Chapter Text
It starts young, as most things do.
He is five and his mother tells him that he is not allowed another syrniki after dinner. He feels something he has never felt before rise up like vomit at the back of his throat, thick and suffocating. His mother tells him that they are called figure skaters for a reason. Skating is an art, and there is nothing more important than devotion itself, nothing more important than becoming art.
His mother tells him that competitions are not won by being anything less than beautiful. Yuri doesn't know what he wants to be yet, doesn’t have to know, his Baba argues, he can be whatever he puts his mind to.
Yuri knows he will be a figure skater. He knows he wants to be art, if that is what will make him the best figure skater the world has ever seen. Knows it the way the sky is blue and the way that his Baba makes the best pirozhki, that he will be a figure skater. That he will be beautiful. Art. A murky wisp of an idea he reaches for with both of his hands and holds in his grasp is what figure skating is to him. His first love.
His Baba takes him to the kitchen after dinner, lifting him up on his hip and feeds him still-warm syrniki from the pan after his mother has taken a nap on the couch. He feels his stomach turn as he rejects a second, sickness bubbling up behind his teeth, hot and cloying.
He learns this sickness is shame. This is permanent. A fever you cannot sweat out. He learns that will stick with him for a very long time, so long that he would forget what life was like without this.
He goes to bed hungry that night and cries, head tilted just so in the pillows so that no noise escapes. It feels like there is an animal trapped in his chest, a rabid dog trying to claw its way out, begging for a something that Yuri doesn’t even know how to define the shape of yet.
The dog inside him rips his heart to shreds and makes a home in his ribs.
Yuri Plisetsky learns that hunger is pain and that if he works hard enough the hunger can turn into something beautiful. He feeds the dog inside him glass and hopes that will put it to sleep.
He is eight and watching the other skaters. They are older and wiser, gliding effortlessly along the ice. Bodies lithe and unassuming. Shoulder blades pressing through skin, lycra costumes hanging loosely off their frames. Angelic wings preparing for flight.
Whispers of tinier waists, the older girls frowning and turning to the side, lifting their shirts up in changing room mirrors. Gagging coming from behind locked doors in the boys bathroom, the unmistakeable sound of stomach acid hitting the porcelain bowl below.
No one had to teach Yuri how to carve parts of himself out for something greater. To satisfy the dog. There was simply not enough time to be taught, not enough time for Yuri to be young and innocent and unaware, wide eyes already soaking up as much knowledge as much as he dared to take.
There was no time left to not be good enough, and Yuri Plisestky would rather rip out his own heart than be left behind.
He keeps track of what he eats, almost obsessively so. He learns there are good foods and bad foods and sometimes okay foods but Yuri finds it easier if there are no foods at all, nothing to distract or tempt what lies inside of him. He doesnt want to make the mistake of not following the rules enough, finds it easier to make new rules, better rules for himself. This way he will always make sure he is doing something right, knows he is something right.
He already feels the ache of being nothing, of the dog tearing itself limb from limb behind his lungs. The dog cries for a less cruel life, for a softer death. So Yuri does as well, as Yakov drives him to his house. A shell of a home in Moscow, after practice, after lessons, after winning places on a podium. He does not know much, but he knows he is far too young to feel as much as this. He unlocks the door to silence, to an empty fridge and a sleeping figure on the couch and not much else.
He has already been not enough once and twice.
Not enough to be noticed, not enough for anything worthy of feeding the dog to remain. He has been just about worthy enough for lessons to be paid for and a birthday card with his name scrawled just so on the inside, and Yuri would never dare bite the hand that feeds. He keeps the love he is given tucked neatly in the bloody space in his chest as the dog sniffs around, waiting for something to happen.
He cannot imagine rejecting what little has been offered to him already. Yuri clings onto anything given with both hands and tucks it carefully behind his ribs. He smooths out its corners and uncrinkles the edges. He claims devotion, offers himself to whatever higher power deigns to listen that he has proved himself this is not all he has left to become. He swears to whoever is listening that yes, this is art, this is something beautiful.
He is not sure he believes himself.
If this went, if the hand retired, the dog would swallow him whole and there would be nothing left for him to hold. Awards win money and hearts, awards win more skating lessons and win a hand running through his hair after a medal around his neck. Awards dull the pains at the pit of his stomach and quiet the dog begging to be fed. Awards fill his chest with more space to become something, instead of this nothing he is cursed with being.
They offer the space for love to be nestled between his ribs.
Yuri already knows that when something as precious as love is given to him it turns to glass that cannot help but be adorned with thousands of spiderwebbing lines decorating its surface. He has never been careful, has tried to be delicate and it has not worked.
He knows this.
The fissures will cut deeper and he will end up picking up the pieces, cherry-red dripping off his fingers as he does. He will feed the dog and the dog will cry for more and less at the same time and it will never stop. He clamps his hands around his ears tucked into a stall after practice and begs for it to stop, the sounds of half digested lunch and bile being forced out echoing around the room. He does not know if this is a lesson to be learned or a rite of passage but he knows that all he wants is for everytbing to just stop.
He prays one day it will.
Above all else, this is a learned behaviour, and what is Yuri Plisetsky if not the most diligent student figure skating has seen?
It starts young, as most things do.
He is ten and he has finally swallowed enough of his pride to stand sit down politely next to his coach during breaks.
He goes to a bigger rink now, in the city centre and with other skaters. Yakov has taken him under his wing, like a poor imitation of his grandfather. Yuri likes Yakov. Yakov is good. Strict, but understanding.
He knows that Yuri has limits that he tries his hardest to hde. Understands that Yuri cannot let the dog gnaw on his ribs for too long, that it will tear his very being apart. He keeps the dog as fed as Yuri will allow and stops him from losing it completely. Hunger bears art and art is everything to someone as shallow as Yuri Plisetsky.
He has mastered the art of appearing quiet and content for as long as he needs so he can hear whispers among coaches that spark up every time a certain older skater steps upon the ice. They talk of grace he brings that is so rarely bestowed upon the rink, unrivalled power behind every jump.
Yuri's eyes are fixed upon the prodigy, eyes transfixed on the skater. He feels something horrible and sick take root in his chest. Nothing this painful could be good, and nothing less than idolisation has ever hurt this bad.
His eyes stay glued to Viktors form, not daring to blink and miss a moment of his free skate practice, gaze firmly on him. This is art, Yuri thinks to himself bitterly. This is art and this is born, not made. This is all Yuri has ever wanted to be and all he knows he can never become laid out in front of him in five-foot-eleven glory.
The day Viktor throws him a rose at the end of his competition, Yuri cries in the drive home. Cries for the dog inside him that he will never be able to feed, cries for the young Yuri who wanted an extra serving of dessert, cries for the Yuri who listened to his mentors, first friends, throw up in bathrooms.
Viktor promises if he wins gold then he will choreograph his free skate, and Yuri promises back to himself quietly that he will feed the dog his shame and desire and everything ugly that ruins him, will feel it the glass shards of his broken heart and the fat that just wont cut itself off his inner thighs and hopes that the dog will shut up and go to sleep. The dog will shut up and work and help him skate and make him something. Will make him anything, will make him win. The dog will eat away at his heart and fat and his bones and his sanity and maybe then he will be beautiful and an artist or the art or anything inbetween.
He is thirteen and he jumps too high, doesn't take into account the angle of the skate on the ice. The weight he's lost and the control ripped from him in the process.
He over-rotates, and barely manages to catch himself, slamming into the side of the rink, feeling devotion blossom across his ribs. Commitment to his art like lightning splitting across the front of his thighs.
Yakov screams at him, out of fear for his career or maybe out of fear of the apathy hat Yuri carries. Maybe Yuri should be angry, maybe then it would be something. Be anything to cover up the lack of art, the lack of devotion that he so obviously carries.
Yuri thinks bitterly to himself that this needs to be under control before it's his knee, his hip, his ankle that rams itself into the wall.
Viktor never needed to do this. Viktor never needed to force himself to be art. He came to the rink perfect and beautiful and heaven sent, a breath of fresh air while Yuri was dragged up from the seventh ring himself. All torn sinew and tendons, dripping. Sharp edges and something so unmistakeably human. Nothing like Viktor.
After he wins gold, at the end of this season he will breathe again and the dog will be quiet and he will feed it what little he lets Yakov give him. He will feed it what little he thinks he deserves that Viktor gives him, what he holds and breaks because of course it fucking does because he’s fucking Yuri Plisetsky and he never learned how to control himself. He has nowhere to put it, nowhere to hold of course he feeds it to the dog.
Yuri Plisetsky goes home that night and stares at himself in the mirror, gripping the sides of the sink below. He promises that this will be over after this season, ending this once and for all.
Yuri throws up blood in the toilet that night, crying as he spits up cherry-red pills for hours.
He doesn’t go to practice the day after. He feigns a stomach bug.
The dog howls and there is no more glass left to feed it.