on the umpteenth watch, about Viktor skating Yuuri on Ice. In Katsuki’s hands, the piece was exactly what it said it was: the story of Katsuki’s own journey from falling in love with skating to moving to America to finally coming into his own in St. Petersburg. It was the embodiment of what Katsuki had said at the press conference after the short program: the incessant need to get closer to Viktor’s level, to Viktor, even in the times before Katsuki knew what it was exactly that he was reaching for. It was moving, but it was simple.

From Viktor, it was something else entirely. Viktor skating Katsuki’s story (to the best of his ability—Yakov had not skimped on the step sequences, and Viktor stepped out of one of them slightly and simplified a spin as well) was no longer the story of reaching out for Viktor, of struggling to reach his level, of the feelings Katsuki had experienced along the way. How could it be? Even with the closeness the two had been forging since Katsuki moved to St. Petersburg, he couldn’t know Katsuki’s story the way Katsuki knew it himself.

No, instead, Viktor skated Katsuki as he saw him. The step-out, the simplified spin—they were failures, because Viktor actually could not skate the routine Yakov had set for Katsuki, but Viktor made them acknowledgments of the fact that Katsuki was already on his level; that Katsuki belonged.

Seriously, where was this level of PCS when Viktor was skating his own routines?

The swelling sections that spoke to Katsuki’s growing strength and self-awareness, his overcoming of distance, anxiety, and the hard demands of the ice to keep skating, became in this rendition less about what he had overcome and more about who he had become; they held a mirror up to the skater Katsuki had managed to make himself.

Watching Katsuki watch it, watching the emotions play across his stunned face, Yakov had to admit that he’d missed the most important part of what this skate was for Viktor, and it seemed for Katsuki: it was a love letter.

No wonder the PCS was high; he’d gotten Viktor to tap into the only thing that had ever brought Georgi anywhere near Viktor’s scores. Only Viktor was already Viktor.

And Katsuki...Katsuki had a burning fire in his eyes that he’d never seen there before.

He wasn’t surprised when Katsuki went out and won the championship.

He was, perhaps, a little surprised to see him break 180, and 280 total—even without the quad toe.

Perhaps he ought to make Viktor skate all of Katsuki’s programs for the rest of their careers.

Chapter Text

To be fair to the International Skating Union, there was no actually good way to have arranged things for his, Yakov Feltsman’s, benefit. Not that they were trying to do so in the least, but there was nothing they could really have done if they had been. He was screwed, screwed the day Yuri Plisetsky decided to turn senior this year, doubly screwed when Georgi Popovich, to his surprise, didn’t retire, triply screwed (though don’t tell anyone, because no one could know how close the reigning King of Skating, the Living Legend, the Eternal One, Viktor Nikiforov had come to it) when Viktor didn’t either, and quadruply screwed (perhaps maybe even an axel, with the extra half-rotation) when he, out of the goodness of his heart and the covetousness of his choreographer’s soul, arranged to personally haul Katsuki Yuuri out of what had probably been his retirement as well.

So yes, he’d brought it on himself. Poor him with his diamond shoes pinching his feet and his cloth-of-gold hair shirt. Three of his Russian skaters had taken all the available Russian slots; his sole Japanese skater had both Japanese slots. He was actively bogarting every available position in the Grand Prix and he had the audacity to complain? Well, no one who knew him well would be surprised. But even though it was a problem that most coaches would give their left feet for, having four skaters eligible for two slots in the Grand Prix (men’s singles division) meant that there was literally no way that Yakov wouldn’t be screwed over by the Grand Prix assignments when they came out.

Oh, yes, Katsuki had thought there was a way, but it had involved him not being placed by the Japanese Skating Federation into two Grand Prix slots, and even Katsuki (after a long ‘discussion’ that mostly consisted of Yurio ranting, Viktor acting shocked that he doubted himself, and Mila teasing them both) had to admit that as a defending participant in the Grand Prix Finals, one of the six top male skaters in the world, and the only one in Japan, it would have been professional suicide for them not to send him.

So no. There was no way that Yakov wasn’t getting screwed. Either his best skaters would all be cannibalizing points from each other by facing each other all the time, or he would literally have to fly out to every single Grand Prix competition with at least one skater.

Or, as it happened, both.

Assignment day was almost a holy ritual at the rink. Everyone knew that when the assignments were posted, Yakov would call them into the big conference room and they would go through the list together. Some might cheat and glance at the list on their phones or a laptop beforehand, but most of them waited, because there was something therapeutic about all being in it together.

Viktor and Katsuki slid into place last—fair enough, they’d been on the ice together when it had dropped, so they’d had to change out of their skates. Somehow while he’d been gone in Japan Viktor had bribed, cajoled, or otherwise convinced Zhenya to switch their schedules so that they were always on the ice at the same time except when one of them was on alone. He hadn’t changed it back because first of all if you didn’t trust your subordinates to do the thing you’d delegated to them you were wasting your time and theirs (so what Zhenya set, Yakov went with) and second it seemed to be working for both of them. The only real problem had been that it meant Yurio was constantly complaining that he didn’t have shared ice time with Katsuki (not having it with Viktor was apparently a blessing), but he’d shut up when Viktor had pointed out that it allowed both of them to be around to critique his skating as his jump coach and footwork coach.

Well, both of them when Katsuki wasn’t in the studio with Minako. Sometimes he wondered when that boy slept, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to know because the answer was probably much less than he would have preferred it to be.

Anyway, they had made it in, and found seats, so now he could begin.

He pulled down the projector screen with an old-school thwap (they’d never gotten around to one of those permanently installed walls that you could just project on, and they probably never would) and waited for the project to heat up. Eventually, blurry lines resolved themselves into the English in which the ISU had seen fit to grace them with the information they needed.

Skate America

Viktor Nikiforov

Mila Babicheva

Skate Canada

Yuri Plisetsky

Cup of China

Katsuki Yuuri

Georgi Popovich

NHK Trophy

Viktor Nikiforov

Trophée de France

Georgi Popovich

Rostelecom Cup

Katsuki Yuuri

Yuri Plisetsky

Mila Babicheva

Well, that was his entire year sorted out right there. At least there was no competition with three competitors at once. But he privately discounted Georgi’s potential of making Barcelona as less than nothing—Katsuki was unquestionably ahead of him, as was Christophe Giacometti, whom he’d been drawn against in both competitions, meaning he would have to skate his absolute best both times to get a silver and bronze. That would put him in, most likely, but it also assumed that literally no other skater but those two could skate better than him (and if so, he’d deserve to be in). But it wasn’t likely; this was why he’d expected Georgi to retire.

But he would support him of course in any case.

Katsuki’s path was only easier because he was better than Georgi: he too had to face Giacometti once, and Plisetsky and he were fairly evenly matched if the competition weren’t in Russia—which it was.

There was a real chance that the judges would in fact underscore him to punish Yakov for splitting his time with a Japanese skater—though they’d cross that bridge if they came to it. Leroy was also in that competition, and he was always a threat for gold.

Viktor was Viktor.

And Plisetsky actually had a reasonable path: up against Leroy twice, and that would be a pain, especially as Plisetsky seemed to particularly hate the man (how could they channel that, he wondered?). But otherwise only Katsuki himself stood out as a threat, and unlike Georgi he didn’t see any unknown zooming up the ranks to surpass Plisetsky; he was the unknown.

Mila was Mila, and would handle her business just fine.

So he could expect a trip to Barcelona, but whether he would be accompanying two skaters, three, or four was uncertain—five highly unlikely.

Well. That just meant it was time to go to work.

Chapter Text

The thing was: Skate America was actually remarkably close. It hadn’t been that long since Yakov had had a skater who needed to qualify for the Grand Prix or for nationals; Mila had been a junior more recently than she liked to pretend, after all. But it really had only been her since Georgi and Viktor both made their senior debuts, and so he was somewhat out of practice with the whole rhythm of a season that started with the regional events instead of with the Grand Prix itself. Usually, he had the whole offseason through the regional competitions to work with his senior skaters, honing their routines, getting them ready to hit the season strong.

Maybe this was why Christophe Giacometti always peaked later in the season; he knew Josef’s other skaters had to hit the regional circuits every year, and that meant less time for Giacometti to get his coach’s individual, undivided attention—until the Grand Prix was in full swing, at which point of course the other skaters’ schedules freed up, because they were never actually challengers.

The pitfalls of a smaller federation—though of course there was nothing actually stopping Josef from doing what he himself had done with Katsuki and going out-of-federation. Or like Cialdini had done and moving to another federation entirely and then training whoever came by.

Speaking of Cialdini, he had another skater, didn’t he? That Thai skater, Chulanont. Katsuki had nothing but good things to say about him but of course he also only had good things to say about everyone except for one Katsuki Yuuri. But the details of what he had to say suggested that Chulanont was worth paying attention to: it wasn’t just gushing, it was specific. Apparently Chulanont (or “Phichit,” since of course he had been Katsuki’s roommate and they were close) was not just expressive but emotive—something like Kenjirou Minami, if recordings from juniors were anything to go on—and paired that expressivity with quads that would have made Kenjirou a real challenger if he had had the same.

He’d have to find a time to check in on his skates, if this demon of a schedule would let him.

Viktor was up first, and that was a blessing. Viktor had been more than a little distracted by Katsuki, but that connection had proven very useful as (for once!) he’d actually listened to both another skater and Yakov himself. On the balance, a Viktor who didn’t spend every moment on the ice but actually did what he was told on the ice was a definite win. In fact, he’d been trying to convince Viktor to develop a hobby for years, to make sure the boy didn’t burn out—if his hobby turned out to be hanging around Katsuki Yuuri, well, it would be hypocritical to complain.

Besides, distraction or not, Viktor was ready. Viktor was always ready.

Mila was ready too, because Sara Crispino was also assigned to Skate America, and that meant Mila had no time for anything but figuring out how to beat her rival.

Well, “rival.” Yakov held his skaters’ phones when they were off the ice, and the number of notifications that blew up Mila’s from “Sara ♥♥” was somewhat of a telltale sign.

The two of them were his most consistent skaters. He could afford to pretend he didn’t notice that they were getting attached—and it wasn’t as if Katsuki and Crispino didn’t understand the draw of the ice.

Of course, so had Georgi’s various paramours and yet…

The Japanese Folk Medley was coming together nicely, the step sequences just a beat harder than Viktor could flow through automatically but in a way that was (so far) keeping his attention in a way that it had been years since Yakov had seen him focus. While he couldn’t argue with the results, he would have been a very poor mentor indeed if he hadn’t noticed that over the last few years Viktor’s short programs in particular had gotten less and less of his mental space, to the point where it sometimes seemed as if he were already skating his free program in his head while he was midway through the short, calculating exactly how many points ahead he would be at the completion of the short and what, therefore, he had to do to win with the free.

The folk medley wasn’t like that. Perhaps it was the quality of the music itself, which was just a little different than the European classics Viktor usually skated to (Bolero, of course, included). Perhaps it was the way that Lilia, Katsuki, Minako, and Viktor had somehow all come together to define those step sequences, just a little bit outside of Viktor’s comfort zone (and not in the way that the Eros hip thrusts had been back when it had been his program—a sight Yakov would still have preferred to scrub from his memory). Or maybe—most likely—it was the fact that Katsuki would never look away when Viktor skated it, and Viktor loved that.

Strategically, Yakov had made the decision not to tell Viktor that that would be true whatever program he skated. Let him think there was something special about this one; it would help him through the season.

Things were so busy that he only barely made time for Thursday tea with Minako and Lilia—but he knew the consequences if he failed to show, especially since (as Lilia never refrained from pointing out) it was at his house. He made sure the house was stocked with the little tea crackers that she liked, light enough that it had been part of her diet even when she’d been performing, tough enough not to crack in the hand or melt away when tea touched them.

She hadn’t said anything when he’d brought them out the first time, but he’d noticed that several of them had disappeared by the end of the evening, and he knew neither he nor Minako had partaken.

They had gotten back into the usual routine from back when Minako had stayed with them, past the awkwardness of re-establishing the familiarity that had once been there and landing instead in stilted shop talk, and now their conversations moved freely around their mutual interests (Minako and he shared a fascination with the brewing techniques of German small-batch breweries, while Lilia and Minako could go on at length about obscure French artists whose artwork he could recognize because of Lilia but would never voluntarily view; all three of them shared a surprising interest in orchid horticulture, though none of them had ever been able to keep one alive because of their respective work schedules).

So the days passed quickly between the rink, his house, and his office—the middle one really only to fall into bed at night and to pretend to Lilia every Thursday that he actually lived there—and before he knew what had happened he was on a plane to Boston with Viktor and Mila in tow.

Chapter Text

He was used, of course, to splitting his attention between Mila and Viktor at a competition. He’d done it last year at the Grand Prix Finals, and at Nationals, and at Worlds...honestly, he was probably more used to splitting time between the two of them than he was at taking either of them to a competition alone by now, especially as they’d been matched up for one of their competitions last year too.

They were both fairly easy, at least compared to Plisetsky and Katsuki. Yes, he had to make sure that Viktor didn’t paint the town red and forget to come and sleep—but that wasn’t a problem this year, since he was just sitting in his room texting someone (Yakov would have expected Katsuki except that it was very early in St. Petersburg and it was almost impossible to get him up. Still, maybe it was). The Crispinos had taken Mila off his hands, Michele Crispino’s unnecessary presence (since he was in the NHK and Rostelecom) serving as its own guarantor that Mila would get annoyed halfway through the evening and come back to the hotel to get her own sleep. She wasn’t skating on the same days as Viktor, of course, but they were there for the same length of time, because juggling more than one flight with more than one skater was beyond even him.

The assistants were there too, of course, but asking them to wrangle leading skaters like this was impossible.

Mila was up first for her short program, and she had drawn skating third. Not a bad position, he thought, except that Sara Crispino was skating second and so Mila was pouting that she couldn’t go and watch her rival skate.

“At least you know she’ll be in the green room watching you,” he pointed out. “And I’m sure the two of you will find plenty to talk about after you join her. Now stretch, so help me God, or I will tell Lilia that you chose to do a routine she helped choreograph stiff.”

“No you won’t, Yakov.” Mila laughed at him, but at least the laughter was a good sign that she was coming out of her funk.

“Fine, I’ll tell Minako, and she’ll tell Lilia.”

Mila mock-shuddered. “You wouldn’t.”

“I would.”

“Fiiiiiiiiine.” She slumped to the ground in a parody of exactly what would set Lilia’s teeth on edge and then straightened and started going through her stretches. “Hardass.”

“You think this is tough?” Viktor popped out of nowhere, as he was wont do to. It was easier to make him and Mila officially part of each other’s coaching teams (and he was her jump coach, as he liked to point out) so that Yakov didn’t have to police where each of them could go when. “You should hear him yell at me!”

“Everyone can hear him yell at you. People in Siberia can hear him yell at you. Previously uncontacted tribes in the Amazon only know about our civilization because they have heard him yell at you.” Mila rolled her eyes, and her hips as she reached for full stretch.

“Hmph.” Viktor stuck out his tongue. Sometimes it was hard to remember he was 27 and not 7. “Fine. Be that way. I won’t share Yuuri’s message then.”

“You will.” Mila’s eyes hadn’t stopped rolling. “Because if you don’t he’ll be sad that you didn’t do what he asked you to, and you hate to disappoint your darling Yuuuuuuuuuuri.”

Viktor turned a bit red. “I mean...it’s not like...I…”

“Vitya.” It was honestly vaguely unsettling to see Viktor anything but confident, especially about, ahem, affairs of the heart. Perhaps he did mean something serious about Katsuki, as Yakov had hoped. “Tell Mila what you have to say and then get out of the way unless you’re training her on jumps.”

“Right.” Viktor nodded vigorously. “He says, uh, ganbatte? I think it kind of means the same thing as davai? And also ‘tell Mila I owe her lunch.’ What’s that about?” He pouted. “Why didn’t Yuuri invite me?”

“That’s about Mickey Crispino being an idiot.” Mila nodded happily. “Tell him thanks, and next time don’t bet on Mickey seeing what’s under his nose.” She straightened and flicked Viktor’s nose. “I bet your Yuuri that I could make Mickey think that I was just passing on notes from him when I was texting Sara, and I guess he got an angry phone call.”

“Oh. So you and Yuuri…”

“Are very good friends like you and I used to be before you got all silly and jealous.” Mila flicked his nose again, then turned to Yakov. “I’m up soon, aren’t I?”

“Yes.” He decided it was the better part of valor to ignore the content of their exchange. If he didn’t acknowledge any of it, he didn’t have to officially know it. “She’s well into the second half of the routine now.”

“Good.” Mila rolled her shoulders and marched towards the ice. “Let’s do this.”

And do this she did. She ended up in first, half a point in front of what Viktor had insisted on calling “the good Crispino,” and dashed away from the Kiss and Cry to the green room where she chattered away at her crush with free volubility.

If he had been inclined to think so, it was rather cute.

Viktor, on the other hand, was his usual machine-like self, only with an extra fifteen percent of manic energy every time he checked his phone until Yakov took it away. Apparently the two Yu(u)ris were having a watch party at their house, not just at the rink, and Viktor was somehow bereft that he was unable to be there even though the entire point of the watch party was that they were watching him. Yakov had to yell at him twice to remind him that he was up first and so he didn’t have time to fuss about. It was just like old times, honestly, back before the last couple of seasons when Viktor had stopped caring about anything.

Not that he really needed to worry about him. Viktor went out first and did what he always did when he skated first, which was to take the soul of all the other skaters competing, glance at it contemptuously, and smash it to bits beneath his skates. The Japanese Folk Medley version of this was beautiful, and haunting, and Yakov wasn’t sure he wanted to know exactly how much Katsuki had enjoyed it back in St. Petersburg. But without a sense of how much he could hold back and still end up in first, Viktor (who seemed immune to such a thing as mere nerves from going first) always did his best.

It wasn’t a record, but it was a comfortable ten points ahead of the American, de la Iglesia, who had honestly been overscored by the home ice judges, and twelve ahead of that Kazakh skater Yakov had been considering bringing in. Altin would do very well next season—this season if he was like Giacometti and built on things over the course of the year.

But no one was touching Viktor. Not today—not until Plisetsky and Katsuki got their chance at the ice later in the season, or Leroy or Giacometti got into full swing and upped their game.

Chapter Text

Bouncing between two skaters could be exhausting, but it also had its benefits. One of the biggest was that because of the obligations he had to each, he could use them to play off each other and not have too much downtime for either. Viktor he could busy with checking Mila’s height on her triple axel; Mila was busied shooting video of Viktor’s step sequences to send to Katsuki and Plistesky, who apparently kept up a running commentary via a group chat that he was happy to be out of. But since it also meant that Viktor’s steps and Mila’s jumps got better as the competition went on, and neither of them stayed out too late or goofed off in the middle of a serious competition, he considered it not only an acceptable use of time but even one that justified allowing Mila to have her phone out at all times.

If there happened to be a few texts with “Sara ♥♥” as well, that wasn’t his problem.

It might be Michele Crispino’s, however—not because Mila was saying anything to the other Crispino that she shouldn’t, but because he somehow managed to get himself thrown out of the hotel after blowing up about something (Yakov wasn’t entirely sure what, but it really really wasn’t his problem). That did not, he thought, seem likely to actually make Sara Crispino skate worse; if anything, he suspected, she would skate with more confidence without her twin yelling every time a male skater, event organizer, or coach got within three feet of her.

Though to be fair, he didn’t know exactly how much of Sara’s skating routine was based around exactly that: it might unsettle her slightly not to be dealing with that.

And so it seemed to prove: it wasn’t that the good Crispino skated poorly at all, but there was just a little less enthusiasm in the wider gestures, just a little bit less certainty in the landings of the combinations, all of which seemed to his trained eye to suggest that Crispino was a bit in her own head at times, rather than living in the moment—almost Katsuki-ish, if he was honest. Not to the same extent—skating second-from-last, she shot straight up to the top of the leaderboard, whereas Katsuki was wont to fall. But her score barely scraped over the previous skater’s total, and was actually lower than her free skate score (the difference from the short being what put her ahead). Mila wouldn’t have any difficulty beating that.

Nor did she. She could have practically fallen and still won—not that she did. But she came off the ice with a frown on her face, and rushed away from the Kiss and Cry as quickly as possible. He let her go: Sara Crispino had to be at the same press conference, so it wasn’t as if the two of them would be able to be late for it. He wandered after her slowly, catching only the tail end of their conversation.

“Not acceptable.” Mila was shaking her head, a mock-serious pout on her face (he could tell the difference because she didn’t look like she was going to tear someone’s spleen out—Mila did not do upset by halves). “Do you want me to waste away like Viktor?”

“What?” Crispino looked confused. “Viktor isn’t wasting away.”

“Not now.” Mila gave up on the pout and rolled her eyes. “But he’s been bored out of his skull for two years.” Three, Yakov would have corrected, but he wasn’t going to interrupt. “Do you want me to get bored, Sala? Is that your goal? To kill me with boredom?”

“Never.” Sara Crispino’s lips started to curl up into a smile.

“Good.” Mila nodded sharply, then glanced up at him. “Now, it’s camera time. Let’s get going before Yakov drags me over by the ear.”

“We wouldn’t want that.” Sara heaved herself up to her feet and let Mila lead her away, Yakov trailing behind them both.

One gold down, one more to go.

Viktor’s skate was even less tense than Mila’s. Crispino had skated flat, but she’d hit all her jumps; the women’s skaters had actually been remarkably consistent that day, with none of the top six falling. That meant that while Mila’s lead from the short program and her higher base level of difficulty had given her a serious cushion, she had at least needed to skate relatively clean to win—one fall, maybe, but no more.

Viktor could have fallen on every jump, and Yakov wasn’t sure he wouldn’t have won anyway. He had a huge lead—not huge for Viktor, but huge in terms of other competitions that did not include him—and the pressure of that had clearly gotten to the other skaters. Otabek Altin of Kazakhstan was in first when Viktor took the ice; he’d been in third after the short, and he alone of the last group had neither downgraded a jump nor touched ice when not expecting to. Leo de la Iglesia, the home skater, held onto second by a whisker, having had to downgrade a triple-triple combination to a triple-double, his legs seeming to noodle out from under him on the pressure, but staying on his feet. Guang Hong Ji of China had popped a quad into a single, and then hit the ice when trying to re-insert the quad later. Phichit Chulanont of Thailand had touched the ice on his quad, but actually come through fairly cleanly otherwise—he was in third, making a charge from sixth after the short.

And of course, all of them went down a slot when Viktor went out and Viktored his way through Bolero.

He had led the short program by ten.

He won the competition by twenty-three.

But of course, Yakov knew, that wasn’t the point. He won by twenty-three, but if Katsuki or Plisetsky had been there, he would have won by five or fewer. Of course, this being Viktor, he probably would have upped the difficulty had there been a real challenger. But there was plenty to work on despite the size of his victory.

Which was good—Viktor had been sitting on his laurels for too long, if Mila was comfortable assuming that other skaters had noticed it.

It would be good to see what Skate Canada had to show him. And all too soon, Yakov would be there.

Chapter Text

He would very much have liked to have more than a week between Skate America and Skate Canada. Two weeks would have been grand. Three would have been luxury.

One was what he got.

At least he only had one skater to prepare for it, and he was the skater who was entirely and absolutely raring at the bit to go: Yuri Plisetsky, finally starting his “real” (in his words) senior skating career. Yakov had tried to point out that actually the St. Petersburg regional had, in fact, been a senior event, and one that he had done very well in indeed, so as to reduce the pressure put on this event, but that had gone nowhere, because of course it had.

Katsuki had (thank all that was holy and several things that were not) apparently been working Yurio through all his paces on his step sequences the entire time Yakov and Viktor and Mila had been gone, taking advantage of getting up early to get some extra practice in.

Why he was getting up early was obvious to everyone, but since Katsuki appeared to be under the impression that no one knew he’d been texting Viktor (and Mila, though she’d mock-pouted again when she’d found out how much more often he’d been texting Viktor than her and then teased Viktor about it for an entire day and a half until Sara Crispino texted and distracted her), no one bothered to disabuse him of the notion.

It wasn’t entirely clear how he hadn’t noticed that they all knew, but Katsuki could be very private when he wanted to. Or just oblivious.

Plisetsky, though, had taken full advantage of it, and of having Lilia’s attention practically to himself (she tried with Georgi, she had always tried with Georgi, but he wasn’t Viktor their near-son and he wasn’t Mila or Yurio who were actually talented at ballet even though they cared more for the ice, so he did always get pushed to the back burner, exactly where he liked to be given that he did not like ballet all that much). His turns were crisper, his extensions longer, his spins tighter than when Yakov had left.

But Plisetsky didn’t really feel that in his bones, and Yakov knew the problem. Plisetsky had spent so long putting senior competition on a pedestal—for all he insisted that he was going to smash everyone and everything to bits, he was clearly coming from a place of uncertainty and anxiety every time he did, like the time he’d yelled at Katsuki to retire in a bathroom, which he’d shamefacedly admitted to after Katsuki had mentioned that something that was vaguely and tangentially related to bathrooms—that he wasn’t sure what to do now that one was upon him. He couldn’t accept that he was really ready, oscillating aggressively between extreme overconfidence and insistence that he wasn’t entirely prepared.

Of course he never phrased it like that. Yurio couldn’t possibly be honest about any sense of potential inadequacy. Instead, it always came out as a series of yelps, like Potya if someone stepped on her tail. “Come on, Katsudon, you have to watch that spin more closely! I know there’s something more I can do!” “Viktor, are you blind? There’s no way that combination was right—I was wobbly on both landings. Tell me how to fix it!” “Oi, witch” (this last being a reference only and always to Mila, like the loving little brother-slash-asshole he was) “hit replay on the music, I need to run through that again.”

In other words, Plisetsky dealt with anxiety the same way Katsuki did: through overwork.

Maybe rooming them together hadn’t been as good an idea as he thought. Because they’d been egging each other on, spending more than half the hours in the day on the ice, let alone at the rink, and Zhenya didn’t have the gumption to stop them—or more likely, he sympathized. Which, Yakov supposed, he did too. But it wouldn’t do anyone any favors to be exhausted before the competitions actually came around.

Which is why, he supposed, it was a good thing that Plisetsky fell asleep instantly on the flight to Ottawa, barely rousing when they hit Amsterdam to transfer and then collapsing into his seat again on the second flight.

Apparently that was what he had needed, because he was back to his usual overly-energetic self when the warmups came. Conveniently, this was the version of Yurio that he was most comfortable with, having dealt with him all through juniors.

The short program was not all that Agape could be, which from Yakov’s perspective was fine. From Yurio’s, it was not. He spent an hour on the phone with Katsuki and Viktor (interestingly, on speakerphone together, despite the fact that it was early-early-early in St. Petersburg...though to be fair, it sounded from the echoes like they were at the rink, with Katsuki preparing still for Cup of China which was far-too-soon after Skate Canada) yelling about different kinds of love and how it was still ridiculous that Viktor had given him this “stupid all-encompassing stuff.”

Then he talked to his Grandfather on the phone until 2am, which made Yakov suspect that Plisetsky knew more about agape than he wanted to admit.

Besides, his short program had been anything but bad. He was in third, behind the hometown favorite Leroy and the surprising performance of the Czech skater Emil Nekola. But he was only fractions of a point behind Nekola and a few points off of Leroy—which given that Leroy was habitually overscored in any competition in North America wasn’t too bad. It should position him nicely to take at least a silver with a reasonable free skate.

Reasonable, however, was not exactly Plisetsky’s forte, especially when he felt he had something to prove.

Yakov sighed and prepared a ‘free day’ full of distractions (mostly food—Plisetsky was a growing boy so as long as it wasn’t too heavy he could eat all he wanted and still skate just fine the next day). Not that Plisetsky was likely to get distracted. But at least he could get some nice times in before he had to listen to another rant about “Jean-Jacques Le-Annoy” or any of the less polite names Yurio tended to call him.

Chapter Text

The day of the free skate dawned bright and clear. It was honestly a gorgeous day; one of those that helped you understand why it was that people lived in Canada, even though it wasn’t Russia.

None of that mattered to Yurio, of course. Yuri Plisetsky did not get up on the wrong side of the bed that morning because Yakov had never known which side of the bed he’d gotten up on to make a difference in Yurio’s mood. If anything, this might have been the right side of the bed, because while he was grumpy and angry and just ever so teenaged, he was only spitting mad about one thing: the fact that he was skating third from last in the final group.

He’d skated earlier in the short program, but that was random assignment: Yurio really wasn’t used to going anywhere but last in the free, and he was hopping mad about it.

“Why are they here for JJ.” It should have been a question, but this was Plisetsky. Everything was a declaration, and the only things he said as questions had the word “idiot” in them. There was a crowd of young Canadians (at least he assumed they were Canadians—they were in Canada, after all, and they were mostly waving Canadian flags, though that could have been because of who they were rooting for) shout-singing the annoyingly catchy song about himself that Jean-Jacques Leroy used for his skating.

What? Yakov might not take things as personally as his skater did—or his other skater did—or, fine, his other other skater did—but he was perfectly capable of identifying an ear worm and resenting it. And that song was an ear worm. It probably helped Leroy’s PCS as well, which was frustrating, because “being yourself” shouldn’t contribute to PCS unless you mean the kind of free-flowing self-expression that they all aimed for. Having a song about you, personally, shouldn’t be banned, but it shouldn’t mean that “being JJ” got you extra points for skating to “The Song of King JJ.”

It wasn’t as if he expected Katsuki to get bonus PCS for skating to “Yuuri on Ice,” after all. If anything, given the way Katsuki had historically been scored by anyone but Japanese judges, he would expect lower scores because “of course he expresses himself well, it’s about him.”

Apparently that didn’t count for Leroy.

Fine, maybe Plisetsky’s ranting was rubbing off on him a little bit.

Promising himself that he would do better at tamping down on that resentful spirit in both of them, he accompanied Plisetsky into the arena for warmups, past the crowd of mostly women shouting Leroy’s name, and a not insignificant number of Yuri’s Angels, who of course his skater mostly ignored. That was his m.o., of course: they loved him precisely because he was a bit of an aloof ass, or rather a moody teen.

“I want to do the flip.” Plisetsky hadn’t actually stopped talking since they entered the rink—or really, since they left the hotel, or maybe even since he’d opened his door when Yakov had knocked—but there was something different about the way he said this, like he knew that Yakov had only been half-listening before. “It’s the only way I’ll beat JJ.”

“That’s not true.” Yakov grunted. “No flip.”

“But Yakov!”

“No flip.” He put a hand on the young skater and turned him to face him, stopping him from stalking forward towards the dressing rooms. Then he glanced around—no cameras—and pulled him into an abandoned hallway. “Yura.”

“What.” There was the pout. Not as mock- as Viktor’s or Mila’s, evidence of Plistesky’s teenage years.

“What do you think is going to happen in the free skate if I let you do the quad flip?”

“I’m going to crush that pretend king JJ and smash him into bits!” This was why he’d drawn him away; Plisetsky was incapable of modulating his voice at this point. “He’s going down!”

“Really. You think, here at Skate Canada, adding one and a half points to your technical score is going to make the judges give you enough points to beat the Canadian skater who currently leads?” He squeezed the shoulder he was still holding. “One and a half points. That’s the difference between a quad toe and a quad flip. And you don’t have a triple flip in the routine right now, except in the back half of a combination, so don’t tell me you’re quadrupling a triple. It’s one and a half points today. Do you honestly think that will do it?”

Yurio’s face screwed up, and then it was like all the air went out of him in a rush. If Yakov hadn’t had a hand firmly on his shoulder, he might have fallen. “Then what do I do?”

At last, an actual question. And one he had an answer for.

“Skate your routine as planned. Ignore JJ; you won’t always face him in Canada. Beat Nekola. And make it so all the posts about this competition afterwards are about how JJ got hometown treatment.” He remembered Alain and Nathalie from competitions; they had been the sort of skaters incapable of not reading their press, and he had no doubt their son of the self-titled short program song was the same way. “I won’t tell you the best revenge is living well.”

Yurio snorted.

“But I will tell you this: revenge is a dish best served cold. Specifically, in Barcelona in a few months time.”

Plisetsky nodded. That, he could understand.

When it came time for Allegro Appassionato, Plitesky was...well, he was the Russian Fairy, much as Yakov knew he’d always hated that nickname. He lived his life allegro, and it meant the music fit him perfectly. Lilia had truly outdone herself, and he could see Katsuki’s speed and control peeking out of some of the sequences as well—or Minako’s, since of course they’d also worked together. He wasn’t a fairy in the twee way that some people meant it, little garden gnomes and sprites in flower cups. He was fae; he was wyrd; he was the reason medieval Irish farmers nailed horseshoes over doors and Russian peasants kept their children close when Winter came to call.

He was magnificent, and he was still just fifteen. Yakov had no idea what what going to happen to the rest of figure skating when he was old enough to drive—assuming he could navigate his last growth spurts.

There was no question when Emil Nekola came to skate next that he was already beaten before a skate touched the ice. He held onto third, but the gap between him and sixth was less than that between him and Yurio.

JJ still vaulted into first, exactly as he’d warned Plisetsky that he would, but there was no doubt in his mind that this was the sort of performance that would be referred to every time that someone mentioned how the ISU needed judging reform.

And that was all he could ask of Yuri Plisetsky—yet.

Chapter Text

He had been expecting Viktor to have something to say about accompanying them to the Cup of China, one week—really four days—after he returned from Skate Canada. Of course he had. Katsuki was skating in it, and it was his first truly high-stakes competition of the year (for all that Katsuki had been extremely nervous around the regional championship, no one else at his caliber of skater would be—Plisetsky had just been annoyed, though to be fair that was Yurio’s default setting). So of course Viktor, who was the most extra definition of extra possible, to the point where he would have called the dictionary to complain about what picture of him was put in place next to the word “extra” if they had been so gauche as to put him in it for that definition, wanted to come with.

What he had not expected was for Katsuki’s sports psychologist to have provided a letter backing him up.

“What’s this?” He didn’t growl, he really didn’t, but he could perhaps see how someone like Katsuki who was less familiar with his actual growls might have thought he had.

“It’s...a medical waiver…for me...well, for Viktor…” Katsuki mumbled, then turned on his heel and started to leave.

Now Yakov did bark. “Katsuki. Get back in here and tell me what it is. I’m not going to bite you even if I don’t agree with whatever it is.” He grabbed the paper when Katsuki handed it over and scanned over it quickly. “So this suggests that...going to a competition with Viktor would be helpful to your anxiety? How so?” He held up a finger. “Notice, I did not ask whether you think this is a good idea, or whether this was your idea, your psychologist’s, or Viktor’s. I will ask those later. Right now I am asking: does this say what I think it says?”

“Yes, Coach.” The structure of the answer seemed to give Katsuki something to lean against, and he straightened. “It says what you think it says.”

“OK. Now. Can you explain to me why it says that? Again, I’m not asking your opinion yet. Just the facts.”

“He thinks that I put Viktor on too much of a pedestal.” Definitely true, Yakov scoffed to himself. “And that I have lingering associations between Viktor’s presence at a competition and the Sochi Grand Prix Final.” Also definitely true, though Viktor’s presence in general no longer seemed to be an issue. “Ah...he thinks that if I qualify for the Grand Prix Final again...when I qualify for the Grand Prix again...whenever that is, whether it’s this year or not...if Viktor’s there, I’ll freak out.”

“That seems reasonable.” He could see the logic, yes. Katsuki’s anxiety was always lingering there, ready to bite.

“So it’s kind of like exposure therapy? He thinks that having Viktor there at the Cup of China might make it somehow...rewrite that part of my memory? Well, not like I’d forget Sochi. But it wouldn’t be as much of a trigger, if I went to another competition with Viktor there and skated differently.” He gulped. “He thinks...if I can do well at a competition with Viktor around, maybe I won’t be so anxious the next time. And even if I do badly, since Viktor won’t be skating, it still won’t necessarily push all the same buttons. So I shouldn’t spiral. I hope.”

He nodded. “Thank you, Katsuki.” He sat down and drummed his fingers on the table. “And now that you’ve told me what he thinks and what he suggests...what do you think?”

“I think it’s worth a try.” Katsuki wasn’t meeting his eyes, but that was OK. He didn’t need to stare into his soul right now. “I think skating on the same ice as Viktor in practice has been helpful, but I can’t help but think that if I go into the Grand Prix Final again, knowing Viktor is watching...assuming I even make the Grand Prix Final again...it will all come back.”

“And this might help?”

“And this might help.”

“Then we’ll do it.” He stood, crossed to the door and yelled. “Zhenya! Get me Vitya’s training schedule! If he’s coming to China, we’re staying in that time zone until he goes to Japan!” He glanced at Katsuki. “You can stay too, if you want. Visit home.”

“Oh no, I couldn’t…” Katsuki shook his head, and Yakov laughed.

“Katsuki, you told me you didn’t go home for five years from America. If I’m going to let Viktor do this ridiculous thing and go halfway around the world for the two of you to be at a competition at the same time, we might as well double down. He can train in China as well as here, as long as I’m around; you can train in Japan, too. Hell, maybe being adjusted to the time zones will help him in Tokyo, not that he needs it.” He scoffed. “And getting ice times in Japan in advance of the NHK is always a pain—if we go back to Hasetsu, I’m sure your friends the Nishigoris will give us the rink.”

“Oh, well, Hasetsu’s not really close to…”

“Is it closer than St. Petersburg?”

“Well...yes?”

“Then it’s close enough. Can you call your family, get us rooms in the inn again? I’ll be busy figuring out your training schedules for the next three weeks.” He stuck his head out the door again. “And yes, Vitya, you can come. Now stop moping and get on the ice. If we’re all leaving for China in four days, I want everything step perfect before we muck up all your circadian rhythms.” He turned to Katsuki, standing gape-mouthed in his office. “That goes for you too, Katsuki. We have work to do.”

“Yes, Coach. Uh...thank you, coach?”

“You’re welcome.” He did his best to smile at Katsuki before sticking his head back out of the door. “Vitya! Zhenya! What are you waiting for? An engraved invitation? Get your butts in gear!”

Chapter Text

For most of his time in China, Yakov tried to focus on Georgi. Georgi had been his skater almost as long as Viktor, and while he had a realistic sense of which of his skaters was most in line to win, he was not going to be the kind of coach who failed to bring his best for each and every skater under his guidance. Georgi needed to iron out some of the transitions in his routine, and Yakov was going to make sure that happened.

That didn’t mean that he didn’t pay attention to Katsuki and Viktor, though, and there was his downfall.

It was a mistake, it turned out, to bring Viktor. Not for Katsuki’s sake; he was fine. Actually, if anything, Viktor’s presence seemed to calm him. Maybe it was because it reminded him that this was not the Sochi Grand Prix Final, since Viktor wasn’t actually skating against him; maybe it was the way that he and Viktor seemed to laugh more often than he could remember either of them laughing before (not that he had much experience with Katsuki, but still); perhaps it was that Viktor was actually a distraction from the rigors of the regular event schedule, and so didn’t let Katsuki get so far into his head as to get nervous leading up to the competition.

No, it was a mistake to bring Viktor not because of Katsuki, but because of Viktor.

Again, not because of his own skating. Viktor was Viktor; they found a rink, because of course anyone who could claim that Viktor Nikiforov, five-time yaddity-ya champion etc., had trained at their rink would jump at the chance. At that rink, he settled down to do Viktor things, like hitting quad flips as if they were nothing, like skating both his and Katsuki’s routines, trading off with the Japanese skater…

Like making Yakov want to pull his hair out.

That was why it was a problem bringing Viktor. Yakov was certain that if he wasn’t bald by the end of the Cup of China it would be only because Viktor got bored with tormenting him.

The worst part was that he didn’t think Viktor actually realized it. He was so wrapped up in Katsuki and whatever their weird symbiotic skate-mirroring thing had become (and why had he, Yakov, had that stupid genius idea in the first place?) that he probably didn’t even notice that he was making Yakov’s carefully constructed rink timing plan dissolve at the seams. He probably didn’t even realize that every time he tugged Katsuki off the beaten path of their scheduled activities to “just one more place you have to see,” he was driving his old coach batty.

Or maybe, being Viktor, he didn’t care. Not that Viktor was, on average, an uncaring person, but he was definitely the first to volunteer that Yakov needed some aerobic exercise, some heart-pumping, chest-thumping time, and that if Yakov wasn’t going to get on a treadmill or on the ice himself, Viktor would just have to provide it by scaring the ever-living stuffing out of him and making him boil over.

Lilia had somehow always agreed, and now apparently Katsuki did too. Such betrayal!

Still, it had gotten Katsuki all the way to the short program draw without freaking out, and that was something. And since Viktor was, officially, one of his coaches—though what coach he could be was still undetermined, since Plisetsky would have gutted them all like fish with his knife shoes if they’d suggested anyone else was Katsuki’s jump coach, and the idea of him taking Minako’s place as a dance/steps coach was laughable on the face of it—he was there.

In fact, the two of them were having some kind of moment as Katsuki waited to go on the ice, and Yakov…

Yakov knew better than to interrupt. Let Katsuki be Katsuki. Yell at Viktor later. After all, if he hadn’t wanted Katsuki Yuuri warts and all (the wart in this case being his complete obsession with Viktor) he shouldn’t have flown to Hasetsu in the first place.

The routine was ready. The skater would be too. He had to be. Viktor was often unthinking and ridiculous, but if there was one thing he was not, it was a saboteur. Whatever he was doing with Katsuki, and whatever Katsuki thought he was doing, it had to be something they both thought would help. And Yakov wasn’t going to interfere until it became a problem.

“You’re up.” He tapped Katsuki on the shoulder, who nodded.

“Yes, Coach. Viktor?”

“Yes?” That was a tone of voice he’d never heard from Viktor before: active listening, like whatever Katsuki said was the most important thing in the world.

“Don’t take your eyes off of me.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Fine, fine, yes, watch Katsuki.” He rolled his eyes. “You’re up, Katsuki. On the ice.”

“Yes, Coach.” A sharp nod, and what he thought of as Katsuki’s game face came down. “And Coach? Could you watch me too? Not like Viktor, just...watch?

“I’m your coach, Katsuki, you’re literally paying me to watch.” He waved at the ice. “Go, go. I will watch, yes.”

Katsuki handed him his skate guards and glided out towards center ice.

Here was the thing about being an elite men’s singles figure skating coach: eventually, you saw it all. Every single skater, if they skated long enough, if they were good enough to last, skated a love theme. Most skaters weren’t Christophe Giacometti, turning the dial on every single theme past love on its way to lust. But even those who were more restrained, calmer, less ridiculous about it usually added some elements of the mature love between a man and a woman (or a man and a man, or a woman and a woman, or any other combination or definition of gender and sexuality—who was picky?) to those routines, at least once they were past Plisetsky’s age.

So it was not, all things considered, that unusual to see Katsuki Yuuri skating On Love: Eros with...well, with eros. He’d seen the routine before, most days in practice, back at the regional championship, basically every time that Katsuki had skated it, in fact.

He’d never seen it like this.

He’d never seen anyone like this.

He wanted to say it was Katsuki rising to the occasion. He wanted to pretend it was the monkey leaping off his skater’s back, leaving forever. But he knew what it was with every gesture, every glance back at the spot, three feet to his left, where Viktor stood transfixed.

Katsuki came off the ice twenty points in the lead, breaking the personal best he’d set in Japan, and leaving the hundred point mark in his rearview mirror along the way.

Yakov met him at the Kiss and Cry, then left him with Viktor as he rushed over to Georgi’s side.

Poor Georgi: skating after Katsuki was going to be the death of him.

Or perhaps not.

Georgi had a look in his eyes that Yakov had only seen before from Katsuki and Yurio: the kind of militant determination that spoke to the iron core that had kept this particular skater still skating, still winning medals, even though he had spent that entire time in Viktor Nikiforov’s shadow.

“That is love.” Georgi gestured over towards where Katsuki was now leaning on Viktor as he led him towards the green room. “I too, will skate my love. And Anya will have to see the truth of it!”

Maybe Yakov should save some hair-pulling for Georgi as well. But he knew better than to point out to a skater about to go on the ice that whatever was brewing between Katsuki and Viktor, it was not the same as what had ended between Georgi and Anya. “Go on then, Gosha. Show it to the world.”

And show it he did. Katsuki held onto first after all the skaters were done, but Georgi was less than ten points behind him—and in second place.

Oy. Coaching them to back-to-back free programs was going to be murder.

Chapter Text

Viktor, of course, volunteered to wait with Katsuki while Yakov dealt with Georgi.

It wasn’t like he could avoid taking him up on it; while Georgi was skating, he’d need someone to be making sure that Katsuki didn’t hyperventilate and do a runner. But that didn’t mean either that he was going to give over all his coaching responsibilities to Viktor, no sir. Katsuki was his skater, whatever he was to Viktor, and that meant he was responsible for him.

“Fine.” He nodded to the overeager young man he’d helped raise since he was two decades younger. “You can wait with Katsuki while Gosha is skating. But when we get his scores, you’re the one walking him to the green room.” He clapped a hand on Georgi’s shoulder. “And Gosha—I fully expect you to be going to the green room. Giacometti is a threat, because his free skate is always better than his short, and Katsuki says Chulanont’s is really good as well—” he raised an eyebrow at Katsuki, who looked like he was trying to sit out of sight, out of mind, but nodded “—but there’s no reason that the other skaters should trouble you.” Georgi had a tendency, like Katsuki’s but opposite, to skate poorly in his free skate. Katsuki, he knew from talking to him and from careful, forensic analysis of his previous skates and press conferences, was the sort to worry he could never possibly be good enough and implode because any minor error got magnified out of proportion. Georgi, on the other hand, got overconfident on the ice—but paradoxically, needed the support before going on the ice because he knew he was overconfident once he got there.

It was a vicious cycle, but Yakov wasn’t going to risk sending him out on the ice already deflated and thinking about who would beat him.

Skaters. He shook his head.

“Anyway, Katsuki, that means we’ll only have a minute or so before you go on the ice, so here’s what I want from you. You too, Vitya.” The two of them looked at him, one quizzically and the other trying his best to look bored. “I want you to spend the time before you skate thinking of the one place you’re going to show Viktor in Hasetsu.” He rolled his eyes at their now-matching confused looks. “The skate is about Yuuri on Ice. It’s about your journey from Hasetsu to skating on the same ice with Vitya, nu? So build on that. After this, you’re both flying to Japan and we’re going to train in your home town for a week. Vitya will be on the ice you’ve been skating on your whole life; he’ll be staying in your parents’ inn. If that’s not fodder for the story of your routine, Vitya doesn’t look like a flashy piece of tinsel every time he gets into that Bolero costume. You know you do,” he added before Viktor could open his mouth.

“I...I…” Katsuki squared his shoulders. “I can do that, Coach.”

“Oh! Yuuri! I Googled it, is there a castle in Hasetsu?” Viktor bounced on his toes. “Can we go to the castle?”

“Save it for during Gosha’s free skate.” He glowered at them. “Right now, we have press conferences to prepare for.”

Usually, a competitor would have had a chance to announce the theme of their routines for the season in advance of a program like the Cup of China—Russian state TV had interviewed the whole Russian contingent at the rink a month ago, revealing Georgi’s “Heartbreak,” Viktor’s “Reinvention,” and Yurio’s “Transcendence” (argued down from “Stabbing You All With My Knife Shoes”)—but the Japanese media had been so focused on asking about Katsuki’s work with him and Viktor at the regional championship that they hadn’t even asked.

Which just meant that Katsuki was going to have to answer that question today, at the press conference between the short program and the free. In front of the world and everyone.

“LOVE!” Yes, it was worse than he’d imagined. They’d agreed on the theme, of course; how could it be anything else after Viktor had given him On Love: Eros? But they hadn’t agreed on shouting it out like a challenge to the world. He put a hand on Katsuki’s shoulder and that seemed to steady the skater. “My theme for the season is love,” he said, more calmly, staring at something over the shoulders of the reporters...oy vey, Viktor had snuck into the back. “There are just so many people that have given so much for me to be here where I am. I used to think I was alone, but that wasn’t true. My family, back in Japan, welcomed me home after last year as if I’d never left for America. My ballet coach, Minako, taught me everything I know, and even moved to Russia to be with me. Ciao-Ciao, Coach Feltsman, Madame Baranovskaya...they’ve all given of their skills and gifts to make me a better skater. My roommates, Phichit and Yura, have been there in their own particular ways for good days and bad. And now, training on the same ice as my idol, Viktor Nikiforov, having him choreograph my short program...how could my theme be anything else? We call everything on the ice love, and I want to leave everything on the ice this year.”

Well. Not a total disaster. At least he’d mentioned someone other than Viktor. Yakov pointed at a journalist he could definitely trust to steer the conversation somewhere else and patted Katsuki’s shoulder. He really hoped taking them both to Hasetsu wasn’t going to somehow blow up in his face. He had one skater who didn’t make him pull his hair out; he hoped that would still be true in two weeks.

The free skate was...well, the free skate was exactly what he’d expected, except that Phichit Chulanont, possibly inspired by being mentioned by Katsuki in his press conference, possibly just blossoming into another threat, broke 200 and was ahead of even Giacometti when it came time for Georgi to skate.

“Gosha.” He made eye contact with his skater, trying not to wonder what Viktor and Katsuki were doing back in the backstage area. “You do not have to be perfect. Your skate is about imperfection, about the heartbreak we all feel when things go wrong. Do not try to catch Chulanont or Giacometti. Just be the best Georgi Popovich that you can be.”

Georgi surprised him by pulling him into a teary-eyed hug. “Yes, Coach!”

He wasn’t sure Georgi had ever called him that before.

In the end, he was right: Giacometti and Chulanont were still ahead of him, but Georgi was going into the green room with a very respectable 280–180 on the free skate was nothing to sneeze at, even if Giacometti and Chulanont were twenty points ahead, leaving them a few points clear after overcoming Georgi’s short program lead.

“Katsuki.” He grabbed Viktor and threw him at Georgi as soon as the scores were announced. “Tell me about Yuuri on Ice. Where are you taking Vitya? Where is this story taking you?”

Katsuki turned from where he watched Georgi drag Viktor over towards the green room. “My parents’ dining room table. We’re going to eat katsudon prepared the right way.”

“Then show me skating on the same ice as Vitya and then taking him home to eat your favorite food.” He nodded to the ice. “There’s nothing else out there. It’s just you, telling me the story of how you got to that place in your life where that was a possibility—no, a reality.”

“Yes, Coach.”

And Katsuki did just that. He’d thought Yuuri on Ice was a finished product, a spectacular free skate that he was proud of having designed. He’d thought he’d pushed Katsuki to his current limits, enough to show him that their partnership as coach and skater could go to even higher heights once they were comfortable with each other. He’d thought he had made it as hard as it could be and still be a reasonable skate for someone coming off of the aggressively mediocre skates that Cialdini had given him.

Apparently, he’d been wrong.

Katsuki Yuuri shocked them both—he could see the set of Katsuki’s shoulders afterwards, there was no way he was not shocked too—by landing a quad flip at the very end of his program. Clean. No hand on the ice, no over- or under-rotation, no double-footed landing.

Scratch that. He didn’t just shock them both. He shocked them all, because there came Viktor flying past him and tackling Katsuki to the ice, lips locked onto Katsuki’s.

Well.

He’d have to find a new name for the Kiss and Cry so that Viktor didn’t get any further ideas.

Chapter Text

Well, Viktor sure had made things interesting for them all. Katsuki too, he supposed, since he was the one who had incorporated a final quad flip he hadn’t even mentioned he was going to do (though to be fair, they had been working on it in practice—since he could do the quad flip when he was thinking about Stammi Vicino and not his feet, there was no reason he couldn’t do it in the routine. But it wasn’t in the routine before). But he wasn’t the one who’d rushed the ice when he wasn’t even a contestant. Thank goodness Katsuki had been last to skate; it meant there was no one to be delayed by the...incident…and so no complaint being filed against them.

And now Katsuki had interviews, because on top of all of that he’d somehow vaulted himself into first place over Chulanont (and a few points ahead of Giacometti as well), and knocked Georgi off the podium—a shame that, but he could hold his head up high nevertheless.

“Skater Katsuki!” He thought he recognized that reporter, the one from the Japanese press...Morooka Hisashi, that was it. He ignored the baying of the international journalists and indicated that Morooka should go on. “Skater Katsuki! That was incredible! How long have you been working on the quad flip?”

“I…” Katsuki looked over at him and then at Viktor, who had of course insisted on coming with, though Yakov had managed to elbow him into the back with the other support staff and a muttered “I’ll deal with you later.” Katsuki swallowed. “A long time?”

“I’m sure you all saw Katsuki skate Vitya’s Stammi Vicino.” Yakov decided this was a training question, so he could handle it. “He learned the quad flip practicing it, though it has not been previously consistent enough to demonstrate in competition.” And still wasn’t, except now everyone would expect it in the future, so they would have to train it further. Sigh. More ice time for Katsuki and his jump coach—and that jump coach would have to be Viktor, since Yurio was at about the same level of quad flip knowledge as Katsuki, if a little more consistent because of his greater confidence in the footwork of the landing.

“But Skater Katsuki tripled the quad flip when he performed Stammi Vicino!” Apparently Morooka was a Katsuki fan. He supposed he could allow it, since it wasn’t a question about what happened after the flip.

“He did that time, yes.” He nodded. “However, since he’s been training with us in St. Petersburg, he has had a different training regimen.”

“So Katsuki only learned the quad flip in St. Petersburg?” One of the Italian journalists butted in, and Yakov mentally crossed Ezzelin Balotelli off his list of potential interviews the next time a major competition landed in Rome.

“No. I learned it myself, but Coach Feltsman and Viktor-san helped me make it more consistent.” Katsuki straightened in his chair. “When I skated in that video, I didn’t know I was being recorded, but I was simply showing a good friend my progress; there was no reason to push myself. Now I am skating not just for myself, but on behalf of my country, Coach Feltsman, and Viktor-san.”

Oh great. Just the entry point the press needed. Yakov sighed and ran a hand through his hair, wondering how long he would still have it. He pointed to a Russian reporter—at least they would know that if they crossed him there was a chance he could make them regret it. “Maxim?”

“What exactly is your relationship with Viktor Nikiforov?” Well, there was a nice direct hit. He couldn’t interrupt Katsuki to answer this one, either—that would be worse than anything Katsuki could say.

“Uh…” Or maybe not. Katsuki seemed to have crashed like those cheap PCs they’d gotten after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the rink had first gone electronic and cut corners everywhere. He elbowed him; it wasn’t his preferred way to deal with Katsuki, but it did always work with Viktor.

“Viktor-san is my idol, and one of the best things about moving to St. Petersburg has been getting to know him better on the rink and off.” Oh thank goodness, something had rattled loose in Katsuki’s brain and fallen onto his tongue, even if he did sound like a PR bot. Actually, that was exactly what he sounded like; this was the PR soundbite they’d worked out in case anyone asked about him skating Stammi Vicino in the first place. “I try my best to surprise him, and he tries his best to surprise me, and, well, I guess you saw what that looked like today.” He gave a little shrug.

“Are you two dating?”

“We will not be taking questions on the relationship status of my skaters at this time, thank you.” Yakov glowered. “Katsuki just won a gold medal. If nobody cares to ask any more about that, I’d be more than happy to get my skater back to the hotel so he can get some well-deserved rest.”

The press conference settled down after that, but Yakov was fairly certain he knew what the headlines were going to be about tomorrow anyway.

He made sure Georgi was OK with how he’d skated, and safely ensconced in his hotel room with a pint of ice cream and orders not to leave or talk to the press, before addressing the issue again with his remaining skaters.

“You two.” He pointed at them each in turn as they arrived at Katsuki’s room. “Figure this out. Whatever it is.” He held up a hand. “Don’t tell me. Just make sure Katsuki has something other than six month old press releases and blather about surprises the next time someone asks that. Which will be to you, Vitya, at NHK, so get your stories straight.” He tried his best to glare at them, though it was hard with Viktor bouncing on his toes. “I don’t care what the story is. I don’t care if you secretly ran away to get married in Cyprus while I wasn’t looking. I don’t care if this was a one-time thing that will never happen again and was just Vitya getting excited at seeing someone else ratify the quad flip. I don’t care. What I care about is that the next time someone asks us about this, we have an answer.” He shoved them inside of Katsuki’s room, and almost slammed the door, then thought better of it.

“Oh, actually—the next person to ask you won’t be a journalist at the NHK. It will be Katsuki’s family, because we’re flying to Hasetsu in thirty-two hours, in case either of you forgot.”

Then he slammed the door on two very alarmed-looking skaters.

It felt good.

Chapter Text

For all that he’d told Katsuki and Viktor that he wanted them to explain themselves and figure out what was going on between them, he didn’t actually want to know. Especially when they didn’t come out of that room until well after any civilized definition of dinnertime. Well, his definition; certainly he had become forcibly aware by virtue of a peripatetic lifestyle linked to international skating that there were many civilizations that accepted much later hours for dinner than he did. And here they were in one of them, or at least one where there were enough people of the contrary persuasion, so he did not in fact starve Viktor or Katsuki out.

Still, it was very late when they did come out. The way they were constantly touching each other suggested that he very much didn’t want to know the details of whatever they’d worked out. But he reminded himself that he too was going to have to see the Katsuki family very soon, so it would be better if he did not seem too surprised at whatever he had misled their son into.

Such discoveries were better made with a full belly and access to whatever quantities of alcohol he would later deem necessary, so he took them out to (his second) dinner.

Unfortunately, that meant that Giacometti and Chulanont somehow ended up with them, since apparently his skaters were incapable of not gossiping as widely as they possibly could. Fortunately at least Josef was there too—and Cialdini, which on a night when there was probably a lot of drinking in front of them was fine as well.

“Sooooooooo…” Apparently Chulanont was not holding any grudges against Katsuki for snatching the gold medal from him, if the way he was glommed on to the side of him that Viktor had not claimed was any indication. “Details, Yuuri! Do I have to give Viktor Nikiforov a shovel talk?” He seemed alarmingly gleeful at the prospect.

“Yes, tell us, Viktor. Have you finally caught the elusive bull and gotten the horns?” Giacometti winked in a way that was absolutely unnecessary to make his innuendo come home. But then, he wouldn’t be half the skater he was if he wasn’t like that all the time, and if he weren’t the skater he was then Viktor would have checked out of everything even earlier, so Yakov could leave the young man a little slack.

“Well…” Viktor winked back and Katsuki turned bright red. Yakov definitely didn’t need to hear this. He raised his hand to order whatever vodka this place had—he didn’t usually prefer vodka, despite being Russian, but it was a quick way to get drunk—but not quickly enough to miss Giacometti’s response.

“Took you long enough!” He turned back to the table. What was that? “You’ve only been pining since he swept you off your feet at Sochi.”

“Wait, what?” Katsuki looked confused but it was Chulanont that spoke. “Yuuri, you didn’t tell me you talked to Viktor at Sochi.”

“I didn’t!” Katsuki waved his hands in front of his face, which didn’t seem entirely sure if it wanted to be blushing red or draining of all color in panic. “I holed up in my hotel room, went to the banquet, and didn’t talk to anyone! I just...drank...champagne…” He suddenly got very quiet.

Viktor was looking like he had looked the time that Yakov had accidentally stepped on his favorite toy at age eight and broken it. It was a look he’d have preferred not to see again. “You don’t remember the banquet?”

“You got drunk at the banquet?” Chulanont seemed, unlike everyone else at the table, to think this was the best news he’d heard all day. “Yuuri! I’m so proud of you! Was it as bad as the night of the hockey team?”

“No! I mean...I woke up in my hotel room…” Katsuki’s sentences weren’t so much sentences as disjointed syllables that you could reconstruct into sense afterwards.

“I have pictures!” Apparently Giacometti couldn’t stand to be out of a conversation for very long—though Yakov could process, through his dawning horror, that apparently he had been very remiss in going to bed early in Sochi, so maybe he did have something valuable to contribute to them all.

“Oooooh!” Chulanont grabbed the phone, wedged himself impossibly closer to Katsuki, and started flipping through the album. “That’s Yuri Plisetsky, right?”

Yakov sighed, signaled to the bartender for the vodka, and slid around to look at the phone behind Chulanont. If three of his skaters were somehow involved in whatever this was, he needed a) a drink and b) to have as much knowledge of it as he could.

It was actually better than he’d feared. Clothes came off, but just few enough that he could understand why he hadn’t heard any complaints through official channels. The pole-dancing was a surprise, but it was well-executed (Lilia had never, to his knowledge, even considered dabbling in such a thing, but she did host guest dancers of a wide variety of kinds for workshops, including a surprising number of burlesque performers from Western Europe and the Americas). And since it was well-executed, it could pass for youthful hijinks, exuberance, and artistic performance instead of drunken debauchery.

Ironically, to his eyes, Viktor’s and Katsuki’s dance, as captured by Giacometti’s phone, was much more salacious despite involving more clothes and fewer phallic analogues (or perhaps that was just Giacometti’s phone taking on its owners’ viewpoint).

There was a video, which he was very glad Viktor had not shown him before including those very same steps in his Bolero.

Katsuki started by slinking deeper and deeper in his seat, but by the end Viktor had somehow hauled him up to the point he’d started at—and Yakov did not miss the way his hand never left the Japanese skater’s side.

“Well, it’s a good thing that we already decided we’re dating.” Viktor squeezed Katsuki.

“I suppose.” His face had decided on brick red in the end. “Did I really…”

“Dance his soul of his body, then leave the next day and never call him?” Giacometti completed the sentence for him. “Yes, mon ami, you did. And some of us had to hear about it every day for six months!”

“Only six months?” Chulanont mussed Katsuki’s hair. “Some of us had to hear about Viktor Nikiforov every day for five years.”

“Phichit!”

The vodka had finally arrived.

Yakov decided it was high time to go sit with the other coaches. Whatever crisis Katsuki had gone through had apparently passed, and his skaters had an answer to nosy questions from reporters. Whatever else was going on could be dealt with after.

Chapter Text

After turned out to be on the way to Hasetsu. Right at the end, actually—as always, Katsuki seemed to fall asleep immediately on the flight, and since Viktor had somehow managed to charm his way into the seat next to his new boyfriend on every leg of the journey (how one charmed inanimate algorithmic seat assignment machines, Yakov didn’t know, but if anyone could do it, it was Viktor on a mission) he’d slept too, the two of them leaning into each other in a way that Yakov couldn’t help but admit was adorable.

But adorable or not, it didn’t stop it from being the truth that they were about to arrive in Hasetsu, home of among others one Katsuki Yuuri, and as far as he knew no one except those at the dinner that night knew what the deal was between the two. Katsuki hadn’t taken time away from the group to call anyone, and he didn’t seem like the sort to relay important news in a short call anyway—unless that was a Katsuki trait, given what Yakov had unearthed from Katsuki about how he’d heard about his dog’s passing. So they were hurtling towards a town that was set up as a veritable Katsuki Yuuri shrine (no matter how much the skater liked to downplay or deny it) where everyone was going to be hungry for news of their hometown, gold-medalist, newly-kissed hero.

Katsuki finally woke up a few minutes before their arrival. Before Viktor could do anything disgustingly sentimental like kiss his boyfriend awake, Yakov swooped in. Verbally, of course; you couldn’t have gotten between their bodies without a crowbar and he had no desire to be there anyway.

“Rise and shine, Katsuki. You don’t happen to have called ahead so that we won’t have to explain any of this?” He waved a hand at the two of them and Katsuki at least had the grace to blush. Viktor just preened. “I’ll take that as a no. You did arrange something at some point?”

“Yes, Coach.” Katsuki was still blushing. “My...ah, my sister should be picking us all up.” He groaned. “Oh God, she’s going to ask so many questions.”

Katsuki Mari, ask questions? Yes, that sounded like the woman he remembered.

“Why are questions a bad thing, my sun?” Viktor smiled up at Katsuki from where he was still leaning against his shoulder.

“Because...because...because…” Katsuki flailed.

“Because he has seventeen posters of you in his childhood bedroom, so his family definitely know who just kissed him in China.” Yakov had the pleasure of watching both his skaters flinch, for entirely different reasons. Two birds with one stone. “And because while his mother and father are the sweetest people you’ve ever met, his sister has some actual standards about who her brother dates.”

“Yakov! I’m wounded! What are you implying?” Viktor did his best to pout, though his lips kept twitching upwards every time he (Yakov assumed) remembered he was still hugging Katsuki.

“I’m implying that while Katsuki might be under the impression that he’s won two gold medals in as many seconds, there are still some people in the world who can tell he deserves the best.”

“Aren’t I the best, Yakov?” Viktor batted his eyelashes.

“You? You’re a pest, that’s what you are.” He rolled his eyes. “The best skater, yes. The best boyfriend? Well, let me be the first to tell you, Vitya: I know your track record with relationships, and while I’m willing to accept that you’re serious about Katsuki, you had better not hurt him.”

“Is this a shovel talk? Why are you giving me the shovel talk, Yakov? Shouldn’t you be giving Yuuri the shovel talk on my behalf?” Viktor actually did pout this time and Yakov just sighed.

“I don’t need to give Katsuki the shovel talk because he already has you on a pedestal and would do anything to make sure you didn’t get hurt. You, on the other hand, seem to believe that just because you can bounce off the ice, finish your routine, and still get a gold medal, your heart and his are equally resilient. Be careful. Of both of you.”

“Aww, Yuuri, you don’t need to put me on a pedestal!” Of course that was all that Viktor had taken away from that. “Unless you get to be up on it with me! Ooh, we could get our own little apartment, up on a pedestal, so no one could get to us, and Yakov wouldn’t go around giving innocent people shovel talks! Oh, and we could program it to walk wherever we needed to go so we wouldn’t have to choose between living in Japan or Russia!”

“Vitya, you’ve just described Baba Yaga’s house.”

“Isn’t that the witch with the chicken house?” Katsuki finally decided to re-enter the conversation.

“Yes! But don’t worry, Yuuri, I’m not going to become a chicken-witch! Hmm...if I had magical powers, I think I’d be like Harry Potter!”

“The Chosen One? Really, Vitya?” But they ignored him. Oh well. That was their problem, if they didn’t want to listen to him.

Specifically, it was their problem because of what was coming when they did make it into Hasetsu.

“YUURI!”

“Over here!”

“Is that your boyfriend?”

“Is that Viktor Nikiforov?”

Yakov could see how it had happened. Katsuki Mari was there to pick them up, of course. But there were three of them, not just one or two, and (as he later discovered) the onsen’s van had broken down so that their parents were trying to fix it, and the only other person they knew who had a big enough van for everyone just happened to come with three very loud children in tow.

Not that Nishigori Yuuko herself was much better. She’d been mildly starstruck, he recalled, when she’d met him; meeting Viktor was, apparently, too much for her to handle.

On the plus side, her fangirling and the triplets’ manic pestering were enough to squarely eject Katsuki Yuuri from his comfortable malaise clinging to Viktor, and send him into full-on damage control mode. He had evidently come to the immediate (and, Yakov suspected, accurate) decision that the Nishigori clan was a font of nothing but embarrassing childhood (and young adulthood, and adulthood) stories about him—not to mention that he had remembered the posters of him in the terminal, which Yakov for one could not imagine forgetting about—and so dedicated every morsel of his being to getting Viktor into the car, the car over to the onsen, and then Viktor out of the car as quickly as possible.

That was still plenty of time for the four Nishigoris to tell three different stories about how Katsuki Yuuri had idolized Viktor as a child, to Katsuki Mari’s evident (and Yakov’s private) amusement.

Chapter Text

The Katsuki family was much as he remembered them from his brief prior time in Hasetsu: inordinately kind and polite, especially to pushy Russian visitors who had an inclination to take their son away from them (not that he thought of Viktor in the same category as himself, but they did both want to bear Katsuki Yuuri away to St. Petersburg). Also, while very quiet, the kind of people who had good insight into a situation if they actually did bother to say something. And, it turned out, all extremely aware of who Viktor was. Which wasn’t a surprise, given Katsuki’s poster collection, but even with that knowledge he had underestimated the welcome Viktor would receive.

So, apparently, had Viktor. He apparently had thought that his new boyfriend’s family would be standoffish, or judgy, or something—he looked like he did every time Lilia evaluated his dancing, already wincing away from a criticism that hadn’t even come yet. But with the exception of Katsuki Mari taking delight in needling both him and Katsuki Yuuri about “making out on international TV before you even told us,” the Katsukis were nothing but gracious. They even agreed to let Viktor stay in Katsuki Yuuri’s room—apparently, his mother confided in Yakov after dinner, they had actually been quite concerned about where to put both him and Viktor given the fact that the onsen was not really set up for multiple overnight guests—a fact which caused Katsuki Yuuri to sprint upstairs at full speed to (Yakov assumed) do something about the posters.

Which was somewhat pointless since not only had he mentioned them to Viktor, but Katsuki Mari made absolutely sure to bring them up at dinner.

Three times.

“Mari-neechaaaan!” His skater’s head was buried in the table as if it would never emerge again. “He already knows I’m a fan!”

“But I didn’t know you were that much of a fan, Yuuri!” Viktor had recovered quickly from his hesitancy around the Katsukis and was now shoveling katsudon down his throat like there was a limited supply of it on earth. Which, to be fair, there was, since Yakov had to agree with Katsuki Yuuri that his mother’s katsudon was superior, and she did live several thousand miles away. The Japanese skater had tried to say something about only getting it when he won gold only to have Yuuko (who had not stayed for dinner, but had heard about the preparations before leaving with her trio of insatiable skating fans and a promise from Viktor to come skate at the rink the next day) beat both Viktor and Yakov to pointing out that he had literally won gold less than three days ago.

“You knew how much of a fan he was, Vitya.” Yakov rolled his eyes. “We showed you the Stammi Vicino video, after all.”

“Yes, after you flew here and recruited him to skate in St. Petersburg, Yakov!” Viktor pouted. “Why didn’t Yurio show me the video? I could have been the one to bring Yuuri home with us! Or I could have stayed here! It’s so nice here, and the food is just...delicious!”

“That is why Yurio did not show you the video.” Yakov grumbled. “Imagine, Russia’s Living Legend running away to Japan during his prime.” He sighed. “Not that I cannot see the attraction. Perhaps I will stay here and eat katsudon and go to ninja houses, and you can go back and coach Yurio through puberty.”

“There’s a ninja house? Yuuri, how did you not mention there’s a ninja house? We have to go!” Why was that the main thing Viktor had taken away from that?

“It’s the castle.” Katsuki Mari was holding back a smirk, badly. “We know the owners; I went to school with one of their kids, so we used to go all the time. I’m sure my brother would be happy to give you a private tour.”

“Mari-neechan!” Katsuki Yuuri’s head had just risen from the table, and slammed down again.

“That sounds wonderful.” Viktor, on the other hand, was grinning ear to ear.

They did not, in the end, go to the ninja house the next day. They went to the Ice Castle, instead, because Nishigori Yuuko spent the entire morning spamming Katsuki Yuuri with texts about it—or rather, as it turned out when they arrived, the triplets stole her phone and did it.

Viktor spent the morning signing autographs, taking selfies, and generally being feted—which he usually would only grin and bear, with hidden sighs that only Yakov and (he was beginning to suspect) Katsuki Yuuri noticed. But apparently doing it for a trio of small children and their very excitable mother instead of the press made it more bearable.

Also, Yakov confiscated the phones after the selfies were taken, so that no additional photos or videos would hit the internet of Viktor’s routine.

Because that afternoon was spent actually practicing, for once, for which Yakov thanked God and whichever of God’s agents had made Nishigori Yuuko a rabid Viktor Nikiforov fan. She shut down the rink and even banished her children the moment they reminded her that Viktor was planning to practice his actual routines for the actual NHK Trophy on her ice.

She also squealed at a volume that he’d only heard from jet engines when Katsuki Yuuri happened to mention that he and Viktor actually sometimes skated each others’ routines.

This led to the two of them doing that, which Yakov supposed he could approve of, since it always improved their work. And it turned out that (after gushing for ten minutes nonstop without taking a breath about the skating) Yuuko had a good eye for the details of their skating. She was observant, and appeared to have an encyclopedic knowledge of both of his skaters’ prior routines (“Viktor-san, that turn, it seems like you’re doing it like you did in your 2014 free skate, but when Yuuri-san does it, it looks like your 2016 free skate…”).

He was definitely going to take advantage of that in the week they were here.

Chapter Text

Sometimes, Yakov had to step back and take stock of things. This was one of those times. In an immediate sense, their time in Hasetsu was frustrating, and Viktor (and to a lesser but related extent Katsuki) was making him pull his hair out. The two of them were so wrapped up in each other that they would sometimes not even seem to have heard what he had to say, and one time he had to actually have Yuuko flash the lights in the rink just to get their attention while they were ignoring him.

Then there was the time (only a day into their visit) that the two of them sat down on either side of him in the onsen—what he thought was going to be a calming, relaxing place with no one chattering at him about their relationship goals—and started pitching something about a joint exhibition piece. Which was ridiculous; they weren’t skating at the same event until and unless they both made the Grand Prix Final, and while he was reasonably certain that they both would do that (and qualify for Worlds as well) there was no need to throw off his already somewhat squeezed schedule in Hasetsu just to have them practice something they wouldn’t need for a month.

But of course, Viktor knew his weakness. Most of the time, to the detriment of Yakov’s blood pressure, hairline, and general stash of the milk of humankindness, he didn’t listen to anything, but sometimes apparently he was paying all too much attention. And evidently this was one of those times, or maybe one of those issues. He pretended to rub his chin in that infuriating way he had whenever he wanted to look thoughtful, and sighed about how much of a shame it was that Yakov Feltsman, even after such a successful career coaching and choreographing for the best skaters in the world, didn’t feel confident in his ability to remake one of his routines for pairs.

“Truly, a great loss to the skating community,” he added with solemnity that hung loose on what Yakov could already tell was going to be a massive grin when he let it out. “Such a skilled choreographer, losing his edge. Why, I heard he didn’t even choreograph any of his skaters’ short programs this year. Maybe he just doesn’t have the spark of it.”

“I choreographed Gosha’s routine, and you know it, Vitya.” But by making him respond, Yakov knew that Viktor had won.

“Ah yes, and remind me; Gosha did full justice to that program in China, and what place did he end up in?”

“Georgi was in second place after the short,” Katsuki interjected, and Yakov felt a surge of affection for the skater for being willing to take his side against his boyfriend’s, even if only perfunctorily.

“And who was in first?” Viktor pointed out, waving a hand. “That just means that the training programs at our rink are superior, which they are. The choreography…”

“Fine.” He growled, though there was a limit to how intimidating you could be while naked in a hot spring, without losing all dignity. “I’ll choreograph you a pair Stammi Vicino, if—and only if!—you agree to only rehearse it after you both qualify for the Grand Prix Final. And leave me alone to soak right now,” he added, realizing that there was a good chance Viktor would become his usual touchy-feely self in celebration.

“Oh, Yakov!” Yes, Viktor was about to do that, until Katsuki rose out of the water and drew Viktor’s eyes along with him.

“Thank you, Coach. Let’s go, Vitya.” Ah, so they’d progressed rather rapidly to that stage, he thought, as Viktor’s face blushed red at the nickname.

So yes. They were being annoying, and having to redo both their exhibition skates to be a single pair skate that was still recognizably Stammi Vicino was a bother he didn’t need in his life.

But when he zoomed out and thought about it in more depth—say, when he’d gotten Yuuko to watch whichever of the boys was skating and take notes for him, while he had a moment to himself to catch up with the paperwork from the rink that for some reason had to be done by him even in absentia—he had to remember where Viktor had been a year ago (let alone Katsuki; he hadn’t been his coach then, but he couldn’t imagine he’d been in a good place).

A year ago, he’d been yelling at Viktor to get off the ice occasionally, insisting he go back home to walk Makkachin rather than staying on the ice all night, and worrying that his skater had lost all motivation for anything and was just mechanically repeating the motions of skating practice because of a desperate need for structure and organization before his life fissioned apart—a feeling he recognized all too well from when Lilia and he had gotten divorced two years before. But Viktor hadn’t been losing the love of his life—or if it was, it was the love of the ice, not the love of another person whose actual human feelings had to be considered. He’d stayed on the ice longer and longer, but there had been less and less feeling in his skates. At one point, Yakov had thought that skating a routine like Stammi Vicino, with its echoing loss in every gesture and every move, would allow him to channel the emotions into rekindling that love of skating, but now he knew better—and when he remembered the emptiness he’d seen in Viktor’s eyes then, he could, he supposed, live with seeing them all too full with Katsuki Yuuri now.

Besides, neither he nor Katsuki was actually skating worse because of it. If anything, between their mutual inspiration, the freedom of practicing away from prying eyes that didn’t belong to three miniaturized skating fanatics, and Yuuko’s initially cautious but now increasingly specific advice, they were growing by leaps and bounds. Katsuki could hit the quad flip eight out of ten now, and Yakov knew that both he and Vitkor were under the impression that he somehow didn’t know they were working on the lutz.

So yes, frustrating they were (including those lutz practices—just tell him, for goodness’ sake, who did they think had taught Viktor the quad flip in the first place, or any other jump for that matter?) but it was so much better than a year ago.

And the food was pretty good too, he thought, as he shoveled yet another delicious plate of Katsuki’s mother’s cooking into his mouth. Maybe he would live up to that threat and move to Hasetsu, making Viktor train Yurio.

No, that would be cruel. He wasn’t sure to which of them, but definitely to at least one.

Chapter Text

But for all that Hasetsu was a wonderful idyllic break from reality, the truth was that that NHK Trophy was getting closer and closer—and Japan was larger than Yakov preferred to admit. So it was all too soon that they were headed out of town again, with Katsuki (Yuuri) and his family exchanging goodbyes and (to all of their surprise) Viktor getting swept into a hug by each of Katsuki’s parents.

“Take good care of our Yuuri,” Katsuki’s mother insisted. At first Yakov thought this was only addressed to Viktor, but then she pushed a basket with food in it into his hands. “And don’t let Minako-sensei forget she still owns a business back here! I know she must be having fun gallivanting all around St. Petersburg with that Lilia-sensei of yours—she sounds like she’s enjoying herself over Skype—but you mustn’t let her forget where she comes from!” She shook her head at him. “You artists, making your lives in such cold places. Don’t forget to relax sometimes too!”

He wanted to protest that he was not an artist; he just enabled the ones who were. He wanted to point out that Lilia was no longer “his Lilia” by any stretch of the imagination except his own. He wanted to remind her that Minako was her own person, and not his responsibility.

He did none of those things. Instead he harrumphed something he knew she would interpret as agreement, thanked her politely for the food, and yelled at Viktor to get a move on before they had to beg the JSF to delay the start of the competition for him.

This was, of course, unlikely, since they had two full days scheduled before the actual competition, but there was never any value in letting that boy get too comfortable. It was the way in which he and Yurio were most different: where Yurio needed to be dialed back (by yelling), Viktor needed to be poked (also by yelling).

To be fair, most of the Russian skaters were best motivated by yelling. That might have something to do with the fact that he’d trained them all together, and they were used to the yelling by now. Viktor most of all; sometimes he thought that Viktor might never get up off his (extremely comfortable) couch in his (extremely minimally furnished, except for the couch) apartment if it weren’t for his yelling and Makkachin’s demonstrated need to use the facilities outside.

Come to think of it, that might be a symptom of depression. He should remind Viktor to go see his own psychologist. Maybe Katsuki would help; he seemed to be getting help from his, and Viktor tended to listen to Katsuki.

Even without yelling.

Katsuki was, by unspoken agreement, coming with them to the NHK, even though he could have stayed in Hasetsu for another week, training at the Ice Castle. Yakov wasn’t entirely sure how that had come about, except that after China the decision had just...been made for them. Or perhaps Katsuki and Viktor had discussed it, but certainly neither of them had mentioned a thing to him.

Though to be fair, they hadn’t had to, had they? He’d been the one buying the tickets and arranging the backstage pass for Katsuki as part of Viktor’s team (or rather, the one telling the assistant coach back in St. Petersburg who was in touch with the ISU and the JSF about it—he didn’t have to do everything directly, thank goodness).

This was not shocking, of course, given their now-extant and now-public relationship, and the fact that Viktor demonstrably skated better when he was motivated not just by yelling but by trying to impress Katsuki. What was perhaps more of a surprise, at least to her, was that he was also bringing Nishigori Yuuko in a similar backstage capacity.

It was an open question whether she or the triplets had squealed louder when he’d asked her to come along: her in excitement, the triplets in excitement first and then abject horror as they’d realized that the invitation did not include them.

“Maybe when you are older,” he’d found himself grunting as one of them (he was pretty sure it was Axel, but he would have hated to be quizzed on it) clung to his leg and the other two similarly attacked Viktor and Katsuki (they had apparently quickly evaluated the fact that their mother and father were not the soft touches here, as shown by the way that the two skaters had quickly crumbled and started begging him themselves, forcing him to be the bad guy here). “Perhaps if you were skating as novices, I could justify issuing you passes like I did for Plisetsky before he graduated to juniors.”

From the videos he had already been sent from Yuuko of the triplets practicing Plisetsky’s programs from novices, this had been both a rash promise and one likely to land him in extremely hot water with the FFKK when his next intake of novice female skaters was entirely from out of country.

In any case, triplets or no (and it was still no, thanks to Nishigori Takeshi’s stepping up to take care of his own children while his wife went and realized one of her oldest goals and watched Viktor Nikiforov skate for a medal from rinkside), they were all on the way together, and it was almost impossible for him not to be a little bit buoyed by the clear excitement that Yuuko was bringing to the event.

This was going to be a good competition, he could already tell. Otabek Altin was an up-and-comer, but he wasn’t up-and-come just yet; the other competitors weren’t going to be on Viktor’s level no matter what they did.

Did that mean he was going to let Viktor relax? Not in the slightest. He was not above leaning on the “show Katsuki what you can do” and “remember that Yuuko has spent her whole life waiting for this” cards if he had to. But between Katsuki’s help, Yuuko’s insightful eye, and his own notes, Viktor’s skates were better than they had been in Skate America. Nothing was assured—but he wasn’t going to let his skater do anything but his best.

Chapter Text

In the end, Viktor did not do his best.

To be fair, “not his best” was still in first place after the short program. “Not his best” was still easily in first place after the short program, and if it were any other skater, including Katsuki and Plisetsky or even Giacometti (who had, after all, come in second to Viktor in almost every relevant major competition since they’d both been in seniors), it would have been his best.

But it wasn’t a season’s best.

It wasn’t even the best he’d done the program that week.

Perhaps they should have considered more carefully the emotional politics of skating to an entirely Japanese folk music medley in front of an entirely Japanese (or close as made no nevermind) audience, and a Japanese judging panel. Perhaps they could have analyzing in more detail what that would demand of Viktor’s PCS, and therefore what attention he would or (more importantly) would not have for his technical elements. Perhaps perhaps perhaps.

One of Yakov’s favorite English language proverbs was “if wishes were horses, beggars would ride,” especially because it had aged out of relevance again—yes, if wishes were horses, beggars might get one, but now nobody wanted a horse anyway.

Similarly, if perfect planning were possible, maybe Viktor could have done better, but it wasn’t and they hadn’t and not only that but nobody actually wanted a perfectly planned roboskater anyway.

Not even him. Not even though he showed his love to Viktor through intensive critique. That didn’t mean he wanted Viktor to be perfect; if anything, it meant that he couldn’t have a perfect Viktor, because if he did have a perfect Viktor he wouldn’t be able to tell him anything, wouldn’t have known what to do with him.

“The steps weren’t in time,” he pointed out as they sat together, crammed next to both Katsuki and Yuuko in the Kiss and Cry, so close together that even Katsuki and Viktor couldn’t be blamed for being almost in each other’s laps. “The overall sequence, yes, you came in and out at the right point, but the individual steps were off the beat.”

Viktor nodded. “Yuuri will help me with that, right Yuuri?”

“Of course!” Katsuki was glaring at the ice like it had personally offended him as Viktor’s score nevertheless soared to the top of the leaderboard. “The spin too.”

“Yes—more Lilac Fairy, less Stammi Vicino,” Yuuko put in, her awe at being here at a Grand Prix event on Viktor’s team apparently expressing itself in trying to be helpful—he could see how she and Katsuki had both been raised by Minako. “Less longing lingering on the ice, more speed.”

“Exactly.” Katsuki and Yuuko were in sync enough that, oddly enough, he could see how she could no longer critique him properly—they had the same vision sometimes, but also some of the same blind spots. Viktor had spun slower this time because he had to spin slower, because his body was heavier, his limbs more mature, than when he’d raced through Lilac Fairy. Katsuki could have skated it faster, but then Katsuki seemed to have an inhuman ability to calculate the speed at which he was rotating and adjust it in real time, like Viktor could do with jumps but with the added difficulty of your inner ear being thrown off by the massive motion of the spin itself.

“Not faster.” He shook his head as they began the unfolding of themselves from the Kiss and Cry towards Viktor’s press conference. “Just more intense. Make it look faster by throwing yourself into it more. She’s right though—less lingering. You’re not skating sorrow and loss anymore.” Nor feeling it, if the fact that his two skaters were holding hands was any indication. Yuuko was giving their joined hands heart-eyes and while he wasn’t at that level yet, he could acknowledge the value of having a skater (or two skaters) who wasn’t mired in depression anymore.

“But Yakov!” Viktor pouted. “Why can’t I try what Yuuri suggests? You know he’s the best at spins!” Katsuki blushed, as if this wasn’t something they said every day at practice between convincing Yurio to adjust things and building up Katsuki’s own self-confidence in his Eros.

“Yes, Vitya, your boyfriend is the best at spins.” He rolled his eyes and directed them down the right hallway, in case Viktor got too distracted and ran into a wall or something, since he was just staring into Katsuki’s eyes anyway. “And because he is the best at spins, and because he has for some reason decided to simply forget all the things he knows about how you are not the best at spins because he has idolized you for years and also is apparently in love with you as well, he has decided to give you the advice that would work for him if he were going to fix the problem.”

They took another hallway—this rink was badly designed, or maybe he’d made a wrong turn somewhere—and he continued. “And of course, she’s used to watching Katsuki, and she also has you up on some ridiculous pedestal as a skater,” he thought he heard Yuuko mutter something like it’s not ridiculous, how many titles has he won under her breath, “so of course she sees the same things.” Finally, this was the room set aside for the short program press conferences. “So you let them tell you the problem, but you let me tell you all the solution, all right? And you want to know what the real solution is?”

“What?” Viktor was really easy to lead, if you knew how: just pique his curiosity.

“Skate the hell out of Bolero.” He pulled Viktor inside the room and pushed him in front of the cameras. “And forget about the short program until we’re back in St. Petersburg and we can actually work on it. You can’t skate yesterday’s program, Vitya. You can only skate the next one.”

Chapter Text

Reconnecting Viktor to Bolero proved surprisingly easy. Or perhaps it should not have been surprising; now that he had some sense of where this program had come from, due to (he refused to say thanks to) the revelations about the Sochi banquet, it made perfect sense that having Katsuki around to work with would help Viktor immensely, not just because he was skating Viktor’s programs to show him how they could be improved but because he was the secret core that set Viktor’s Bolero apart from the dozens, hundreds, thousands that had come before.

Also, it meant getting to hear Viktor and Katsuki have to explain to Yuuko how this particular rendition of this particular routine had come about, and that was hilarious enough on its own to merit having brought her up from Hasetsu, everything else aside.

Viktor, of course, was loud and expansive about it, gesturing widely and almost knocking himself and Katsuki on their backs while gesturing to illustrate the story. Katsuki at first hunched down into himself, as if disappearing into the rink wall would keep him from all the embarrassment radiating off him. But Yuuko and Viktor between them needled him out of his self-imposed disappearance and eventually he was contributing to the story of how he had “inadvertently ghosted” Viktor for months until Yakov had forcibly reunited them by flying out to Hasetsu.

At this point, of course, Katsuki decided to turn the tables on Yuuko by explaining to Viktor just how long she had been a fan of his, and just how much he owed his own love of Viktor(‘s skating) to her influence. But this was a bad move, it turned out, because Yuuko knew even more than Yakov had known or Katsuki Mari had chosen to reveal about the history of the infamous poster collection, not to mention the ends to which Katsuki had gone to acquire them.

“He had to pretend he was Googling porn to explain why his computer kept acting up,” she finished. “It was less embarrassing than admitting he’d been hitting up obscure Russian sites to try to get that one perfume centerfold Viktor did for local distribution only.”

“I remember that one!” Viktor was unreasonably excited, Yakov thought, but this was technically the downtime between ice time, so he wasn’t going to intervene. “It basically was porn, Yuuri, so maybe that was actually the truth!”

Yakov also recalled the shoot, which had been uncomfortable and overly long, since it had involved getting shots of Viktor lying directly on the ice with very little between him and it. But it had been part of the initial windfall that had helped Viktor set up the Nikiforov fund that was currently helping Katsuki pay for his coaching fees, not that he was going to point that out to either of them right now.

“He knows.” Yuuko’s grin was as wide as an Olympic rink. “That one was right above his…”

“Yuuko!” Katsuki slapped a hand across her mouth.

“Oh, you found one, Yuuri? I was going to offer to give you a signed copy, but if you already have one I can just sign yours the next time we’re in Hasetsu!” Viktor beamed.

“Oh, it’s not in Hasetsu.” Yuuko had, with what appeared to be long experience, ducked out from under Yuuri’s hand and gotten her voice back. “He took that one to Detroit.”

“But you don’t train in Detroit anymore, Yuuri…” Viktor tapped his lips with his finger. “Would that mean that your copy of that particular poster is in St. Petersburg?”

“OK, I think it’s time for us to get back on the ice!” Katsuki was beet red as he shouted that, looking imploringly at Yakov. “Break is definitely over, right Yakov?”

It wasn’t, but he also didn’t want Katsuki to implode either.

“It would be, but neither of you is properly stretched after such a long break,” he grumbled. “Yuuko, with me. Vitya, Katsuki—stretches first, then jumps, starting with singles and working up.”

“Yes, Coach?” Was there something in the water in Hasetsu that made the people there overly deferential?

“First of all, I’m not your coach.” He huffed as Katsuki and Viktor got moving and he and Yuuko took their places by the rink wall. “You can and should just call me Yakov. Second...what does the Ice Castle need?” She looked confused so he continued, still looking out over the rink instead of making eye contact. No need to make this too personal. “I have a skater who will probably be training in Hasetsu every off-season until he retires. He’s four year younger than Vitya is, and he has more stamina, so that’s a long time. The Ice Castle is clearly not up to code as a full-time rink for a world-class skater. So what do you need to make it one?”

“I…” she paused. “Money. We need money. And staff. And...probably a weight room?” She sounded hesitant.

“Doable.” He snorted. “I imagine Viktor will throw money at you like a firehose when he realizes that he and Katsuki will be spending months here in the off-season, and having two skaters associated with your rink winning medals will bring in crowds. Think! What do you need right now to scale up for that?”

“A weight room, like I said.” She took a deep breath. “New lockers in the locker room; half of them wouldn’t keep out a stiff breeze if you slammed the door. A new floor in the dance studio—yes, there’s a dance studio, you didn’t think Minako would let my parents train her star danseur without a second studio for him to train in?—and someone to run classes, if Minako is staying in St. Petersburg. A credit card machine that isn’t older than my parents. A new squeegee lining on the zamboni.”

“Give Zhenya a call.” He handed over a card and she took it with a little bow. “He won’t know the contractors, you will, since he’s in St. Petersburg, but he can tell you if you’re being ripped off, and he has access to the rink’s line of credit. You’ll pay us back once Ice Castle is back on its feet, but I won’t see my skaters lose gold because they can’t skate in the off-season.”

“Wait, this Zhenya is Evgeni…”

“Yes, yes.” He waved it off. “I should have known that if you followed Russian skating enough to be a fan of Viktor’s at twelve you’d recognize the name. He prefers that we just call him Zhenya, da?”

“Zhenya.” She shook her head. “And he can loan us the money?”

“Technically he can spend the money. I can cover the costs for a while myself.” He didn’t become the most successful men’s skating coach in Russian or world history for no money, after all. “I will make sure the rink books are balanced. You just make your Ice Castle what it needs to be for them to skate there.”

“Thank you, Coach.” He finally looked at her and raised an eyebrow, and she corrected herself. “Thank you, Yakov.”

“Do not mention it.” He waved a hand. “Now. They should be done stretching by now.” He raised his voice to a shout. “Vitya! Ice! Now! Why are you not halfway through those jumps?”

Chapter Text

Bolero was insipid, Yakov decided, as he listened to the strains of it filter through the air and Viktor began to move. He could understand why people skated to it, of course; it wasn’t insipid the first time you heard it, or the tenth, or the hundredth. It still had the stirring air of the insane repetitions, the sense of mania and the sense of something inexorable building. It was completely reasonable that everyone skated to it. But everyone skated to it, and so how it could it be anything but insipid?

That was how, he thought, as Viktor landed the quad flip and the building erupted—but Viktor’s bullfighter did not, the victory slipping through his grasp with every further motion, the build-up of the music hammering home the degree to which he did not, could not, triumph even as the scene demanded it of him. There was something different in Viktor’s Bolero—not just different from how all other Boleros were danced, not just the cosmic inversion that he and Viktor and the entire rink had discussed and discussed and beaten to death as they were planning the skate in the first place. That was still there, of course. But there was something new in it this time, something distinct from what they had plotted out, something changed even from that first time that he’d exchanged videos with Viktor, Katsuki’s Bolero for his Yuuri on Ice.

Something intriguing, something he wasn’t sure he’d seen from Viktor in years.

Paradoxically, it was confidence. Not arrogance—Viktor had skated more than one routine with arrogance since his long run had started—and not pride—Viktor had that coming out of his pores even on his worst day—but confidence, or maybe conviction. The belief that the thing he was doing was right, that the choices he was making, the decisions he was taking, were the ones he had to do even though he was going to lose.

Because that element that they’d discussed remained. This was still the story of a Bolero where the skater-as-toreador lost, was trampled beneath the feet of the bull he was meant to slay. But whereas before it had been the tale of a bullfighter who lost, now it was the story of a bullfighter who chose not to win. And not the way that Katsuki’s bullfighter had when he had skated Bolero for Viktor (or rather for Yakov, not knowing that he was going to be showcased to Viktor via the magic of the modern cell phone), the bullfighter who could not bring himself to kill the bull and so chose rather to die beneath its hooves than to inflict pain upon the other. No, this bullfighter could have killed the bull, or at least was capable of trying to; he chose not to. He willingly left himself open to the horns, the hooves, the weight of the beast. He welcomed it. He knew that it was what he wanted; that being run over was not just the better of two evils, the only choice left once one knew that killing the bull was morally impossible, but as an active preference.

It was electric. He wasn’t sure when the last time he’d watched Viktor skate and not known what was coming next was; yes, Viktor loved surprises, but he loved surprising the audience so much that he rarely surprised Yakov. On the ice that is; of course he was a distressingly frequent surprise off of it, but that was different. On the ice, he skated what he was told and the deviations from it, the famous surprises, were usually either pre-planned surprises for the audience alone or the kind of predictable surprise that, paradoxically, Yakov had come to expect. That was, perhaps, why some of Viktor’s motivation had been failing; he was not as surprising as he wished to be. The fact that he often relied on Yakov to generate the surprises, rather than surprising Yakov himself, was part and parcel of that.

But now?

Now he was surprised. He had thought Viktor had already plumbed the emotional depths of this so-predictable song, but he had not. The song was still Bolero, but Viktor’s skate was not the Viktor’s Bolero that he had come to know. And while the moves remained the moves they had choreographed, they felt new. Each step felt like a revelation, like it was the only way Viktor could have skated that movement and yet and at the same time something that had been magicked onto the ice by his feet in a second of pure inspiration.

Was this Katsuki’s influence? It had to be. Or rather, the influence of knowing Katsuki had forgotten the Sochi banquet but fallen in love with Viktor anyway; the power of knowing that the bull had not meant to trample you, but that in the very act of giving up your body to be trampled you achieved...something. Perhaps Lilia would have the words for it; she had always been better at the conceptual language used in both their disciplines to express the inexpressible. Yakov could tell you that the way Viktor hung in the air in his triple axel towards the end of the program, giving the feel of a quad axel without the rotations of it, said something about longing and loss and the hope that came out of opening yourself up to both those things and not shutting yourself off. But he couldn’t have said exactly what that said in the larger picture of the piece, not in words, not without imagining how Lilia would have phrased it. The impossible union between soul and soul, only achievable by the abrogation of the self, or something like that, perhaps.

Whatever it was, it was gold medal worthy.

More, it was world record worthy.

If there had ever been any doubt that Viktor was going to win the NHK Trophy and head into Barcelona a commanding favorite for a sixth straight gold at the start of the program, there was none at the end.

Altin’s score had been scorching, and would have won on any other day. It might even have won against Viktor on an average day. But today? Today, the bullfighter lost the battle on the ice, but there was no question that he also won the war.

Ugh. He was going to have that stupid song stuck in his head all day.

Chapter Text

Things after the NHK were alarmingly normal. He had to prepare Georgi for the Trophée de France, so he flew back to St. Petersburg after Viktor’s triumph—and the two of them flew with him. They said their goodbyes to Yuuko at the airport, and Yakov reminded her that she needed to make sure she sent Zhenya that list. Katsuki and Viktor looked at him oddly, but he didn’t bother to explain. It wasn’t their problem to worry about. The whole point of having a coach, in fact, was that they shouldn’t have to worry about things like their off-season training beyond actually doing it once he told them what it was.

Back in St. Petersburg, everything was an anticlimax. Minako and he got tipsy his first night back as he told her all about her hometown and his experience there, and he had to admit it felt a little unfair to have her laugh in his face about his despair over how oblivious Viktor and Katsuki had apparently been about their respective feelings. She was pleased that her boy (as she referred to Katsuki when drunk) was doing well for himself—“whatever else you might say, Yakov, your Viktor is a catch!” she chortled at 2 am—and he was relieved to hear that she apparently approved of his insistence that Yuuko have plans for the Ice Castle beyond mere maintenance.

“The Nishigoris always did need someone’s foot up their backside.” She poured another finger of vodka into each of their glasses. “They love skating—those girls aren’t Axel, Loop, and Lutz for nothing, and don’t let Takeshi-chan pretend that it was all Yuuko-chan’s idea either! He’s the one who signed the birth certificates, not her—but honestly that’s all the Ice Castle has been for years, a labor of love, kept open because they love it but not expanded. With some investment and a clear direction, there’s no reason it shouldn’t be put on the map. For heaven’s sake, Katsuki Yuuri trained there! Japan’s Ace!” She slammed her now-empty cup down on the table. “They’ll be flocking to it, once anyone knows its there at all.”

“Especially when Viktor starts training there in the off-season.” She looked at him questioningly and he downed his drink as well. “You didn’t see him with the older Katsukis, it was like they already had two sons. He’s been looking for a father and a mother his whole life, there’s no way he could resist.”

For some reason, Minako decided that was her cue to take his glass away. “I doubt your Viktor has been looking for parents his whole life.” She bustled up some tea in the kitchen as she spoke. “But I’m sure he liked the Katsukis. Everyone likes the Katsukis. You like the Katuskis, unless I’m much mistaken.”

He nodded. “I do. Good people. Raised a hell of a skater. Along with you. Good work there, Minako.”

He woke up the next morning with the kind of splitting headache he’d managed to avoid since he was young, reckless, and in his twenties. Minako unfairly seemed no worse for wear.

At least he hadn’t put himself on track to train Viktor that day. Bolero with a hangover would be hell on wheels.

Not that Georgi’s particular brand of sentimentalism was great for his bad mood either, but with Georgi he could just switch their focus to jump combinations instead of the whole routine at once and he wouldn’t question it. He wasn’t exactly an obedient skater, but he didn’t really care what they practiced from moment to moment (which was, if you really thought about it hard, probably some of why Viktor was the multiple champion and he was just a very good skater, but it was helpful today).

That Thursday, he sat and ate crackers and drank tea while Minako and Lilia talked about how Viktor and Katsuki had both thrown themselves fully into ballet that week like never before. Well, never before for Viktor; apparently Katsuki had been this enthused when he’d first started, which Yakov had no trouble believing, but not in a few years. Anyway, they were doing really well, figuring out how to match positions, which he supposed was important if he was going to be choreographing them a pair Stammi Vicino.

Oh god, they wanted it for the Barcelona final, didn’t they? As if he didn’t have enough on his plate. He murmured something into the conversation that kept Lilia and Minako from noticing too much, or that he hoped would do that, and started running through the Stammi Vicino routine in his head. A lift could go there, he supposed, and that step sequence would lend itself well to being done in tandem…

“Yakov?” Lilia’s voice broke into his train of thought.

“Yes, Lilia?”

“You’re humming.” She detested humming. Sing or don’t, she used to tell him. You’re a decent baritone, Yakov, but a terrible refrigerator.

“I’m sorry.” He was. He wasn’t paying attention to the conversation, but he didn’t mean to hum over it.

“Was that Stammi Vicino?” She cocked an eyebrow. “Why were you humming Vitya’s last free program music?”

“He wants me to choreograph him a pair skate to it—him and Katsuki.” The words tumbled out of his mouth without conscious thought, and she pursed her lips.

“A pair skate? For two men?” For a moment he thought she might continue that in a direction he really hoped wasn’t the direction she was going to go. But it wasn’t; she wasn’t that kind of person. “Who do you have doing most of the lifts? Vitya is heavier, but Katsuki’s stronger.”

Minako broke in to point out that Katsuki had apparently done lifts for her in ballet recitals—of course he had—but that there was also a skill to being lifted that Viktor might not have, and before he knew it the three of them were pulling out pen and paper, turning on his computer to watch the old Stammi Vicino frame by frame, and sketching out the transformation of the choreography.

It was surprisingly pleasant to collaborate with them again.

If he wasn’t careful, he might get used to it, and then where would he be?

Chapter Text

It was always strange when he went to a competition with just Georgi—not bad, per se, but unusual. This was even more true now that he was coaching Katsuki and Plisetsky as well, since they were also world-class athletes like Viktor. And like Georgi, if he was fair; he was rarely to never short of his complement of three senior male ice skaters, and there was a reason that while Viktor had dominated competition for most of the decade, Georgi was still there, at the same age, still holding down one of those three slots not just at his rink but in all the competitions where Viktor’s triumphs meant that Russia qualified three skaters. Or two, really, though Plisetsky was going to complicate matters this year. But Georgi was such a different skater from Viktor that even though they had been the two constants of his coaching life for a decade and more, alongside a rotating cast of, well, everyone since Zhenya really, it was still strange to go to a competition with Georgi and not Viktor.

Or really, Georgi alone, because Georgi’s quirks only really came out when he was the only skater Yakov was responsible for. Not Georgi’s big, bold, obvious tics that were too plain and present to be considered “quirks”: not the obsession with his femme du jour, or the over-the-top romanticism that went with it, or the tendency towards excessive mascara that would set an entire burlesque club to shame (not that Yakov had any reason to know anything about that if anyone asked).

No, he was thinking right now, as they boarded the plane for Paris, about the little quirks, the things that Georgi was only comfortable enough about to manifest when he had Yakov’s full and mostly undivided attention (he of course always had one eyeball on his phone even when he was out with Viktor and Katsuki in Hasetsu and the time zones were wrong; you never knew when one of his skaters, even one of the juniors or novices, was going to do something absolutely ridiculous that required him to react).

This Georgi had a predilection for hot chocolate, warm but not too warm, no, that’s too cold, get me another, please, Yakov, you know I don’t skate my best if I don’t have my hot chocolate. No, that’s too hot, but we don’t have time to wait for it, so ask them to make it again won’t you?

This Georgi suddenly forgot every stretch Lilia had ever taught him in the ballet studio, every term he’d ever learned, and needed Yakov to re-explain the complex routine he was supposed to have memorized, move by move, every time. Once he’d made the mistake of trying to pull this nonsense when (unbeknownst to him) Lilia had actually been along for the trip, as a surprise to Yakov, and she’d flayed him up one side and down the other, but that had only stopped him from doing it for about two months; she didn’t come frequently enough to make the threat real.

And now she didn’t come at all, but that was its own situation that didn’t really involve Georgi at all.

Speaking of Georgi, this Georgi was not the calm, compliant Georgi who he was used to (to the extent that Georgi or any of his skaters was ever compliant—he considered thinking ‘except Katsuki’ but then he remembered Hasetsu...and the whole Viktor situation), the one who hit his marks and did what he was asked without someone’s eye on him at all times during the skate. No, this Georgi had a little touch of Viktor or Yurio in him, which he supposed meant this Georgi was a Russian skater, so fair enough—but he would throw a little improvisation in, a lutz instead of a flip, a quad-triple in place of a triple-triple.

And that was the last thing about this Georgi, the thing that took him from frustrating, bothersome annoyance to worth all of that, the thing that meant that (if he weren’t always running three ways from Sunday with far too much to do and far too little time to do it in every facet of his job) Yakov would have done his best to contrive to get Georgi alone more often even if it would have cost him what little bits of his hair Viktor, Mila, Plisetsky, and now even Katsuki were not taking from him: this Georgi was a better skater.

He often wondered what would have become of Georgi Popovich if he, Yakov, had taken a look at his intake roster that year and said “I don’t need anyone else,” or if Georgi had been the sort of skater who had looked over at his age-mate Viktor Nikiforov and said “I can find another coach” and not “I can skate with him.” Or even if Viktor had just not shown up that day, or ever—if he, Yakov, hadn’t taken him and had still taken Georgi. What would Georgi have done without Viktor’s shadow? What would Georgi have done with another coach, another team, without being “that skater of Yakov’s who isn’t Viktor”?

What would he have done if he was just “that skater of Yakov’s”?

Because for all that Viktor had dominated competitions for their entire time skating together, for all that Christophe Giacometti had been his second for most of that time, Georgi Popovich had in him the skill, the fire, and the emotion to have been something truly tremendous if he had been the only one his coach had had to think about.

Just as he did here, at the Trophée de France, with no Viktor to worry about, no Plisetsky to distract, no Katsuki to draw attention even though he didn’t want it.

And he showed it by ending the short program in first.

Yakov had to admit that he’d given Georgi’s short program less attention than Viktor’s, and that was probably unfair. His fantastical depiction of a witch, after all, wasn’t going to break Viktor’s short program record, no matter what they did. But he should have remembered that just because it wasn’t going to break the record didn’t mean it couldn’t dominate an evening—and at a competition like the Trophée, where Giacometti was the heavyweight but always started slow, both in the season and in individual events, it could push Georgi very high indeed.

He resolved to make sure Georgi didn’t falter as he so often did in the free; a short program like that deserved both eyes, as often as he could spare them.

Besides, it wouldn’t hurt if someone could make Giacometti sweat besides Viktor.

Chapter Text

Giacometti was too much. He could already tell this by the time the Swiss skater was halfway through his routine; only a real fall here would push him down to the point where the base value on Georgi’s free skate (to say nothing of Giacometti’s rather high PCS, especially here in France, the closest thing to home turf he had on the international circuit) could pull him past him back into first. The American, de la Iglesia, had fallen off the pace, however, touching down three times, as if trying too hard to make up for only getting the bronze on his home turf at Skate America. Cao Bin, who had been rushed into the series out of retirement at the last minute after another Chinese skater had pulled out, had slipped past him into first—well, it would be second after Giacometti finished, unless he literally skated out of the rink and out towards the Arc de Triomphe out in the distance. But he was on old knees, and while the young guns had not yet caught up to him, he had definitely peaked at last year’s Grand Prix Final, where fourth place had been a surprise. No wonder he’d tried to go out on top; it was a shame they’d dragged him back, though at least he’d get a medal today for his efforts.

The color of that medal, however, had yet to be determined.

Giacometti came off the ice to thunderous and deserved applause. His routines were far more sexual than anything Yakov would ever have choreographed for his own skaters, but he could appreciate skill where he saw it, and young Giacometti—hah, hardly young anymore, training Viktor and Georgi together for so many years had warped his sense of when skaters retired, as Giacometti was one of the senior seniors on the circuit now—had skill in spades. There was a reason his display case at home (or Josef’s at the rink—he didn’t know where they were kept) was full of silver from the competitions Viktor skated in and a fair amount of gold at the ones where he didn’t.

Though he a bronze this year, courtesy of Chulanont and Katsuki, so maybe he was slowing down. Not like Cao Bin, of course, but not like Viktor either, whose ‘slowing down’ meant his short program was unlikely to break a world record. Though Giacometti had always been a slow starter to the season; perhaps he was just building up steam.

Yes, there it was; a score Georgi had, even with his slight lead from the short, no real chance of beating. Silver was the goal then; and make no mistake, a silver medal in the display case would be a real achievement for Georgi.

Which meant he had to distract him from the possibility. Georgi wasn’t Katsuki, with his nerves of mush and heart of glass at his worst, but he wasn’t Viktor or Yurio either. He needed something to think about that wasn’t the competition, but it was more because he skated his best when he wasn’t caring about totals than because he was worried about his results.

“Gosha.” He slapped his skater on the shoulder before he took the ice. “You terrified them as the witch. They’re all ready to fall for you as the sleeping prince. Don’t think about what Giacometti just did. Think about making them watch you as you awaken to love and loss.”

“Yes, Yakov.” Georgi straightened his shoulders. “I won’t let you down.”

“That’s not it.” He made a gesture cutting through the air with the off hand. “You’re skating last today because you already didn’t let me down in this competition. I don’t want you to skate for me. I want you to skate for them.” He waved at the crowd. “They want to see the story you have to tell. Tell it.”

“Yes, Coach.” And Georgi took to the ice, quieting the shouts that had accompanied Giacometti’s (extremely high) score.

He hadn’t been wrong; Georgi didn’t have the base values to pass Giacometti. But his PCS was right up there with the Swiss, and he hit every jump; there was nothing in Cao Bin’s performance that could have passed it, and while de la Iglesia’s base values were actually higher, the falls had already taken him out of the running. Georgi slotted into silver by a comfortable margin in both directions, and Yakov gave him a rare embrace when he came off the ice.

“Mazel tov, Gosha.” He turned his skater to the standing audience. “Well done.” Then, as they sat down in the Kiss and Cry and awaited the inevitable revelation of the specific score that would give him the silver, he went on. “However...you really ought to have substituted in the quad toe for the triple in that combination…” Too much praise would make his skaters soft, after all.

And in the back of his mind there was the never-ending math problem that was the qualification standings for the Grand Prix, which told him there was a very interesting clustering effect that had happened now that they were down to one competition left.

Viktor was in, of course. Thirty points out of thirty would do that for a man, woman, child, or sentient snake, not that he had had any doubts at any point.

Also in were the skaters at twenty-six points: Giacometti, with this most recent win, and...yes, he checked his math again, Otabek Altin with his two seconds to Viktor. An excellent performance for the young Kazakh; impressive to qualify when skating against Viktor twice.

But those were three slots; the other three were still, technically open.

The most likely result was that JJ Leroy and Katsuki Yuuri were both in; each had won their prior skate, but they were head to head at Rostelecom, so only one could win—though if the other came second, they would be at thirty and twenty-eight respectively.

Also in the mix there, though, were Plisetsky, with his silver, Seung-gil Lee with his bronze at NHK; and Emil Nekola with his similar bronze from Skate Canada. Even Crispino, fourth at the NHK, could technically vault into the running with a win, though since he was probably the sixth-best skater there, that seemed unlikely.

Equally technically, Georgi was currently sitting on 22 points, along with Phichit Chulanont—and he would have to check the actual scores to see which of them had the tiebreaker, since each had a silver and a placement just off the podium in fourth. But of those already done with their skates, they were currently sitting in a tie for fourth, meaning that there was a chance, a tiny one but a chance, that one of them could sneak into the final if there were some kind of chaos at the Rostelecom Cup. It would take one of the other skaters having the worst day of their lives, but...

If there was one thing Yakov was certain of, it was that the Grand Prix was always a venue for chaos, especially when Katsuki and Plisetsky were both involved.

Chapter Text

Three skaters. How had he thought he was going to be able to manage three skaters in one event? He was pulling his hair out and it wasn’t even anyone’s fault this time, except maybe the ISU. Mila in the women’s, Katsuki and Plisetsky in the men’s—it wasn’t even Viktor he had to deal with, so why was it so stressful?

It was so stressful just preparing for it that he let it slip during Thursday tea that he was worried, and both Minako and Lilia looked at him like he’d grown a third head (“like he’d grown a second head” was a look that Lilia directed at him often during the time around the divorce, so he needed something to distinguish this actual look of shock and surprise from whatever that had been).

“Yakov...you don’t think you’re going to do this alone, do you?” Minako recovered first and looked between him and Lilia. “I mean...you don’t think anyone is going to let you do it alone, right?”

“What?”

“You really ought to talk to Zhenya more, Yakov.” Lilia sniffed. “We’ve all had our tickets for weeks. Since the announcement, really.”

“Tickets?” He was reduced to single words, because he really didn’t know what was going on, and that was an unusual situation for him. He thrived on control; what was this then?

“Oh, do keep up.” Lilia reached over for a biscuit, somehow making it seem dainty rather than a reach. Or no, not dainty—imperious. Like her arm was always destined to move through that air and there was never any reason for her to have to do something as unladylike as stretch for it. “Our tickets down to Moscow. And our tickets for the venue as well, I suppose, though if I recall correctly your silly ISU has the policy of only issuing those at the gate.”

“They’re not my ISU.” He was clinging to the things he understood here.

“Oh, I’m afraid they are. Just like the IDO is ours.” Lilia and Minako shared a look. “Either way, we already have our tickets.” Lilia took a sip of her tea. “So you can take your hand out of your hair.”

He slowly lowered his hand—when had it gone up there?—and took a sip of his own tea. It was strong, like they both liked it (he hoped Minako didn’t mind, though he supposed by now she had to be used to it) and it settled something in his stomach and his mind.

“So you’re coming to Moscow.” They nodded.

“And Vitya as well. Poor boy, I don’t think you could pry him away from Minako’s young man with a crowbar now.” Lilia shook her head, while Minako snickered. “I don’t think Gosha will be joining us, but perhaps next time.”

“Next time?” He shook his head. Not the point. “Thank you, Lilia. Minako. I appreciate it.” He sipped the tea again. “So what roles did you imagine yourselves filling?” One did not assign Lilia Baranovskaya a part, and he didn’t really want to imagine how she would react if he did the same for Minako, despite her technically being in some sense his employee at this moment in time.

“I have no idea what I’ll be doing,” Minako volunteered, sipping her own tea. “Because I would say that I was planning to help Yuuri-chan, but I have a feeling that Viktor-chan is going to take that entirely out of my hands. Maybe I can be the one who knocks on their door really loudly before Yuuri-chan has to skate.” She laughed again. “Actually, that might not be a bad idea. I can make sure that Viktor-chan doesn’t end up being an active impediment to Yuuri-chan doing justice to his routines.”

“And I will make sure our little Yurio does not disappoint me.” Lilia set down her cup with nary a rattle, impressive with the china they were using and the unevenness of that particular table. But then again, he hadn’t changed the table since she’d lived here, so she still had experience. “I did not choreograph Allegro Appasionato to not see it skated at the Grand Prix Final this year. Or to see anyone butcher it with moves like that Cristophe Giacometti likes to use.”

“I don’t know, I quite like his...moves.” Minako smiled into her tea and Lilia stared.

“Okukawa Minako, I know exactly what you are talking about, and I will not have any of it in my house.” Lilia arched an eyebrow, and Yakov forcibly restrained his tongue from pointing out that this was not, in fact, her house anymore by drinking his tea. “That man is filthy, and while I will concede that there is an aesthetic quality to certain elements of his routines, there is very little artistic about them.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” He had run out of tea, and apparently, self-preservation instinct. “There are certain arts that indulge in that sort of sensuality, though I will concede that figure skating is generally not one of them.”

“Yakov Feltsman.” She stared him down and he managed not to back down, which meant he saw the tiny curl of her lip upwards and the miniscule nod she granted him before turning aside. “That is entirely outside the point. I will not allow Yuri Plisetsky to do that to any of my choreography, so I will be making sure to keep a good eye on him. You need only show up, do your kiss and cry, and pay attention to our dear Mila and make sure she doesn’t run off with an Italian.”

“Does everyone know about that?” Minako inquired. “I was under the impression that she thought it was a secret.”

“Mila is quite skilled at self-delusion,” Lilia decreed. “She also believes that no one knows she lifts Plisetsky over her head every time she has a chance.”

He nodded. “She’s not as bad as Katsuki.” Minako shifted and he cut her off. “I’m referring to the fact that he thinks that I don’t know he and Viktor are actually practicing when they want me to think they’re sneaking out to make out.” He poured more tea for them all. “I’m sure they are also making out, of course, but they’re also working up to the quad lutz, and to forgetting that we have security cameras on all the ice surfaces at the rink.”

“A quad lutz?” Minako hummed. “That explains the changes in his step sequence he wanted me to look at while you were in France. It has to be the transition into the different jump.”

“Those boys.” Lilia smiled, and Yakov decided that he could live with rebellious skaters if it meant he got to see that in his living room again.

Chapter Text

Having Lilia and Minako around for the Rostelecom Cup was a lifesaver. So was having Viktor, in its own way—mostly because it meant that Katsuki’s focus was on Viktor, and not on his own butterflies or whatever it was that populated his stomach during events like this. Viktor was of course playing everything up to the best of his ability, because he was Viktor and because, apparently, what Yakov had been certain was a horribly excessive personality that was dedicated to making every hair on his head come off before Viktor turned thirty was actually the dialed-down version of Viktor before he found someone to love.

It was nice, he supposed, that Viktor had found someone. God knew his little boychik deserved it, but did it have to be another skater, and one of his skaters, and the one who had the most potential Yakov had seen in a skater since Viktor himself? This last bit was a sentiment Yakov kept carefully locked behind his teeth and indeed thrown into a special box somewhere inside his brain labeled “kissing and other such activities” in case Yurio ever developed the ability to mindread and decided to go rummaging around, because the last thing he wanted Plisetsky to know was that he thought Katsuki had more potential than him. That wasn’t even entirely true; they were just such completely different kinds of potential. Plisetsky’s potential was that of a train’s blueprint: you could see how the pieces would eventually go together when someone actually did the work of constructing the cars, engine, and so on, and putting it on the tracks, and there was no reason except for a failure to move forward with the project that it shouldn’t be an excellent train, but it wasn’t one yet (though to be fair, this year had meant a lot of that train was put together, and Yakov would not bet against the blueprint being fully assembled before anyone was ready for it, Plisetsky included). Katsuki’s, though, was a train already built, just sitting in the trainyard without someone to tell it that it was time to pull out onto the track.

Or rather, one just gathering steam, because much as Plisetsky’s was under construction, the gold medal at the Cup of China strongly suggested that Train Katsuki was on its way as well.

They unpacked and headed down from the rink to the little cafe nearby that Yakov preferred to take his skaters to before this particular competition; after all, with Russian skaters at his rink, it was very rare that he did not have at least one skater in the Rostelecom Cup, since the federation liked to show off its best performers and who could possibly be better than one of Yakov’s?

No one.

While they were sitting at the cafe—open air, and the winter was unseasonably warm (climate change—pah!), so anyone could see them, though apparently Viktor’s strategy of hiding himself with a beanie and sunglasses in the winter was somehow working, since they hadn’t been mobbed yet—Katsuki and Plisetsky got into an argument. Well, Plisetsky argued in Katsuki’s general direction at least.

“I’m going to win the gold, and I’m going to qualify for the Grand Prix, and you’re going to be eating my dust, Katsudon!”

“Yes, Yuri.” Katsuki seemed amused. Apparently months of living with Yurio had taken the edge off of the Yuri Plisetsky Experience, which was all for the good, since he really didn’t need one of his two male skaters getting the other one off his game. After all, they could and should easily both qualify, unless somehow one of them ended up off the podium.

“We’ll see if you’re that calm when I’m standing up on the gold medal podium looking down on you!” Plisetsky stuck his tongue out, and Yakov was forcibly reminded that he was only just eligible for seniors—and perhaps in another few years, they’d have changed the eligibility rules so that children his age weren’t anymore.

“Oh, you want to stand on top, do you?” Viktor leaned over into Katsuki’s space to tease Yurio, though the Japanese skater didn’t exactly seem bothered by it.

“Of course! I’m going to destroy you all. Even you, old man, when we get to Barcelona. Be prepared to look up at your competition for once, loser!”

“So you want to be way up high? Looking down on everyone else? Like, say, a turtle on top of a nine-turtle stack, maybe?” Viktor leaned back, but kept his arm around Katsuki. “Sounds about right for you, Yurtle the Turtle.”

“DON’T CALL ME THAT!” Plisetsky jumped to his feet. “Now I’m going to double destroy you! I’m going to win every gold until they don’t even remember who you were!”

“Excuse me, but I think I’m going to be winning the gold here, isn’t that right, Isabella?” The downside to having this conversation in public (there were downsides to having it at all, but sometimes you had to work with what you had, and what he had was Yuri Plisetsky, ball of rage incarnate) and one of them was that other people could hear and see you—or, as in this case, walk up and interject themselves into the conversation, as Jean-Jacques Leroy did now. “I promised her three gold medals as an engagement present, and I have every intention of delivering.”

“Really, Leroy?” Somehow Mila made the skater’s last name sound like a mild insult—not like Yurio did by making it sound like a swear word, but just something about the way it twisted in her mouth—and raised her eyebrows from where she sat safely across the table from the dual-Yu(u)ri contingent. “Congratulations, by the way. Isabella Yang, wasn’t it?” She reached out and shook the hand of the woman next to Leroy, apparently his fiancée. “I seem to recall your future husband’s last gold medal was rather assisted by being on home ice.”

“I can beat you all on any ice.” Leroy puffed up his chest. “Canadian, Russian, Spanish—I’m going to win them all!”

“Sure, John-James.” Viktor nodded and winked at Mila. “I’m sure that you’ll do just grand here, on Russian ice, against a Russian skater who almost beat you back in Ottawa.”

“It’s Jean-Jacques! Remember that name, because it’s going to be at the top of the leaderboard tomorrow—JJ Style!” Leroy threw up his trademark hand gesture before Isabella Yang could drag him away.

“He does realize that the short program is two days from now, right?” Minako remarked into the air after they left, before the entire table burst out into laughter.

Chapter Text

As Minako had correctly pointed out, there was a full extra day before the men's skaters were to take the ice. That was not true, however, for Mila and the women's singles, and therefore not true for Yakov either. He and Mila were at the rink bright and early, and he was sure they would have been uninterrupted and fully prepared if it hadn't been for an unexpected interruption during Mila's morning workout.

Though at this point, what even was "unexpected"?

"Mila!" Sara Crispino's voice rang out across the ice after Mila finished a jumping pass (triple axel, clearly improved ever since Katsuki had started "just mentioning" things to her). "In bocca al lupo!"

"Sala!" Mila ground to a halt and Yakov ground his teeth. "What are you doing here? Did Mickey drag you over to Russia just because he's skating? You really need to hold the line sometime!"

"But then I wouldn't get to see my favorite competition!"

"The Rostelecom Cup is your favorite competition?"

"No, silly Mily, you!" Crispino bounced on her toes and Yakov wondered if she knew what her chosen nickname sounded like in Russian.

"Mila! Off the ice! Take a cool down and be back this afternoon!" She had only fifteen minutes left in the session anyway, and they definitely weren't going to get anything further done.

"Thanks, Yakov!" She started to pull off her skate guards then glanced guiltily at him and did a cool down on the ice before exiting. Crispino followed her out to the locker room, chattering away.

To be fair, Mila was back in time for the actual competition that afternoon. She was drawn last and he considered telling her to pull the triple axel entirely, since no one else had put up a score that justified the risk to her ankles. But he recalled how she'd hit it perfectly in practice, and the way she was beaming at him, bouncing on her toes, and decided that breaking her concentration now would be the greater evil.

"Go break their hearts." He nodded out towards the ice and she grinned.

"Will do, Coach!"

His heart remained unbroken, as did her ankles, but he could not necessarily say the same for the rest of their competition, since she was a clear ten points ahead by the end.

Perhaps he should have been encouraging romantic entanglements in his skaters long before this. But then he thought about his history with Georgi's and shuddered. Maybe it had to be the right person…

Fortunately by the next day, Viktor had calmed down and was actually being helpful with Katsuki, instead of just impulsive, while Lilia was indeed handling Yurio like she was born to the position. That left him, unusually enough, the time to actually watch the competitors' skates with more attention than he usually could spare, rather than noting major points and reviewing video afterwards to make larger commentary for his skaters.

Because qualification for the Final was so close, the draw at Rostelecom for the men's singles was significant. Michele Crispino was drawn first. He and his sister seemed to have had some kind of falling out (Yakov did not want to know or ask if it had anything to do with Mila) but apparently he was using that for motivation, not despair (at least not yet). Or maybe he was just desperate to go to Barcelona, because he posted a career high short program, and for once Yakov felt like he might have a competition on his hands for his skaters from someone other than their rinkmates and maybe Giacometti.

That feeling intensified when Emil Nekola went out and beat Crispino's score. He would have sworn the Czech was staring at Crispino while he did it, but that was not his problem; he might be willing to accept that his own skaters' personal lives were significant but he'd be damned if he'd lower himself to care about second-order drama.

Up third was Leroy, and Yakov was interested to see how he'd respond to the pressure, both that he'd put on himself two days before and that provided by the quality skates in front of him.

Regrettably, something went missing from Plisetsky's skate bag as Leroy's skate began (he suspected afterwards that Yurio had faked it so he could sneak out and watch Leroy) so he missed the first minute of the performance.

By the hushed silence of the crowd despite the rollicking music, he had missed something important.

Or maybe they were just prescient, as Leroy proceeded to pop a quad and fall out of a combination. He even stumbled on a step sequence, which would be reasonable except Yakov had been watching his steps for years now and he never did that. His skaters weren't as difficult on the footwork as Katsuki's, but they were always solid-to-flawless.

Until today.

When Leroy pulled up in his final pose, Yakov couldn't feel anything but pity. Some skaters rose to the moment. Others had the moment overwhelm them. Leroy had proven to be the second.

Perhaps he should recommend Katsuki's psychologist to them.

His two skaters were the last on the ice, so that meant Seung-gil Lee was the one who had to follow that particular performance. He was impassive, seemingly neither sympathetic to Leroy’s fate nor impressed by Crispino’s and Nekola’s performances. In the end, he slotted in just below Crispino, Yakov noted distractedly, but still far ahead of the disaster that had been Leroy’s skate.

He was distracted from the Korean skater’s performance, though, by attending to Plisetsky, whose gear had magically reappeared and who needed to calm down.

“I do not care what Jean-Jacques Leroy did.” Lilia’s tones brooked no disagreement as he approached. “Celebrating another’s misfortune is beneath a true danseur. Triumph on your own merits, or not at all.”

“Besides, Leroy may have fallen, but Crispino and Nekola didn’t,” he added as he joined them. He didn’t want to jinx Seung-gil Lee, so he didn’t mention him, though in the end he would have been proven right. “And they’re high enough that you’ll need all the quads.” He stopped. “All the planned quads, please. I do not want to find out if you’ve been sneaking into Katsuki and Vitya’s practices and adding the lutz.”

“But Yakov…” Ah well, a complaining Yurio was a normal Yurio.

“Yurio!” Viktor hurried up, to all of their surprise. “I need something from you.”

“What could you possibly want, old man? Shouldn’t you be fawning over your katsudon?”

“That’s just it! Yuuri just watched James-Jacob Leroy fall and he’s thinking about the Sochi Grand Prix! I need you to distract him!”

“I’m about to skate, you idiot.”

“That’s it! I need you to skate a routine that makes Yuuri worry about how he’s going to beat you, not about how Javier-Jeroboam is feeling! Thanks, Yura!” Viktor squeezed him into a hug that Yurio was not fast enough to avoid and ran back in the direction of Katsuki.

“Pfft. I’m not going to skate for Katsudon. I’m going to crush them all for me.” And Yurio slapped his skate guards into Yakov’s hands and pushed off.

Well, whether he was doing it for Katsuki or he wasn’t doing it for Katsuki, Plisetsky finally made Agape fully and completely his own. Perhaps it was the love of his roommate and (only semi-admitted) idol; perhaps it was having his grandfather in the stands—Yakov remembered he would have to say hello to Nikolai before he disappeared, leaving only a basket of pirozhky behind—perhaps it was the hug from his (even-less-admitted) other idol. Whatever it was, his bends were just a little deeper, his spins just a little tighter, the sensation of floating just a little lighter.

And since they were in Russia, the crowd was just that little bit more on his side.

It wasn’t Viktor’s record, but it was damn close, closer than Yakov had honestly expected Yurio to be able to come at this point in the season with these emotional beats, even if the technical value was high enough. And, he could tell when he was handing Plisetsky off to Lilia and joining Viktor and Katsuki at the boards, it had definitely done what Viktor wanted.

“Did you see that?” Katsuki handed Viktor his glasses, thus ensuring that he would see nothing, as he turned to Yakov. “He finally did that step sequence into the spin without the hesitation, just like I showed him!”

“Yes, yes, very good.” Yakov brushed it aside. “Now, what about you?”

“What about me?” Katsuki shrugged. “I’m fine.”

“I need you more than fine.” He clapped Viktor on the back. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I don’t think you need me right now. Skate for him. I’ll see you on the other side.”

And he walked away. Viktor and Katsuki had some kind of...ugh, some kind of moment that he definitely did not need to hear Viktor’s enthusiastic retelling of as Katsuki made his way to center ice, but apparently there was no way to avoid that except to tune it out.

And then Katsuki’s Eros began and neither he nor Viktor had attention for anything else.

There was no way Katsuki was going to beat Plisetsky, not in Russia, not when Agape had apparently unlocked for him, not today in other words. But Emil Nekola might as well have skated his excellent routine through mud, and Michele Crispino’s personal best would have required a fall. Eros and Viktor were inextricable for Katsuki, not just because the older skater had choreographed it, and that came through on the ice.

As for Yakov, he got to head into the second half of the competition with three skaters holding an average rank of 1.33. Not a bad two days’ work at all.

Chapter Text

No rest for the wicked, or at least for the overtaxed and overcommitted coach. While Viktor and Katsuki were off doing who-knew-what exploring Moscow, and Yurio and his grandfather had met up for whatever passed for quality time between them (it had something to do with the pirozkhy that was currently in his hand from the brief moment he had exchanged gruff greetings with Nikolai, but he didn’t know any more), he and Mila were back to the ice.

It wasn’t exactly a deep question who was going to win the Rostelecom Cup on the women’s side, of course. There was another Russian skater, from one of the Moscow academies, but she was not on Mila’s level. Neither were any of the foreign skaters, and they had the double disadvantage of also not being Russian at a Russian competition. So he was fairly confident in his skater. But still—there were formalities to go through, and he did need to make sure she didn’t do anything crazy.

Like trying a quad for the first time in a major competition.

“But Vitya said…”

“I don’t care what Vitya said! He may be your jump coach, but he’s also a maniac!” He growled. “Practice the quad if you must, but I only want to see it come out when you need it.” He took a bite of pirozhky to stop himself from cursing. Of course Viktor had been teaching not just Plisetsky and Katsuki the quad flip and now the lutz, but also Mila the toe loop. Of course. He’d thought that giving Viktor something to do would stop him from being a menace, but no. That boy was going to be the death of him yet.

“But Mickey can do one, and he’s not half as good a skater as I am!” She glanced around to make sure Sara Crispino wasn’t in earshot, though he was fairly certain she could plead accuracy even if her girlfriend-or-whatever-she-was had overheard.

“He needs the quads. You don’t.” The pirozkhy was a little different than he’d expected...more pork and egg. It tasted very familiar, actually. He took another bite.

“But I want it. Can you imagine the look on Sala’s face?”

He swallowed. What was that flavor? “I can imagine the look on my face when you fall and break your kneecap on the ice!”

“But I’m hitting it eight out of ten times!”

“So you want a twenty percent chance of a broken kneecap?”

“Yakov! You let Yuuri do the quad flip!”

“And he needed it because Plisetsky and Vitya are both ahead of him. Show me a skater you need to beat with the quad toe loop and I’ll let you skate it.” Oh no. Oh no no no. His mouth had gotten ahead of his brain; what was he, Viktor?

“Alright, Coach.” Yes, she’d noticed it too. He was going to have to let her jump the quad toe in Barcelona, wasn’t he? Because even he couldn’t deny that Sara Crispino was at least as good as her.

“Ah! Only if you need it. And I decide if you need it, so not in the short program.” He finished the pirozhky. Ugh, it was on the tip of his tongue...why was it so familiar?

“But Yakov…” Ah, he was back to being Yakov. Clearly she was displeased with the decision.

“But nothing.” Katsudon, that was it! How had Nikolai done it? He’d need to get the recipe, because that was delicious. “I promise, I’ll pay attention. If you need it, you can do it. But if everyone else falls flat on their face and you’re clear to the title, we are not going to risk it, clear?”

“Clear, Coach.” But she had a mischievous look in her eye and she dashed off soon after—and he found her huddled with Sara Crispino, so no doubt there was some kind of plan in place.

Oh well, that was a problem for Future Yakov, the poor man, because Current Yakov at least had a skater who wasn’t going to risk her neck for a title she already had practically in the bag. And indeed, she ended up ridiculously far in front of that Muscovite skater in second, and with two golds was headed for her date in Barcelona—with destiny, perhaps, and with Sara Crispino almost undoubtedly.

The boys the next day were suspiciously well-behaved. Nikolai must have said something to Yurio, because even he was barely acting out. Leroy did very well in the free, going first in the last group, roaring back with a 190 that put pressure on the remaining skaters—though with his previous day’s skate falling into the 60, he was still no danger for the top two unless something went badly wrong. Leroy was capable of more, of course, having topped two hundred before in his career, but his parent-coaches had apparently decided that (for all his bravado) a lower-risk approach that could not fail to get him that 190 was a safer route than going all-out for the gold. After all, the real goal here had to be the Grand Prix Final; not including the harder jump combinations meant a lower risk of the same falls happening a second time.

Unfortunately for Leroy’s peace of mind, Seung-gil Lee gutted out a score exactly .3 points ahead of his—a single blade canted slightly to one side might have made the difference, or a gesture that was just a little less tense and more effusive—already pushing him down to second.

Michele Crispino skated like his sister’s love depended on it—maybe it did, for all Yakov knew or cared—and actually beat Leroy’s free skate score, pushing him high up into first; high enough, in fact, that Nekola, evidently feeling the strain of trying to reach for the placing that would put him in the final, fell on his first combination. However, he had enough of a cushion from the short program that when he picked himself up and finished the program with verve and vigor, he was still five points clear of Leroy.

That meant….Yakov didn’t have time to think through what that meant, because Katsuki was up.

“Did you get any of Plisetsky’s pirozkhy?” Yakov asked his skater as he was about to go onto the ice.

“Yes?” Katsuki seemed confused by the question, but he answered anyway, like the dutiful boy he was. “It was good?”

“It was katsudon pirozkhy, right?” Katsuki nodded. “Think about what that means. Think about how that boy must look up to you if his grandfather noticed and made that particular flavor of his favorite food. This skate is about your journey on the ice. Show me, show us all how Katsuki Yuuri got to the point where Yuri Plisetsky’s grandfather is making katsudon pirozkhy, and you can’t miss.”

“Yes, Coach.” Katsuki nodded, exchanged a kiss with Viktor, and skated out onto the ice.

It wasn’t Katsuki’s best performance—he doubted he would see him top the skate after realizing that Viktor loved him, though you never knew what the future held—but it was enough to beat Crispino’s score; enough, therefore, to push Katsuki to the top of the leaderboard.

“You know what to do.” That was Yakov’s only advice to Plisetsky as he ran over from the Kiss and Cry to stand next to him and Lilia by the boards. “Don’t disappoint Madame Baranovskaya.”

“I won’t.” Plisetsky took the ice, back stiff and head held high, but Yakov was glad to see his body loosen as he occupied center ice and waited for the music to begin.

“I believe I have told you more than once to call me Lilia,” he heard from beside him as he watched.

“Yes, but have you told him that?” He glanced over at her slight shake of the head. “I said that for him. You’re still Lilia to me. And thank you, Lilia.” He didn’t think he had to say for what, with Plisetsky out there on the ice, which was a relief since he wasn’t actually sure exactly how much he was letting slip with that thanks.

“Hmph.” She sniffed. “No need.”

The music started up and Plisetsky was...it was difficult to describe exactly what Plisetsky was, except if he thought back to one of the first times he saw Lilia herself dance. Plisetsky wasn’t exactly like her, of course—he wasn’t a prima, for all that he trained with two. Unlike Katsuki, he didn’t opt for the more feminine moves either, though his body was flexible enough for most of them given his young age. But back then Lilia had been fierce and bold and willing to show parts of herself that even she didn’t quite fully understand. This wasn’t a criticism of Lilia now; if anything, maturity meant that she now understood those parts of herself, and so couldn’t quite expose them in the same wild way. But back then she had been mad to dance, crazy for the way that the performance let her take those emotions she didn’t know what to do with and push them out to the audience, finding relief of a sort in the communal sharing of the same feelings she had bottled up inside.

Plisetsky’s skate was like that. The entire rink could feel his passion, could feel the emotions that he felt towards himself, towards Nikolai, towards Katsuki, towards Yakov, towards Lilia, towards everything pouring out of him and infecting them all.

At the end of his skate there was no doubt that, like Mila, he was being scored high because he was Russian—but also like Mila, he would have destroyed every skater on that ice even if he had been from Plainview, Texas.

“Congratulations! That was amazing!” He would have to tell Katsuki off for that—he was supposed to be in the green room, how had Viktor let him out like that?—but he couldn’t help but be amused that his older skater was so excited to have lost a gold medal that he’d snuck out and embraced the younger, who held the hug for a moment before squirming like a cat in water.

He dragged Plisetsky off to the Kiss and Cry. The score came in—breaking 200, a personal best for Plisetsky—and he glanced up at the leaderboard.

Plisetsky RUS

Katsuki JAP

Crispino ITA

Nekola CZE

Lee KOR

Leroy CAN

Wait...he ran some numbers in his head. He ran them again, then grabbed his phone and went back through the earlier competition numbers.

Georgi had scored…wait, Chulanont had been in…

Ah well. He wasn’t taking all his skaters to the Grand Prix Final, because Georgi’s total score across two competitions was about six points behind Chulanont’s, after they were level on qualification points. But that meant the final six into the Grand Prix Final on the men’s side were set: Viktor, Plisetsky, Katsuki, Altin, Giacometti, and Chulanont.

Oh god, they were all going to be in Barcelona together. Not to mention Mila and Sara Crispino.

At least Altin had a reputation for being relatively stable, because this was going to be a madhouse.

Chapter Text

It was a minor blessing, but one Yakov would definitely still count, that there were two weeks and not just one between the Rostelecom Cup and the final of the Grand Prix. He needed that much time if not more to square away the final preparations for their attendance in Barcelona (not that complicated, since he and the training staff were flying to Spain already anyway with Viktor’s confirmed qualification, but still a headache because of the need to make sure that the three additional skaters he was bringing with were also accommodated). He needed it to quietly but as inoffensively as possible inquire as to whether Lilia and Minako were coming along too (they were, to his great relief, and apparently Minako had invited Katsuki Mari to come visit as well—well, the entire Katsuki family, but only Mari had been able to commit to getting away). And most of all he needed that time to catch his breath and check in on what his skaters were actually doing when Viktor said innocuous things like “practicing” and “working on their jumps.”

He was fully expecting to walk in on Katsuki and Viktor sucking face at least once, and he was not disappointed (or rather, he was not surprised when he did—it wasn’t like he was hoping to see it, it was just basically exactly as he’d predicted). What he was also expecting, and also correct about, was that he would interrupt at least one supposedly insignificant jump practice and see his skaters working on jumps he hadn’t formally approved yet.

“Again.” His voice from the shadows of the rink seemed to startle Viktor, which was perfectly fine, thank you very much, because seeing Viktor Nikiforov, he of the decreasing interest in his routines (until this year) and frustration with the way that none of his competitors pushed his scores (until this year), and also of the routine and complete technical precision that bordered on robotic try a new jump after all this time—and underrotate it at that—had startled him too, even though he’d reviewed the rink tapes and known it was going on. There was something different about it in person. Something more vulnerable, more personal, and less blood-pressure-raising (though still somewhat—this was a jump that could after all ruin his career if he wasn’t careful). “That was not a quad lutz, Vitya. That was at best an overrotated triple, and at worst mush. Again.”

“Yakov! How good to see you!” Viktor had regained his equilibrium, it seemed. “What are you doing here?”

“I heard a rumor that one of my skaters was doing jumps without a coach, so I had to come down and investigate.” He leaned up against the railing. “But now there’s a coach here, so, have at it. Again, Vitya. If you think you’re going to learn a quad lutz by ignoring me, you have another think coming.”

“But, Coach, Viktor is the jump coach.” Katsuki hurried over on his skate guards—Yakov assumed it was his turn to take the ice next—and stopped a few feet away. “Please don’t blame him, we just wanted to improve and do you proud.”

“Vitya is Plisetsky’s and Mila’s jump coach, but I do not see Vitya’s jump coach here, for the simple reason that he does not have one.” Yakov grumbled. “And I would be much prouder of Vitya if he showed an ounce of common sense about his health and his training one time in his entire life. Did you know, when he learned the quad flip, it was just like this? I had to come into the rink, my rink, at night to see this idiot boy jumping alone on the ice. At least this time he had you with him; that year he could have wiped out, could have been lying on the ice with a broken ACL, MCL, ankle, neck, anything, and there would have been no one there to spot him. Yes, he won gold with it, yes it surprised people, but I had hope he had learned better. And he didn’t even master it until he got some actual commentary on his practices, so I don’t know why he didn’t just ask for it this time around. Now, Vitya, again. If you insist on risking your neck for this ridiculous jump, you need to focus on your hips, you’re coming at it all wrong.”

“Yes, Yakov!” Viktor grinned, like the first time he’d discovered that Chanukah had eight days of presents instead of just one, and Katsuki looked back and forth between them with confusion. “Don’t mind Yakov, Yuuri, he’s just fussing. The hips, you said?”

“Just fussing he says. Just fussing over you and your health and wellbeing, you ungrateful brat. And yes, the hips. And don’t let your arms open up so early, you decide when the jump ends, not your body. You.”

“Yes, Yakov!” And the ridiculous boy skated back to center ice. “Something like this?” He picked up speed, launched into the air, and...yes, that was better. At worst a q, possibly even fully rotated, though it was a little hard to tell when he double-footed the landing like that.

“Not as bad, but you will not be shaming me by putting something like that into a routine. My god, who raised you, to double-foot like that?”

“Well, you did always say that was better than a fall.” Viktor had the audacity to wink at him. Or maybe at Katsuki who was still looking between them like he’d never seen them before. And maybe he hadn’t—this was the first time Viktor was trying something truly, truly new to him, and their dynamic when he did was fundamentally different than when working on something they both knew he could do, even a new routine.

“And so it is! But that doesn’t mean you can get away with it. Again.”

This time Vitya landed on one foot, though it was still wobbly. “Marginally acceptable. Katsuki!”

“Yes, Coach?” Katsuki looked startled to be remembered.

“You’re up. Let’s see how it’s coming for you.”

Katsuki’s jump was actually more controlled; he couldn’t be sure if that was just Katsuki’s natural gifts or if he was benefiting as well from the same advice he’d given Viktor before. His hips were right, his arms were right, the only difficulty was a little over-rotation, if anything.

“Good.” He nodded curtly. “Vitya, perhaps you should retire and take up coaching full-time, if that is what you can produce in another skater. After all, you never see me jump a quad lutz. Perhaps it is time for you to teach.” He snorted. “Or perhaps you should just let Katsuki jump first so you can see how these things are done. Plisetsky!” He shouted out into the echoing vastness of the rink. “I know you’re out there, Potya was sitting in the window looking out for you when I drove by your apartment on the way here, get your butt down here and show me yours.”

“What? I mean, I’m not…” Plisetsky emerged from the tunnel, apparently giving up on the completely obvious lie. “Yes, Yakov.”

His jump was like Viktor’s, a bit rawer than Katsuki’s but within the bounds of acceptable, he supposed. “Again, but more fluid—more like your other jumps. This isn’t an extra rotation thrown in after you do the triple lutz, it’s the same jump but more. Don’t try to fight for it in the air, make the approach and the launch do the work for you so that you don’t have to fight it.”

“Yes, Coach.” This time, Plisetsky hit the jump.

“Acceptable.” He clapped his hands. “These practices stop now. You are all supposed to be on rest time, and if I find out someone got a stress fracture, a sprain, or even just bags under their eyes from being too exhausted to practice during scheduled practices, I will personally ask the Spanish government to revoke your visas.” He continued on before Yurio and Viktor could interrupt him. “The quad lutz goes into the regular practice rotation in your normally scheduled jump practice. And no one jumps a single one without at least one coach besides Vitya on hand. Understood?”

“Yes, Yakov. Thank you, Yakov!” And Viktor had the temerity to throw his arms around him and hug him. Hmph.

Chapter Text

Of course, the other side effect of being home for more than a week at a time was that he had to catch up on all the other things that he had to do, both at the rink and at home. Quite a few responsibilities and minor annoyances had naturally piled up in the time of his absences for various tournaments, including but not limited to everything with the juniors (fortunately, none of them had the kind of excessive and unusual needs and skills that Yuri Plisetsky had, and therefore none of them truly required his personal attention, rather than that of the array of talented coaches he was training up under himself—but he did need to check in with that talented array of coaches lest they forget who they worked for or what the end goal always was), everything in his home (perhaps he should invest in a cleaning service? At least he didn’t have a pet to waste away in his absence, so there was a small pain that he had managed to avoid inflicting onto the world), and everything related to his ability to function outside of his work environment.

Yes, he too had a therapist to see.

Not a sports psychologist, however. Though he supposed one could inarguably say that all of his issues were fundamentally sports-related, and though he himself had competed as a skater, the issues he needed to work through were not, or not exactly, the ones that the sports psychologists he knew specialized in. Or rather, some of them were (balancing time and energy, finding equilibrium in a high-paced environment with extremes of emotion and feedback, ceasing to overinvest in certain emotional aspects of the situation and position he found himself in) but many of them were not. Coaching, after all, was not performing, and while they used the same verb in many languages, his kind of “training” was not the same as the “training” his skaters did. The difference between subject and object, he supposed.

Besides, all of the sports psychologists he knew were his employees, or contract workers, or intimately connected to his employees and contract workers, and that was an unfair burden to put on both him and them. Not to mention that under no circumstances was he going to go to anyone who might ever see Viktor, Yurio, Mila, or Katsuki professionally and vomit up all his feelings about his skaters in their general vicinity.

Not that he planned to do that anyway, but he was aware that the possibility certainly existed if he wasn’t careful, and so he was careful.

A friend of his from a different time in his life (before he’d met Lilia, actually; they’d gone to the same schools up until he had dropped out to pursue sports) was—not a psychologist or a psychiatrist he was going to go see himself, because that would have been a different kind of inappropriate or perhaps simply inconvenient, but—a professor of psychiatry at one of the top medical schools in St. Petersburg. They still sometimes got together for drinks (once, alcoholic; now that they were both grumpy old men who did not exactly enjoy the sensation of a hangover the next morning, mostly heavy, dark tea) and he had hinted around the possibility that perhaps he would appreciate knowing if there was anyone who his friend might have heard good things about or remembered fondly.

A week later he’d received an email with a discrete list, and he’d researched them on his own enough to know which one he was going to see.

That had been before the madness of the season, in fact, but he’d almost forgotten about it in the scrum of the Grand Prix qualifiers—but Past Yakov had known himself well enough to plan it for the gap, and now he had to pay that particular piper.

He didn’t especially like to reflect on himself, but he wasn’t going to be a hypocrite about it. If he could bully Katsuki into seeing someone (not that it was actually bullying, because Katsuki was actually quite willing once an authority figure suggested it firmly and not tentatively, as he implied Cialdini had done, as just a normal thing you had to do and not a disgrace or a dirty secret) he could do the same himself.

In the end, it was both more and less than he’d expected or feared. It had felt more like a conversation than like the stereotype he supposed he held inside his head of monologuing into the air on a couch while someone muttered “hm” and “ha,” and it was definitely not like the interminable and useless single meeting he and Lilia had had with a “marriage counselor” before the divorce. At the same time, he was well aware that the dynamic of a conversation had in fact masked a great deal of information traveling one-way (he was a specialist, after all, in nothing if not in being able to pick up the subtle overtones and undertones of a particular situation, since that was the thing that set a good skate apart from a bunch of jumps that happened to occur within a three minute interval alongside music). And he knew that that transfer of information was not, in itself, the point of the therapy, though it was perhaps somewhat cathartic in its own right.

No perhaps, actually—it was cathartic to talk about things without judgment and without accounting for someone else’s preconceptions or presuppositions.

Still, he was under no illusion that he was done with therapy. He had made another appointment for after the Finals (no point in pretending that he was going to have any time before besides this, and anyway they were soon and then nationals and then worlds and oy gevalt). And he had a list of goals he had written himself without prompting (but he was fairly certain with something that resembled prompting from a crow’s eye view).

One of which was to clean the damn house before he had Lilia over for...before he and Minako had Lilia over for tea.

Which was in...two hours.

He dialed a cleaning service. Some battles you could not fight on your own, and not all of those were mental either.

Chapter Text

With all the craziness of getting four skaters to Barcelona with all their attendant gear, coaches, and baggage, he almost wondered whether the Grand Prix was worth it at all. But of course, it was; without this competition, after all, when would he have found his other ace skater? And yes, he supposed that also meant when would Viktor and Katsuki have met each other, and when would Plisetsky have discovered there was something more than absolute vicious ambition that could inspire skating and all the rest.

But mostly, where would he have found his third qualifier? Though to be fair, Georgi had been the odd man out this year—but he doubted he would have been so high if he hadn’t had Katsuki and Viktor’s love story to inspire him.

God, Georgi was such a sap. And what did that make him, Yakov, if he was fully honest?

Well, full honesty was hardly necessary, now was it?

He gave the skaters the first day in Barcelona to acclimate themselves. He could hardly have kept them in the hotel if he’d wanted to; Lilia, Minako, and Katsuki Mari were all going out, and he was pretty sure Minako would just have dragged Katsuki Yuuri with them if he had tried to stop Yuuri and Viktor from going out on their own. So he just released them all with a sigh and wandered down to the touristy regions himself. It wasn’t like he actually had spent a lot of time in them for all that he’d been to Barcelona frequently; he usually stayed close to the rink, but today he was just going to let it go.

Or he was going to try to. Apparently he was incapable of avoiding his skaters even when he was actively trying to: first, he spotted Mila skipping down a block hand in hand with Sara Crispino, and had to duck into a jewelry store to avoid being seen. Not that he was ashamed of being there, or anything; she knew he was in Barcelona, because he was literally there to coach her. But he didn’t want to see anyone. It was free time, and one of the things his therapist had been very clear about was that transforming free time into productive time was something he should think about. He thought that was probably their way of saying that he ought not to do that, but they were very into self-processing of thoughts and emotions, so they just said he should think about it. Well, he’d thought about it, and yes, it was probably a good thing to actually have free time free. Occasionally. When he could get away with it.

So he didn’t want to spend any of it awkwardly explaining that he wasn’t stalking his skater, and yes he trusted her, and no he wasn’t going to drag her back to the rink. So instead he stepped into the nearest store, which happened to sell jewelry, and turned his back to the windows and the door so that no one would see him.

Except then he had to run into the back room, where they sold necklaces and bracelets and other larger trinkets (well, not trinkets, since you could maybe pay for one of these with the winnings from a Grand Prix event, if you scrimped and saved otherwise). Why did he have to run into the back room? Because the front room, with the (slightly more reasonably priced, but still expensive) rings and other smaller items, was not empty itself. No, it was occupied, and specifically by two more of his skaters.

Forget him stalking them; were they stalking him?

No, because whatever Viktor and Katsuki were doing right now, it had absolutely, positively, definitively, one-hundred-percent nothing to do with him. If anything, it looked like they were completely unaware of the entire rest of the world, down to the poor clerk who was trying to demonstrate different rings to them.

Huh, he would have thought Viktor was more of a gemstone type. But the simple bands they were looking at would certainly make skating easier…

Anyway, that was not his business, so he slipped on back before they came to their senses or Viktor’s Yakov-sense that let him stop doing the things he’d get in trouble for right before Yakov turned the corner activated (that had gotten him out of countless scrapes that were only reported to Yakov later when someone on the training staff got drunk—not that he would be getting in trouble for exchanging rings with Katsuki [unless it was some kind of prank, because the boy did not deserve that] but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t notice if Yakov lingered). Anyway, this was his free time, and it was healthy to carve out space for himself, even if that space was...apparently in the back of a jewelry store in the fashionable district of Barcelona.

Worse, that back room, while not occupied by anyone he already knew, was not empty either—the lone salesman had a gleam in his eye and there was simply no way he could go back out into the front room until he was certain that Katsuki and Viktor were done in there, which was unlikely, so he would need to a) buy something, and b) probably still ask if there was a back door, which meant that whatever he bought was going to have to make it worth the salesman’s time to risk letting him use a staff entrance as an exit.

A rather significant amount of money later, he was slipping out the back with a necklace burning a hole in his pocket that was exactly as expensive as necessary to justify its extreme simplicity and grace. It rather reminded him of Lilia, in fact: no one could mistake how valuable it was, but at the same time it took absolutely no notice of anything around it (not that necklaces could notice things) and therefore took no pains to make itself gaudy or overwrought. It was simply certain of its own value, so certain that it made sure that everyone else had to be equally certain.

As he was making his way down the back alley behind the shop, he almost thought he saw Yuri Plisetsky on the back of a motorcycle, but obviously that had to just be some other fit yet waifish teen, because there was no way one of his star skaters was on a motorcycle a few days before a major competition. At least he had a helmet on...but it definitely wasn’t Plisetsky? Right?

He made it back to the hotel without further incident, and zipped the necklace into his luggage. It wasn’t as if he had someone to give it to—but he was still oddly unwilling to simply go back tomorrow and return it.

Chapter Text

Like the prior competition (and had that really only been a couple of weeks ago?) the women’s short program of the Grand Prix Final was earlier than the men’s, so Yakov was forced to leave his three male singles skaters to their own devices for a terrifying day. Who knew what they might be getting up to, individually or (worse but inevitably) in some combination? Even Katsuki, whom he’d once thought of as his sanest, most reasonable skater, was apparently prone to wild fits of not just fancy but whatever it was that you called taking temporary leave of your senses and all the wisdom you might have scraped together over the years. Perhaps “whimsy.” Or perhaps just “Viktorism,” since it was just like Viktor to do it and it was obviously Viktor’s influence that was causing it in this case.

But that was not his problem right now, though obviously it would be soon and in a sustained way across the rest of the competition, the season, and perhaps his life.

Right now, he had to deal with Mila. This was, he would technically declare if pressed, better than having to babysit Yurio (or worse, deal with Yurio after he discovered that Yakov referred to it as “babysitting”). It was also strictly speaking superior to seeing what Viktor had come up with to keep things “surprising,” “interesting,” or “worth paying any attention to all, Yakov, really,” even if right now that mostly had to do with Katsuki, rather than diving off a high dive into a hotel pool and yelling “cannonball”—though thankfully he had actually done a half-pike into a smooth entry into the water. And it was even better than watching Katsuki alternate between quiet worry and loud, exuberant affection for his newfound boyfriend. Although if he thought about it carefully, perhaps it was less different from that than he might have preferred, because Mila was doing her own version of that. It’s just that her version of it had a different kind of tension in it.

Katsuki, for all that he was doing very well with his psychologist, was still a ball of stress when he actually had to skate. Viktor had been very helpful too, honestly, with that aspect of Katsuki’s skating, at least at Cup of China and Rostelecom. But despite the way or ways that Viktor helped him deal with it (which he didn’t necessarily want to know about in detail but still), the stress was still there, and it still made Katsuki quiet, reserved, and seemingly standoffish if you didn’t know what was going on.

Mila was...not like that. Mila’s stress showed itself entirely in exuberance, as if she could only shed the concerns she might have about the performance she would be putting up by loudly and seemingly joyously interacting with other people. Put her in a crowd she’d never met before right before a skate and she’d emerge with three new friends and six phone numbers, even though she might not remember any of the nine by the time she calmed down in the Kiss and Cry. If Katsuki was an introvert’s introvert, Mila was an extrovert who found other extroverts too reserved. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t stress flowing through her veins. It just meant that she dealt with it in a way that for most people would not read as stress. But he knew better, and he was prepared for this particular Grand Prix Final to find her at her most outgoing and charismatic.

The reason for that was the other parallel between her and Katsuki: the one thing that made Mila different was Sara Crispino’s presence, and Sara was not only here but actively competing against her—and, it might be added, definitely flirting with her. Which was fine; despite Michele Crispino’s noted immaturity, his sister was perfectly fine, and she and Mila certainly seemed to fit together well. The issue was that as Sara increased her visible interest, Mila became more and more focused on her, to the exclusion of the rest of the world, much as Katsuki did on Viktor—but since she was also stressed, this meant there was a rapid and sometimes explosive alternation between extroverted Mila, metaphorically begging the whole world to pay attention, and Mila-in-love, ignoring that same world to gaze longingly at a pair of purple eyes.

It meant that she was actually quite like Katsuki in the end, except the moments of quiet came from the love and the moments of volume from the stress, instead of the other way around.

It was his job to calm these particularly choppy waters in time for her to skate her best. Fortunately, she was drawn before Sara, which meant that he could easily dismiss her desire to jump her quad toe by pointing out that she didn’t yet know that she needed it; Crispino could fall (he didn’t say, since she’d have immediately gotten defensive about Crispino’s form, or worried about her safety) or simply not put up her best work (he did say, and she got snippy about it), and then she wouldn’t need it at all. And if she did need it, as she wanted to insist she would, the free program was a more impactful place to put it anyway, especially if she could sneak it just over the border into the second half of the program for the extra points. He knew Katsuki had been working with everyone on their stamina, even if just by unintentionally showing them it could be done better, so he had hopes for her second half in the free. Just not in the short; it was too short.

And so he was able to win that particular battle. The larger war? Well, he decided to take a page out of Katsuki’s book for that too.

“Look, Mila. Milotchka.” That got her attention; he hadn’t really called her that since she exited juniors. “We both know who you want to watch you. And we both know she has to be watching; you’re first, she’s last, so she has no excuse—not that she needs one after coming to see you in Moscow of all places.” He harrumphed, just so that she would know he wasn’t going too soft around the edges. “Ridiculous as that was, you know she’s watching. So show her what you can do. She won’t look away; don’t let her look away.”

No one could have looked away, even if they had wanted to; Mila’s short program was a thing of beauty, and if she sat in second after the short it was only because Crispino clearly had been watching and had dropped in another combination jump on top of her triple lutz to pull a season’s- and career-best short program out of the nonexistent pockets on her women’s clothing.

Ugh. He was going to have to let Mila jump the quad toe in the free, wasn’t he? Oh well. At least she could hit it. Not even the biggest puppydog eyes or the grandest love affair would have convinced him if she hadn’t.

Chapter Text

The men’s singles competition was destined from the start to be the greatest stress of Yakov’s long career. How could it not be when he had a full half of the qualified skaters, and all three of them had their own complex and intricate dance of interactions? Not to mention that Giacometti was probably Viktor’s best friend who was not his new boyfriend, and Chulanont was the same for Katsuki. He’d even seen Plisetsky voluntarily seek out Altin, which meant that everything in the world was purely topsy-turvydom and there was no point in trying to figure out anything anymore.

At least Lilia had an answer for the last; she’d actually cornered Altin herself and started pestering him about his training regimen. She ended with a sniff and came over to Yakov afterwards. “That boy does not do ballet anymore,” she began without preamble. “Not a great waste to the world of dance, of course, but imagine if he had kept up the flexibility on top of all that strength.” She sat down beside him and drummed her fingers on her leg, a sure sign of Lilia in mid-flow of thought and therefore not to be interrupted. “Perhaps pilates or yoga? I don’t begrudge him the choice to leave ballet, but he confessed to doing mostly practical drills for flexibility, and I would hate to see him waste the cross-training opportunity. He acknowledged that Yurio’s skills were beyond him in that regard, but didn’t seem to have a good grasp on how to adjust.”

He worked very hard to not say “why are you telling me this,” because Lilia hated it when people couldn’t keep up. “He’s not my skater,” he said instead. “But you’re right, of course.”

“Naturally.” She sniffed again. “But now that you’re taking on other nation’s skaters permanently, it’s time to make up for lost time.”

He nodded. Of course she hadn’t forgotten a student she’d taught once, several summers ago, among a group of novices—a group that, now that he thought about it, had included Plisetsky. He should have realized she’d remember that he’d brought Altin over for that one summer, back when the Federation had been encouraging bringing in “Commonwealth of Independent States” skaters (also known, more frankly, as “former Soviets”) for temporary training as a goodwill gesture but before the sanctions had forced them to allow permanent slots to be allocated to non-Russian nationals. “Ah. You think I should offer him a position?”

“Don’t be smart with me, Yakov Feltsman. I know you’re planning on it.”

“I don’t recall asking you to use my last name.” Either when they were married or now.

“Hmph. Then yes, Yakov, I expect to see that boy in St. Petersburg next year. Try Maria; she may not have made it as a dancer, but I believe she has a little studio that might be of use to him.” Maria had been one of Lilia’s favorites, for all she claimed not to have any favorites who didn’t win awards for the academy or the company, but she had broken an ankle at a key point in one of the audition seasons and never fully been able to make her way back into the company after that. No surprise that Lilia had kept abreast of her doings, however. He would, in fact, be surprised if Lilia were not the primary investor in that ‘little studio.’

“I’ll consider it, if he agrees. He’s done quite well for himself in Almaty.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. He’s in love with Yurio. Obviously he’ll come.” And with that little bombshell, Lilia swanned off to talk to Minako.

God, this competition was going to be the death of him, if for no reason than that he was going to die of toxic exposure to hormones.

Katsuki was drawn first in the short program, which had the benefit at least of giving him a good chance of getting through it without panicking about everyone else’s high scores. Yakov was going to give him a pep talk and then glanced at his hand where it was still holding Viktor’s.

Ah yes, the rings.

“Katsuki. Vitya.” He nodded to them both. “Vitya, you’re up last. You can watch Katsuki, but I want you stretching after that.” He turned fully to Katsuki. “Yuuri. I don’t need to tell you anything but this: congratulations, and go show your fiancé your Eros. If you don’t, he won’t focus enough for his own skate, and I know you want to see that.”

“Yes, Coach.” Katsuki blushed down to his neckline, but he kissed Viktor goodbye and skated out onto the ice.

He put up a good score, not threatening Viktor’s record but high enough that Yuuri on Ice ought to put him in a good position for the final. Yakov checked his schedule on his phone while waiting for the actual score—yes, there was already a phone call scheduled with his psychologist for the day of the final. They didn’t need the ghosts of Sochi reaching out to strangle Barcelona.

Then he hurried over to Plisetsky, who was skating second.

“Took you long enough.” Yurio growled, but Yakov could tell his heart wasn’t in it.

“If you’re worried I’m not paying enough attention to you, go show me why I should pay more.” Yakov clapped a hand on Yurio’s shoulder, and he could tell from the perfunctory way the skater shrugged it off that this was nerves. “Viktor choreographed your program too. For you, specifically. Go show him and Katsuki exactly why that was a generous offer but a tactical mistake.” He let a small smile crack onto his face, knowing it would draw Yurio’s attention off his skates. “After all, a true competition is the greatest love you could show either of them—and what is Agape if not selfless love for your friends?”

“They’re not my friends. The old man is an annoyance and Katsudon is an underachiever.” The objection was practically rote at this point. “...Thanks, Coach.”

Yuri Plisetsky was incandescent from the moment the music struck. Yakov didn’t flatter himself that it was all his pep talk, but whatever the young man was thinking about, every gesture came through exquisitely, speaking to the kind of love that didn’t need Katsuki’s Eros to find its mark; the kind that did not require reciprocation because it was deeper, more fundamental than the mere exchange of love for love. He almost could not believe it was Yurio skating that particular skate; it was as if every ounce of combative refusal to acknowledge affection that the boy had within him was stripped away and the deep, abiding, uncompromising affection that it usually shielded was bared to the world.

Even Plisetsky was crying when he came off the ice. Otabek Altin, stretching in the hallway, was frozen mid-motion (he was going to cramp tomorrow, Yakov could tell) and any doubts he had had about Lilia’s intuition in that regard (small though they might have been) were banished.

Even Viktor didn’t have anything playful to say—or perhaps he had actually gone to do his own stretching like he was told, for once.

The score was what it had earned: Viktor Nikiforov no longer held the short program record for senior skaters, and even Katsuki’s excellent performance was over ten points back.

Yakov just had time to hear the swagger in Yurio’s voice as he joined Katsuki in the green room (before being tackled into a hug that knocked them both on the floor—he heard the thump as he turned) before rushing off to deal with his third and last skater.

He barely registered Chulanont getting the crowd clapping along, Giacometti’s sexiness barely holding a candle to Katsuki’s Eros (and therefore ending a few points behind it), or even Altin’s remarkable response to Plisetsky’s record that shot him up into second, with a score that in most competitions would have put him easily atop of the leaderboard. His focus was on Viktor Nikiforov, and tamping down the enthusiasm of a skater who had finally seen a true competitor out on the ice.

“You can change one jump,” he finally told him to get him off his back. “One jump—the lutz, or even the flip we took out, one jump. It’s a short program; you don’t have space or the time to do more. And Vitya—if you try to do more, you risk the free program entirely. Save your knees for Bolero.”

Viktor nodded, but he was fairly certain he hadn’t heard him.

Well, he had apparently heard the part about being allowed to change a jump, because his first jump out of the gate was that damn quad flip. He hit it, of course, but it threw off the rhythm of the routine just enough that he could already tell it wasn’t going to score as high as it had at Skate America, though it could still exceed the NHK. Unfortunately, he could see from Viktor’s body language that the skater knew it too, and so he was probably the only person in the entire arena who was not surprised when Viktor’s third jumping pass turned into the quad lutz—or when he doublefooted it and touched ice.

“Idiot.” He hissed under his breath as he embraced Vitya after he finished. “I told you to change one jump. You could have been in third, maybe fourth, depending on the PCS.”

“And now I’m in fifth. But Yakov! I rotated it! Aren’t you proud of me?”

“Foolish boy. Of course you rotated it. You are my skater, since when could you put in a jump you didn’t rotate? We’ll have to work on the placement, though; you don’t have the stamina for that to be your last jump.”

“Oh, Yakov! I knew you cared!” Viktor seemed less put out than he’d expected him to be to be in fifth. But then, as he watched Katsuki and Plisetsky latch onto him as soon as he reached the locker room, perhaps he had reason to be upbeat.

And there was always the free skate, anyway.

Chapter Text

Any normal coach the day after that particular men’s short program skate would have been spending concentrated time with his skater, trying to figure out what to do about the free. Yuri Plisetsky had just broken the nigh-untouchable record Viktor Nikiforov had once held; Nikiforov himself had touched down and ended in fifth, but also tried and rotated a jump he had never previously pulled out of his bag, and no one who knew Viktor’s record would fail to believe he was going to continue using it and master it as soon as possible, probably by the free; Otabek Altin was in second place with a score that would have equaled Nikiforov’s from last year’s Grand Prix Final; and Katsuki Yuuri and Christophe Giacometti were known as finishers, not starters, but had both placed quite reasonably as well, meaning they were also lurking in the wings.

Phichit Chulanont was also skating. It was not exactly fair to the young Thai skater, Yakov knew, to dismiss him in that way, but it was clear that this was an exceptional year, and he was the second-youngest skater on the ice. He’d be a real force to contend with in the future, much like Katsuki last year; but this year he was unlikely to reach forth for gold.

Still, any normal coach would have been trying to find whatever he could pull out of whatever hole he hid his craziest ideas in to help his skater push forward, because it was clear just from the short program that the free in the men’s competition was going to be pure madness.

Yakov, of course, was not any normal coach. He had a skater going into her own free skate, one who he had to coach through landing her first quad toe in competition; he had three on the men’s side, meaning he had literally not enough hours in the day to coach them all appropriately.

It was a blessing that he had so many willing hands (and eyes, and ears, and skates). Lilia had shooed him away when he’d tried to come to Viktor’s practice that morning, sniffing that she could deal perfectly well with one recalcitrant, ridiculous skater child, thank you very much. He’d taken the time to work with Mila on the quad toe, and particularly on actually integrating it into the free skate in a way that looked organic rather than like she’d decided to toss her biggest jump at her biggest problem willy-nilly.

Then Minako had taken one arm and (to his surprise) Katsuki Mari had taken the other and marched him out of Katsuki’s practice immediately after, with Minako rolling her eyes and insisting that if Lilia can do it, so can I. He’d used that time to go over the rest of Mila’s program with her, making sure that she didn’t neglect any of the material she’d worked so hard to perfect just because she was jumping a quad now.

Finally Viktor of all people slipped in the door and locked it in his face when he tried to go to Yurio’s practice; he got a text from him saying “sleep, Yakov!” and a stupid selfie of him with a thumbs up, and they didn’t open the door when he rattled it.

Wisdom being nine-tenths doing the the thing right in front of you and doing it right, regardless of whether you wanted to, he crashed for an hour’s nap.

Then it was time for Mila’s free skate.

He did not have time or energy to spend really focusing on any of the other competitor’s skates before her. Yes, they were the four best other women in the world besides her and Sara Crispino. Yes, one of them (he thought the American, skating third, but he only got a glance at a red white and blue flag while going over her routine with her again, so it might plausibly have been the French skater, going second) scored highly enough that Mila was going to need her normal A game to even make a silver (he would have to watch that skate on video afterwards—it must have been very impressive). But Mila needed someone (and the only someone was him) to keep her out of her own head. She needed someone to grump at her so that she could put on the Mila Babicheva show: they couldn’t really provide the group extroversion that was most helpful for her, since so many of those associated with their group were practicing for their own skate tomorrow and therefore would have to watch her on the television or slip into the stands at the very last moment. So she would turn all that onto him—they’d done this before, after all, when it had been just them at tournaments—and he would gruffly deflect it and she would laugh at him and all her energy would get out that way.

Or not.

“Mila, talk me through the quad toe sequence.” If she was not calming down—and he could tell she was not calming down—he’d have to try things he tried with other skaters. In this case, this was his go-to with Viktor before this year: technical work as a distraction from the scene itself.

As Mila detailed exactly what they’d tweaked to allow her the run-up to the quad toe instead of the triple it was replacing and give her the additional speed to produce the additional height and spin needed, starting from the previous jump, he watched her body language closely. No, this wasn’t what she needed either, though it was probably helpful to have her go over the new routine.

“Alright.” He sighed. It probably wasn’t a good idea to piss Mila off, which was his go-to with Plisetsky most of the time. So what was left was...the Katsuki method.

“Crispino can’t watch you, because she’s skating right after you.” She snapped to attention as soon as he said the name. “But if you do well enough, she’ll have to watch the replays while she’s warming up. Make it worth it.”

“Yes, Coach.” She winked at him—that was the Mila he knew. “I’ll do that.”

She did. The quad toe, if nothing else—but the score was high enough to vault her over...oh, it was both the American and the French skater, everyone in the women’s was a slow starter and fast finisher, it seemed—but there was also a sparkle to her movements, a precision to her deep edges, that spoke to the power of the training that they’d put in and the inspiration that was clearly working for her.

He grumped at her in the Kiss and Cry, because how could he not—she would have been shocked if he had not—but not about anything in particular. It hadn’t been a flawless skate, but with the quad toe...yes, it was a personal best.

He watched Crispino watch those very same replays he’d told Mila she would, and saw the squaring of her shoulders that said she’d seen the challenge in those jumps and that sparkle. He also saw her push herself to her utmost—to another personal best, in fact—and still fall short.

She didn’t have a quad, after all.

One gold medal down.

One to go.

Though which of his men’s skaters would bring it home, he could absolutely not have told you.

Chapter Text

Despite the furor and kerfuffle that always attended a victory, in this case Mila’s, Yakov nevertheless found time and space to check in with all three of his men’s competitors that evening and continued to work with them the following day before their evening competition (he couldn’t imagine what he would do if he ever had pairs or ice dancers, who were performing during the downtimes of his other skaters—go mad, probably). During this time he found out that the responses of his three men’s skaters to their respective rankings was rather more similar than different, though each of them thought that he was having a unique and special reaction to the situation.

Yurio was used to being in first place, a point that he repeatedly emphasized throughout their discussion and even into the actual drills. Yakov suspected he was rather overcompensating, but then again little Yurio had been overcompensating most of his life: for his height, for his youth, for his preference for figure skating over other sports, and for his fans and their overeager determination to make of him the ethereal skater he did not actually want to be.

He was also grimly certain that “the old man has one more surprise in him,” and his response was, like his skating, more that of the ancient fae than the modern fairy: “I’m going to take his best shot, smile, and gut him with my ice shoes.” Which, fortunately enough, was a metaphor for wanting to make sure his final skate was a personal best, and not a literal declaration that he would leave the other skater bleeding out on the ice, though Yakov wasn’t entirely sure he wouldn’t do that if he could get away with it. Well, that was unfair; it was clear that this year, with Viktor as his jump coach, had brought Plisetsky further away from his reflexive hatred of Viktor (or at least made that a rhetorical position and not real) and towards something like an angry, grudging respect.

His feelings towards Katsuki had mellowed even further. “That idiot is probably getting himself sick right now, so I don’t have to worry about him,” he sniffed. “In fact, you ought to check in on him; make sure he’s getting fluids and keeping food down. He could probably skate something amazing if he tried, but it’s going to be just like Sochi again.” Yakov could hear the concern underlying the bravado, and made a mental note to never tell Plisetsky how transparent he was.

Anyway, Plisetsky was adamant that, first place or no, he was redoing the jumps in the free, and Yakov couldn’t deny him; after all, he also knew that Viktor was not going to take fifth place lying down, even if he had been strangely upbeat about being actually challenged during the short program. And Plisetsky did have a less than terrible (better than the others’) quad lutz...so in it went.

And in went the quad flip-triple toe combination in place of the regular quad flip, and so on down the line. If Plisetsky was going to lose, he was going to lose while doing his absolute damnedest—and if he was going to win, he was going to win in style.

Yakov respected that, and he was going to do his best to help him do so.

However, that also meant doing his best to help his competition, since he could hardly play favorites (and how could he—it would have been a ouroboros of preference between the three?). And besides, Plisetsky’s knife-shoes threat would have extended to him had he detected even the slightest hint of not doing his best for the others. Yuri Plisetsky wanted to win more than he wanted to breathe, but a win was only a win for him if the others did their level best and he still triumphed. A good kid, that one.

Viktor was Viktor, which meant that not only was the quad lutz already planned into the routine before Yakov got to see him, but all the other embellishments to Bolero were in place as well. All Yakov really had to do was formally approve them, tweak a few entrance moves here and there, and remind him over and over again that PCS was just as necessary as technical skill: Lilia was working with Plisetsky as they spoke about the “passion” in Allegro Appassionato, and no one could doubt Katsuki’s scores for Yuuri on Ice. Not that there was any doubt this season about Viktor, unlike the last couple when he’d been a bit down. But still—technical prowess was all well and good, and indeed was very good and very well, but it was not enough.

Bolero still had to surprise people, because if it could do that, then the PCS couldn’t be anything but grand.

Viktor nodded along and then confided in him that he would have no problem latching onto the emotion of the piece: he and Katsuki were getting married, he said, when one of them won gold, and the pursuit of that would power him through the bullfight.

Yakov said nothing about the ending Viktor’s bullfight was choreographed to have, him falling before the unattainable bull, and simply turned the conversation to Viktor’s step sequences.

Katsuki...Katsuki was, oddly enough, not the ball of stress about that potential marriage that he normally would have been. He wasn’t even as stressed about being in third as he’d expected. In fact, if he’d had to put a word to Katsuki’s mental state, it would have been (for the first time since he’d met him) calm.

It was almost eerie.

But Katsuki explained it and suddenly it all made sense: Katsuki believed that Viktor was going to win gold. Therefore, whatever he did didn’t matter; they’d be getting married anyway. He graciously accepted Yakov’s grumpy insistence that they still punch up his routines (“I want him to be proud of me,” he said, as if Viktor wasn’t literally carrying around a picture of Katsuki in his wallet and showing it to random passersby and technical staff as they waited for the practice to finish, gleefully shouting ‘that’s my fiancé’ every time). But he really didn’t feel the pressure; he believed he didn’t need to win, because Viktor was going to do that.

Yakov would not accept this. Not that he wanted stressed out Katsuki Yuuri. Not at all. But he was not here for one of his competitors blindly accepting another’s victory. Not on his watch.

“And if Vitya breaks his leg?” He watched Katsuki’s face crumple and waved it off. “Fine, forget that. If Plistesky lands four different quads after you’ve both skated, and Vitya’s score can’t overcome a twenty-five point differential? You’re almost twenty behind, but that gives you a cushion on Vitya. If you want that wedding, you have to be ready to skate a score that earns it yourself, and not trust that Vitya can come from behind. When was the last time he had to do that, anyway?”

“Cup of China, five years ago. Cao Bin was overscored on the short and Viktor-kun tripled a quad. He beat him by twenty-five on the free skate.” Of course Katsuki knew that.

“Yes. Five years ago. It’s not his specialty, is it? But it is yours. You’re the one who crushes free skates after middling short programs. You’ve done it your whole career. Do it again. Do it for Vitya.”

Katsuki took their re-programming of his free skate more seriously after that.

Although it didn’t seem like it was like going to be entirely necessary, because after Chulanont went out and did a perfectly respectable routine (producing a combined score that would have medaled at Sochi, and was likely doomed to sixth, or fifth if someone fell) Viktor took the ice.

No, Viktor Nikiforov did.

When Yakov had first coached Vitya, there had been a hunger there, a need to prove himself, in the same way he supposed that Yuri Plisetsky now had. That Viktor had for years come onto the ice with a swagger that, he now realized seeing it again, had slowly leaked out of him over time. Sochi Viktor had gone onto the ice knowing no one could beat him, but in the sense that none of them were at his level. Earlier Viktor—and today’s Viktor—believed that no one could beat him because he was at a level where he did not have to care about their level.

In short, this was Viktor Nikiforov, the man who could do things no one else could do on the ice, not because the other skaters were weaker, but because he was Viktor Nikiforov, and nothing else mattered.

The slow incantation of Bolero began and Viktor was a revelation. Previously when skating this routine, even at the NHK Trophy when he’d made it entirely his own, there had still been no way to forget that this was Bolero, that it was perhaps the most overdone program music of all time, and this was Viktor Nikiforov putting his own championship spin on it. It had been revelatory, wonderful, amazing, all the adjectives you could pile together, but it had still been Bolero. Familiar, but reinvented.

Now he could actually forget it was Bolero entirely. It was just Vitya, skating over some repetitive music, and inhabiting the character it seemed he had been born to play on the ice. He landed every jump perfectly. Four quads: toe loop, salchow, flip, even the lutz. Quad-triple combinations, even. He was magical. He was divine.

He was Viktor Nikiforov.

And when the blue roses cascaded onto the ice and he skated over to Yakov on the way to the Kiss and Cry, there was only one criticism he could muster to show Vitya his love and pride.

“Where was that all season?”

There was no surprise at all when the scores came in and Viktor had finally done it: he had broken his own unbreakable record for a free skate. He had come in a hair under 320 points after starting under 100. And he had thrown down a massive challenge to the remaining skaters.

Beat that, his routine said.

There had to be real doubt in every mind that they possibly could.

Chapter Text

You had to hand it to Christophe Giacometti, Yakov mused. Most skaters, following a skate like Viktor had just thrown down, would have deflated entirely and turned in a skate that might have left Chulanont still clinging onto his respectable skate in second. But maybe Christophe was just used to skating when Viktor had ridiculous scores, or maybe he’d decided to get the most out of the rare opportunity to skate after Viktor in a free skate, but whatever it was he did not go gentle into that good night.

He also didn’t beat Viktor, but that almost went without saying.

Yakov didn’t see the whole routine, because he was too focused on Katsuki going next. But he could hear the crowd in the background, and they didn’t seem like they were emotionally exhausted from the grandeur of Viktor’s skate; they seemed like they were engaged, and that meant Giacometti was on.

However, he kept his attention on Katsuki. He’d recruited Katsuki because he believed the skater could do great things—could do things even Viktor couldn’t do—and he was not about to let him slide through underneath Viktor’s greatness in their first skate directly against each other under his watch.

He just had to figure out how to unleash the competitor he knew was there underneath the layers of Katsuki’s other concerns, stressors, and conditions.

Katsuki was warmed up. He was prepared, physically. Now Yakov had to talk to him; always the hardest part of the job, but the one he was starting to relish with Katsuki, who (unlike Viktor and even Yurio) obviously cared what he had to say—or perhaps more accurately, obviously listened (since both Viktor and Yurio did, quite clearly, care, even if they ignored him).

“It looks like Vitya’s done your job for you.” He clapped Katsuki on the back. “After a skate like that, who could deny him the gold?”

“He really was amazing, wasn’t he?” Katsuki beamed, and Yakov nodded.

“He was. Now, he’s given you an amazing present—that skate was for you, and you know it. What are you going to give him?”

“Huh?” Katsuki looked like this had never occurred to him before.

“You don’t have to worry about gold. Vitya has that covered for you, doesn’t he, with that world record score? All you have to think about is the fact that Vitya is sitting in the green room right now, watching that screen, and he will be watching when you skate. Whatever you skate, however you skate, that’s for him.”

“It’s always for him.” Katsuki squared his shoulders. “You know that.”

“I know that. He knows that. But show us. And show all those people. They’re all out there, thinking that Vitya put out the best performance we’re going to see tonight, and you know, historically, they’re probably right.” He snorted. “But they don’t have to be. You skate what you want Vitya to see. You skate what you want to give to Vitya. You’ve been skating Yuuri on Ice for you both, wondering where this season would take you—where the last twenty-three years have taken you. Now you know. You’re going to marry my Vitya. Show him what that means to you, Katsuki.”

“Yes, Coach.” Katsuki hugged him. He wasn’t an octopus like Vitya, but he was surprisingly strong. It was only a moment, and then he was out on the ice.

He glanced up—Giacometti had indeed passed Chulanont, but only barely, and Viktor was still in the stratosphere above them both—then back out onto the ice.

His gaze didn’t leave Katsuki for the rest of the routine.

When he’d first started watching Katsuki, for Viktor’s competitor reports, he’d been struck by the musicality of his skating. Everyone always was; even now that he had—yes, he had landed—a quad lutz and a quad flip, they still talked up his PCS above all. And deservedly so. Then, when he’d seen Stammi Vicino and flown halfway and more across the world to sign that skater to a contract, he’d seen the potential power of his skating too; seen it in Viktor’s routine, and then gone back and excavated it out of his prior work, ignoring the overly simply material Cialdini had given him and keeping his focus on what could be, what was possible. Over the year of coaching, he’d kept pushing Katsuki in that direction, though usually indirectly: letting Viktor push his physicality, Minako hone his music and his steps, his psychologist help him cope with the pressures of being at the center of attention as well as the center of the ice.
But he’d never seen it all come together quite like it did tonight.

Yuuri on Ice had never been an easy program, but he had still been working with a skater in Katsuki Yuuri who was transitioning out of Cialdini’s overly simply routines and moving towards something stronger, something more demanding. It had been the hardest routine he thought Katsuki could handle now, plus a little, rather than the hardest routine he could handle ever. It probably still wasn’t that—but with the changes he, Katsuki, Minako, and (presumably) Viktor had made to ramp up the difficulty for this finals, it was somewhere closer.

It was not just Yuuri on Ice, the story of how Katsuki had gotten here; it was Yuuri, on ice, the man he had become, the skater he had become, showing himself off. Telling the world: you see that routine Viktor Nikiforov just skated, the one that blew you all away and shattered your hearts into a thousand pieces? He did that for me. And I deserved every moment of it, because I’m going to take ever shattered shard of your hearts and glue them back together again, stronger and more beautiful than before.

The technical difficulty of this routine was, almost impossibly, higher than Viktor’s Bolero had ended up, because Viktor simply could not do some of the sequences Katsuki could. And the presentation...every single member of that audience, Yakov thought, could have written Katsuki’s biography by heart after that skate, because every single nuance, every little moment of it came through as clear as a bright winter day over the Neva.

If Viktor had stormed into the rink and reminded everyone that Viktor Nikiforov was still Viktor Nikiforov, Katsuki had just done something even more impressive: he had just informed them all that Viktor Nikiforov was no longer on top of men’s singles.

They sat in the Kiss and Cry and for once in his life Yakov felt the urge to use it for the second of its named purposes.

Because for all that Vitya had just broken his own unreachable, unattainable, impossible mark? Yuuri had just pushed a quarter point past that new record. And with his higher score from the short program?

Katsuki Yuuri was in gold medal position, with two skaters to go.

Chapter Text

You couldn’t fault Otabek Altin’s work ethic. Maybe Lilia was right; maybe he should continue to expand his lineup of skaters beyond the Russian Federation. It wasn’t as if those sanctions were going away anytime soon, so having another senior male skater to amortize the costs by paying rink fees would be easily defensible to the federation (even if some of those rink fees might be initially covered again by the Nikiforov fund, it wasn’t as if he could legally touch Nikiforov fund monies without a skater to associate them with). Although that all depended on Altin accepting his offer, and for all that Lilia was certain he was hung up on Yurio, Yakov hadn’t seen it himself and so wasn’t going to commit to certainty on that point. Though doubting Lilia had never worked out well before…

Anyway, Altin had to have known, assuming he had a coach that could count or a moment of his own to look at the scoreboard, that it would take a superhuman effort for him to launch himself past either Viktor or Katsuki. His career high in the free skate was not even near 200; it would have taken a 207 or higher to pass Viktor, let alone Katsuki.

That wasn’t to say that he didn’t give it the ole college try.

He wasn’t sure when Altin had learned a quad flip—maybe he was watching old Nikiforov footage like Katsuki had, or maybe he was just preternaturally talented—but there it was, and there was only a small wobble on the landing. He wasn’t sure when his motions had been butter-smooth on the ice; he recalled a rather more powerful, less artistic skater, one who had (after all) given up ballet for modern dance after a summer in St. Petersburg. Hell, he’d watched the boy twice this year against Viktor, and while he’d done extremely credibly to take both silvers, he’d never looked this good.

It wasn’t enough, but it was a personal record, and it was the kind of thing that could easily be a springboard to greater things, if he had a coach who was capable of building him up from it.

Yakov made a mental note to check in with his coach, and with him, about whether Almaty was really prepared to provide that for him going forward.

He had time to look at Altin’s performance because Yuri Plisetsky was in competition mode, which meant that talking to him was pointless until he was literally just about to go onto the ice. Well, maybe competition mode wasn’t quite the right term, since he didn’t do this in every competition or before every skate. In fact, he’d never seen it except skating against Katsuki or Viktor—so at Rostelecom, and in the informal competitions they occasionally held at the rink. Maybe it was better to call it his little brother face then; the one that said “I don’t care what he did, I’m better.”

Lilia was the only one fool enough or brave enough or simply unconcerned with his temper enough to talk to him now, and she was going over the Allegro with him in hushed tones.

To Yakov’s shock, he was actually nodding. He was engaged. He was paying attention.

Maybe the chance of losing truly was what Yurio needed to become his better self.

Lilia too was clearly more engaged than she’d realized, as he saw her unbend enough to actually demonstrate a movement rather than simply talking it out. She never did that with his skaters. It was simultaneously something she insisted no true dancer should need (“if you cannot imagine it with your body from your mind, you are not truly in tune with your body and there is nothing I can say to you,” she had remarked one time when Viktor had gotten frustrated and yelled that she should just show him) and something she did only with her most proficient dancers (he remembered one golden evening in their house in St. Petersburg—probably golden only with nostalgia and age, as the light there was almost never as good as he remembered it being—when she and Minako had leapt their way through the living room, which had been kept much cleaner back then he remembered with a wince, working out the ending of one of her solo pieces).

She must be more invested in Yurio than he’d thought. Or perhaps it was investment in her student beating Minako’s—not that the two of them had not spent ample time each talking to both Katsuki and Plisetsky, but that didn’t change who each of them had begun their training with or who they looked to as the ultimate authority. Whatever it was, she quickly returned to her resting pose and started firing off suggestions at Yurio nonstop, and he...nodded through it all.

He had never seen Plisetsky in that much of a zone.

Soon enough, sooner than might have been best, it was time for him to give Plisetsky his last words before going on the ice, Altin’s score having nestled into a comfortable third well above Giacometti and Chulanont but equally well below Viktor and Katsuki.

“I know, I know, it’ll take a miracle to beat them. Spare me.” Plisetsky was already snarling before he opened his mouth.

Yakov shook his head. “That’s not the point. The point is that you are the world record holder for the short program, and no free program can take that away from you. The point is that you belong on that ice just as much as either of them. Everyone’s impressed with Katsuki and Vitya? Make them remember how much more they were impressed by you two days ago. I want that whole podium, Yuri Plisestky, and I know you want it more than me. Go out and show them exactly who is skating last today and why.”

“Yes, Yakov.” Plisetsky’s shoulders, which had been hunched up, he now realized, in anticipation of something like the speech he’d apparently been imagining, straightened. “You’re right. Screw both of the old men. I’m Yuri Plisetsky.”

That hadn’t necessarily been the flavor of the takeaway that he’d intended, but it would do.

Yurio had hit a career high at the Rostelecom free skate, but there was no question, given the tweaks to the base values here, that he was going to break that apart if he landed all his jumps. The question was whether that would be, could be, enough to surpass Viktor—or ahead of him, Katsuki.

When Yurio took the ice, the sheer energy with which he took his initial pose took the audience’s attention and focused it on him with an unwavering insistence that he never allowed them to release. Here I am, it insisted, and you cannot look away even for a moment, because you might miss what I’m going to do next. His PCS remained high; Lilia might have gutted him like a fish if he’d let that go just for higher technical score, and he could recognize the moves she’d been talking about and marking as new transitions into the increased difficulty of the jumps. The technical was excellent as well, though the quad lutz (which of course he brought to the skate, impossible boy) was if anything over-rotated, as if he’d decided to commit every ounce of his strength to it and only realized too late that his strength was actually greater than he realized. He held onto the landing, though, and a half a beat, a quarter beat, a quaver later you wouldn’t have thought anything had ever been off.

He was good.

No, he was great. Last year in Sochi, he would have been a shoo-in for second and a challenger for first. Hell, here in Barcelona he was doing the impossible, challenging two record-breaking performances with the chaser to his own record from two days before.

In the end, it turned out, he fell short of last year’s Yurio had achieved a lifelong dream, beating Viktor fair and square on the international stage because while he didn’t beat his score from Sochi, Viktor’s score this was just enough lower than last year’s. But Katsuki Yuuri remained on another level; his world record in the free was enough to beat out Viktor and pip Yurio by a bit over a point.

A miracle for silver.

A podium all Yakov’s own.

He wondered what on earth was going to happen in the rest of the season if this was the Grand Prix Finals.

Chapter Text

Yakov didn’t usually pay much if any attention to the exhibition skates. He made sure his skaters weren’t doing anything too dangerous or unprofessional, ensured they’d practiced enough to not discredit him, and let them go. It was the easiest way to create some small bits of peace in his world: one routine that he didn’t have to argue through or try to calibrate perfectly to what his skaters could do and what they would do. In all honesty, if he could have skipped the exhibition entirely, he would have done so, because his job was done, and while he had nothing at all against having some fun in figure skating (why else was he in figure skating, he would respond if you had asked, other than the sunk cost fallacy, a certain gluttony for punishment, and the fun of it?) he enjoyed the exhibitions more as the moment when he finally got to rest and less as something to actually watch.

But for the Grand Prix Final, he knew that Yuuri and Viktor were planning to do their paired Stammi Vicino, and that was his program, damn it all, so he was planning not only to watch but to actively prepare them both for the fatigue of doing another full-length free program instead of the usual silliness.

He was focused on them, and their needs, until Lilia stormed up to him and stuck her finger in his face.

“What is this I hear about Yuri doing a double skate?”

He gestured out towards the ice. “Honestly, I think it’s cute. Stammi Vicino was always about Viktor trying to find someone; with Katsuki winning the gold they’re going to get married this off-season. They asked me to help them…”

She cut him off, which was relatively unusual for her with anyone else but he noticed she did frequently with him. “I’m not talking about them.” She sniffed at the ice. “It looks good. They deserve it. No, I’m talking about the other Yuri. Plisetsky.”

He stared. “What?”

“Don’t gawk, Yakov, it’s not a good look on you.” She pulled out a cameraphone, to his utter surprise (sometimes he wondered if Lilia really knew it was the twenty-first century and not the late nineteenth, when ballet had dominated the Russian cultural sphere) and shoved it in his face. He blinked and read the text.

“With Altin?” He shook his head. “I don’t know anything about this.”

“Of course with Altin. Who else does Yurio know? The other two idiots are out here, and Mila is too obsessed with la belle Crispina to do anything with him.” She put the phone away and rolled her eyes. “Besides, I told you already, Altin is in love with Yurio. Of course he’d do a skate with him, just like these two idiots in love are doing. If anything, he probably suggested it.”

“Maybe.” He wasn’t going to discount her intuition on this point given that he had barely known they knew each other. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“Well, you can’t stop it.” She put her hands on her hips. “I’d tell you you ought to, and you really ought to, but we both know that Plisetsky is temperamental.” Coming from Lilia, who had stared down more than her share of primas over the years and had her own reputation as well, that was as good as saying ‘he’ll throw a shit fit right on the ice.’ “So you probably can’t. So I need you to go make sure he’s not going to make an idiot out of himself or Altin. And while you’re there, you might as well scout him out. He’s not a ballerina, but you’d be an idiot yourself to let him slip through your fingers.”

He refrained bodily from mentioning that Altin was not in fact already in his grasp, and nodded. “Fine. But you need to make sure these fools in love stay on task and don’t…oy! Do that on your own time!” He bellowed at Katsuki and Viktor who had stopped practicing lifts and started kissing. “No kissing on the ice!”

“But Yakov, we call everything on the ice love!” Viktor laughed back, and he rolled his eyes in response.

“Yes, we call it love because it is not literally love. If you want to craft a step sequence that expresses your desire to kiss Katsuki, or if he wants to jump a quad flip so you kiss him again, be my guest, but no kissing on the ice.”

“Fine!” Viktor started skating very quickly for the exit from the ice, towing Katsuki behind him, before Lilia stopped him with a word.

“Vitya.” He stopped with a splash of snow on the ice, grinding to a halt and then to attention. Clearly he hadn’t realized she was there. “Practice now. Kissing later. Do not make me come out on the ice and stop you.”

“Yes, Madame.” Katsuki was blushing redder than the sun on the Japanese flag patch on his track suit. “No, Madame.”

“It’s good to see one of you understands that there is a time and a place for everything.” She turned to Yakov and cocked an eyebrow. “Well? What are you doing here still? Go make sure Plisetsky doesn’t break a leg, or Altin’s leg, or something. And make sure he doesn’t embarrass me.”

He doubted anything Plisetsky could do would actually embarrass her, but he simply nodded and went over to the other ice surface where he now knew Plisetsky and Altin were practicing.

Ah. Yes, Lilia was going to hate this.

But it was a good skate. And it spoke to both Plisetsky’s and Altin’s journeys on the ice this year. So he couldn’t actually veto it. He did take the opportunity to (as gently as possible, which was in retrospect probably not very gently) chat up Altin’s coach and ask how the facilities were in Almaty, which led to a soft sigh and a request that “if you’re going to steal my skater, wait until after he wins nationals, please? I need the funding.”

That, he could do. Altin came over and it quickly became clear why the coach was so resigned; he was quiet and reserved as Yakov had remembered him being (except on the ice—that exhibition was ridiculous) but it was fairly clear despite that that he was very interested in what Yakov had to say—in a way that suggested that this was not the first time he’d thought about what it would be like to get instruction from him again.

Nothing was resolved but...once you staked a claim to skate on the same ice with Yakov’s skaters, he didn’t think you were likely to back out.

The exhibition itself was good fun, he supposed. No ankles, hips, knees, etc were injured, the Stammi Vicino was not up to actual pairs skate standards but competent enough, he supposed, and Lilia only sniffed three times during Welcome to the Madness and glared at him once.

All in all, a successful enough exhibition.

And if he got a little drunk at the gala, who could blame him? When was the last time a coach had swept the podium and had three world records set in a single competition? Never, that was when.

He had every right to enjoy himself, and besides—Katsuki and Viktor had snuck out early, to the loud disappointment of Chulanont and Giacometti, and Yurio and Altin were in a corner somewhere and Mila and her Sara were dancing the cha-cha under Lilia’s and Minako’s tutelage, so there was nothing for him to worry about.

Chapter Text

Yakov woke up with a headache that for once was not Viktor’s fault, or even Yurio’s. He glanced about his bedroom in the hotel and nothing seemed particularly out of place, so he hadn’t gotten too rowdy the night before; he generally had a fairly hard head, though now that he was older than he liked to admit he was not insensible to the possibility of a hangover. Still, hangovers were merely physical distractions, and it wasn’t as if he had anything else to do today except pack and get out of the hotel to fly back to St. Petersburg.

He was in a foul mood, though, as they sat and waited for Aeroflot to get their act together and actually fly them back to St. Petersburg, so he snapped at Katsuki as if he was Viktor when he first approached him in the airport. Seeing Katsuki’s face fall, he pinched the bridge of his nose, avoided shaking his head because that was likely to make things worse, and tried again.

“What is it?” Katsuki probably still experienced that as snappish, but it was really the best he could be expected to do on however much sleep he’d gotten, with a headache, and without his coffee because Yurio had promised to come back with drinks for everyone and he’d been too much in pain to realize that Yurio being helpful probably meant there was an ulterior motive.

“Nothing, Coach!” Katsuki waved his hands in front of his face like this was that one American movie Viktor had insisted he watch when they found it on TV his first night at Skate America...Star-something, whatever it was...and he could make Yakov forget he’d said anything.

“Out with it,” he grumbled. “We’re here until the never-sufficiently-bedamned airline gets its act together and a plane comes to the gate, so you might as well spit it out.”

“It’s just…” Katsuki wrung his hands and Yakov made a silent “get on with it” gesture that was deliberately not obscene. “The Russian and Japanese nationals are both in three weeks.”

“Yes?” Yakov tipped his head back and pinched the bridge of his nose again. “I am aware of this. I have a coach for you in Japan, I’ll stay here with the Russians so the federation doesn’t cut off our funding, gold medals for everyone, yada yada yada. What is it?”

“You have a coach for me in Japan?” Katsuki seemed distracted. “Since when?”

“Since I’m your coach and I can read a calendar,” he snapped. “What, did you think I was some kind of schlemiel, that I’d take on a skater and not have a coach for you when I had to be in Russia?” To be fair, he’d been planning for it to be Minako before Yuuko had shown her skills at the NHK and taken him up on his emailed offer, but the point was that he’d always had a plan. He sighed. “So yes, I have a coach for you. Was that the point?”

“Oh! No...that wasn’t the question.” Katsuki bowed. “Coach Yakov, I want to ask you: do you think I can win the Japanese nationals?”

“What kind of a question is that?” He waved a hand at where Katsuki was still wearing the Grand Prix Final gold medal because Viktor wouldn’t let him take it off, for reasons he very much did not want to investigate now or ever. “You just won the Grand Prix. Do you think Japan is hiding some kind of genius skater who for personal reasons just decided not to skate in the Grand Prix competition this year?”

“No, Coach.” If Katsuki were Viktor or Yurio he’d have stamped his foot, but Katsuki just let out a huff of air. “It’s just...are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” He remembered Minako’s advice about how to deal with Katsuki. “I am absolutely positive, Yuuri, that you can do this.” He sat up and glanced around. Still no Yurio and thus no coffee. “In fact...how about a bet?”

“A bet?” Katsuki looked confused, which Yakov supposed was fair.

“A bet. You win All-Japan, and I’ll teach you something that will keep Yurio and Vitya off your back.” Even in his hungover state, he found Katsuki’s blinking response hilarious. Perhaps especially in his hungover state. “Yuuri, you didn’t really think they were going to take your gold medal laying down? Just let you win every time?”

“It’s not that, Coach, it’s…” Katsuki started and trailed off, and suddenly Yakov understood.

“You somehow thought there was a question if you’d be skating against them again this year?” Katsuki nodded. “Yuuri, even if you lose All-Japan, even if you lose it as badly as last year, they’re sending you to Worlds. You just won the Grand Prix Final. They would be idiots not to.”

“But…”

“No buts.” He shook his head. “Here is what is going to happen. You will win All-Japan. You will come back and we will all be exhausted from this ridiculous schedule we are all on, but once you do come back I will teach you a jump neither of them can do. And then we will see who wins Worlds. Farshteyn?”

“Yes, Coach.” Katsuki straightened up and then bowed again. “Thank you, Coach.”

“Thank me by figuring out where the hell Plisetsky went with our money and my coffee.” He waved a hand. “And don’t you worry about All-Japan. The biggest concern you should have about that is how many times Vitya is going to videochat you at awkward hours of the day and night because of the time difference. And don’t forget to greet your fans! Especially the other skaters—that Kenjirou Minami will be heartbroken if his gold-medal-winning idol doesn’t say hello.”

“Yes, Coach.” He thought Katsuki might have been smiling, but noticing would have required keeping his eyes more open than he preferred so he didn’t.

Eventually Yurio did come back, though the brash way he strutted forward with terrible Starbucks in hand suggested he’d been doing something surreptitious—probably calling Altin, from the way he carefully avoided mentioning the other’s name while boasting about the other skaters he’d beat at the national championships, Europeans, and then Worlds. But Yakov didn’t really care as long as caffeine flooded his system and the headache receded.

Tomorrow, he would have to figure out how to teach Katsuki the quad axel. For now, he would wait for Aeroflot to get its act together and drink more bad coffee while ignoring the world.

Chapter Text

It was unclear to Yakov which of Viktor and Yuri Plisetsky was more motivated towards triumph in the upcoming Russian championships. One thing was certain; it was not Georgi, who had confided that he was aiming for the podium but that he had no interest in learning a quad lutz or anything like that.

“I want to do this routine as well as I can,” he told Yakov, “and then...I think it’s time that I found something else to do.”

“Retirement?” He wasn’t entirely surprised. Georgi was, after all, the same age as Viktor, and most skaters by that age who had not won multiple consecutive gold medals were already retired.

“Maybe.” Georgi winked, and Yakov felt like there was something he’d missed in the madness surrounding all his other skaters. “I’ll let you know.”

He shrugged mentally and agreed. If there was another crazy thing coming down the pike, he’d deal with that when it happened. No need to borrow trouble for himself right now.

Viktor, however, was practically manic, insisting that he needed a gold medal to give Katsuki because Katsuki had given him one. The suggestion, broached finally by Mila, that perhaps any of his practically uncountable gold medals from the past decade might do was laughed to scorn. “He already saw me win all of those! I have to win a new one! Yuuri is worth a million gold medals!”

When Yurio pointed out that Yuuri could win his own gold medals, “you idiot,” Viktor took the opportunity to turn the tables on him. “Yurtle! Are you saying you don’t need to be the top turtle in the world after all? Are you saying Yuuri can beat you fair and square again?”

“Who the hell is Yurtle? I meant the Japanese championships and the Four Continents, old man!” Yurio did his best to get Viktor into a headlock, but giving several inches of height and many kilograms of weight meant all he did was awkwardly embrace the older skater before cursing and pushing him away again. “I’m gonna destroy you both at Worlds!”

“You’re welcome to keep thinking that.” Viktor laughed. “Especially if it helps you feel better when I win the Russian championship again!”

“But Viktor, what if you’re like Sampson? Maybe your hair thinning out is why you finally lost a Grand Prix Final?” Mila inquired sweetly, which caused Viktor to go running into the bathroom yelling about a non-existent bald spot. Mila and Yurio had convinced him he had one, somehow, and Yakov (who had lost enough of his own hair because of Viktor’s ridiculousness) had no inclination to tell him they were lying.

“Hey old man, it’s probably for the best that you aim for silver at the Russian championships. It matches your hair, after all, whatever you have left of it,” was all Yurio had to say after Viktor came back into the room to send him scurrying away again.

Yurio, on the other hand, was grimly intent on getting the gold he had failed to achieve in Barcelona at the Russian championship. After all, he apparently reasoned, if he had beaten Viktor once, he could do it again. And again and again; Yakov wasn’t sure whether Yurio’s future plans actually acknowledged the idea that Viktor would, logically, retire someday, because it seemed as if he only imagined himself atop a podium if Viktor was at least one step below.

“And then Europeans, and then Worlds, and eventually the Olympics!” He yelled. “I’m going to win them all, and I’m going to jump into my swimming pool of gold medals like Scrooge McDuck and you’re all going to wish you had my records!”

“Ooh, that’s a good idea!” Viktor had apparently recovered from the hair thing, and was back to tweaking Yurio for fun and profit. “I should do that! Once I win the Russian championships, I think that will fill the last bit of my Olympic-size pool with all the medals I’ve already won.”

“Just be sure to wear a swim cap, you don’t want to lose any more hair.” Mila seemed to mostly participate in these to make fun of Viktor, which Yakov couldn’t really blame her for.

Georgi probably had the right idea. It was dangerous to get between those two.

But say what you wanted to about the ridiculousness of both Yurio and Viktor (and Yakov did, at length, back home whenever Minako or Lilia let him) but they were taking the training seriously. Both of them had progressed their lutzes to the point where he was now more surprised to see a wobble than a clean jump, and were working on adding the loop as well.

Katsuki was also joining in, though he had a calmer, more even keel after their conversation. Yakov didn’t know the details (he didn’t want to know the details) but he knew that the psychologist had also had some useful techniques for Katsuki in managing the stress of being expected to win All-Japan. And speaking of details he didn’t need to know, he also knew in general terms that Viktor and Katsuki had some kind of bet going on about not placement but total score at their respective nationals.

He thought it involved the location of the wedding, but he wasn’t entirely sure—and again, he didn’t want to know details in case it was more...intimate than that.

Or also more intimate than that.

At this point Katsuki had practically moved in with Viktor, though they were officially not going to live together until after the wedding. Yurio had compensated by loudly announcing that he was “perfectly fine on my own” and then been extremely embarrassed when Viktor had swept him up in a hug and insisted that he should move in with them too.

This was made less confusing for everyone else when Yakov explained that, in addition to his apartment where Viktor lived, he also owned a rather large manor with a carriage house on the outskirts of the city.

The Nikiforov fund was a great use of his excess money, but Yakov had insisted that he set something away for his future after skating, and land was a good start.

Training for Mila went easily; like the boys, she had tuned her quad until he was no longer concerned about it (though he had insisted she would not be using it until Europeans at least, and maybe Worlds, because Mila there are no Russian women within fifteen points of you). And like Georgi, she didn’t want a completely overhauled program to destroy anyone, just to do her best with the one she had.

All in all, the two weeks before Katsuki flew out to Japan and the Russians entered intensive training for their own national championship were productive and relatively easy.

The week of the championships themselves, however, was hell—as he should have anticipated having all his senior skaters competing at once, one thousands of miles away.

Chapter Text

It really was a blessing to work with Nishigori Yuuko. She, unlike Katsuki, understood the importance of true real-time feedback across the distances, and her triplets (the little monsters) were good enough at running a camera and a streaming setup to allow him to provide that feedback to Katsuki, though the hours it involved were terrible. At least they’d gotten the streaming and video setup at Ice Castle improved; it had been one of the first expenses they’d submitted after his conversation with Yuuko at the NHK, and it seemed the work had already been done. Probably by a very bored technician who lived in Hasetsu with family and had nothing else to do because no one else there seemed very interested in high-tech gadgets. Well, their price had been reasonable, if he was converting correctly from yen (and if he wasn’t he didn’t need to know; they still had plenty of money in that budget) and at least the place was more filmable now.

“What the hell was that?” He was also thankful for the two-way audio link, though he cringed when he remembered the age of the child who was monitoring it and the voluble way he preferred to curse. “Katsuki, I told you I would teach you that jump after the championships, not before.”

“Sorry, Coach!” Katsuki skated up and the triplet (he thought today was Axel’s turn, though that might just have been that he had that particular jump on his mind right now) switched cameras to the one directly at rink level. “That was supposed to be a triple! I just overrotated.”

“Get your head in the game!” He growled. The whole benefit of Katsuki, physical gifts aside, was supposed to be that he did was he was told, and didn’t have this Viktor-like streak of pushing boundaries that Yurio had somehow nonbiologically inherited. Though he had a suspicion how these things might have rubbed off on Katsuki as well. “This is our last practice before I have to go coach Mila through her first day of the championship, we don’t have time for you to break a leg!”

“No, Coach.” Katsuki seemed distracted in the way he only was when…

“And tell Vitya to go to sleep! He’s supposed to be resting up for his own practice day tomorrow, not texting you at midnight!”

“But Yakov, you’re up at midnight…” And there was Viktor, who was supposed to be asleep in his apartment, coming through the door of his office.

“I’m not skating this week. You are. Both of you! Don’t think I’ve forgotten you’re there, Katsuki!” Yakov groaned. “If I let you watch him mark through Eros, will you just go to bed already?”

Viktor scratched his chin like he was thinking about it and Yakov decided it was time to pull out the big guns. “If you don’t, I’m telling Lilia you’re moving in with her again.” They’d done that Viktor’s first year in seniors, had him move in with them both, because Viktor had been too tempted by the freedom of adulthood and gotten off his training regimen. No one wanted to repeat having adult Viktor living with them, least of all Lilia, but he also knew she’d do it if he told her it was the only way to keep him focused. So did Viktor, which was why he grimaced.

“Fine.” He yanked a chair over with a squeal of metal on the floor and plopped down in it next to Yakov. “Hi, sunshine!”

“He might be your sunshine, but he needs to be everyone’s Eros right now.” Yakov slapped a hand over Viktor’s mouth. “Don’t even think about saying it.”

“Mhmahdsfa….I wasn’t,” Viktor insisted after he removed the hand.

“And my grandfather was the tsar.” Yakov rolled his eyes. “Katsuki, if this idiot is going to beat Plisestky in two days he needs his sleep. Go mark through Eros so he’ll stop keeping himself up too late. I said mark,” he added. “I don’t care if that was just an overrotated triple, it shows you’re getting sloppy right now. Mark the jumps, and do some cool downs afterwards. Then you and Yuuko can work out the rest of the day’s practices while the rest of us get some shut eye. Both of us, Vitya.”

“Yes, Coach!” Katsuki did seem to have more energy with Viktor watching him, he had to admit, even if that didn’t mean it was healthy for Viktor to go without appropriate sleep for it. And yes, Eros was better, even with the marked jumps, with Viktor there. Hm. Maybe he could work something out with that? He pulled out his phone—Viktor would tell him if anything actually went wrong with Eros, the boy’s face when he wasn’t deliberately holding up his happy mask was transparent as anything—and flipped to his calendar.

When was Katsuki skating again? When was Viktor on the ice?

He made a note to call Zhenya into his office at a humane time tomorrow morning and get something worked out. All-Japan overlapped with the Russian federation’s championships, because everything in the universe secretly hated him, but time zones, the inherent misogyny of institutions, and the bias in favor of singles skating meant that the specific times didn’t always match up. Luckily, the Russian championships were actually in St. Petersburg, so they were training at their own rink without a need to travel (though he had booked the skaters into the competition hotel for the actual competition nights; it would help them all to be on the same routines as everyone else).

Of course, the actual All-Japan was not being held in Hasetsu, so Katsuki did not have the same luxury; he’d be traveling all day tomorrow while Mila was skating, and then his training day was Viktor’s short program—which meant that his skating day was Viktor’s off-day. The time zones did mean they wouldn’t have practice times up against performance times, but between sleep, practice, and cross-training they did only have a small window…

It would end up depending on where Katsuki drew in the skating order for the short (he’d be last in the free or Yakov would know why—and the Russian championships would be over by then anyway, except the exhibition which was a nothingburger comparatively). But they might be able to do it.

He put his phone away and watched Katsuki’s last few glides across the ice for Eros. Yes, much improved. They were going to have to make this work, so that Katsuki could gain that much-needed confidence—and not coincidentally, so Viktor could stop bothering him at all hours about Katsuki.

Chapter Text

Frankly, at this point, Mila’s short program was not all that interesting, to her or to him. Not that she didn’t do a good job of it, but her development as a skater this year had been so impressive that there was relatively little challenge in it for her now, whereas it had seemed an appropriately difficult skate when he first choreographed it all those months ago. He wasn’t sure exactly where to lay the credit, or the blame, for that development; was it Viktor, serving as her jump coach and finding the way to unlock her post-pubescent quads? Was it Katsuki, whose very presence seemed to have inspired all the Russian skaters to give it their all and move in directions he’d always wondered if they could go but none of them had ever dared to try before? Was it him, and his constantly rising expectations based on the collective effervescence of the whole gaggle of rinkmates? Was it Yurio, and the need to show him up?

Probably a mixture of all of them, he imagined. Whatever it was, it had moved her from the best Russian female singles skater to the dominant Russian female singles skater, and arguably the dominant female skater in the world. She had already been favored to win the Russian national championships back at the start of the year, and she had definitely been one of the favorites to make and then medal in the Grand Prix finals. But if he had ever been a betting man (and an insane one who wanted to definitely make sure he got banned from all coaching and competitions again by betting on his own skaters’ skates, the very thought gave him an involuntary shiver) he would have seen the difference between her odds then and her odds now. She had been the favorite to win, in that no other female skater had been given as good of odds to be crowned Russian skating’s queen. But now she was the favorite against the field: a bet for any other skater at all would return better odds than a bet for her, and still the betting came down on her side, driving up the line.

Apparently the sort of people who wagered on skating watched the Grand Prix final. Who’d have thought?

But as he was not going to jeopardize his career by betting, that had relatively little significance for him other than insofar as it translated into increased pressure on her and the expectations that went with the transition from favorite to expected victor. He had found the time to gently nudge her to visit her own sports psychologist and he believed that that and the intentional practices he had begun doing with her (which he had already done with Viktor for years) about how to handle a mis-step when no one expected one of you were both paying dividends.

But you couldn’t tell from the short program—not because Mila messed up, but because it remained simple enough for her now that he couldn’t get a strong gauge on her emotional state. Was she nervous? It didn’t matter. The triple axel’s improvement he could attribute jointly to Viktor coaching and Katsuki demonstrating; that had been the hardest element when he’d choreographed it. But the steps had also increased in difficulty as the season waxed on, throwing in little grace notes here and there—a different entry into a spin, an extra motion in a turn—that increased the difficulty and the artistry at once.

There was no question who was responsible for those: Katsuki Yuuri, and by extension the way he’d brought both Minako (literally, from Japan) and Lilia (metaphorically, by re-engaging her attention) into Mila’s orbit.

Also he was fairly sure it was actually Katsuki who had talked her through her new final spin, since she looked so much like him when she came out of it.

She didn’t use the quad in the short here, just as she had not in Barcelona. He wasn’t going to let her do it in the free either, since she had a lead that was ridiculous enough to make it unnecessary and frankly flaunting if she did, since everyone knew it wasn’t in the ordinary version of the routine (not that anything Mila did on the ice was ordinary). But aside from the lack of quads and bright red hair, she could have practically been Katsuki at times—and he had to actively remember that Katsuki also used to skate many fewer quads as little as a season ago.

It was gratifying but also distressing. What would she have been if he had not brought Katsuki with him? And what would Katsuki have become without the tight bond he’d managed to form with the rinkmates?

Who would have won the Grand Prix Final, anyway? Would it still have been Mila and Yuuri? Or would someone else have stood atop those podiums? Viktor as usual? Sara Crispino?

Well, at least that wasn’t his problem.

And it wasn’t going to be anyone else standing on the top of that Russian women’s podium either. She was going to make sure of that, and he was going to help her, as he always did. She had four years on Plisetsky—it was hard to remember that sometimes, the way they teased each other, but then again many families had children with that age gap, so perhaps it was not that unusual, not that any of them were actually related—and the major difference that four years seemed to make was that Mila knew she could rely on him, while Plisetsky seemed to always half-believe he would tear the rug out from under him if he didn’t skate perfectly.

He did his best to be worthy of that trust—even, or perhaps especially, when it wasn’t necessary, because she hadn’t really made any major mistakes in the short.

Not that there wasn’t anything to critique. Even Katsuki’s record free skate had had a few places where the GOE could have been higher or a motion could have been held for a beat less or more. So with Mila’s short program. But it truly was excellent, and he made sure to make the kinds of critiques that would make that clear to her.

And then as soon as the night was over, he started going over all three routines he was going to have to coach tomorrow for the Russian men’s competition.

It would be so much easier if he just had one male skater too—but then, who would he be if he made it easier?

Probably a man with more hair.

Chapter Text

He had been fairly sure ever since the season started that he would have the entire podium at the men’s singles for Russian nationals to himself. Georgi was no Viktor or Yurio, obviously, and they all four knew it, but in an alternate world in which neither of the others had been born he would easily have made this year’s Grand Prix Finals, and several others as well, and would probably be looked at as Russia’s great hope to defeat—well, now Katsuki obviously, but probably Giacometti historically. And Yurio had cut through juniors like a heated spoon through ice cream, while Viktor had spent the entirety of his and Georgi’s overlapping careers doing the same to senior competition as well. So...yes, he’d been fairly confident that they were going to beat all the output of the other academies across Russia, especially those fools in Moscow who thought they knew something about training skaters.

He was, of course, correct. And they had earned it; for all that his students could be a bit off-topic or even silly when they wanted to (and they seemingly always wanted to, to his grave frustration), they were, by now, well-accustomed to fitting that ridicuousness in around their training schedules. In fact, that was one of the reasons he never felt it difficult to keep to the physically and mentally optimum schedules that he, Zhenya, and the training staff (as well as the staff psychologists) had drawn up: the temptation to overtrain was balanced by the awareness that if he didn’t let his skaters be their completely over the top selves off the ice enough, they’d start doing it on the ice and someone would get hurt.

So they were trained into peak form, and the only real concern was whether one of them would overdo it and fall. After all, unlike Katsuki, he couldn’t tell any of them that there was no real competition here; the absurd Grand Prix Final would have given that the lie if he’d even tried to bastardize his coaching with such rhetoric.

They were indeed one-two-three after the short program, but the surprise was who was in each position. Georgi had come through with a personal best; something about the lowered stakes of having two world-record-holders instead of one skating against him had given an ease and a relaxation to his skate that Yakov had been trying to convince him to inhabit for years. Maybe Georgi skated best not from behind, or from a self-perception of being behind, but from not caring. Whatever it was, he had done his absolute best.

Viktor had been Viktor about it all. He’d skated first, so he’d just blown everyone’s expectations out of the water. He’d actually brought the Japanese medley back down to its original version—not the blinged-out version he’d tried in Barcelona—and that had clearly settled him down. Probably he was thinking about Katsuki watching from Sapporo; at least, that was what Yakov had encouraged him to do, and the sheer artistry of what he’d managed to pull off was, he thought, a reflection of that. As well as of Viktor’s undeniable talent and his re-invigorated love of the sport, of course.

So Viktor was, as customary, in first, and Georgi had shot up the boards to second after his remarkable performance, pushing the lead competitor from one of the other skate clubs (from Moscow, naturally) down to third.

And then Plisetsky had fallen.

It had been on a quad lutz, too; Yakov had tried to tell him that if Viktor had reduced the difficulty he could afford to too—that he held the world record for the short but that didn’t mean he had to re-set that record every time—that he was good enough, strong enough to pass Viktor without it, and to hold off Bolero in the free without a huge buffer.

But Yuri Plisetsky was the purest expression of the word excelsior in a fifteen-year-old body, and he didn’t know the meaning of the term “strategic retreat” where beating Viktor Nikiforov was concerned. So he’d merely shrugged when Yakov had given him the advice, and he’d known it was trouble from that moment on. And there it was—the quad lutz where a salchow had been planned, the wobble on the landing, the foot sliding where it should have been firm, and the hip on the ice.

Fortunately, fifteen-year-old bodies healed quickly, so he should be all right, physically. But the tumble brought a deduction, and the break in his rhythm took him out of whatever sense of agape he’d been projecting and into gutting out the rest of the program. Which he did, and did well enough that the perfectly decent routine by the Muscovite skater was still in third by a few points even with the deduction for the fall and the lowered score because (on replay) he’d underrotated into a triple.

Yakov hated feeling vindicated. No, that was a lie. Yakov loved feeling vindicated, but not as much as he liked a skater actually listening in the first place.

Ahem.

He didn’t tongue-lash Plisetsky when he came off the ice only because the skater slammed his hand into the wall hard enough to potentially bruise and started cursing out his own skating before Yakov could even begin. He just grunted a “so at least you know, nu?” at the right intervals and got him an ice pack.

Then he watched that evening as Viktor reluctantly handed over the phone and Katsuki talked to Plisetsky as well. He didn’t know what was said but the amount of eye-rolling combined with the way that Plisetsky deflated from his anger suggested some of the content.

Viktor grabbed his phone back and kept chattering away, but Plisetsky slammed into his adjoining hotel room and locked the door. Well, they’d have to deal with that tomorrow, but at least it was a rest day tomorrow.

Well, for some of them. Because tomorrow he had Mila’s final to coach...and Katsuki’s to impotently watch from several time zones away.

Chapter Text

Mila’s free program was a joy to watch. It was clear that it was also a joy for her to perform, since she was truly experiencing every sense of the word: free, in that she did not have any technical requirements like in the short program and could jam in as many elements as she chose, however she wished (fine, he thought, within some limits of the rules and regulations of the sport—but Mila wasn’t the sort to chafe at those kinds of limits anyway); free in that she was, for the moment, doing a free program that she really enjoyed (not that he had known it would be that way when he’d choreographed it; he was a good coach, but not a mind-reader); free most of all in the sense that no one could catch her. She skated last, of course. And she skated knowing that she could literally stop skating with a minute left and have no difficulty having the best score of the free skate, let alone with her buffer from her terrific short program. And all this without a single quad in sight.

You see, what had happened to a few of the men during the course of the Grand Prix season (most notably the American, Leo de la Iglesia, but then again he was young—and JJ of course, but no one was going to waste much sympathy on JJ, who would be right back to his normal cocky self by Four Continents) had happened to all of Mila’s so-called competition: they had cracked like an egg on the sidewalk. Knowing Mila’s lead, trying to pile on difficulty to somehow overcome her, they had fallen, literally, one by one and then more than once per program. The only exception was the woman in fourth coming into the program, an old hand at this with several seasons under her belt, who had pared down her program to avoid the curse of the bad ice that was grabbing at the feet of all the others and had skated a clean program that put her into the lead before Mila’s skate. Turning a triple-double combination into a double-double wasn’t bad when the other competitors were hitting the ice hard.

And so Mila had unofficially overtaken first and therefore put herself in gold medal position with much of her program to go, and you could see the ease in her limbs and the calm in her body as a result.

Her PCS was through the roof. He was used to that, of course; Mila was a good skater, maybe becoming a great skater, in her own right, but he also trained what were officially, Grand-Prix-Certifiably, the three best men’s skaters in the world as well, and so he knew amazing PCS when he saw it. Still, this was something special, and while it was no record, it was as good a program as he could imagine anyone skating with that routine. She had captured lightning in a bottle when all she needed was a lightning bug, and the scores reflected that.

He’d just have to make sure she didn’t get too cocky, in between her Grand Prix gold and that easy triumph; Europeans and Worlds were not going to be a cakewalk, since Crispino and (at Worlds) the Americans would be back in the hunt. She couldn’t afford to believe she was going to win just by skating on the ice like she did today.

But for one day—she could enjoy it. Because while his instinct was to get back into the office and start going over what she could correct, he couldn’t do that today. Because today he had two sets of film to watch: Viktor, Georgi, and Yurio’s practice skates from that morning when he’d been busy with Mila’s final warmups, and more importantly Katsuki Yuuri’s short program from Japan.

It was several hours until the Japanese program went live, however, so he navigated Mila’s press conference as easily as he could, slipped into his office, and clicked over to the drive where his assistants had loaded the practice skates from that morning and afternoon.

Hmph. Georgi was getting sloppy on the approach into the salchow. He’d have to work that tomorrow.

So was Yurio; was there some kind of epidemic going on?

Viktor was as annoyingly perfect as ever, of course.

“Yakov!” Fine, annoyingly perfect on the ice. He was annoying, period, in person. Also as ever. “When does Yuuri skate?”

“In two hours, as you know very well.” He knew better than to try to kick out a very overeager Viktor, however, so he just wordlessly shoved some training manuals off the other chair, allowing Viktor to shove it up towards the computer through the deep detritus of the mess in his office. He had cleaned the house; he wasn’t going to start cleaning his office too. “While you’re here, we might as well go over the free program.”

“But Yakov!”

“Vitya.” He cocked an eyebrow, and got a grin in return. “Must we do this dance?”

“Come now, you know you love it!” Viktor’s grin grew wider. “Don’t you just love...dancing?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t you?” It was almost sing-song. “Are you suuuure?”

“Vitya. Don’t.”

“But Yakov…”

“Vitya.”

“Fine. But you can’t say anything nasty about the salchow, because I spent an hour with the other two fixing theirs, and so I was too tired to do mine properly.”

He glanced at the screen, where a tiny Viktor was indeed filmed going over the entry into the salchow with both Georgi and then Yurio.

“Hmph.”

“That’s the Yakov I know and love.” Viktor didn’t hug him, but he got the sense it was a close-run thing. “Now, the lutz, we can talk about…”

And talk they did, until they were startled out of their mindmeld by the chime of Yakov’s phone.

“Oh! Yuuko.” He painstakingly typed the link she’d texted into his browser—he’d realized he wasn’t going to get any sleep anyway, so he might as well watch live, and she was rinkside as the coach, so he had her streaming—and the private streaming site opened up. “Let’ s see what he’s got.” There was no hope of getting the live Japanese feed on any legal site, so this was safer for the PC and for his credit cards. They’d just go over the official footage later.

“Oh! He’s so dreamy!” Seriously, it was like Viktor was fourteen again and dealing with his sexuality for the first time. But he supposed he could allow it if it meant Viktor was going to spend hours with the other skaters fixing their mistakes so he’d be permitted to watch along. “And look at that costume!” As if they hadn’t looked at that very costume every day for most of the skating season.

“Quiet. I need to hear how much he’s on rhythm.” It was a lie; they both knew Katsuki would be perfectly on rhythm. But he couldn’t let Viktor just prattle on; he’d think he was losing his touch.

They watched in what for Viktor constituted relative silence (only one or two exclamations ever time Katsuki did so much as visibly move a muscle) and Yakov found himself nodding at the end. Not Katsuki’s best, but not his worst either. And not the disaster of last year. He was easily in first, though there were a dozen skaters left (his draw had been reasonable for those streaming hours ahead, but not ideal for him). None of them would equal him though.

They could all get some sleep, secure in the knowledge that everyone was exactly in the place they should be.

Well, unless you asked Yurio, of course.

Chapter Text

Where the hell was Viktor? Yurio and Georgi had been here for hours, stretching and getting ready for their final group positioning, and Viktor was still not there. At last he sent Mila to bang on his prodigal skater’s door until he emerged, or until they could convince someone at the hotel to tell them if they’d seen him go anywhere. He wracked his brains for places that the other could have gone. Was he walking Makkachin? Was he haunting some favored bar, restaurant, or cafe? Was he simply living his own Viktor-world, wandering around with his head in the clouds?

No, that was offseason behavior. In season, Viktor had never been anything but professional in the narrow bounds of the actual competition day. He had been extremely unprofessional on other days, and on practice days especially, but it was very unlike him to be late for a competition, much less a major one like the Russian nationals. Yes, Viktor was the multiple time defending champion and no one had any doubts where he would end up this time either, despite the Grand Prix final proving that he was not only fallible but capable of losing to a Russian skater no less. But he was a professional about his domination; he had been one even when he was at his most depressed or out of sorts, and there was no real reason that Yakov could think of that he would be anything else now.

Well, there was one reason.

He pulled out his cellphone and dialed that reason’s direct line.

“Yes, Coach?” It was early in the morning in Japan, but he’d had no doubts that Katsuki would be up. After all, the Japanese championships were hard to get online in Russia, but the Russian championships had Viktor Nikiforov, so any self-respecting online streaming service that catered to figure skating fans had access to them. And while he might be a competitor, Katsuki was still a fan first and foremost. A fan of Viktor, too, even if they were engaged now. So of course he would be up, ready to watch Viktor’s free program—and also Yurio’s and Georgi’s, because Katsuki was nothing if not generous to his rinkmates.

“When did Vitya go to bed last night.” He probably should have made it a question, since it was phrased like one, but he rolled on without a question mark. “Or more accurately, I should think, did he go to bed last night?”

“We got off the phone in the early afternoon!” Katsuki seemed to realize what he’d just said. “Wait, it’s…”

“A thirteen-hour time difference.” Yakov grimaced. “So what...four in the morning?”

“Maybe three?” He could hear Katsuki cringe across the phone line. Something in the hesitation that crept into his voice, combined with the nature of the pauses. “Sorry, Coach, I didn’t think…”

“You already skated that day. You didn’t need to be the one thinking. This is on Vitya, not you.” He pulled his phone away from his ear and texted Mila the information. “Now...I’ve known Vitya for years, Katsuki. But he doesn’t usually drink caffeine on competition days, because he’s usually running on more than…” he checked his watch. Subtract an hour for Vitya to have calmed down after talking to Katsuki…“six hours of sleep.” He took in a deep breath. “So tell me...how many shots of espresso can I cram into your fiancé without impairing his concentration and balance?”

“Uh…” The thing he loved about Katsuki, even when he and Viktor were being a combined pain in the ass, was that he would take ridiculous questions like that in stride and actually answer them. “Four? If he drinks them all at once. If you give him three-and-one, or two-and-two though, he’ll need the bathroom before he skates.”

Oh, that was right. Viktor had an unfortunate tendency towards certain bowel functions under caffeinated circumstances, as shown most memorably before a certain Juniors final where he’d only been saved from being in the bathroom at the wrong time by an equipment malfunction for one of the underprepared Muscovite skaters in the same group. He did not want the story of how Katsuki knew the same information. “Got it. Thank you.”

“Uh, Coach?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t be too hard on him?” He was going to scoff at that when Katsuki continued on. “He was...uh...critiquing my jump sequences. When we were talking. At four in the afte...three in the morning. It was, um, helpful.” He could almost hear Katsuki making himself smaller. “So...uh...it wasn’t...if you were thinking…”

“What you two talk about in your private time is private, Katsuki.” He did not want to have the birds and the bees conversation with a second skater in that relationship. “But I’m glad to know he had some insights. We’ll talk those through later, during a time when he’s not running late for his national championship. Good skate, by the way. Take your rest day to rest.” He hung up the phone just as the doors slammed open.

“Look what the cat dragged in!” Mila was a little too gleeful, he thought, though it had worked to get Viktor here so he couldn’t complain. “Rise and shine, Viktor Yakovlevich! You already missed your morning practice slot!” He knew she’d already told him this from the way that Viktor only rolled his eyes, a technique that was difficult when you were trying to also shield them from the fluorescent lights.

He did not comment on “Yakovlevich.” This was not the time.

“Mila! Thank you for bringing our missing skater back to the land of the somewhat living.” He shoved cash into her hands. “Now, if you can conjure up a quadruple shot latte with extra sugar, you can keep the change.” She flipped through the bills—rude, but that was Mila—and then nodded and ran off.

“As for you…” he turned to Viktor, who tried his best to turn his rictus into a real grin.

“Yakov, I didn’t know you cared!”

“Can it. Katsuki says you were helpful, so we can let it pass this time, but you’re going to have to learn to get sleep before your own damn competitions. Now go stretch and drink whatever Mila brings you; you’re in no shape to be on the ice yet.”

Viktor must have been in bad shape, because he didn’t have a cunning retort, and actually did what he was told. Or maybe Katsuki was rubbing off on him.

The actual competition was nothing too surprising. Lilia showed up to put the fear of something more than God into Yurio about actually skating the routine she’d trained him for, and not improvising (he could feel the depth of her sniff at that word in his bones). Plisetsky spat like a wounded cat at it but responded by edging over 200 on the free skate. Georgi did his absolute best to beat that but fell short, ending up in second after his own skate. And Viktor, running on espresso, arrogance, and a desperate desire not to let Katsuki down, cruised to a relatively mundane total of 305 and another victory.

“Order has been restored.” It was good there were no reporters there to catch Viktor tweaking Plisetsky as they walked down the hallway towards their press conference.

“That’s what you think, old man. I’ll be taking your European title in a couple months, and don’t forget who got the better place in Barcelona!”

“Yes, as I recall, it was Yuuri.” Georgi apparently had a death wish, because he interjected. “Katsuki, that is.”

“You!” Plisetsky put Georgi in a headlock, then Mila lifted him off, and Yakov sighed. He had scheduled the press conference in the single furthest conference room available for precisely this reason.

Skaters. Mad, the lot of them.

Chapter Text

This time, for Katsuki’s free skate, there was no thought of sneaking off and not getting enough sleep.

For any of them: by common consent, it seemed, they had all decided that the gala was a great excuse to stay up late and make a watch party out of it. Someone (he suspected Zhenya, but it might have been anyone who worked on the facility end and not the actually-on-the-ice-skating end) had hooked up the feed that usually went to his office to the big screen in the room where they held press conferences, and instead of heading home after the gala was done, like they usually would, the whole contingent of his skaters and support staff (and hangers-on) had migrated en masse to the facility and taken up seats.

It was good that they had found that courting favor with the press by making the press conference room nice; this way he didn’t have to worry about Georgi, Yurio, Mila, or Viktor injuring something sitting on the kind of hard chairs that usually stood in these places. Instead, they had very comfortable chairs designed to produce very comfortable coverage, and so while he might wince at Plisetsky sitting backwards on one, he didn’t have to be concerned that he’d have a muscle cramp tomorrow.

Even Lilia had gotten swept up in the madness, evidently, as she was sitting very upright in one of the chairs in the back, being served tea by Zhenya.

It was definitely Zhenya who’d organized this; no one else would have thought to have tea and coffee sitting on the sideboard because this was going to be a long night.

There was not supposed to be any commentary on this feed; it was just Yuuko’s setup, migrated from the Ice Castle to rinkside in Sapporo, by special permission because of Yakov’s status as Yuuri’s official coach. He suspected the request might have been denied or modified involuntarily if he had been anyone other than Yakov Feltsman, the man who coached Japan’s Ace to a Grand Prix gold (any other accolades he might have won, such as the ISU Coach of the Year, were nothing in Japan compared to that). But it had been approved, and now it was set up.

And apparently, now it came with a commentary track.

Or three.

Yes, he recognized those voices, and he could see that Viktor did too from the way he kept looking up in surprise every once in a while. Axel seemed to be doing the baseline commentary, with Loop and Lutz providing color as necessary.

But perhaps he had that wrong.

What was clear enough was that it was not the adult who was supposed to be supervising them and Katsuki who was providing the commentary. The three children were bouncing up and down (he couldn’t see them, but he had met them, and he knew what ‘squealing while bouncing up and down’ sounded like) as the next-to-last group took the ice. Evidently the Japanese federation had decided that setting up the equipment mid-meet would be too much disruption or too much effort, and so the girls had been stationed there for a while, or at least so he gathered from what they were saying.

Because oddly enough, they were saying it in English.

Or perhaps not oddly; he knew they were taking English lessons, because “Uncle Yuuri says we might need it for international competition someday!” and because Katsuki Mari was giving them a deal on teaching them out of the textbooks that Katsuki Yuuri had used to improve his own English before moving to Detroit and then left in Yu-topia Katsuki. He also knew that they knew he’d be watching. So even though they did lapse into Japanese for more technical discussions (he assumed from context) or when extremely excited, most of the commentary was in passable English for a bunch of young children for whom it wasn’t a native language.

Not that it was his, either, so who was he to throw stones?

They were not bad critiques of the skating, either, once you paid close enough attention. They could tell their jumps apart, and they weren’t just talking about who had fallen (though many of the skaters in this group did).

Those girls were definitely going to be a handful once they grew up. Or now.

He glanced around the room as the last group warmed up—there was Katsuki, looking surprisingly calm as Yuuko nudged him and said something the camera didn’t pick up, though the children laughed. Yurio was trying to get into some kind of argument with Georgi, who was admirably refraining, and Mila and Viktor were apparently...betting on the outcome of this? Nothing good was going to come of that.

Katsuki was skating last. Yakov had to admit that he hadn’t paid full attention to the rest of the Japanese men’s skaters after checking their scores from the year’s competitions; none of them were anything like a threat unless Katsuki had a total meltdown again, and if he did all of them were threats.

He did notice Minami Kenjirou, apparently currently in third. Good for the kid. Evidently that regional championship in Japan was loaded this year.

And Minami did justice to his program—the same bopping thing it had been earlier in the year—enough to remain in the medal position after his skate. He’d bump down once the veteran going after him skated, and then Katsuki, but a bronze at that age in the seniors wasn’t bad.

Even if Yurio would have said it was.

He noticed Katsuki saying something to the young Japanese skater as he came off the ice, so that was good as well. Assuming it didn’t come out as an insult somehow, but he figured if Yuuko didn’t look bothered he didn’t need to be either.

The triplets had only good things to say about Minami—did he detect a hint of incipient idol worship from Lutz?—and so they talked through the future silver medalist’s perfectly workmanlike performance, which he would agree with them did not have the inspiration of Minami’s even if it was of higher technical difficulty.

And then it was time for the main event.

Katsuki looked...calm. That was the first thing he realized as the triplets zoomed the camera in on his face, then back out to get the wider angle on the skate. He looked like someone who had a story to tell, and complete confidence that his audience wanted to listen to it.

Which was accurate: all Japan (and All-Japan) was no doubt waiting for their returning Ace to tell them the story of how he had flamed out so spectacularly and returned to such triumphs. But it was nonetheless significant that Katsuki himself seemed to think so.

He glided into Yuuri on Ice with that same sense of ease. At Barcelona he had demanded you listen to his story, but here in Sapporo it was clear that he was simply catching up with old friends. It was the kind of storytelling that goes on around a fireplace in a well-lived-in living room, or perhaps at the table in his family’s onsen. Not urgent, not demanding, but also impossible to look away from or ignore—not because it insists you listen but because the circumstances, and the teller, and the story itself simply are that enthralling.

And more than that: as Yakov watched, and listened to the triplets awe, he understood that this was Katsuki’s thank you. He remembered Katsuki saying he’d never come home to see Vicchan because he’d never won anything, and he realized this was Katsuki’s first skate at home since he had won something.

No wonder he looked like he was finally at peace with his own journey—not only had he enthralled Viktor, but he had justified to himself the entire six years of absence from Japan, and now he was back, and telling them all what he had achieved.

If Viktor’s Japanese folk medley had been the wrong music for a Japanese audience, Yuuri on Ice was the right story. He didn’t need to peek at the scores coming in at the end to know the entire audience had been right there with Katsuki, or that the judges were going to be too. Nor did he need Viktor’s shout of triumph to tell him when the scores were up.

He did look, of course. It was a Japanese record for both free skate and overall mark. But he hadn’t needed to. Katsuki Yuuri had come home, and his country had welcomed him home with golden arms.

Chapter Text

Yakov would have sworn there was a time in his life when the period between Russian Nationals and the European championships was slow. He had distinct memories of it, for goodness’ sake! There had been years he’d even bemoaned how long it took for the ISU calendar to flip over into the run-in from Europeans to Worlds. After the mad dash of the Grand Prix qualifiers (which, to be fair, for most skaters and their coaches were only two competitions and not six-plus-a-final), it was practically a sedate time of year. There was a month or more between major competitions. All the time in the world!

That was not this year.

First of all, there was the tension about who would be assigned where. Russia had, due to Viktor’s complete destruction of all comers and Georgi’s competence, three slots for both Europeans and Worlds. Were they really going to send only Yakov’s skaters? On the flip side, Japan had three entries to Four Continents, because everyone did, but only a single slot for Worlds; would they send Katsuki to both, or try to build up their other skaters’ portfolios by sending him only to Worlds, leaving the 4CC to a more junior group?

This last was stated, when Katsuki was the one stating it, “which would they send him to,” but that was ridiculous. At least he’d stopped suggesting that they might not send him to either, given his absolute destruction of all competition in Japan this year, but he was still uncertain about whether he’d get a Worlds slot.

In Yakov’s professional opinion, as expressed frequently and with increasing volume in the days before the assignments were made, that would be lunacy. Katsuki had just won the Grand Prix; if he was willing to skate for Japan at Worlds, they would be fools not to accept.

As it happened, there was no actual drama around Katsuki’s placements: he was going to both, because Japan needed him. Also because they saw gold medals dancing in their eyes, Yakov thought privately, but he couldn’t really blame them because the same visions had appeared to him ever since he’d seen Katsuki’s Stammi Vicino.

Russia, however, was a different story. While Japan had reached out a bit early to assure him that Katsuki was their top choice for both competitions, and thus taken a load off of his mind, his own federation had also reached out, but with the opposite effect.

“I’m afraid that the committee has agreed that we should not send all three of your skaters to both of our major international competitions this year,” the clipped voice of the man from the FFKK said, straight out. “Out of courtesy, however, we would like to ask you your opinion of which of your skaters should go to Europeans, and which to Worlds.”

He pinched the brow of his nose, glad this was a phone call and not an in-person meeting or a videoconference of some sort. “Does this mean that it is the official FFKK position that Russia should not send its best skaters to represent it to the wider world?”

“That is not what we mean. We simply believe that Russia would be best served…” but he was not going to let that go by.

“Please, tell me exactly what Russian men’s skater did better than any of my three skaters in the Grand Prix? Or perhaps it was the Russian nationals that you were thinking of where someone managed to score higher than anyone from my facility?” He grabbed his hair—perhaps Viktor was not solely responsible for his baldness, not with the FFKK in his life—and shouted at the phone. “You know and I know not a single skater was within ten points of them.” He shifted tactics, his voice modulating to a sweetness he knew would be correctly read as sarcasm. “Oh, I know! It must be that there is some rising junior that the FFKK would like to see compete, someone who has done so well in the junior ranks that they simply have to be acknowledged, even though Yuri Plisetsky won every competition he entered last year and didn’t even sniff senior levels.” He returned to his more natural mode of speaking. “Enough schmegegge. Russia would be best served by winning medals. Russia’s best chance of winning medals is to send my skaters.”

“There are some who do not believe it is in Russia’s best interest to send a team composed of entirely one facility’s skaters to major competitions.” The official sounded exasperated, which was only fair because Yakov was beyond that himself. “You know this.”

“I know that there is plenty of nonsense that gets thrown around when people want to see their little proteges promoted beyond their skills.” He took a deep breath. He needed to calm himself. What was it Lilia always said? Their nonsense is not your problem. Just make them regret it later. How could he use this ridiculous situation to his advantage? “I protest the unfair treatment of my skaters, and I want that noted. I believe you should send all three to both competitions. But if you’re telling me that Russia is officially refusing to do that…” He paused.

“Go on.” The official was not going to say that out loud. Well, then, they could take a hike.

“Is that the FFKK’s position?”

“We will not send skaters from the same facility for all three positions at both competitions. We will send at most two to each.” So that was a yes.

“Then I’m afraid that Viktor Nikiforov has exhausted himself with this season and is in need of a rest. Georgi Popovich would benefit from one too. So send Yuri Plisetsky to both, and Nikiforov to Worlds.” He hated doing this, but it was for the best, if the FFKK was going to be idiots. Georgi wouldn’t medal at Worlds, but without Viktor there he had an outside shot at bronze in Europeans. Viktor could spend his time tuning his programs and jump-coaching the others, and fly to see Katsuki at the 4CC without being exhausted from Europeans. He wasn’t lying; he could see how much the schedule and the distance was wearing on Viktor—and Georgi was the same age, so by Worlds he would be flagging. Plisetsky was young; Katsuki’s stamina was inexorable. But Viktor and Georgi would benefit from this—if you ignored the absolute ridiculousness of not sending all three of Russia’s best male skaters to either competition.

“But Nikiforov…” The man on the other end was clearly unhappy about not having Russia’s great male star in both competitions.

“You asked me who was best suited to what competition, and you told me that my skaters could not skate in the spots they have unquestionably earned.” He growled into the phone. “I have answered you. Have the good grace to take your answer and let me get back to my skaters.”

He took it out of the official’s hands by hanging up the phone.

It did not ring back.

God, sometimes he hated being a coach.

Chapter Text

There was another reason for recommending that Plisetsky be placed in both Europeans and Worlds: it meant that there was slightly less of an explosion when he passed the news around. People at the facility were pissed, but there was not the thermonuclear detonation there would have been if Plisetsky had not had the chance to compete all the competitions his first year in seniors. Oh, he was still pissed that he wasn’t going to have a chance to “destroy the old man” at the European Championships, but Viktor’s obvious excitement about getting to go to 4CC as Katsuki’s co-coach took the wind somewhat out of those sails. He’d expected Georgi to be angry about Worlds, but apparently the older skater had been planning retirement anyway, and decided Europeans would be an appropriate last hurrah—or as he put it, with a laugh, “a chance to get out of Vitya’s shadow at last.”

Viktor privately told him he could use the time off too—which meant that his little Vitya was finally getting old, because he’d never have mentioned anything of the sort before.

But what that all meant was that the time before Europeans and the 4CC was a madhouse: Viktor was training at lower intensity, but everyone else was gearing up, and since Katsuki had won All-Japan, there was that quad axel to consider. They agreed that he would save it for Worlds—and further, that they would only train it without Viktor and Plisetsky, both because they didn’t want either of the others breaking their necks trying it themselves and because Yakov was able to convince Katsuki that “surprising Vitya” was worth not telling him this.

Of course, all that meant was that Viktor and Yuri (and Katsuki, by natural extension) started working the quad loop. But then again—why not have all six quads? Why do anything? Why even bother to coach them, if they were just going to do it themselves?

Technically, he supposed, Viktor was doing his job as a jump coach, but it was still ridiculous all around.

Mila was also starting to show dangerous signs of trying a quad salchow, and he didn’t even know what he was going to do with her since she so clearly didn’t need it to win, and her ligaments and joints were only so strong.

Two weeks before Europeans he demanded that everyone slow their roll to avoid injury—except Katsuki, who had another month before 4CC anyway. That of course just meant that he got a lot of whining from the Russians, but it was worth it to make them all take a deep breath and relax for a week. He even got to drink his tea at Thursday teatime with Lilia and Minako that week, because instead of him filling in the others on the skaters’ madness, the break from the ice had meant that the skaters had started intensifying their cross-training and the others got to tell the crazy-skaters stories while he sipped and listened.

Hm. The tea was actually pretty good when he got to taste it.

It was still a little strange having Lilia in the house, especially when she sat directly in front of the cupboard where he’d put the necklace he’d brought back from Barcelona. Not that she was likely to go rummaging through his things and find it, but there was still an itchiness to it, like she would somehow know it was there.

Whether that was a good thing or not, he wasn’t sure. What she would think about the necklace if she saw it, he also wasn’t sure. He wasn’t even sure what he thought about the necklace, or why he continued to connect it with Lilia. All he was sure of was that the tea tasted good and he was too nervous for his own good.

The final week before Europeans was as always a hell week, though actually having Viktor around as a jump coach full time that week was a real help. Even Georgi’s jumps were looking stronger, and he’d thought he had stopped getting better years ago. Plisetsky was in fine form, and Mila looked like she could break records.

Viktor and Katsuki were, of course, inevitable hitchhikers on the European journey, even if Viktor was not skating at it. He still had media obligations, because the FFKK was nothing if not aggressive in showing their displeasure at Yakov’s unwillingness to do as they pleased. And Katsuki was along because it seemed impossible not to bring him along; it was simply assumed. He was Viktor’s fiancé, but that wasn’t it, because Viktor wasn’t skating. He was Yurio’s roommate, but one did not necessarily bring one’s roommate to an international competition. He was in some ambiguous way everyone’s spin and step coach, especially Mila’s, but he would not usually have authorized such a figure coming to rinkside either unless they were the force that was Lilia. But there he was, just as Lilia and Minako were—and why was Minako with them anyway, when Katsuki wasn’t skating either?—and he couldn’t really bring himself to regret it or have any second thoughts.

Rather, he was glad of it, because Katsuki’s presence seemed to unlock something in his other skaters. Yurio was marginally less grumpy, and even shook Viktor’s hand for a photoshoot without looking like he wanted to rip it off (though the photographer may have been disappointed with that, since he asked them to retake the shot three times). On the other hand, Mila and Georgi took turns sighing about “true love,” which seemed to make each of them happier, and their skating more intense. And all of them took practice more seriously with Katsuki there, as if his focus somehow diffused or osmosed into their pores and made them pay more attention.

All in all, while he probably should not have brought Katsuki if you looked on paper, paper didn’t show everything.

Katsuki was a part of his rink family, and he was not going to be left behind just because he happened to skate for a non-European country that sent him to the 4CC.

Chapter Text

Hmph. Apparently Yakov’s skaters were not the only ones capable of being inspired by seeing someone they cared about and respected (or, perhaps, in simpler terms, loved) doing well. He wasn’t mad about it, per se, but it was frustrating to see that Sara Crispino had somehow added a quad toe loop also during the break. One that he was fairly certain had not been in evidence when he had examined the footage from Italian nationals to scout on Mila’s behalf, which meant that it was being pulled out specifically because Mila was in this competition, and Crispino wanted to beat her, which meant in turn that he had to let Mila skate her quad toe, and deal with the way that she kept asking him to let her skate the quad salchow as well, which meant that he had to endure her annoyance when he said no.

So, not his favorite day, unless you counted the quality of the actual skating. One of the best parts of coaching Mila, just like Viktor and the Yuris (with apologies to Georgi) was that she was quite capable of keeping up her PCS and her general vibe of performance even and despite the fact that she was upping the difficulty of her routines.

One of the frustrating things about figure skating in general was that usually the effort and concentration required to hit a really big jump, or even move through a particularly significant step sequence or spin—but especially for jumps, because they had a much higher chance of causing pain or a total wipeout of the program—reduced the attention the skater had for all the little grace notes that made a routine special. Someone whose entire focus was on “will I stick this jump” didn’t have time to be thinking about tempo, or about what their arms were doing artistically as opposed to physically, or any of the wild multitude of things that had to be going through your head to actually make a figure skating routine a performance and not just, well, a routine.

That was, come to think of it, what had really been spectacular about Katsuki even when he’d been skating for Cialdini, even when he hadn’t yet shown his great physical skill through Stammi Vicino. Even when he’d been bombing Sochi and whatever was worse than bombing All-Japan, he’d somehow kept all that stuff out of his performance elements. He’d still been Yuuri on ice, even before Yuuri on Ice. Most skaters either couldn’t even try the jumps or couldn’t do the art while trying them, and almost no skaters could keep the artistry flowing while missing the jumps. Only Katsuki.

But that wasn’t the point today. The point today was that Mila and Crispino also managed to keep ahold of their artistry while skating their hard jumps; neither program became a purely mechanistic routine of jump after jump—as so many of Viktor’s opponents had become in trying to equal his quad flip, all ignoring his pure beauty on the ice as well—and instead both of them had incorporated harder jumps into routines that somehow seemed to call for the difficulty rather than being reduced by it. It was as if the routines themselves somehow understood the contest of wills and hearts between the two of them, and responded; as if the ice, which was always alive in the sense of being an adversary for even the best skaters, was now alive to help rather than hinder.

No records fell, because the judges were not at their most generous; underrotations that would have passed for adequate in prior years were ticked off, and the PCS scores were only routine and not extraordinary, though he would have had to have words with the judges had that not been the case for all the skaters equally (but it was; perhaps they just weren’t easily impressed today).

Still, Mila and Crispino did remarkably well, with a clear void ahead of the third-place position going into the free skate.

God, Mila was going to demand that salchow, especially since she was (for once) in second. By a bit over a third of a point, but in second.

Those concerns were pushed to the back of his mind the next day, as Georgi and Yurio put forth their best efforts. Yurio, paradoxically, seemed a bit deflated by not having Viktor in the field, even though he hadn’t skated against him in the Grand Prix before the final either. It didn’t help that he drew very early, meaning that he had to skate before Giacometti, Nekola, Georgi, even Michele Crispino—anyone else who might have thrown down a good performance to make him realize that there was competition here even if Viktor was absent (or rather, doing a ‘spontaneous’ color commentary visit to the booth of the Russian broadcast, reciting a formula to reassure his fans that he was not seriously injured).

Of course, “lackluster” Yurio still broke 100, but only just—it was a major comedown from Barcelona, but better than the Russian nationals because he did not touch down. He also didn’t do the lutz, because at least sometimes he listened to Lilia, if not to Yakov, and she had read him the riot act about his performance at nationals.

Small mercies.

Georgi did well—he was looser than Yakov had ever seen him in international competition, as if knowing this was probably his last hurrah was freeing rather than intimidating—and actually improved his score from Russian nationals. Hm. Perhaps he’d simply mishandled Georgi his entire career, if this was what produced two consecutive personal best short programs. He wasn’t sure how he could have unlocked this devil-may-care attitude before, but whatever it was, it was working for him; he was once again ahead of Yurio, and if there was anything that could snap the younger skater out of his funk it was being second to a senior who wasn’t Viktor again.

But actually, that was the only surprise: Giacometti was a slow starter, just under 100, but in third, and Nekola and Crispino were clustered right below. The third Russian skater had fallen twice, right when Viktor had entered the broadcast booth, which was awkward, and Yakov had turned his cellphone to silent in order to plausibly pretend he didn’t see the reporters calling to ask why Viktor’s lines about needing a rest sounded rehearsed.

He could deal with that tomorrow—just like he’d deal with Mila’s demands for more quads tomorrow.

Tonight, he was going to bask, darn it. He had three skaters here and their average placement was 1.67. He had earned it.

Tomorrow he’d focus on how to get that down to 1.33.

Chapter Text

Mila was only hitting the quad salchow four or five out of ten in practice. This led to a long, drawn-out fight over whether she could use it in the free program, which he wasn’t entirely sure he had won. She wanted this win over Crispino even more than she’d wanted her Grand Prix gold; he wasn’t sure why that was, although perhaps while he’d been forced to fuss over the boys something more had happened there than he’d been entirely aware of. He was fairly sure they were dating, or whatever the kids called it these days when you weren’t living or training in the same city but you snuck kisses whenever you didn’t think your coaches were watching whenever you were competing together and your phone was constantly going off in practice to the point where even Viktor, king of not caring about any interruptions at all as long as he could be in touch with Katsuki, told you to turn it down.

But whatever it was about the two of their relationship that led to this kind of extreme competitiveness, while probably technically helpful in the long run (after all, he was pretty sure this was why Mila was pushing herself further-higher-faster despite trouncing the competition in Barcelona) was very annoying right now.

Not only that, but his running argument with her bled into the off-day discussions with the two male skaters, and then Viktor was bothering him about Mila’s jump, which was technically fair because he was her jump coach but also deeply annoying in its own way because they trod over the same ground again and again and even if Viktor did agree with him that didn’t actually do anything to help them figure out how to convince Mila, it just annoyed him further and frustrated Viktor.

And then there was the interview. Or perhaps The Interview. Because someone from the FFKK had decided that it was a grand idea to get Viktor in front of non-Russian TV this week, explaining for the non-Russophone world why it was that he, the greatest living skater blah blah blah, was not skating in the European Championships.

While he, Yakov, was willing to play at least a little political game with the FFKK and pretend it was Viktor’s exhaustion—and while he knew that Viktor privately thought that his chances of winning Worlds were much higher without the intervening competition—Viktor was, at his heart, a chaos gremlin incarnate. Which meant that allowing him to go to an interview that wasn’t tightly controlled and where the hosts decided to stream live in order to maximize viewership of their coveted interview with the sainted Viktor Nikiforov was a mistake.

Now, Yakov was the one who’d devised the fig-leaf over the FFKK’s decision, so he was technically on the hook for it. But he also continued to deeply resent it, so he wasn’t exactly going to throw a hand over Viktor’s mouth.

And that meant that when the reporter started—started—right out of the gate with “So, Viktor, why don’t we see you out there on the ice representing Russia?”, it was Katy bar the door—this being an American expression Katsuki had brought over for when Yurio decided it was time to pitch a snit fit, but also perfectly applicable to Viktor here.

“It’s funny you should ask that,” Viktor said with a sly grin. “Officially, I’m resting myself to do better at Worlds, because I want to beat the two Yuris who managed to slip ahead of me at the Grand Prix and rest my aging bones. As you can imagine, of course, Yurio does nothing but make fun of me for that, but what can you do?”

All Yakov could think was take the bait, take the bait, ask about the nickname. And they did.

“Yurio?”

“Ah, Yuri Plisetsky. We all call him Yurio, because you can’t have two Yuris in one training group, right?” Viktor laughed. “He should be grateful it’s so simple! I still think we should have gone with Yurtle the Turtle.”

Take the bait. This time they did not.

“Ah...well, I want to go back to something you just said—“officially” this absence is to rest for Worlds. Can you give us any hint as to what you meant by that?”

“Just what I said. Officially, that’s why.”

“And unofficially?”

“Unofficially—well, I can hardly tell you what’s unofficial, can I?” Yakov breathed in, which was just the right timing for him to release a hacking cough when Viktor went on. “I couldn’t possibly suggest that there was any other reason, that would be unprofessional.”

“And is there another reason?”

“Of course not. I could hardly suggest that the FFKK didn’t want to send three skaters from the same skating club as their only representatives to this championship. That would be ridiculous.” And then the bastard had the audacity to wink.

The interview went sideways from there.

Needless to say, Yakov was doing damage control with FFKK all weekend, despite throwing in the necessary “I told you sos” whenever possible. The controversy almost overshadowed—perhaps it did overshadow—Mila holding off Sara Crispino for gold by a point and a half, even without the quad salchow (prompting a different “I told you so” from Yakov), and even in the men’s it put a damper on Giacometti’s surge from third, Georgi’s manful attempt that fell a few points short of overtaking him, and Yurio’s classical Allegro Appassionato that was everything Lilia wanted from him pushing him to gold. Georgi announcing his retirement from the bronze medal podium at Europeans only stoked the flames further, because it made it very clear exactly why Viktor would have agreed to skip Europeans.

But Yakov could hardly blame him. Viktor was a competitor down to his soul, and he knew that all three of them resented the fact that they didn’t have the chance to sweep the podium (even if Giacometti would almost certainly have foiled such a plan). Even Georgi, who undeniably skated more calmly and cleanly without Viktor there, didn’t want to skate without his longtime rinkmate. A few points was not worth not competing against the best, he said, even though he hadn’t actually taken off the bronze medal so Yakov wasn’t sure if he really meant it.

And now the press was going to be watching Viktor’s every move—as was the FFKK, which hadn’t officially sanctioned anyone but was still making mumblings in the background that were ominous.

Just in time for Katsuki to have to compete at the 4CC, with every eye on him as Viktor stood by his side.

Chapter Text

Preparing Katsuki for the 4CC was a strange mix of building his skater up and tearing him down. Like all skaters, Katsuki was prone to developing bad habits when left to his own devices too long. In his case, it was a tendency to try to skate like Viktor when he didn’t have someone directly giving him feedback that helped him skate like Katsuki instead. It was as if twelve-year-old Katsuki Yuuri had decided that Viktor Nikiforov’s skating was the perfect skating, and everything he’d tried to do since then was just an elaborate form of mimicry. To be fair, a lot of other skaters, and the entirety of the world’s judges, and the very scoring system itself seemed to have made much the same decision. But still, Katsuki Yuuri wasn’t Viktor Nikiforov, and to truly skate his best he had to respect those differences.

So when they got back into the swing of seriously working together, now that Europeans were over and he didn’t have to pay as close attention to Yurio, Viktor, and especially the just-retired Georgi, he had a lot of work to do in terms of redoing Katsuki’s habits. They had to remove a layer of Nikiforovity from each gesture, each jump approach, each landing. It wasn’t that they were bad because they were like Viktor’s; but they weren’t as good as they would be if they were Katsuki’s, through and through.

Not only that, but while doing so he had to be careful not to imply that Katsuki was having real problems, lest he should start spiraling. Even with his newfound confidence after two straight gold medals, Katsuki was prone to impostor syndrome, so suggesting directly that he was doing what he was doing by literally impersonating someone else was not always a productive angle to take, even though (as Yakov vented to Minako one time after a particularly frustrating session) the whole point was that it was imitating-Viktor-Katsuki that was the impostor while actually-skating-Katsuki was the genius.

Not that either of them was actually bad. In all honesty, he couldn’t see why Cialdini hadn’t just leaned into imitation-Viktor: yes, he was convinced Katsuki was better than that when he was himself, but Cialdini hadn’t let him be himself either. If you were going to debase the genuine article, you could at least do it in a way that produced results. And imitation-Viktor could have won gold at a lot of competitions. Heck, on the barest of off-days for real Viktor, imitation-Viktor could have gold at competitions real Viktor was in. Katsuki did a very convincing Viktor Nikiforov.

But he was Katsuki Yuuri, and that was not a criticism.

They trained the quad axel fairly intensively—if they wanted it by Worlds, it needed to begin two years ago, but the second-best time to start was always now—and that seemed to help. It was as if the reminder that he was working on a jump Viktor not only didn’t have but couldn’t really convincingly contemplate was a constant reminder to Katsuki that perhaps he did have something to offer to the skating world beyond near-perfect imitations of Viktor’s work.

So did working with Viktor on Eros, because it had been obvious from the first that Eros was better suited to Katsuki than it ever had been to Viktor. For all Katsuki was usually awkward upon first acquaintance with someone, and had self-image issues that made the topic and attitude of Eros difficult for him at first, he had a certain way of moving—a way that Yakov now recognized as learned from, albeit not quite copied from, his Minako-sensei and thus with touches of the prima ballerina in it—that simply fit the music and the movements better than anything Viktor could throw at it. Even now, with both of them intimately familiar with it and Viktor working on the jumps side by side with Katsuki as a jump coach, you could see how Viktor’s own type of sensuality (and much as he did not like to admit that his Vitya had a sensuality, it was there) was not the same as the piece’s, and Katsuki’s was. Even Katsuki, who was beyond in love with Viktor by now (which was convenient as they were scoping wedding venues) was capable of seeing that. And it helped with the impostor syndrome.

What did not help was the drumbeat of articles about the Viktor-Georgi-Yurio scandal—or the other set of articles that were all some variant of “Can Katsuki Be Beaten?” Obviously he could, because he had been the year before (or the year before that; the year before Japan had not even bothered to send him to 4CC for obvious reasons). And reminding him of that was not helpful.

The ones about Viktor were helpful when they helped Katsuki get out of his own way and let his righteous indignation about how Viktor had been treated fuel forgetfulness about his own tasks in hand, but they were distinctly unhelpful when that meant that Katsuki felt the added pressure of living up to the suggestions that many of them made (off the record, couched in multiple conditionals, so no one could sue) that Viktor was actually stepping back not because of the FFKK, but because of Katsuki—whether because his rival was so dangerous or because he was a besotted idiot or because he had lost a step because of his interest in the other skater.

All of these just made Katsuki run away—usually metaphorically, not literally, though there was one time he had to be pursued through the streets of St. Petersburg like it was a low-budget Hollywood spy thriller about the Cold War—and that set them back more hours of training.

Privately, Yakov scoffed at both sets of headlines. Viktor was a year older, at an age when skaters were usually already well-retired. It was no shock he was scoring only amazingly and not incredibly—and if you considered that he’d actually managed to beat his free skate record (only to have Katsuki take it back, of course) and learned a new quad, it wasn’t exactly fair to say that this current situation was “holding him back.” If anything, he’d just been overscored when no one else was on his level, and now they were compensating by underscoring him as if he’d fallen to the others, instead of them rising to him.

And as for the question of whether Katsuki could be beaten: if you put Altin or Leroy on their best day on the ice, they could outskate anyone. So obviously the 4CC was a real competition, even if Katsuki was a worldbeater. He had to actually go do it again and again—just like with Viktor, nothing was actually assured. That was one of his least favorite things about having coached Viktor for the last several years: everyone acted as if Viktor didn’t have to work to earn his wins. Yes, he was a bit overscored on reputation (see: now underscored) but that was the difference between 335 and maybe at the lowest 315—and 315 would have won all those competitions anyway.

So yes, Katsuki could be beaten. It was just their job to make sure he wasn’t.

The whole team was pulling for Katsuki, of course: Yurio was grumpily keeping up his end of their bargain by helping him polish the jumps alongside Viktor as a co-jump-coach; Minako and Lilia had their heads together trying to figure out if there was one iota more of feeling or emotion that could be wrung out of a level four sequence or spin; even Mila and Georgi played their parts. Although the two of them were mostly there to get Katsuki out of his head sometimes with ridiculousness, with Katsuki in particular that was an extremely valuable service.

All in all, they were in as good condition as they could be headed to 4CC. And it helped that JJ Leroy was back to talking a big game, while Otabek Altin was continuing his quiet dominance in filmed practices at Almaty. It meant that while the media attention focused on Katsuki, Katsuki could focus on how Leroy and Altin were doing, and not on himself.

It shouldn’t work—but then, what about how Katsuki Yuuri’s brain worked was logical?

Chapter Text

He wasn’t sure whether Katsuki drawing last was a blessing or a curse. On the one hand, it meant more time for him to get inside his head, more time for him to get worried about other competitors’ scores, and more time for basically everything that could go wrong in a competition for Katsuki Yuuri to go wrong.

On the other hand, it meant that Viktor had all the time in the world to dial up the difficulty of Eros to exactly whatever point it was that would make Katsuki end up where he needed to be.

Viktor, and not him—he’d basically ceded the technical aspects of Eros to Viktor as soon as they’d agreed to have him come as Katsuki’s jump coach, because he knew that Katsuki would take that kind of tinkering better from Viktor than from him, and because it left him free to do what Viktor was not as good at: checking out the competition to see what form they were in.

Oh, obviously Viktor could read a score and see what the state of the field was on any given day, but it was not his strength to evaluate why each of the competitors had been scored that way, or what that meant they could expected from them over the free program. That was and always had been Yakov’s strength. Indeed, the power of their partnership as a coach and skater had always been that they could do both, in tandem, so easily: Yakov identifying the weaknesses in another skater and therefore what Viktor needed to train to do, Viktor adjusting on the fly as the scores came in. Obviously there were exceptional days when Viktor ignored everything else because he was feeling like he could go for a record, but most of the time he scored remarkably consistently ahead of the field. Commentators missed it; even Katsuki didn’t seem to have fully grasped it. Perhaps the sheer size of the gap disguised it from most people’s view, or even their consideration. But Viktor Nikiforov had been between eighteen and twenty-two points clear of his competition in a remarkable percentage of his skates since turning senior, and that was entirely because he and Yakov made such a pair. When the other competition was on its game, Viktor dialed things up; when they were not, he dialed them back. He never got exhausted by skating too hard of a routine when no one was going to challenge him, but he also never relaxed when the competition was raring to go.

This year was an exception, because with Yurio and Katsuki both smashing records themselves, and with all three of them skating for Yakov anyway, that option didn’t appear. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t help Katsuki with it-- and he had no doubt that Katsuki was entirely capable of skating the top of the line just like Viktor.

Leroy was drawn first, and whatever had plagued him at Rostelecom was not a problem here. He had destroyed the Canadian field at their nationals, of course, and now he was out for blood here as well. His short program was no Agape; Yurio’s record was safe. But it cleared 114, and set a mark that was going to be trouble for everyone. They weren’t going to do the quad axel at 4CC no matter what; that was already decided. But any hope of avoiding the lutz was out the window already, and the loop might be called into play as well.

There was just something about the way Leroy seemed to get scored for high PCS that rubbed Yakov the wrong way. Yes, his skate was a technical marvel, but skating to a song about how awesome you, personally, were seemed like easy mode. Yes, Yuuri on Ice existed, but that song was about a journey, about the twists and turns and regrets and opportunities along the way. Theme of King JJ was just about being completely awesomesauce amazeballs (as Mila had put it once). There was no depth, no nuance. He supposed there was a tiny bit of a redemption arc in its minuscule depths now because he had bombed so totally at Rostelecom, but that was it.

Otabek Altin, on the other hand, reminded him of a less stressed version of Katsuki last year, as he was in desperate need of a coach who could get his technical scores on his free program to equal those on his short—as he now demonstrated by sliding in a mere half-point behind Leroy’s amazingly high score. The difference between them was that Leroy had frequently broken 200 on his free skates when things went well; Altin had practically never done so. It was a strange paradox, especially as Altin did not seem to have a real problem with stamina, which could have explained such a difficulty. Here, his score felt much more justified than Leroy’s—Altin had a controlled, internally-focused style, to be sure, but there was an unquestionable grace to his motions that could not help but call to the audience and the judge. He didn’t rely on gimmicky clap-along songs or self-referential ridiculousness; he just skated well, and movingly, and with technical precision.

Yes, Yakov wanted to get his coaching claws on that. If he could elevate Katsuki to the heights he had achieved this year, what could he do with Altin? Of course, given that Katsuki, Yurio, and maybe even Viktor (if he didn’t follow Georgi into retirement) would be skating again next year, with another year of lutzes and their mutual competition under their belts, did suggest that he might not be able to push Altin to the top—but then, wouldn’t he love the challenge?

A problem for a future Yakov. Right now, he needed to focus on what this meant for Katsuki.

Katsuki, who was probably looking up at those scores in the 110s and panicking, even with Viktor helping him. If anything, in fact, Viktor was probably trying to overcram that short program, forgetting that Katsuki held the record for the free program and thus did not need to break the short program record to be in position to win.

Or not. He returned to their sides to find Viktor talking Katsuki down—more sensitivity, honestly, than he’d thought his skater truly had.

“You’re not a dime-a-dozen skater, Yuuri!” Viktor was shaking his head. “Those skaters out there—Altin, Jimmy Johns, all of them—they’re bringing their A-game because you are here.”

“But I am!” Yakov didn’t wait to hear whatever it might have been that Katsuki was going to follow that up with.

“You are?” He dug into his pocket and pulled out a small coin. “Here’s a dime. You owe me eleven. And remember, they have to be like you, so I’ll only accept who’ve held the men’s free skate record, I’ll be satisfied. You have two.” He gestured at Viktor. “Good luck with the rest.”

“Coach…” Katsuki deflated, but he felt like in this context that was a good thing, since it meant he didn’t have an argument about how awful he thought he was.

“Yes? I heard Vitya here telling you only true things, and you were disagreeing with him.” He jerked his head abruptly towards the entrance to the ice and they started walking down the hallway in his wake. “You do not need to skate a three hundred point short program. You cannot do that. All you need to do is be Katsuki Yuuri, and all of those skaters will fall by the wayside. If not now, then after the free skate.”

“But Coach, he scored 114.”

“And how high was Yurio’s score in Barcelona?” He cocked an eyebrow. “Are you going to make me call Yurio’s math tutor for his GED and ask them to tell me what number is higher?”

“No, Coach.”

“And who won the gold medal in Barcelona?”

“Oh! I know this one! My Yuuri won it and then we kissed on the podium!” Viktor was incapable of being quiet any longer.

“Thank you, Vitya. Exactly.” He put a hand on Katsuki’s shoulder as the skater removed his skate guards. “You will be fine. The rest of it doesn’t matter. Think about how you’re going to kiss Vitya after this podium, and show that in your Eros. I will avert my eyes, and the judges will love it.”

“Yes, Coach.” Katsuki was beet red.

He squeezed his shoulder, then turned slightly away. Let Viktor have the last word—for Eros, after all, that was probably a good idea.

And apparently it was. No, Katsuki did not beat Yurio’s record, or even Leroy’s or Altin’s scores. But he was firmly over 100, in a clear third place, and well within striking distance the next competition day.

And what more could a coach ask for than a good chance at the podium?

Chapter Text

Well, one thing a coach could ask for beyond a good chance at the podium was a break from the ridiculous PDA his skaters had decided to indulge in.

“I said to skate it in Eros. I did not say to do it in a public cafe,” he groaned for what felt like the fiftieth if not the hundredth time. “And for the love of all that is holy, please, please do not do it on the ice.”

“But we call everything on the ice love!” Viktor laughed, squeezing a brick-red Katsuki up against his side in the little coffee shop they had stopped at on the way to the rink from the hotel for their day off practices.

“Yes, everything on the ice is love.” He rolled his eyes and hid behind the coffee cup. “That does not mean we need to make it easy for everyone watching to translate.” He sipped the overly bitter brew. “And while Yuuri on Ice is a love story, it is not a love story about you, Vitya.”

“Isn’t it?” Katsuki looked confused. “I was skating about Viktor-chan when I skated in Barcelona…”

“Yes, you were. But that was because you thought your story ended with marrying Vitya.” He deliberately ignored the look that passed between the two skaters at that. “But I hope the two of you have planned your honeymoon enough to know that your life does not end with your wedding, Yuuri.” He sipped the coffee again—a mistake. “Yuuri on Ice is a love story about you. Isn’t it, Vitya?”

“My Yuuri is very lovable.” Viktor grinned wide, but then frowned. “But I’m not sure I understand why it can’t be a love story about the two of us.”

“That’s what Stammi Vicino is for. The duet, I mean.” He stood up and tossed the rest of the coffee in the trash. “Yuuri on Ice is about Katsuki being someone worth loving—not about him loving someone else. And that’s what I want to see you practicing today, Yuuri.”

They worked on it. They really did. Katsuki was having real problems connecting to the story from this angle, and at the end of the day Yakov was forced to throw up his hands. “We will work on this for Worlds, Katsuki. Here...skate whatever you think will get you to where you need to be.”

It was with a heavy heart that he watched the scores come in during the free skate. Katsuki, of course, was third from the end, with Altin and then Leroy after him. That meant that Katsuki was going to have to put up a score that would hold up against the best that those two skaters could throw against it—and the other skaters were not helping Katsuki with that endeavor.

By that he meant that Katsuki responded best to being challenged. You could say that Altin and Leroy had challenged him with their short programs, but that wasn’t the sort of challenge that worked with Katsuki: he would skate best if he saw those skating against him do well on the day. And no one was pulling that off. The scores were sliding in lower than he knew these skaters could produce: Chulanont was the lone exception, and his score was still standing highest when Katsuki came to the ice, despite the three skaters between them.

He sighed. Perhaps he should have kept Katsuki on the ice even later yesterday than he did; perhaps he should not have given up on what he knew in his heart was the best motivation for the skate. After all, he was also responsible for challenging Katsuki, and perhaps by telling him to do what worked for him he had failed in that.

He pulled Katsuki away from Viktor just before he was supposed to go on the ice.

“What are you thinking about today for Yuuri on Ice?”

Katsuki squared his shoulders. “What you said, Coach. I’m going to skate this for me.”

“And what are you thinking about yourself?”

“That I’m worth this and I deserve it.”

He frowned. The words were right, but the attitude was wrong. This was Katsuki Yuuri reciting what he thought other people thought he ought to say, not Katsuki Yuuri believing himself. This wasn’t how he talked about Viktor or even about Yurio: when he was asked about one of them, he sounded militant, aggressive, definite. Now he sounded tentative, like it was a rote lesson and not something he actually believed.

He put his hands on his shoulders.

“Katsuki, do you think I lie to you?”

“No, Coach.”

“And do you think Viktor lies to you?”

“No, Coach.” He looked more scandalized by that question, which was fair.

“And do you know the only gold medal I have never had a skater win?”

“What?” He looked confused.

“Katsuki, I have had skaters win the Russian nationals—Viktor hasn’t lost it in years. I have had skaters win the Grand Prix—you just did it, and you know Viktor’s records. I have had skaters win Worlds, Olympics...but there is a major competition I have never had a skater win. What is it?”

“I don’t understand.” Katsuki looked like he was going to cry.

“Katsuki, you are the first non-Russian skater I have coached through senior competitions. I have never had a skater win the Four Continents Championship, because I have never had a skater skate in the Four Continents Championship.”

“Oh.” Katsuki still looked bewildered.

“Katsuki, I want this. I want to be able to tell the Leroys, and the Kazakhs, and all those American coaches, and Celestino Cialdini, that this is a competition they don’t get to keep to themselves anymore. And you know what that means?” He didn’t let Katsuki express his confusion again, but went right on. “It means that I am telling you what I think will give you the best chance of winning this competition, because I want it just as much as you.” He let his hands fall back to his sides. “Yuuri, a year ago you didn’t even qualify for this competition, but this year you are here, the Grand Prix champion, with my Vitya by your side, because of you. You, yourself. You did this. You deserve this. Vitya’s love is not something you are lesser than. My coaching is not something I am condescending to give you. We are not lying to you. We are not bullshitting you. This is you.” He threw up his hands. “I’m teaching you a quadruple axel, for heaven’s sake! Who else is doing that? Who else could? So don’t give me this farkakte nonsense about what you deserve. You deserve it all. Go out and get it.”

Katsuki nodded, once. “Yes, Coach.” And then he handed Yakov his skate guards and took the ice.

He did not look back.

He did not look at Yakov, or Viktor, or seemingly anywhere except down at the ice. He took center ice and a hush fell over the audience. They knew that Katsuki had set the world record the last time he’d skated this in international competition, and the Japanese record the last time he’d skated it at all. They knew that they might be about to watch history.

There was something subtly different about Katsuki this time, Yakov decided as he watched his skater begin to move. Every other time, Katsuki had been clearly aware of the eyes upon him; it was, after all, the dominant way he interacted with the audience, that awareness. He wanted Viktor not to look away; he wanted the audience not to be able to look away. But today, he didn’t get that sense. It seemed almost like that skate of Stammi Vicino, all those months ago. This was Katsuki skating for Katsuki; Katsuki skating his routine not for a coach, not for a lover, not for the judges, but because he had to. Not in the sense that it was his turn on the ice, or that medals or endorsements or anything material or external was hanging on it, but in the sense that there was no other way that what was inside Katsuki Yuuri could be itself than to skate this program, on this ice, in this moment.

His gestures were smaller than they usually were, but they had all the intention in the world, as if every millimeter of motion was deliberate, intentional, inevitable. It wasn’t the story of Katsuki Yuuri; it just was Katsuki Yuuri—the difference between a beautiful painting of a flower and watching the flower itself bud open before your eyes.

He didn’t notice any technical flaws in the skate, though he was certain there were some—he’d have to catch them on the replay and go over them before Worlds. But he wasn’t sure he’d have noticed even if Katsuki had popped a jump. It was just that enthralling, that organic. Everything that was happening on the ice was what had to happen on the ice. Just as a flower is itself, and needs no comparison to some idealized sketch somewhere in a plant identification booklet, so too this Yuuri on Ice was simply who Yuuri was.

The quads were there, of course. He stuck to his promise not to skate the 4A before Worlds, but the lutz and the loop and the toe loop and the salchow were all represented. The technical difficulty was through the roof. But none of that really mattered. He could have been doing the old-school figures that he loved to practice in his free time on the ice, and the PCS would still have been high enough to put him into first—or so it felt.

Yakov had been told, as a small child in the little underground synagogue, that this world was but an antechamber for the world to come—that what you did here was preparation for banquet hall afterward. He remembered it well: how could he not, when it came from Rabbi Yakov? But today he began to wonder if perhaps this was the banquet itself, because he must surely have done something in a prior antechamber to have deserved to coach this skater in this life.

The world record had already been Katsuki’s. Now it was his twice.

Altin’s and Leroy’s skates were somehow merely afterthoughts, for all the work they’d put into their short programs. Altin responded as he had in Barcelona, with calm quality of his own, and a score above 200 itself, sliding into second without question. Leroy, on the other hand, tried desperately to regain first place, launching into a quad lutz he had clearly not practiced enough, and adding two combinations in the second half, which led to tired legs and a second fall. He fell, literally, into fourth, with Chulanont somehow staying on the podium despite a short program that had been below his usual standard.

But no one really cared about any of that, not after Katsuki Yuuri’s free skate.

Not after they saw what it looked like when Yuuri let himself like himself.

Chapter Text

In the wake of Katsuki’s triumph, Yakov once again had to deal with kissing, but he also had a 4CC gold medal to showcase, so he supposed he couldn’t be too annoyed. Katsuki and Viktor skated their Stammi Vicino for the gala, despite the fact that Viktor was not technically a skater for the “Four Continents”; Yakov rather thought that it was because the audience would have rioted had they been told that the skate would be banned, rather than any real argument from his team, that had convinced the organizers to allow it.

He made further formal contact with Altin’s team in the aftermath, as well. They agreed that it would be disruptive to move the skater midseason anyway, so he would continue to skate in Almaty until the end of his contract and the season year—but that they would have a “soft launch” where he would provide them all with feedback on how Altin’s current free program could be more competitive at Worlds. It was probably technically stepping on the toes of the Kazakh coaches, but they seemed so eager to have a chance to produce additional Kazakh slots at Worlds and the Olympics if Altin could place higher that he didn’t think they felt the insult. And he was interested in seeing what tweaks Altin could already do, as opposed to what he was already doing.

Of course, this was more remote work, which he’d been trying to stop having to do, but he supposed that if the rumors about Altin and Plisetsky were true, he could probably deputize some of the jump coaching to his other skaters, as he had with Katsuki after all.

And since those suggestions would be relayed through his current coaches, it was a sufficient sop to appropriateness anyway.

Starting next year, he’d have two foreign skaters—and two of the best in the world. Perhaps the FFKK would have a problem with that. Perhaps they could stick that where the sun did not shine, since they hadn’t managed to clamp down on doping in the sport or influence the larger Russian anti-doping efforts. He wasn’t the one who was causing the limits on his recruitment of Russian skaters, after all. And he wasn’t the reason that Viktor (if he was still skating), Mila (if she hadn’t thrown Yurio off a cliff and gone to prison) and Yurio (if he hadn’t burned out) were already thinking about what it would mean to skate as Olympic Athletes from Russia at the next Olympics.

Besides, Kazakhs were members of the Commonwealth of Independent States; theoretically, he was supposed to be helping them!

Somehow he didn’t think the FFKK would see it that way, but he was within the rules so again, that was their problem.

Altin himself was quiet about it, but seemed pleased; his main questions had been about housing, ice time, and other practicalities, and those were relatively easy to resolve given the impeding emptiness of the current Yu(u)ri apartment and the increased coaching hours that would be opened up by Georgi’s retirement without a currently qualified male junior skater coming up immediately through the ranks.

All of everyone’s attention now turned towards the insanity that would be Worlds. It was a horrible choice by the FFKK not to send all three of Yakov’s Russian skaters, of course, but it was a practical blessing for him to only have the four champions to bring: like Barcelona, that was plenty of madness to import to one place, without adding Georgi to it.

But before they arrived there, there was almost a month to train, and that training was not the kind of tuning up and polishing routines that Yakov preferred to do in the final months of the season. No, it was the pure insanity of trying to increase all of the skaters’ difficulties at the same time while also maintaining their certainty about the meaning and significance of their programs. Usually the experimental phase, when they were still actively changing the routine and deciding on how to approach what jump when, was done by now, and they were settled into figuring out exactly how to make those agreed-on moves integrate smoothly into a coherent artistic whole that would exceed whatever they had done in the Grand Prix, nationals, or Europeans.

This was already a grueling task, since it sometimes seemed the equivalent of pricking a stone for blood.

Now it was paradoxically made more difficult and easier: easier because they were making larger changes more often, which meant there was more room to layer on different meanings or changed emotional beats into the programs, but harder for the obvious reason that they were still getting their feet under them and had none of the benefit of already knowing the moves that usually made the search for meaning easier.

Mila’s skates were, perhaps, the most usual: she was adding in the two quads as a regular element of each program now, but this was merely an increase of rotations and the concomitant padding of approach moves. This was hardly simple, but it was not the sustained reorganization that the boys were doing, and so it felt simple comparatively. They worked together on making sure that she did not forget the heart of each routine even as she made it harder; that she did not run out onto the limb of technical difficulty, lose contact with the steady trunk of her interpretation of the music, and fall, metaphorically or literally.

With the boys, on the other hand, he was at times tearing up the routines root and branch to reimagine them as the incredibly difficult programs that they had now proven themselves capable of. Viktor, like Mila, had added two jumps—the quad loop and lutz—to his programs, and that was difficult but not impossible to accommodate. Yurio, the mad passionate boy, had begun the season with two quads and ended it with five: his flip, loop, and lutz were all somewhat inconsistent still, but there was no way he was going to be left behind Viktor, and Yakov had no desire to leave any of the three skaters behind. So with each of his Russian men’s skaters he spent hours on and off the ice, doing their best to make it look as if each of their programs had been planned from the start with those jumps, and with enough transition time to let them actually land them without destroying the rhythm of the skaters’ connection to the music.

Katsuki was on another level of difficulty, however. He had begun his time with Yakov with one solid quad: the toe loop. He had added the salchow early enough to have it included in his planned original routines, and Yakov had known he was capable of the flip for long enough that it had become a central part of both Eros and Yuuri on Ice by the Grand Prix final. So far, so much like Viktor. And like both Viktor and Yurio, he too had added the lutz and loop, which had to be integrated to make the quadfest they were embarked on look natural, and not merely like a jump exhibition.

But now he was teaching Katsuki the quad axel, and that had to go in too—and go in at a place where it made sense inside Yuuri on Ice.

Which meant at the end.

In other words, he was now trying to choreograph a routine that included six quads, and did so with the single hardest jump ever attempted by a human being at the end.

Thank all that was holy that Katsuki was the ridiculous prodigy that he was, and benefited more from a crammed program than he did from having proper time to breathe.

Minako was the one who had to remind him of that when he noticed that Katsuki was flubbing the lutz and loop when he put them in, before the axel was even ready.

“You’re letting him get in his head,” she said from beside him as they watched Katsuki scrape himself off the ice again and circle back to try to get it right. “He’s thinking about the fact that no one else is doing six quads, and he’s forgetting that he’s Katsuki Yuuri so it doesn’t matter.”

“You’re right.” He attacked the routine that night in his office, ripping out the long arcs and delayed approaches that he’d built in for the other two skaters and replacing them with tighter lines and more steps and spins.

He shouldn’t treat Katsuki like his other skaters, because he wasn’t like them.

Katsuki wanted to do things no one else had ever done. Yakov wanted to choreograph things no one had ever been able to do. He needed to remember that: it was the core of why they were working together, and it was going to blow the whole skating world apart if they got it right.

Chapter Text

Worlds was approaching faster than he’d prefer it to, and he was getting so stressed about having his three male skaters ready for it that working with Mila and her mere desire to incorporate two quads and try to break the women’s record was a relaxing relief.

Perhaps that was why he got sloppy at home.

Well, in one sense, it was obviously why he got sloppy. He hadn’t really had time to clean, not with the rink stealing every moment that wasn’t given to washing down whatever scraps of food he happened to have found (or, in a blessed moment, found time to order for the rink as a whole meaning that he also got a full meal) or snatching the seconds of sleep available to him. So his house, which he had done his best to return to something like a reasonable accommodation for himself and Minako, as well as for Lilia when she visited for Thursday tea, had become more like it had been during the long years of divorced bachelordom: not a pigsty, because he was not actually a dirty person (though to be fair, he did not think pigs actually deserved that bum rap either), but a pure and unadulterated mess.

He didn’t expect Minako to clean up after him, of course, and it was his house, not hers—not only that, but she was actually quite busy herself, because in addition to coaching Katsuki (which she was still doing, and doing amazingly well if the boy’s continued flexibility and artistic flair was any indication) and voluntarily also coaching any of the skaters who dared to ask her to do so (one of the junior girls, Nadia Kuznetsova, had become almost a fixture by her side), she was also doing something unspecified for Lilia.

So neither of them had any time to clean, and that meant that things just got stuck everywhere, willy-nilly, as they moved piles around to make life happen in the interim.

And that was definitely his fault.

Also, he’d never really unpacked from Barcelona, and that was definitely his fault, because while it was busy now he’d technically had a small amount of down time in the immediate aftermath of the Grand Prix Final and then of the nationals, down time that he had not adequately used at home but instead squandered on crazy things like the quad axel and yelling at his own federation. The bag had been reused, of course, because he only had so many good travel bags and you didn’t waste one just sitting on the side of the sofa or anything, but it hadn’t been properly cleared out and put away, and it was still bulging with random objects from all his travels that year, from receipts to skate guards, while it took up space in the living room.

So perhaps it was entirely his fault that when Lilia came over for tea on that last Thursday before Worlds there was nowhere really for her to sit, and he had to frantically clean the living room and kitchen to make it appear as if there had ever been a floor, table, couch, or chairs in the home.

And it was certainly completely his fault that he knocked over his travel bag, and because he hadn’t fully zipped it up again after grabbing what he immediately needed out of it, everything tumbled out of it onto the floor.

But it was definitely not entirely his fault that when he did, Minako decided that this was the perfect time for her to decide to be helpful in a totally unhelpful way, and picked up a small, flat box that he hadn’t even remembered was in the bag until that very moment.

And it was totally not at all his fault that she had the gall to immediately and loudly ask him about it when he was doing his best to pretend in front of Lilia that the mad scramble she’d just witnessed had never happened at all, thank you very much.

“Oh, Yakov, what’s this?” Minako waved the box and then shook it to hear if it would rattle. “Wow, it’s even wrapped. Must be pretty special.”

Lilia of course was, if you were rude, nosy, and if you were polite, naturally inquisitive, and so took a look herself.

“Quite expensive as well, Yakov.” She raised an eyebrow. “I wasn’t aware you were in the habit now of wearing jewelry.” Of course she recognized the box. Not only had he spent a probably in retrospect unreasonable amount of money trying to compensate for what was definitely in retrospect inadequate amounts of time he had been spending on their marriage, she was a prima ballerina—dressing in expensive jewelry was not exactly a foreign concept to her, even if she tended towards greater simplicity in her private life.

“Hardly in the habit.” He didn’t grab for the box, because he wasn’t a heathen and besides there was no way he’d get it away from Minako even if he tried. “The boys were in there buying their rings, and I didn’t want them to notice me, so I got out as quickly as I could.”

“Wouldn’t that involve not buying anything? I hardly think most high-end boutiques have a rapid checkout process.” Minako had the audacity to giggle at him.

“Unfortunately they had me cornered deep inside the store, so the only way out was through,” he grumbled.

“They had you cornered? I thought they didn’t know you were there?” Lilia had an unpleasant habit of remembering things.

“Inadvertently cornered. You know how they are. They don’t notice anything around them, but they do tend to blunder about.” He was realizing how ridiculous this sounded, even if it was entirely accurate to the truth as he recalled it. “Anyway, I forgot it was there until now. You can open it if you like.” If they opened it, perhaps he could keep the story about how it had reminded him of Lilia behind his teeth where it belonged. He just didn’t want them to ask him any more questions about it before his true story sounded even more like a lie.

Minako, he thought, would have liked to say more, but Lilia swiped the box from her in one quick motion and handed it to him with a sniff.

“I hardly think we need to see what Yakov is buying, whether for himself or anyone else.” She made her way over to the portion of the couch that the travel bag had previously obscured in a grand motion that was somehow heightened rather than diminished by the squalor to which he had let the surroundings descend. “Tea, please, Yakov. I find myself quite in need of it.”

And apparently that was that. He stuffed the box back in his travel bag, as the only thing to hand that could contain it, and zipped it up thoroughly this time, then ran to get the tea service.

Lilia drank quickly, as she only did when she was disappointed or annoyed.

He just wished he knew what he had done wrong.

Well, besides let the house she’d decorated descend into madness and mess.

One thing was sure: he definitely wasn’t going to ask Minako.

Chapter Text

Arriving at Worlds was...an experience, as it always was. You would have thought, perhaps, that he would get used to that particular experience; that after dozens of years and dozens of champions, after a whole Viktor Nikiforov’s worth of gold and the concomitant press conferences and media availabilities, he would have an easy enough time dealing with, well, everything.

But you would be wrong.

Yakov was not bad at dealing with the press, not by any means. But there was something different about the press conferences at Worlds—and God forbid, the Olympics—than from the ones he’d helped Katsuki, Viktor, and the rest through this year at all the other competitions. The kind of press you got there was just that little bit less experienced with the rules, customs, and general circumstances of the sport, just enough to make it more wearing, more annoying, more of a pain in the tuchus than it already was.

Not that he could avoid it, of course; they even arrived at Worlds three days earlier than usual just to accommodate everyone who wanted a piece of each of his skaters.

Yes, each. Mila, who had once upon a time been a blessed source of relative calm (very relative, given her own personality and existence, but he took what he could get) was now the center of her own media firestorm, between the quadruple jumps and the fact that someone (he suspected Michele Crispino) had dropped a word in some media personality’s ear that she might have a thing going on with her main rival.

She did have a thing going on with her main rival, but that wasn’t the point as far as Yakov was concerned. The point was that now he had to deal with questions and press conferences about it, whereas before he just had to deal with Mila swooning a lot and swanning around bragging about how her girlfriend was definitely also hitting a quad. And it wasn’t as if he stopped having to deal with that, either! No, the world was an unfair place, and he was living squarely in it.

Because Mila was still the easy one, for all that she had the media buzzing at her heels. Viktor’s statements about the reasons he hadn’t been at Europeans were still in every reporter’s mind, which meant that Yurio was also asked about it (though he seemed to have taken a page from Altin’s book, thank God, and just growled at people instead of screaming now when they brought it up). Katsuki was the center of his own media circles, not just the entire non-European world which was screaming for him to beat Viktor but all of the other reporters who wanted to ask about the world record, the Japanese record, the other world record, and of course his relationship with Viktor.

At least they had the engagement rings to flash in front of everyone; he didn’t want to ask Mila to marry Sara Crispino, but it would make everything easier. For him at least.

Speaking of difficult for him...they had brought the whole gang into town, again, just like at the Grand Prix, but this time Lilia wasn’t talking to him the way she had in Barcelona, and he couldn’t just ask Minako what was going on because that was (as his therapist put it) unhealthy triangulating.

His therapist also suggested he just talk to her about whatever had gone wrong in their communication, but to do that he would have to have a freaking minute to think straight in between his four skaters’ various commitments and his own additional time requirements as a coach in both gendered singles events.

At least Georgi hadn’t gone through with his threatened post-retirement transformation into ice dance or pairs—and Katsuki and Viktor were only doing it for their exhibition. If he had three sets of coaching meeting and availabilities to attend, he might just knife someone, Yurio-style.

But that left precious little time to think, let alone to talk to Lilia, and with everything else in the world going mad at Worlds he just tried to keep his head above water rather than working to additionally fix anything. He had thought, once, that he’d gotten a little bit into the swing of even Worlds, but this year was proving him wrong: there were just too many demands on his time from too many directions to make everything go smoothly.

Fortunately, Viktor seemed to have gotten over his annoyance at the way the FFKK had treated Europeans, and so he wasn’t making additional waves—that was probably Katsuki’s influence, given that he knew which of the two of them was more likely to not want to draw additional attention—and Yurio was spending all his time with Altin, which meant that he was blessed by Altin’s preternatural ability to avoid press, cameras, and any and all attention he didn’t want. So at least there weren’t any additional crises being produced during the competition. But Yakov found himself, for once in his life, wishing that the competition day would come not just for the chance to see his skaters put themselves out there doing their best, but just so that he could identify one job to do and do it well.

Why wouldn’t anyone just let him coach?

Well, to be fair, they did have a couple of practice days, and he threw himself into them with a vigor and a fury that he recognized as deflection but wasn’t going to overanalyze right now. Katsuki’s quad axel was up to seven times out of ten, and honestly he was more worried about Viktor’s loop than that, so he could be satisfied.

The real issue, if he could be honest with himself, was Viktor. Not his skating per se; that was as good as it had ever been. But as all his skaters had shot up the record books and the technical difficulties had climbed higher and higher, he’d come to realize that the Japanese Folk Medley just didn’t have the ceiling that either of the On Love routines had—and he knew that Viktor knew it too. And while Bolero was a powerhouse, so were Katsuki and Plisetsky’s free programs, which meant that Viktor was, for the first time in his career, practically the underdog.

It was refreshing, in a way—but it was also worrying. Was he doing Viktor a disservice by coaching these other skaters? Viktor had gotten to 335 last year in a depressive funk; he was topping out in the 310s now, even if he seemed happier.

Where was his responsibility as a mentor, as a coach?

And what could he do to try to get a happy Viktor to score higher than he had last year?

These questions bothered him at night almost as much as Lilia not talking to him, and it was with great relief that he welcomed the first day of the ladies’ competition.

Chapter Text

Mila fell.

That shouldn’t have been so much of a surprise: everyone fell in the ladies’ singles first group, because apparently whoever drove the Zamboni was asleep at the wheel or something (not, actually, that: the ice had been properly resurfaced, or at least looked like it, but there was still something off in the whole group). And Mila of all people was the one pushing herself the hardest to do the hardest jumps—so of course she fell on her triple loop, her easiest jump.

She was cursing as she came off the ice, and the mere fact that she had nailed the others was not enough to appease her. Or to appease him; he found that he wanted this gold more than he’d expected, especially with Crispino going in a later group and therefore after another resurfacing that might help with the falls. He wasn’t going to insert himself into whatever their personal drama was (any more than he was forced to by the fact that Lilia had disappeared and there was no one else around at the moment to chaperone Mila around the rink and make sure nothing happened to her while she was entirely distracted by her fall, meaning that he had to fend off a series of questions about just that personal drama shouted at them by every so-called journalist who saw them). But he did know that Crispino was responding to Mila’s push to greatness with her own great leap forward, and that meant that there was a quad war going on amongst the ladies. And he was not the sort to lose a war.

Mila fell, but he had to balance her fall against the fact that she had, somehow, improbably, managed to get back up and keep the PCS high. She had cursed a blue streak as she came off the ice, but on the ice she’d been the same magical sprite she’d always seemed. The movements of her hands hadn’t trembled or balled up into fists; the graceful glide of her arcs across the ice into her powerful, almost Katsukian spins had still been perfectly timed to the music; her other jumps had melded into the score of the accompaniment almost as if they had been written into it, like the cannons in the 1812 Overture.

It had been a masterful performance, worthy of ever plaudit it could have received, except that she fell.

And being Mila, she wasn’t going to listen to any of the compliments when she could focus on that.

It was a very strange feeling this year, being surrounded by so many perfectionists. Viktor had been one for his whole career, of course. You didn’t innovate to the quad flip when you were already ten points ahead of everyone else just for fun—or maybe some of it was just for fun, but a lot of it was his perfectionism, the belief that he could do anything. Yakov had, he had to admit, encouraged that perfectionism in what were probably unhealthy ways—such as not choreographing routines for Viktor that included elements he wouldn’t do perfectly. He should have pushed more. It felt silly to say now that Viktor had his half-dozen Russian championships and his handful of Grand Prix Final golds and so on, but he should have pushed further; perhaps if he had allowed Viktor to fail on some spins or steps, or if he’d pushed him earlier into the lutz, loop, or even axel (for quads, of course; his triples were perfect already), he might have found himself this year with a Viktor who could do what Katsuki had become able to do, rather than one who was simultaneously limited and spectacular within his limitations.

Or perhaps he would have broken him further than he already had. There was no 20/20 hindsight; he could only work with the skaters he had.

Speaking of which: Mila had never been such a perfectionist before this year. She’d been good, but she’d also been more committed to the joy of skating than to the perfection of it. She was still joyful, never let it be said that she had lost that, but this year she seemed to have an additional fixation on the gold medal, and on the idea that she could skate her routines perfectly and so she should.

The idea that perhaps this was inconsistent with adding two quads in the middle of the year was not something she was particularly open to hearing about, though he did his best.

Georgi, of course, bless him, was never a perfectionist, not even this year. He had the emotional beats he wanted to hit perfectly, so perhaps you could have approached it from that angle, but even then he was simply too wrapped up in how things felt and seemed to care if he twisted wrong or spun a moment too little or even touched on a jump. As long as the audience was crying (it was almost always crying, with Georgi, even when he was in a happy relationship off the ice—to the extent relationships with other skaters were ‘off the ice’) he was happy. Perfection didn’t enter into it.

And even Yurio had been less of a perfectionist last year; yes, he’d wanted to utterly and completely destroy the junior competition, and he’d been disappointed when he didn’t sweep every single junior world record (though he did sweep every single junior competition, without a single quad, because Viktor had dared him to). But he hadn’t cared so much if he made mistakes, because he’d been so certain he was above the rest of them that a slip, a missed gesture, or even a fall was merely leveling the playing field a bit. He had been a tiny little ball of rage (he was still usually a tiny ball of rage) but he hadn’t been a perfectionist until this season.

He thought it was Katsuki’s influence. Ironic, that it should be the skater most famous for self-doubt and flaming out on the most public of stages that would infuse a note of perfectionism into his other skaters, not the one who had the reputation of being, you know, perfect, but that was Katsuki. First of all, he always believed he should be perfect (even though he also believed he could never be perfect—not a great combination for anyone’s mental health). But second, he made it seem possible. Yakov could even remember his own moment of Katsukian inspiration, when he’d seen Stammi Vicino and flown halfway or more around the world just because he’d seen something in the boy that spoke to the possibility of a perfection he’d never achieved. He could easily see how the others had become entranced by the possibility to. It was not that Katsuki made anything seem easy knowingly—the things he made seem easy he genuinely seemed confused that others had difficulty with, like landing major jumps at the end of his routines—nor that Katsuki was so lowly a skater that if he could do it anyone could (though if he’d asked Katsuki, he probably would have said that that must be it). No, it was that Katsuki was infectious. He made others want to be what he was, not just because he was amazing but because he expected you to care as much as he did, and he treated you already as if you did.

And the other skaters had responded by believing that if Katsuki thought them great, they could be great.

And—even if Mila and especially Yurio would reject the idea that they had taken anything from Viktor in this—the fact was that anyone around Yakov’s rink already knew what greatness looked like.

It looked like Viktor Nikiforov, and thus it looked like not just perfection but perfectionism.

Katsuki had made them all raise their game; and in raising their game, they had become more like Viktor.

God help him if their personalities did so too.

The ice was awful for everyone, not just the first group, and Mila was only in third even with her fall—but Crispino was in first, so there was a definite glint to Mila’s eye as they walked back to the hotel.

He hoped Lilia and Minako knew what they were in for as they helped Mila while he coached the boys.

Though to be fair, if anyone could deal with manic perfectionism, it was those two.

Chapter Text

He was trying to figure out whether it was a blessing or a curse that Katsuki had been drawn in the earliest possible group at Worlds for the short program. Certainly, for Katsuki going early was usually a bonus; he had not had the time to worry about what everyone else had done, and he was still in whatever mental state he was in after the earlier warmups, rather than having time to get himself out of his zone or rhythm or what-have-you. Even better, today Viktor was drawn into a late group, so he could spend time with Katsuki before he got on the ice, which for Eros in particular was usually helpful. He didn’t want to know any more about his skaters’ love lives than they already forcibly informed him of, but there was nevertheless something comforting about knowing that Katsuki’s emotions on the ice were genuine, and that his beloved was a comfort to him as well as an idol to aspire to.

However, this was Worlds, and Katsuki had been slightly on edge for that reason all week. It took some remembering that while Katsuki had qualified for Worlds before (Japan had a habit of sending multiple skaters, because they had a long skating tradition and rarely performed badly enough to have only a single slot, and for all Katsuki tended to believe in his own faults to excess, he had earned the nickname Japan’s Ace from somewhere) he had never actually been expected to do well here. He had been the second or third Japanese skater, and everyone was happy if he came home without having completely destroyed himself on the ice ala Sochi (not that they had known about Sochi then).

Everyone but Katsuki, of course.

For Katsuki, Worlds was a memory of failure, even though nothing had truly been expected of him, and now there were expectations, and Yakov could see it hanging heavily on his shoulders, in the very motion of his stride as he walked towards the dressing room before the competition truly began. If he had been later in the program, there was a chance that he would have sunk under that weight, of course, but it seemed more likely to Yakov that seeing people do the same routines to the same music in the same ways (or more or less, though rather less than more in Yakov’s skaters’ case) would center him and ground him in such a way as to remind him that this was just another competition—the last competition—in a year that he was already dominating. It might be Worlds, but it was just another competition where Giacometti would start slow, Yurio would start fast, and everyone would hold their breath to see what Viktor was doing. He could manage it. He just had to believe that.

But because of the draw, there wasn’t time for that. So Katsuki was nearly hyperventilating when Yakov made his way over, Viktor’s hands gripped so tightly in his that both of them stood out white against the black of his costume.

“So.” Yakov decided that playing ignorant wasn’t going to work today, not with Katsuki so keyed up. But humor might. “Tell me, Yuuri. Are you planning to break Vitya’s hand so that he can’t outskate you today?”

“Oh. Sorry.” Katsuki tried to let go, but Viktor grabbed his hands back.

“Psht. No matter. Just let his blood circulate a little. You both have gestures to make, after all.” He leaned up against the wall next to the two of them, hoping a casual air would dissolve a bit of the tension in the air. “So tell me. You skate this for Vitya, yes?”

“Of course.” Katsuki tried to smile but it came out wrong, like the difference between a mirror and what you actually look like in a picture. “Always.”

“Hm.” He flicked Viktor in the forehead. “So, has this one changed so much that you are now afraid of telling the world that you love him?” He grabbed Viktor’s chin and pretended to look in his mouth. “Has he aged so far that you do not recognize him anymore?” He poked the top of Viktor’s head. “Or perhaps it is the hair? Is he too bald now?”

“Hey! If I’m bald it’s just because I take after you!” Viktor started smoothing his head frantically, which had the virtue of making Katsuki laugh—a small thing, but a victory. “And anyway, Yuuuuuri still loves me. Right, Yuuri?”

“Stop being an idiot.” Yurio had stomped over, ignoring the Belarussian currently wavering on a triple toe loop to eavesdrop. “You two are still sickening, Katsudon hasn’t fallen out of love with you or whatever.” He pointed a finger directly in Katsuki’s face. “Don’t you dare screw up now, Katsudon! I’m going to win the gold I deserved in Barcelona, and I’m going to do it despite your best efforts, not because you fell. So get out there and make the old man feel like he’s twenty-nine again or whatever.”

“I’m twenty-eight!” Viktor looked affronted, though Yakov thought most of that was for show now that he’d reassured himself about the hair.

“I would love you if you were fifty-six.” Katsuki probably meant for that to sound romantic, but Yakov had to roll his eyes, since fifty-six was well in his rearview mirror—heck, he and Lilia had still been married then. “And I’m going to do fine, Yura, stop worrying.”

“Who’s worrying! I just want you not to have an excuse when I beat you and they all have to go back to calling me Yuri and you get the stupid nickname this time!” Yurio stomped off, his errand apparently done, and pretended that the Belarussian’s mediocre level 3 spin was worth his attention.

“Go on, embarrass us all.” Yakov nodded to the ice, where the tepid applause greeting the Belarussian indicated that it was Katsuki’s turn next. “Make me have to hide my face from what you want to do to my Vitya, and capture their hearts.”

“I only want one heart here.” Viktor looked at Katsuki when the Japanese skater said that like he had hung the sun and moon, and sprinkled the stars for good measure. “I’ll make you proud.”

He wasn’t sure who that was said to, but he was going to take it anyway.

And make them proud he did. The jumps in Eros had been increased in difficulty as a result of the whole rink-wide arms race, but the spins and steps were basically the same, since they’d already been top-level difficulty before that. But there was something new and fresh about them today, like Katsuki had stopped thinking about them as steps and spins and started feeling them in his body as inevitabilities. He couldn’t help but take that diagonal, slash across the ice that way, rotate there right then. It wasn’t a show, or a message; it was just him, inhabiting not the playboy that Viktor had choreographed back when he thought he was doing it for himself or the ingenue-stroke-femme fatale that Minako had taught Katsuki to portray earlier in the year, but just Katsuki, loving Viktor first from afar and then from up close.

Frankly, it was overly intimate and embarrassing, but audiences and judges ate that kind of thing up, so who was Yakov to complain?

When the music was finished—and the two quads Katsuki hadn’t even had when the season began were landed, though not the axel which was being kept for the free—Katsuki was not only on top of the leaderboard.

No, he’d actually stolen Yurio’s record.

Oy vey, Plisetsky was going to be pissed.

And Yakov was loving every minute of it.

Chapter Text

Yurio was angry, but in that particularly Yurio way that he valued because it was so pure: he was angry that he had lost the record but simultaneously incandescently happy that Katsuki had indeed come through and done his best.

This was, of course, expressed through further angry mutterings and something about “showing them all!” but that was Yurio in a nutshell anyway.

He’d probably need to get the kid more therapy as he aged, since that wasn’t the most healthy possible way to express yourself and would probably lead him into trouble if it remained his primary mode of communication into adulthood, but for a fifteen-year-old, he’d take it.

Also, it meant that Yurio immediately started pestering him about how he could up the difficulty of Agape even further, as if there were infinite room for additional jumping passes in a short program.

He was able to quiet him a little to watch the other major competitors as they skated. No, the Norwegian champion wasn’t a threat, but Giacometti was right after him, and you couldn’t discount him after the last five years of silvers. He started slowly in most competitions, so the short program wasn’t where you were going to mint his medal, but it was still important to know what shape he was in and what he was doing—a lesson that Yakov was still trying to instill in Plisetsky, who had spent too many competitions in juniors not even having to think about who he might be competing against.

Giacometti didn’t make it the best lesson, since he barely scraped himself above 100. Actually, for Giacometti that wasn’t a bad score, so he might be a potential threat in the free—but Katsuki had almost broken the 120 barrier, which meant that Giacometti’s perfectly reasonable score was eighteen points back—and back from the current free program world record holder, with his world-record-setting routine, to boot.

This year was going to break everything Yakov had ever known to be true about figure skating, and the best and worst part of it all was that he was going to have to keep doing it in the future too.

Who was he kidding? It was the best part. The worst part was Plisetsky turning away from Giacometti’s perfectly good routine to bug him even more about how to beat out Katsuki.

The only performance that really shut him up was Altin’s, which vaulted into an easy second with a score in the low 110s. Altin was definitely one to watch, very closely in Yakov’s case given their soon-to-be future collaboration. If he was doing that with the inadequate resources of Almaty and no one within ten miles of his league to compete with…

No, Yakov thought, I have to focus. I still have two skaters to go in this skate.

Yurio’s ridiculous joint exhibition with Altin was making more and more sense to him now. Welcome to the Madness indeed.

As long as he could keep it at bay for another three days or so. He didn’t need to be sane or composed for the Viktuuri wedding. That was an acceptable time to go ‘round the bend.

And then it was Plisetsky’s turn, far faster than he had thought it would be, and he had to find something to tell the skater about what to do. He couldn’t promise him a score better than Katsuki’s, since literally no skater in history had ever done one. He couldn’t promise him a victory, because he was coaching the other two, and besides Plisetsky hated platitudes. He couldn’t, in all honesty, promise him anything.

But he could coach him, and that was what he was here to do.

“Yura.” He didn’t use the diminutive often, and he knew that was going to get Plisetsky’s attention, but that wasn’t why he used it. He used it because it was important to him that Yuri Plisetsky know that in this moment he was the one Yakov’s attention was focused on, that he was the one Yakov was thinking of, and that this was about him, not the other two. “Don’t change your jumps.”

“WHAT!?” Yurio was about to jump down his throat, knife-shoes on, but he barreled along before he could actually do that.

“Not beyond what we already practiced. You don’t want to fall, and besides we already put your hardest jumps here into the routine. You can’t do two quad lutzes, they’d only count one. And don’t tell me you’ll put one in combination, we haven’t practiced it and you don’t have the legs right now.” Yurio looked murderous but was quiet so that was a win. “Do the jumps we practiced. Hit the jumps we practiced. But I don’t want you to focus on the jumps. Don’t even think about them; you can do them in your sleep. You’re Katsuki’s jump coach, or one of them anyway. Just let the jumps come.”

“But how am I supposed to beat him if I don’t change the jumps?”

“Why are you so focused on the jumps, Yura? Is Katsuki a jumping specialist?”

“No, but…”

“No, he is not. And he just set the world record for the short program. Was it because his jumps were harder than yours?” Thank goodness they hadn’t put the axel in this one, because that would be a lie otherwise.

“No.”

“Exactly. Your jumps are equal—if anything, you consistently pull a higher GOE. So don’t fiddle with the jumps. Think about everything else. Your spins, Yura. Your steps. Who choreographed them? Who taught you how to make them work perfectly?”

“You did, that’s your job,” Yurio pouted. But then he sighed. “Fine. The old man choreographed it. Katsudon taught me how to do them right.”

“Right. And why do you think they did that?”

“Because they’re idiots who don’t care about winning!” But Yurio clearly got the point, even if he was grumpy about it. “Fine. They care about me. They’re mentoring. Whatever.”

“And how do you feel about them?” He held up a hand. “No. Don’t tell me. You’re just going to spit out some nonsense about how you hate the two people in the world you’re closest to besides your grandfather, and that won’t help either of us.” He pointed at the ice. “Show me. Not with words, but on the ice. And make sure you pay attention to your sequences, not just your jumps; Katsuki didn’t show you how to do level 4s consistently to see you screw up.” He nodded to the ice, which was finally free of the Latvian who had just done something or other scorewise that got tepid applause. “Show me, Yura.”

Yura did.

He clawed back the world record that Katsuki had re-set just a dozen skaters before, but you wouldn’t have known he was clawing it back unless you knew that Potya had the lesser talons in the family. He looked serene on the ice, like the sun rising over the water on a cloudless, breezeless day—and for all he might be, like the proverbial duck, paddling along furiously underneath that water, you could not see a speck of it on the ice. Watching Yurio’s skate at Worlds would have told anyone who hadn’t already looked it up on their phones that Agape was the love God showed the world in Christian theology, which was convenient because he was so full of it that they wouldn’t have been able to look away to glance at their phone to find out. He was beaming with it, bursting with it, as if his sense of love itself could write the world and its people anew.

There was no way, Yakov knew, that Yurio would ever tell Katsuki or Viktor that he was thinking about them and what they had done for him when he skated it. And since he didn’t want to die, he wouldn’t either. But no one could look at Yurio on the ice and think he had that in him; it was the perfect transformation.

No skater had ever scored above 120 in a short program. If that was the work it took to do it, perhaps no skater ever would again.

Chapter Text

He didn’t really have high hopes for Viktor’s skate. Not that Viktor wasn’t the reigning champion, best skater ever to lace up and defy gravity for the duration of a quadruple rotation, et cetera et cetera et cetera. Not even that Viktor wasn’t his Vitya, the boy he’d raised from an enthusiastic novice to the heights of all figure skating pantheons and now apparently out of nowhere into a happy domestic life.

But the Japanese Folk Medley routine’s base value, even as enhanced as they’d made it in the time afforded by skipping Europeans, just wasn’t quite at the level of the two routines Viktor had choreographed first.

It was obvious why, wasn’t it? Not just because there were somewhat diminishing returns in choreographing three major short programs in a single season, all within the ethos of a single skater (since although it would have been worse than either Katsuki or Plisetsky had made it, Viktor had of course drawn on his own thoughts, feelings, and skating ability for the On Love suite) but also because Japanese Folk Medley was an homage to where Katsuki had been when Viktor had choreographed it, and not to what he was or had become.

And therein lay the key to improving it—but on such a short timeline, a few skaters and one zamboni ride, that Yakov had no real hopes of turning it into something more.

Still, he had to try.

“Vitya.” They stood beside each other as the zamboni cleared the ice, JJ Leroy having just (finally, for the first time this year in a final other than the ridiculously uncompetitive Canadian nationals) put together a real performance and not a flub, only to find himself still somehow in fourth place behind Yakov’s two skaters and Altin. 112 was nothing to sneeze at, but it wasn’t even medal territory yet—and it was still higher than Viktor’s season best for the short.

Though not his career best.

“Yakov.” Viktor elbowed him, and that was when it hit Yakov, not for the first time but perhaps for the most intense or most important time. Viktor was loose. He’d skated for years wound up so tight that you could mistake it for looseness; the combination of growing depression and apparent perfection making him seem like marble with no cracks, a smoothness that seemed like it could not be possibly tight. Who would describe a rockface as tight? And yet it was under tension nonetheless. Viktor had been limestone metamorphosing into marble, not true marble already, and the pressure and the heat had nearly made him unrecognizable since those early days when he’d been more carefree. He had never been Yurio, angry at the world; at the same age he’d been just as certain he’d win, but it had been a certainty that came out in ease, in sprezzatura, not in anger and spitting vituperation.

He had almost forgotten that Viktor, in the intervening years.

But that Viktor had also skated wonderfully. Perhaps that was the problem they were finding in Japanese Folk Medley; perhaps he had been coaching last year’s (the last three years’) Viktor, not his Vitya. Last year, he’d have rolled his eyes at most; now he was back to an elbow in the side and a barely concealed laugh at his coach.

“Vitya, who is this skate for? Is it a historical artifact, a memory for Katsuki of what he used to be?”

“What?” He had Viktor’s attention now. “No, of course not!”

“But it’s all archival music, and it’s stagnant; stagnated, rather. You’ve upped the jumps, but you haven’t made it yours, singular or plural. Vitya, that boy just skated his Eros so well that he blew his own personal record out of the water by almost ten points. Are you really going to give him this in return?”

“What do you mean by this?” But Viktor’s mind was working, he could see it. The same Viktor who had, after all, not only choreographed the other two champions’ short programs but worked with them to perfect them; the same Viktor who could see a skate in its entirety in his minds eye without difficulty or error. “Wait, you don’t mean the jumps or the rhythms, it’s too late to change those effectively and they’re my best jumps already…”

He loved watching Vitya think through a problem, but they didn’t really have the time right now, not with the zamboni almost done and Vitya up second in the coming group.

“Vitya, compare your score with this and with last year’s short. What’s the difference? Is it the feeling? Do you feel less now? It can’t be the jumps; they’re harder. It’s not the steps; they’re harder. What is it, Vitya, that’s holding you back?”

“Holding me back?” Viktor didn’t sound outraged, though. He sounded concerned, like he had only just realized his scores were lower this year.

“Yes, holding you back. Don’t tell me you can only skate like last year when you’re depressed.” He patted the skater’s shoulder as he looked over at him in surprise. “I’m not an idiot, Vitya. I thought maybe winning golds would be the thing to help you keep things together, but it looks like I accidentally got you the right thing—or should I say the right person—anyway, didn’t I?” He nodded towards the ice, where Viktor’s competitors were going out for warmups. “Come on, Vitya, go show the boy what his Eros does for you. Don’t skate for the ideal you thought had moved to St. Petersburg; skate for the husband who’s going to stay.”

The only thing Viktor had to say to him during Chulanont’s very good short program, the one before he went on himself, was this: “you know we’re going to live in Japan for a while, afterwards, right?”

He snorted. “Who do you think is paying for the renovation of Ice Castle Hasetsu? Go, go.”

And Viktor went.

Japanese Folk Medley was still not entirely up to Viktor’s standards, if all was said honestly, at least not compared to Eros or Agape, and it showed. But “not up to Viktor’s standard” this year was bar that most routines would fail to meet, given that the two other routines he’d choreographed had set three short program records between them. The jumps were solid, because of course they were; what was more interesting was that the steps suddenly looked much more Katsuki-like, as if (like Katsuki had with Viktor’s Stammi Vicino and every other routine they’d ever asked him about) he’d had a Katsuki impression just waiting to go. Which he probably had. But this wasn’t quite that; it wasn’t an impression, it was an influence. Viktor had been so careful about not showing that kind of influence ever since he’d become the gold medalist he was, because the press always asked him a million questions when they thought they’d seen a tiny bit of another skater in his routines.

But he was engaged to this one; the questions were already coming. And so he let his hair down—metaphorically, though if Katsuki’s poster collection was any indication of Viktor’s intended future, he might be able to do so again soon enough—and the result was both more Japanese and more Viktor, paradoxically, than he’d ever managed before.

And with that, more relaxed as well.

It wasn’t enough to vault him into first. It didn’t pass Katsuki into second, either. But Altin and Leroy would have to settle for fourth and fifth, because somehow a confident, a calm, a loving Viktor didn’t need a perfect program to make magic happen.

All of which meant that Yakov’s day for the men’s final was going to be absolutely insane, because his skaters would be going back-to-back-to-back at the very end.

It was a good problem to have.

Chapter Text

He did not even try to convince Mila that she should not stress her body with too many quads. What would be the point? She was going to do it anyway, because she felt the need to, and it would be massively hypocritical considering what he was allowing the male skaters to do in the exact same competition. True, Mila would never be able to do the quad axel he was training Katsuki in, but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t equivalent; she had every right to jump as high, far, and often as she could.

And besides, she’d been doing the jumps in practice. Was it that much worse to do it in the one place where she could actually get credit? It was one thing if they had been skating like Plisetsky had last year, with no quads on the menu at all and therefore a real increase in physical danger if one were thrown in at the last minute. But Mila had been skating these, could skate them; it was up to her if she wanted to.

And oh boy oh boy did she want to. She practically screamed when he told her to do what she wanted to do with the difficulty level as long as it was achievable, and did scream when he begrudgingly (it was his job as a coach, dammit!) pointed out that she could probably scoot one of the quads into the second half by switching it with one step sequence Katsuki had lengthened out for her. She’d been fooling around one day mirroring one of his sequences from Yuuri on Ice, and he’d noticed that she could do a longer sequence than she’d had choreographed, and suggested a couple of additional moves to add to one of her level 3s to make it level 4. It had worked, but they hadn’t had the need to insert it. They did now, just to lengthen the routine a bit, and add some space for her to go into the quad with power.

If he wasn’t certain that Viktor had long since claimed that position by right of inheritance or some such, he would have said she was going to be the death of him, but that would have been merely rhetorical anyway. The truth was that he was massively proud of her, and he would have dared Crispino to do her worst and just try to outdo the best female skater he’d ever coached.

Well, he would have done that if he hadn’t happened to be finishing up some paperwork related to next year’s sponsorships during the lunch break and so wandered by the open door of the locker room a little later than usual before lunch—and so overheard Mila on the phone.

Apparently, she had cadged more than a few things from her senior mentor—not just Viktor’s insane belief that any jump worth considering was worth doing, or his perfectionism, but also his desire to make major life decisions hinge on the decisions of the judges of the ISU, of all ridiculous notions.

Apparently, Crispino was just as crazy, or just as enamoured, or just as silly, as her, because apparently she was going along with this. Though to be fair, so had Katsuki, and not only had that worked out for him, but most people would consider him the most level-headed of Yakov’s current crop of skaters (and worst of all, they might be right).

Apparently, Mila was getting married if one of them won gold, just like Viktor and Katsuki had agreed over the Grand Prix Final. And as far as he was concerned, there was no question of that: no Yurio on the women’s side to throw a potential monkeywrench into the works. Sure, there were other skaters, and one of them was even in second right now ahead of Mila, but…

But now he knew why she was jumping so high and hard so fast, and he might not ever tell her that it mattered, but he wasn’t going to let her lose that gold.

Not even to her future fiancée.

The waiting game was terrible, but a familiar terribleness that he had almost come to expect. He would have been thrown off if he’d had a skater who skated too early in the free skate; even Georgi was accustomed to being in the last group almost every time, and Viktor of course almost never skated anything but last (until this season, anyway). Mila too had always come high enough in her competitions to have no doubt they’d have a long wait, especially at a competition like Worlds where so many skaters qualified for the free.

But familiar as it was, it was also still frustrating, especially because Mila was clearly getting more and more wound up with every passing skater. The ice was awful again—the men’s had been fine, as had the pairs and dance, so it was almost as if someone had hexed the zamboni for the women—and he could see Mila’s worries about her own fall last time mounting alongside anxiety about the thing she didn’t realize he knew about.

Well. Was he her coach, or wasn’t he?

“Mila.” He had to almost stand directly in front of her and bodily block her to stop her pacing. “Talk to me.”

“What about?” Smart mouth on her, as always, his little Mila. “Do you need help understanding the scoring rules again?”

He resisted the urge to roll his eyes, and shrugged instead. “If that will help you focus, then yes.”

She stuck out her tongue, but that was more in line already with the Mila he knew. “So helpful.”

“Well, would it help to go over the program again?” She shook her head. “Even if I have improvements?”

“Improvements?” She immediately dragged him over to a small area where they could sit. “Talk to me.”

“I thought I asked you to talk to me.” But he didn’t press the point. “Remember that sequence of Katsuki’s you were mirroring?”

“We already put the new piece in.” Her knee started fidgeting, as if the suggestion of improvements had been the only thing keeping her still.

He looked away from the knee. “Yes. But what about Katsuki’s initial step sequence. The one you mirrored. Could you do it again?” He pulled a piece of paper out of a pocket and a pen out of another and started writing down moves. “If we put it before the triple toe…”

“Replacing the spin?”

“After the spin, replacing the glide—Katsuki uses it…”

“As one of his jump entrances, right!” She stood up, clearly marking the space in her mind and moving slightly to the rhythm of her music in her head. “I mean, I can’t go straight into it like he does, but if I used it to build speed…”

“You could cut the time needed to go into the combination jump, and add an extra sequence for more difficulty. In the second half, too.” He nodded.

She squeezed him tight. “Oh, Yakov! Thank you! If only you knew what this meant to me!”

As if he didn’t. But for once one of his skaters had said thank you, so he wasn’t going to ruin the moment. “Mark it for me now.”

They ran it dry in the hallway for a bit, and then she ran part of it in warmups, just to make sure she had it under her feet. And then it was time.

Mila was a different skater than his men’s singles competitors. Of course, they were each unique, but what the boys had in common was a belief that the outcome of the skate mattered, in blood and soul. Mila still cared if she won, of course, but she had always had a touch more of the sheer enjoyment in her than even Georgi.

Today, though, she had almost the look of a Yuri Plisetsky—a soldier marching into war, knowing what had to be done.

Somehow, it didn’t hurt her PCS; if anything, the sheer determined willpower on display made her movements all the more magical. And the fact that she was, through sheer bloody-minded power and immense skill, putting on a show that had enough quads to have potentially qualified for the men’s Grand Prix this year—it would have been touch and go between her and Chulanont, if you asked him, before you even got to PCS—certainly didn’t hurt her case.

He should have gotten blasé about records this year, he thought as he blinked in near disbelief at the score Mila had just put up for her free program, but apparently not. Mila’s smashing of the women’s world record for both free program and combined score (even from third) still had the power to surprise.

Pity the poor skater who had to follow that! She didn’t wilt, actually, sliding into second without complaint, but it cannot have been easy to watch any hope of gold float away, rotating four times, in the span of a few short minutes.

Crispino battled against it, to be sure—though he suspected that the knowledge that one of them was winning gold probably played a great deal into her posture of confidence in the face of Mila’s score—and he had to tip his cap to her coach for getting her even into Mila’s league for this free skate. She soared and swooped and spun in an effervescent whirl that would have won any normal competition, but brought her only silver in the end.

Mila, it seemed, had won both gold and bragging rights in her marriage.

“Congratulations.” It seemed like the only thing there was to say. Well, except…“we’ll talk about your sequences for next year when you get back from the honeymoon. You’ve clearly been holding out on me.” He would hardly have been Yakov Feltsman if he hadn’t said anything.

The way Mila hugged him made it seem likely that she understood that as well.

And then he was being inadvertently dogpiled, because Sara Crispino didn’t understand personal boundaries.

Well. Neither did Viktor, and he’d managed to live with that.

Chapter Text

It would be a lie to say that Yakov completely ignored the other skaters in the men’s singles before his own; that would be bad coaching, and if there was anything Yakov was committed to, it was not being a bad coach. But he would have to admit that perhaps he paid less cumulative attention to the other skaters than he would have in a normal year—though who knew what normal was anymore—because he had to juggle getting all three of his champion skaters ready for their own skates in their own special ways back-to-back-to-back. Not only did that mean a lot of work, but it also meant that certain parts of the work could only be done nigh-simultaneously. Unlike the short program, there was no time to get one ready and then another; their warmups were all at the same time, because they were all in the final group, and their other needs tended to sync up for that reason as well.

Of course, he probably couldn’t have pried the three of them away from each other with a crowbar anyway, especially when you considered that Altin (not yet his skater—that would have been a complete clusterbomb of a situation, having four in a row. Oh god, was that his future?) was sticking close to Yurio’s side as the latter needled at Viktor about their relative placements.

The rest of the final group—JJ Leroy and Christophe Giacometti, whose “slow start” was really only relative to the massive, improbable uptick in Yakov’s own skaters’ scores—were also around, and Giacometti actually hung out with Viktor and Katsuki (and thus with the other two as well) until his coach called him over as well. So things were busy, and there were always too many bodies moving around to get a quiet moment to look over at the other skaters.

But that didn’t mean he didn’t have some unquiet moments to look over. He noticed the third Russian, the Muscovite, perform a perfectly fine routine that Viktor could have done in his sleep at ten years old; all right, that was probably unfair, but it was definitely below Georgi’s level, which explained why Georgi had a bronze from the nationals of course, but still bothered him.

He saw Emil Nekola and Michele Crispino (who was here, apparently—Sara must have read him the riot act because Yakov hadn’t seen him hovering around her and Mila much this competition) skate back to back routines, starting out .1 apart from their short programs and ending up .1 apart but in the other order from their frees. Nekola would have no medal, of course, but at least he’d have the bragging rights to bring with him to Czechia.

He watched the last skater before the final group, Chulanont, showcase a series of steps that looked very familiar, and...that lutz looked like it was making more airtime than the triple it was would have deserved. Was he working up to a quad? He glanced over at Katsuki jumping up and down and remembered exactly who he had roomed with up until this year.

Hm. Apparently the Katsuki effect didn’t just work on Mila, Yurio, and Viktor.

Then it was time for final warmups, and he almost went cross-eyed trying to keep tabs on all three of his own skaters at once. Yes, Lilia and Minako and Mila and even Zhenya were there to try to corral the madness, but he was the coach. It was his job to find the right thing to tell each of them, his job to make sure they ended up on that podium. And even if it was physically impossible for all three of them to end up on top of the podium, it was still his job to try.

Hm. Katsuki was unusually shallow in his edges. They’d have to figure that out.

Yurio needed to stop showboating and let the piece itself produce the effect. Lilia could probably straighten that out. He made eye contact with her and noticed the little moue of displeasure that indicated that she’d seen it too. Good.

Viktor...Viktor was in the zone. He wasn’t sure he’d seen him this smooth all season.

Oh dear. Did that mean something had happened? Something to put him back in the headspace of last year? Because while he couldn’t deny that a high score like last year’s would be a blessing, he did not want to have to deal with an offseason where Viktor was dead inside again. Not ever.

Well, Viktor was first anyway (or fourth—first of his skaters, in third place, skating fourth in the group). Time to go figure that out.

“Vitya.” He took the skate guards from Mila and waited while Viktor put them on. “How is Bolero today?”

“Great, Yakov!” He examined Viktor’s smile for strain. Was that eyebrow just a bit too manic? Was that grin just a little too wide? “I think this is going to be a really good day!”

“Vitya.” He stomped down the corridor, knowing his skater would follow and wanting a moment of privacy. “What is going on?”

“I’m retiring, Yakov.” Viktor’s grin didn’t waver, and it didn’t look pasted on. “After this skate, I’m done. I’m going to coach Yuuri!”

Yakov felt it like a blow in the chest. Losing both of them? At once? Without mentioning it to him at all? He placed a hand on the wall, feeling the cool plasticine surface to ground himself.

“Oh! No!” Viktor grabbed him by the shoulders. Why? Why did he pretend to care? He was leaving anyway, and taking Katsuki with him. Yakov swept his arms around, trying to push him away, but he fumbled the push and Viktor ended up being the only thing holding him up.

“Yakov! Listen to me!” Viktor sounded frantic. What was he worried about? “I didn’t mean it that way! I meant…I’m going to coach Yuuri with you!”

With him?

“I mean, I’m already a part-time jump coach, and I know you’ve been teaching him the quad axel—don’t pretend otherwise, he’s not that good at keeping a secret and neither are you, all those extra practice sessions—but that doesn’t mean that’s the end of his journey! I mean, I don’t think we’re going to try for quints, but think of it! A quad axel-triple combination! A triple-triple-triple! We could do anything!” Viktor had gone from holding him up to just holding him, actually squeezing him somewhat painfully, but Yakov wasn’t going to let go just yet anyway. No one needed to see his face right now. “So please, Yakov! Let me be Yuuri’s coach! You can still coach him, but imagine what we can do together!”

“Ungrateful child.” Yakov pushed himself away and straightened up. “Scaring me like that! Is it not enough that you cost me the hair on my head? You want to give me a heart attack too, now? Oy gevault, such a fright you gave me. Don’t you ever do that again, you hear me, Vitya? You may have a lot of winnings, but you do not have enough to pay for my medical bills and my funeral if you do that again!”

“So that’s a yes?” Viktor reached out to hug him again, but Yakov swatted his hands away.

“Of course it’s a yes. I don’t know what you thought I was setting you up for by making you a jump coach this year, but obviously it was that. Now stop frightening me and go skate your Bolero. Make sure it isn’t your last skate, though!”

Viktor looked at him in confusion. Yakov sighed.

“Obviously you need to make the podium so you can skate your Stammi Vicino with that boy of yours. Now, go!” He glanced up; as his internal clock suggested, Altin was just about to finish, and Leroy had already done so, ending up ahead of Chulanont but not by as much as prior experience would suggest. “Get ready, get going, and never do that again.

“Yes, Coach!” Viktor danced away and Yakov leaned against the wall for just a moment.

These skaters.

Seriously, they were going to be the death of him someday.

Chapter Text

Perhaps, Yakov thought as the routine unfolded, Viktor had decided that if he was going to retire, he would take Bolero with him. Of course, that was ridiculous; just as Torville and Dean’s magnificent pure 6s had been unable to stop the lure of the music reaching out to other skaters, so too Viktor’s perfection was unlikely to be the cap that contained the genie in the bottle. But after today there would be no point; after today, Yakov himself was sure that he could coach another fifty years and never be willing to give another skater the song.

It was, in a way, a return to the beginning of Viktor’s journey with the song. From the first, Viktor’s Bolero had been different because it portrayed the toreador falling at the end, his defeat written on his face and body prostrate on the ice. The meaning of that skate had gone through evolution after evolution in this mad, impossible season, but now it was somewhat back where it had started: the skater, prostrate on the ice, his battle ended and his journey done.

Only now, it seemed, the toreador was at peace with it. He had battled many bulls, it seemed to say; he had vanquished them all. But now he had chosen this moment, on his terms, to surrender the cape and the spurs and to let the bull run rampant where it would. He had not been defeated, no; but he had chosen not to defeat this particular bull.

Viktor would, undoubtedly, skate again. If nothing else, there was the gala, which he had just triumphantly confirmed his future participation in; not only that, but Yakov was hearing rumors that Chulanont was putting on some kind of ice show in Thailand that, no doubt, Katsuki would end up supporting and Viktor would end up joining as a result. But Viktor Nikiforov would never lace up the skates again; not only was there the chance he might change his name after marrying Katsuki, but more to the point the champion, the lonely traveler who stood atop mountain peaks alone and looked out over the skating world inevitably below him, was gone.

Viktor stood up from the ice to thunderous applause, but Viktor Nikiforov remained there, never to rise again.

It was a marvelous performance, a triumph, a declaration that a decade of superiority had been neither in vain nor imagined.

He had reclaimed the world record for the men’s free program from Katsuki, and he had done so in what no one else knew but would inevitably become known to be his last skate.

Only Viktor Nikiforov could do that.

But there was no time for Yakov to revel in that, no time for anything but a squeeze on Viktor’s arm and a whispered “no notes” before he had to run down to the ice again and push his second skater out onto the ice.

A skater that he realized belatedly also knew that that skate had been Viktor’s farewell to the ice, and had tears streaming down his face.

“Katsuki.” He relieved Minako at his skater’s side and crossed his arms. “He told you, eh?”

“He told you too?” Katsuki looked up, his face red but hopeful, as if knowing he wasn’t the only one who saw what he’d just seen was itself a help. Yakov could understand the feeling. He didn’t particularly want to know what his own face would have looked like if he hadn’t had the crags of years to hide whatever he was thinking from anyone who cared to look.

“He told me. I told him to stop giving me heart attacks and skate, and look what the boy did.” He rolled his eyes. “But of course, he’s not going to hold that record for long.”

“He’s not?” Katsuki looked at him in shock, as if he had been harboring some thought of Viktor’s record standing forever and a day as a monument to his beloved.

“Of course not. Because Vitya doesn’t have a quad axel.” He clapped Katsuki on the shoulder. “He’s retiring because he wants to coach you. Show him that it’s worth it. Show him—show us—what Katsuki Yuuri has become. This is your story. Right now, it ends with Viktor Nikiforov retiring to coach you. But that’s not it.”

“It’s not?” Katsuki sounded confused, but his shoulders were straightening in the way that Yakov had come to realize he had scented a challenge that he was going to overcome despite himself.

“It is not. Because the point isn’t that Vitya is retiring to coach you, or that you’re marrying him, or any of that nonsense. The point is that this is Yuuri on Ice. And there is nothing and no one who deserves the audience’s attention more than Katsuki Yuuri, even when Viktor Nikiforov just set a world record.” He made deliberate eye contact with his skater. “Go remind them of that, Yuurochka. Vitya won’t be taking his eyes off of you; don’t let anyone else, either.”

“Yes, Yakov.” And Katsuki was out on the ice.

There was something about Yuuri on Ice, as it had evolved, that was just like Katsuki Yuuri. The music had seemed a little insipid when he’d first heard it, though it had clearly had the mark of something that could be worked with, so he’d approved it. Apparently that had been Cialdini’s reaction as well, and the composer had revised it to the version he had heard. But every time he heard it, every time Katsuki practiced, or hummed along, or competed, it grew a little on him. And every time he saw the routine, it grew a little too: from a good routine that finally matched Katsuki’s need for a difficulty that stretched his muscles, to a winning one, to a world-record-setting one, to whatever this was. The apotheosis of skating, perhaps. Katsuki and he had worked their way through the new jump sequences, using them as a pattern-card for Katsuki’s career alongside the music and his own musicality. The quad toe first, a simple thing comparatively, one that had been showcased in Katsuki’s routines last year. A quad flip, the one that he’d done to impress Viktor—and known how to do precisely because he’d imitated him. The salchow, Plisetsky’s work with him, which somehow had come harder for him than the flip. The lutz, reminding everyone of the Grand Prix Final; the loop, a seeming decrescendo, especially as everyone had to expect the triple axel that was Katsuki’s specialty at the end.

And then the quad axel, the last image of the newly rebuilt routine, smooth as the ice on which it was performed and precise as a blade on its four-and-a-half rotations.

If Viktor’s applause had been thunderous, Katsuki’s, after a moment of silence, was an avalanche that threatened to wipe away arena, skaters, audience, and all.

Hmph. Two world records in a row. Yakov decided he deserved a nice long vacation after this.

Chapter Text

But of course, there was no time for a vacation, not just yet, because Yurio still had to skate.

Yakov wasn’t sure what was left to say to his youngest skater. He’d just watched the two previous skaters set the world record for the free skate, and in the process eclipse the record for combined score. True, Plisetsky was sitting there with the record for the short program, which meant that in theory he had a chance. But they all knew—even Lilia, who was standing there talking Yurio through his Allegro Appassionato knew—that there was relatively little chance of his doing that. That was fine, Yakov privately thought. He was fifteen. There was no rush, even if there was always the chance that a skater might have growing pains, or break something, or any of the many other pitfalls that could await him in the future. But Viktor and Yuuri were probably the two best skaters Yakov himself had ever seen; Viktor was well-known to be the greatest skater alive, and Yuuri had finally blossomed into the potential that he had shown in Yakov’s wildest dreams, dominating this season like no one but Viktor ever had.

It was all right to be the third-best skater in the world when you were eight years younger than anyone else on the podium. Especially when the current silver-medal place was retiring, and practically handing you his place on a silver platter.

Try explaining that to Yurio, though.

“I’m going to do it.” Oh no. Yurio was arguing with Lilia. “I don’t care, I have to do it, there’s no way I’m beating Katsudon without it!”

“You have never practiced a quadruple axel, and you will not be destroying my choreography by breaking your ankle and falling in front of God and everyone!” Lilia turned her full prima onto Yurio, and Yakov couldn’t be certain if it was an iron spine, hubris, or mere youth that meant he didn’t wilt under the scrutiny. “Skate for yourself. Experience the music. It doesn’t matter if Katsuki jumped a quad axel or fell seven times. It doesn’t matter if you are the only competitor in this entire arena. You skate that program like it deserves, like you deserve, or so help me I will never choreograph for you again.”

“Don’t push her, Yurio.” He slipped into the conversation before Plisetsky could say something he would truly come to regret. “She means it.”

“Of course you’d take her side! You’re still in love with her!” Yurio spat the words out like a curse. “Everyone’s in love with everyone! It’s disgusting! Just stop it! Why don’t you focus on the skating!”

“Are you suggesting that being in love with Vitya has made Katsuki a lower-level skater?” Yakov kept himself under iron control, definitely not reacting to what Yurio had just said or even looking over at Lilia. “Did you perhaps miss the scores he has put up this year?”

Plisetsky sagged. “Fine! I won’t do the axel.” He wasn’t sure how that followed, but he wasn’t going to question it. “But I’m going to throw another combination in with the lutz!” He threw this out like a gauntlet, daring them to pick it up.

He pushed down the urge to glance over at Lilia again and merely raised an eyebrow. “Oh? And where are you putting it? Lilia is right, the musicality of the piece is important. We stuffed your program full of jumps. Where are you putting another combination in?”

“Ugh! You’re the worst!” Yurio practically flung his skate guards at Yakov as he stepped onto the ice. Yakov caught them, and did his best not to look over at Lilia as they both watched Plisetsky take center ice and go into his initial pose.

“He probably could have found the time, if you really wanted it.” She spoke surprisingly softly. “For the combination.”

“It would have broken the artistic soul of the piece.” He shrugged. “Anyone can learn to jump. Only some skaters can skate a song’s soul out. I don’t want Yurio to become the first kind.”

There was no time for any more conversation. Allegro Appassionato began, and Plisetsky transformed.

He was a flame on the ice, dancing like St. Elmo’s Fire over a mast in a storm or a will-o’-the-wisp enticing an unwary traveler into the danger of the marsh. Yakov was once again reminded of the fact that fairies were not benign beings. He could see an ancient peasant nailing an iron horseshoe above a door to keep Yurio out, or casting a few grains out of every sheaf as an offering to protect their home and harvest from his mischief. Viktor had skated a routine as if there was no one else in the arena, pouring his own heart out into the void and speaking to the ice rather than the audience, for all that the audience responded to him. Katsuki had seized the audience’s souls and squeezed, demanding and receiving their respect, love, and adoration. Yurio taunted them, daring them to think of anything but his routine even after watching the two record-setting routines before him.

There was, in all honesty, no chance he was going to pass Katsuki. He wasn’t wrong; without the quad axel, or perhaps even more without the perfect narrative sequence that led to the quad axel, he wasn’t going to have the points.

The question, however, was whether he could catch Viktor.

Viktor had set the record for the free skate before Katsuki retook it, and Yurio’s difficulty wasn’t quite there yet—though his PCS was going to vie with the other two at the very top of the scale. But he didn’t need it to be; despite Viktor’s amazing short program, Yurio’s own world record in the short had left him more than seven points free of him coming into today.

Yurio could not beat Viktor today. But could he score within seven points of Viktor? That was a better question, and one they could not tell before the scores came down.

The difference in their base difficulty was right on the margin, meaning that it would come down to GOE and PCS. It was, Yakov thought, good that Yurio had actually skated the program he had practiced, because his GOE was not merely solid but top-tier: every jump was one he had practiced intensively, and it showed. His PCS was sparkling as well. Lilia’s hand showed, Yakov thought, in the quicksilver transitions between elements and the sheer lightness with which he flickered over the ice. But it didn’t necessarily have the emotional weight of Viktor’s routine—though that might have been his own imposition on the routines, knowing that Viktor was going to retire.

Yurio came off the ice with his head bowed, but Yakov could tell from the lines of his body that it was exhaustion, having left everything on the ice, and not disappointment.

He put an arm around the skater, and to his surprise it was not shrugged off.

“We’ll work on the axel after you finish growing. Don’t want you blowing out an ACL as you age.” He felt rather than saw Plisetsky nod. “But for now, we can work on matching Katsuki’s short lead-ins to the jumps. You’re taking just a bit longer than he is, and it shows.” That got Plisetsky’s attention, and the two of them discussed it in more detail during the long wait in the Kiss and Cry.

It was possible, Yakov thought as they waited, that the judges were fighting, or finding basic math difficult, because it was taking far longer than he’d expected to get a final score for his skater.

When it finally came, he could understand the impulse to delay. Yurio had gone into the free skate with a lead of a little over seven points; he had also underscored Viktor’s free skate by just over seven.

Their final scores were .2 apart, with the senior skater on the lower end.

Yurio had done what he had promised at nationals: he had beaten Viktor at Worlds.

And for the second straight competition, Yakov was going to have a skater retiring after a bronze medal.

Chapter Text

Once again, Yakov was impressed by the accuracy of the name of Altin and Yurio’s routine. Welcome to the Madness was exactly the right phrase for the insanity that was the post-competition time at Worlds. Even without Viktor’s retirement, the press conferences would have been madness personified, and when you added in Viktor yelling out about it from the podium and then grabbing Katsuki and kissing him in front of God and everyone, well, it was bananas.

And then things got worse, somehow.

The gala was a huge blowout, with the two double acts bringing down the house. Sara and Mila managed to surprise everyone by doing their own double skate, and flashed some serious hardware at the end—so serious that Mila actually had to reassure him afterwards that she wasn’t seriously planning on doing competition skating with that big of a diamond on her finger, lest it should bang against something or fly off mid-routine. Everyone it seemed, was pairing up, and Yakov found it very amusing just how annoyed Yurio was by this, given the fact that he and Altin were just as clearly joined at the hip as any of the more explicitly romantic couples. Ah, to be fifteen and oblivious again…

Well, he was amused, that is, until Yurio decided to turn his frustration onto him.

It was at the banquet, because of course it was at the banquet. All of the skaters were as smashed as he could remember any of them being, though since he’d slipped out relatively early at Sochi he understood that this was not actually any worse than Katsuki at least had been on that night. Yurio was one of the only sober ones, being fifteen, which only made the resulting chaos worse. But then again, he’d been sober in Sochi too, and Yakov had seen video of him trying to beat drunken Katsuki in a breakdance contest. God, he couldn’t leave them alone for ten seconds.

Not that he didn’t want to for a few moments after Yurio said what he said.

It wasn’t, to be fair, initially Yurio’s fault. It was of course Katsuki’s, because for all that he was a great skater he was a lousy drunk. He looped an arm around Viktor and one around Yakov (that was how you knew for sure he was drunk, Yakov reflected later, because unlike Viktor he was not a clingy or huggy sober person) and announced to the whole room that since he and Viktor and Yura had gotten their medals, everyone needed a medal!

Well, that wouldn’t have been the worst thing on its own, so maybe it wasn’t Katsuki’s fault.

No, maybe it was Minako’s. Because she, the absolute traitor, had somehow pilfered that little box out of the house that he was graciously letting her live in, his newly-revealed Quisling of a roommate, and tossed it to Katsuki. “Here, let Yakov have some bling too!”

Come to think of it, she was probably drunk as well. She’d been eyeing Christophe Giacometti across the room all night, and he should have realized that kind of open lustfulness was a sign of inebriation.

“Yakov! It looks great!” Viktor was not free of his share of blame for this either, as he caught the box and started yelling himself (it was unclear to Yakov whether Katsuki or Minako being drunk was what made their connection fail; Katsuki was clearly a very coordinated drunk, given what had happened in Sochi, but he might not have actually been paying attention when she threw it, and while Minako was also a graceful sot, she didn’t exactly practice a sport that required much throwing). “Put it on!”

“It’s not for him, idiot! It’s for Lilia!” And this was where it became Yurio’s fault after all. Because if he had just not said anything, everything would have been fine. But no, he had to open his mouth like the immature fifteen-year-old he was and put it all out there when it was perfectly fine being stuffed down inside his chest cavity where it belonged. Fortunately he did so in a way that Yakov could deflect from.

“That’s Madame Baranovskaya,” he started to correct, and then he realized his biggest mistake—or at least, his biggest other than buying the cursed thing in the first place.

“I believe I have told you both to call me Lilia.”

Yes, his biggest mistake was doing his level best to forget that Lilia was there too.

“That’s right! She told me I could call her Lilia if I was going to perform her routines from here on out!” Yurio undermined his triumph, at least in Yakov’s eyes, by sticking out his tongue like the teen he was. “And anyway, I’m not the one who’s in love with her, you are!”

“I never said I wasn’t!”

And this was where it became not Katsuki’s fault, not Minako’s fault, not Viktor’s fault, not Yurio’s fault, not even Lilia’s fault. Because in the end he was the one, not any of them, who blurted it out into the middle of the room.

In his imagination, he thought that a revelation like that would lead to a silence, one of those cinematic scenes where you could hear a pin drop. Of course, the real world didn’t work like that. Not only were there parts of the party that weren’t even paying attention to him, because the Worlds gala was big, but even in the little slice of it that was fixed on him and Lilia, there was a Yurio, and where there was Yurio there was rarely silence.

“TOLD YOU! PAY UP!” He bounded over to Altin, who sighed and handed over a single American dollar with a pained expression.

“Wait, if this isn’t for Yakov…” Viktor was still holding the necklace, and at some point he’d apparently taken it out of its box because now it was there, glittering its pale elegance in his hands. “Then Lilia should wear it! Everyone gets a medal!”

Such an unfilial unadopted child he had.

To his great shock, Lilia, who hadn’t verbally responded to anything since he’d basically told the whole room he was still in love with her, simply inclined her head and let Viktor drape the necklace over her neck, with all the attendant awkwardness of the fact that Katsuki was still attached to his arm.

It looked good on her.

Almost as if he’d intended to buy it for her in the first place, though he would have sworn it was just because…

Fine, it was just because it reminded him of her. But that didn’t mean he’d bought it for her!

Just...for himself. To have something that reminded him of her.

“It looks good.” His voice sounded raspy to his own ears. “I...I hope you like it.”

“It is adequate.” She sniffed. “You could just have given it to me yourself and avoided this...public spectacle. There was no need to try to invoke my jealousy just to make a point.”

Invoke her what now? He thought back to the moment when Minako had first discovered it and the way Lilia had reacted. That was jealousy?

He huffed. “Nonsense. I just didn’t know how to give it to you.”

“You say ‘here, Lilia, I bought you something.’” Katsuki was apparently an eavesdropper, and, given the fact that his and Viktor’s relationship had hardly involved clear communication and real words at any point that Yakov had ever observed, a hypocrite as well. But he was drunk, so he could probably be forgiven.

“Here, Lilia, I bought you something.” He handed her the now-empty box that Viktor had stuffed into his hands when he’d needed them free to drape the necklace over Lilia’s neck.

“As I said, it is adequate.” She sniffed again, but she didn’t leave his side for the rest of the night, so it was probably all right.

Chapter Text

He should have known that Viktor and Yuuri’s wedding couldn’t be the relaxing, easy time that he had hoped for. Sure, Yuuri’s win at Worlds meant that it was in Hasetsu, and therefore he did get to ease himself into the hot waters of an onsen for the second straight year after a long season. So that was definitely a good thing. But crammed into that onsen with him were all the other skaters they’d invited, so it wasn’t actually that relaxing. And for some reason they’d invited JJ Leroy and his fiancé (he wondered whether the card had actually said Jean-Jacques or not, and whether JJ would have shown up anyway) while also inviting Yurio, who was apparently serving as ringbearer, so there were guaranteed fireworks every time JJ opened his mouth in Yurio’s presence.

Which was often.

Add to that the fact that they were getting married in a complex hodgepodge of traditions that somehow ended with a traditional Western ceremony that was staged on the ice at Ice Castle Hasetsu, and there was nothing calm or chill about it. Which he should have expected, given who was getting married, after all.

Minako was somehow officiating—apparently she’d gotten some kind of internationally recognized certification over the internet, which she confided in him had been after five too many vodkas at the Worlds gala when Yuuri had come crying to her that he couldn’t figure out who should officiate their wedding—and had taken the opportunity of the wedding as an excuse to move all her things back to Hasetsu. After all, she pointed out, Yuuri hardly needed someone to show him the ropes in St. Petersburg anymore.

She might pretend she was done with ice skating, but Yakov knew from other sources that she was going to be the chief choreographer for the new generation of talent that had started lining up outside the doors of Ice Castle Hasetsu from as far away as Sapporo once people learned that Katsuki Yuuri had gotten his start there and still trained there in the offseason.

And if she managed to poach some of that talent over to the ballet side, well, he suspected Lilia had some ideas about where she might eventually send them. Not that she’d formally told him any such thing, but he recognized the gleam in her eye from his own.

The least relaxing thing about the whole time was that somehow he and Lilia were both giving away Viktor to Yuuri, at least in this stage of the complex thing that was this marriage (why he hadn’t just encouraged them to elope, he couldn’t say). So they had to carefully make their way down the literal ice while holding onto Viktor and making sure they didn’t fall. Lilia might be good at it, because she had made a whole career out of never falling or putting a foot wrong, but he was a coach for a reason thank you very much. And they weren’t even skating, because after the triplets (flower girls) and Yurio (as mentioned, ringbearer) skated down the aisle showing off there was no way the ice was going to be smooth enough for him to avoid falling anyway.

Better to look like an idiot in dress shoes than prove it by falling flat on his face in the skates that were the symbol of his entire profession.

In addition to the foolishness of giving Viktor away (like he was his to give away, like Yuuri hadn’t already taken him months ago, like Yakov hadn’t been the one to bring Yuuri to Viktor), there was the added stress of being around Lilia all the damn time during the rehearsals.

Oh yes, multiple rehearsals. Apparently you spend one lifetime yelling at a skater about how important practice is and he rewards you by making you run the part where you stand awkwardly next to your ex-wife a dozen times over.

Not that things were actually that awkward anymore. She was wearing the necklace, actually, though he wasn’t sure whether that was a symbol or signal of anything other than the fact that it perfectly matched the dress she had chosen to wear.

Which, come to think of it, he’d never seen her wear before. It looked new, in fact.

Hm.

He decided that if he was going to look like an idiot in one way, walking on that stupid ice, he might as well look like an idiot in every way.

“Lilia?”

“Yes, Yakov?”

“Minako’s moving back here.”

“She is.”

They had always been good at speaking short truths around a point.

“Will I still see you on Thursdays?”

“Will you still serve the biscuits?”

“Would I dare not to?” He huffed. “You could come around more often, if you wanted. The dining room table is practically clean.”

He heard the skeptical noise next to him, though neither of them had actually stopped looking at where Viktor and Yuuri were rather too enthusiastically practicing the kissing of the grooms.

“What? I bought a desk. The table was too messy. And before you ask, it’s actually in the den where it belongs.”

“I wasn’t going to ask.” That was a lie, but one he would let slip because of what she said next. “Perhaps I might come around then. Sometimes. For dinner.”

“For dinner.”

He let the warm glow of that carry him through the intensely embarrassing walk down the aisle, where he only almost slipped every two feet of the ridiculously long entranceway that Viktor had demanded to showcase his walk up. He even managed not to yank on any of the gold medals Viktor was wearing to keep his balance—which was made all the more impressive by the fact that Viktor had insisted that he and Yuuri wear all their gold medals to the ceremony.

Even the juniors ones, which Yuuri had tried to claim didn’t count, and which went a great long way towards equalling their totals since Yuuri had actually completely destroyed Japanese juniors (hence the title Japan’s Ace).

Then they piled them up on the ice during the ceremony, made out somewhat more intensely than he was comfortable watching after being married, and grabbed randomly from the pile for their walk back.

It would have been a sweeter symbol if he hadn’t been sure Yuuri was going to personally restore and clean every single Viktor medal before placing it in the award cabinet in their new home, which was now doubling as his officially-approved Viktor shrine. Still, the thought was nice.

And Yuuri’s were newer, too…

He watched them dance their way back down the ridiculously long aisle while Nishigori Yuuko took picture after picture and the triplets (who apparently had their own cameras now, God help him and the entire world) followed suit and sighed.

Today was not restful, but there were more important things than restful.

They could start planning Yuuri’s next season after the honeymoon.

After all, he would need both his champion skater and his new assistant coach undistracted if they were going to repeat next year.

He was startled to feel Lilia’s hand slip into his, but not so startled as to not take it.

Today was a good day.