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It happens with a bang. Immediately, the whole rink quiets.
It happens fairly often. It isn’t out of the ordinary to see someone fall or even crash against the boards. Most of the time, it doesn’t even garner any attention. With a crash this bad, you normally look at the figure lying on the ice and wait for them they stand up, grimacing or laughing about it and then you go on with your own training.
Sometimes there’s blood, sometimes the physician looks you over, but it’s mostly just bruises and they all have them. They can hardly be avoided when part of your job is to do impossible stunts on the ice and try not to fall down too much.
But all in all, it’s fine. You get the bruises and then you might ice it, or you might not, but that’s how you learn. You get up and do it all over again.
Yuuri doesn’t get up.
Victor is the first to move, having just come back from his break. He falls to his knees next to the prone figure and shouts his name. As if the ice was broken, everyone starts to move. Yakov yells a lot. Some skaters approach the two, some huddle together in groups, horrified expressions on their faces.
Yuri is frozen still.
He saw it happen. How Yuuri’s foot just slipped out from underneath him when he tried to land the quad flip. It’s normal. It happens to the best of them. Yuuri wasn’t even practising a new jump, he’s been able to do it for forever.
The rink was so full of skaters that he had jumped pretty close to the boards. That’s normal, too. But then his foot slipped and he had tried to catch himself on the ice but his foot had slipped away from the boards and physics dictated that his head fell toward the boards.
The crack was sickening. And Yuuri doesn’t get back up, even with his idiot fiancé hovering over him.
Yuri’s seen Yuuri slam into the boards before, at the Chugoku, Shikoku, and Kyushu Championship. It happened a few times after that, too. He’s seen him hurt since he’s moved with Victor to Russia to train here. Bruises most often, once a sprained ankle. It’s unavoidable, really, in their field of work.
But it’s never been this bad before. He’s always gotten back up and laughed it off. And now he’s not even moving.
Yuri can only stare at the place where his rival lies, surrounded by Victor and Mila and Georgi and Yakov and one of the physicians.
Yuri can’t get his body to move. Distantly, he notices that his hands are shaking. He knows how critical head injuries can be. He knows how much they hurt; he’s had one or two concussions before. He also knows how bad it is that he’s not moving.
Yuri’s hands feel clammy, his heart is playing a wild rhythm inside his chest. He should probably move, see what’s going on himself, but he’s rooted to the spot and his body won’t move.
He sees Yuuri’s body on the ice and his grandpa’s body on the floor. He hears his grandpa’s low, pained groan and knows something is very wrong. He sees his still figure in the hospital bed, can feel the cold skin underneath his fingertips.
Someone touches his shoulder and he moves away belatedly. They’re talking to him but all he can hear are the sirens of the ambulance. The talking gets more urgent but Yuri waves them away. He doesn’t want to talk right now. He doesn’t want to hear platitudes coming from someone who is essentially a stranger to him, no matter how long they’ve shared rink-time.
The only good thing is, that Yuri can finally move. If he was frozen before, now he feels like he’s vibrating out of his skin with restless energy. He skates over to the huddle of Yuuri and Victor. He tries to find something to say, anything that wouldn’t feel horrible out-of-place or callous. He can’t come up with anything.
Mila and Georgi notice him approach and let him fit between them, so he can see Yuuri on the ground. There’s blood. Not that much, probably, but it feels like a lot on the white surface of the ice. But at least his eyes are open and he’s trying to formulate words.
“V’tor? Wha’s go’n on?”
Yuri wants to throttle him and hug him and yell at him for doing something so stupid as getting hurt. But Yuuri still doesn’t look okay, his attention drifting in and out, his eyes can’t focus on anything.
Yuri hears the sirens again, but realises that this time, they’re real, when paramedics come rushing through the entrance doors and make their way unsteadily across the ice, holding tightly onto the boards.
The next few minutes disappear into a flurry of movements and spoken words. They ask Yuuri question after question and touch his head and shine a light in his eyes. They then transport him off the ice and out of the door. Mila nudges him and he follows silently.
He can’t remember the drive to the hospital, aside from the overwhelming feeling of worry – it’s not fear, it’s not – and short glimpses of Mila telling him it will be all right.
That’s what they said about his grandpa, too and now he can barely get out of his bed without help.
The hospital chairs are hard and uncomfortable but Yuri’s used to them by now. They sit there and wait in silence. Yakov is running a hand through his ever-thinning hair. Yuri is bouncing his leg. He’s restless but he thinks that if he stands up to pace around the waiting room, he might just walk out of the hospital and not come back.
He needs the Katsudon to be fine. How else is he going to beat him? That’s their whole thing. Mila grasps his hand and traces circles over his wrist that’s supposed to be comforting but it makes him even more anxious and he pulls his hand back.
Sometime after Yakov got himself a coffee and Georgi pulled out his precious diary to write in it, Victor enters the room. The whole attention shifts onto him immediately. He seems exhausted. His hair is all over the place and he’s constantly fidgeting with his ring. He reassures them that Yuuri is fine, just concussed and that he’ll be right as rain in a few weeks. Yuri doesn’t believe him.
They follow Victor through the grey halls of the hospital to Yuuri’s room. Yuri’s legs move on their own accord. Victor opens the door to the hospital room and Yuri hesitates a second before following him inside.
Yuuri is lying on the bed, propped up as if he couldn’t sit up himself. The curtain is closed and it’s semi-dark in here. He looks awfully small and vulnerable. He doesn’t look fine at all.
Yuuri must notice his look and beckons him to his side.
“Yurio, I’m okay. My head just hurts.” He enunciates every syllable carefully as if he’d trip over them otherwise.
Yuri swallows the lump in his throat. If Yuuri is saying it, then it must be true. He’s never coddled him before, never treated him like a child when he knew how much Yuri hated it.
“Don’t fucking do it again, Katsudon”, he threatens. He doesn’t know what he’d do if he was really badly hurt.
Yuri just smiles at him ever so gently and takes his hand, squeezing it reassuringly. Something loosens in his chest that he wasn’t aware had been there in the first place. Maybe it really will be okay.