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He gets along with the other kids, generally. The little report card that he carries back to his parents chirpily says that Viktor never rough-houses with the other little boys, he shares toys at playtime, and he demonstrates good motor skills and coordination during games. All the minders say he’s very precocious. It’s consistent, because he’s consistent. “No surprises there,” his father says as he reads the card over dinner. His voice is pleased enough, but not proud. The barest hint of a frown creases his brow as he scans the rest of the card, but in a moment it, too, is banished from his ever-amicable, unruffled expression.

He’s a little on the energetic side; has problems falling asleep at nap-time. You might consider signing him up for a sport in the afternoon. Come meet us and we can discuss it further. A child’s universe is small, and it’s important that caretakers form personal connections, so that it’s warm and cohesive.

Viktor’s parents do not come in to meet his daytime minders. One day his chauffeur simply arrives after lunch-time to drive him to the local ice skating rink for his first lesson.

From the moment Viktor tugs tiny boots onto his tiny feet and steps onto the ice, he’s hooked. All around him are other kids wobbling and falling, sitting up and grinning at their parents in the surrounding stands while the ice melts into the seat of their pants. It’s okay, he realises, and his heart misses a beat at the liberating thought, it’s okay, here, to stumble and waver.

At home, Viktor has to strain to reach the banister so that he can clamber up the staircase to his bedroom, which lies at the opposite end of the hallway from his parents’ master bedroom. The carpet is luxurious, as is everything really in their pristine house, but it still burns when he slips and scrapes his knee. The Nikiforov residence does not cater to the needs of a small child: it demands that the small child grow up quickly.

Sometimes, one of the maids sees him struggling and hurries over to carry him up. He enjoys being carried. It’s especially great when it happens near his bedtime, because then he can speed through brushing his teeth and slip under the covers with the ghost of human warmth still lingering on his skin. It’s the closest he comes to being tucked in.

After that first lesson, the other kids totter over to the side, where their parents are ready to receive them with praise, a hug, and a juicebox. As Viktor reluctantly removes his skates and hands them to his chauffeur, he watches another little boy chattering away to his mother while she smiles and uses a towel to wipe at the melting bits of ice stuck on his sleeve from a particularly spectacular fall. 

And Viktor does something he’s never done before. He holds his hand up to his chauffeur.

Momentarily, the man’s eyes widen as much as his professional discretion allows. Then a soft look comes over his face, and he transfers the skates to his other hand so that he can hold Viktor’s. They walk hand in hand back to the car, where Viktor gets into the backseat as usual and straps himself in, struggling ever so slightly with the buckle.

During the drive home, he rehearses the words inside his head, borrowing that other little boy’s inflection. “I skated today and I liked it, Mother!”

Mum? Mother. He’s always called them Mother and Father. Perhaps a smile, too? He tries it out, peering at his faint reflection in the car window. Perfect.

Once they pull into the driveway, he trots in through the front door, all set to put his bag down in his room, then go knock on the door of his mother’s study. He clambers up the stairs just fine by himself this time.

At the top of the staircase, a maid stops him to ask conspiratorially what he would like for dessert tonight. His parents are both overseas at a conference they hadn’t mentioned to Viktor, and the wait-staff want to sneak him a treat so he won’t miss them.

This is how Viktor learns about love: he watches. Just outside his car window, walking in the park, he sees grandparents being pulled along laughingly by their youthful grandchildren, held back from bursting into delighted jogging only by their arthritic bones. At daycare, he bears silent witness to the everyday endearments that pass between siblings: insulting pet names, head noogies, childish pranks. All things he has never had.

He listens quietly as his rink mates moan about how embarrassing it is that their entire family will be coming to see them skate at the showcase event next weekend. He deflects their questions about whether his own parents will be coming to see their talented son perform, until one day, as though by tacit agreement, they stop asking. 

As the years pass and his supple young muscles respond ever eagerly to the demands of skating, he becomes more and more aware that his childhood of almost no physical affection with his parents is not the norm. At some point — he doesn’t know when, and only realises years later probably — he stops waving goodbye when his mother isn’t looking back at him. At some point, when his parents aren’t at home, he starts hanging out with the staff that work in his too-high-ceilinged house, helping out around the kitchen so he can observe the way the chauffeur flirts with one of the maids, tickling her side as he walks past, making her blush outrageously and cast a bemused look of apology at Viktor.

Viktor Nikiforov grows up starved for love, and so he reads love into the world, picking up gestures and expressions from rink mates and peers and random strangers on the street. He stands in front of his bedroom mirror, cups a hand to his own cheek the way he’s seen a young couple do while kissing. Wraps his arms around himself in the ghost of a hug.

Other people at the rink are free with their affections, especially in the exuberation after one of his stellar performances. When they notice there isn’t anybody cheering for him in the stands, his rink mates’ parents take to standing in for them.

He flinches the first time one of them opens their arms out to him as he comes away from the spotlight. Then his impassive face scrunches up, and he steps off the ice and lets himself be hugged. 

By seven years old he has had the basics of skating mastered for some time, and has chosen without consulting his parents to specialise in figure skating. By the age of nine, he has scraps of ideas swirling around his head, choreography that he pieces together from all his time spent watching. Like all songs, all Viktor’s skates sing about is love. 

Like a parched region after drought, he seeks out and initiates little touches: a comforting touch on the shoulder here, a high five there. His skin practically aches for them. But all the while he’s careful: he has to read people and situations instantaneously, and accurately, or else he might deploy the wrong gesture and the whole façade would fall apart. Everyone would know about loveless little Viktor Nikiforov, wretchedly imitating for other people’s entertainment.

He has already changed rink and teacher several times along his path to stardom, each time mentioning his plans to his ever more distant parents only as far as they need be troubled with this emerging and vibrant part of his life that is all his own. 

When he gets picked out of the lineup of a showcase skating event by one of the top skating coaches in St. Petersburg, he dips into his ample pocket money to buy farewell gifts for his family’s staff, who have been such parental surrogates to him, and starts spending even more of his time at the rink. Somehow, they feel like the only ones he’s leaving behind.

The moment it becomes clear that his first proper coach is not interested in letting him create his own programs, he finds another. Once he notices that he needs private time on the rink to breathe life into his ideas without the press of other bodies to worry about, he bribes the caretaker to let him in after hours, and grows and grows as a skater and artist. 

At competitions, surrounded by other practitioners in the figure skating world, he hears the whispers about him — how could he not? Prodigy, genius, some call him reverently, admiring his textbook footwork and unflappable control on a surprising amount of muscle power. Proud, loner, others mutter, as he keeps on perfecting the art of walking into a room, demanding and deserving the attention he was never given as a child. It’s all just noise to him. Even as the media starts pushing themselves more in his face, demanding interviews and exclusives, he stays centered, because he has always stood apart from everyone around him. Why should it matter that now people were calling that standing out?

Selfish is the comment that stings a little, but in the way words do when they are true. Skating is about him, in that it’s his only way of performing all that he sees, and wants. But it’s about the people he puts up on a stage by watching them. It’s about that little boy chattering away to his mother. It’s about the little boy he used to be, who asked for ice cream for dessert that day, because already he retreated instinctually to the cold of the rink, wanting to taste it on his tongue, imbibe it and take shelter in it.

He overcompensates sometimes, noting the little pause and questioning raised eyebrow when he’s been a little more tactile than is acceptable. He tries not to lie awake beating himself up about it.

It’s like being a hollow shell, he realises one day. To feel less easy to break, he’s been filling himself up with all the love he can find in the world...

They say that people who fail to really connect with friends and family, often turn to pets for some semblance of affection. Viktor gets a poodle one day, and pours all the love that has nowhere else to go, into Makkachin.

A year and a half before his international debut at the Junior World Championships, his hair starts turning gray. It happens prematurely to some people; he’s just one of them. He’s been keeping it long, admiring the swish of it through the air as he jumps, and liking the flowy lines it created around his head during spins. Coach Yakov frets about it, says that without the stark contrast between his pale skin and dark hair, he’s lost some personality on the ice.

Personality? Viktor shakes his head at himself in the mirror. His skating has never had personality. Who was that Russian ballerina who said that the strongest people were those who could be reborn again and again as needed? Viktor is reborn every time he begins a new program. It’s how he keeps surprising people, all the way up from a regional to a national level, to where he is now.

So never mind that his hair is gray; it will make a distinctive impression out on the international stage, and it’s fitting anyway — like his body slowly being taken over by ice, going as colourless and expressionless as he feels outside of his performances. 

Then he skates for the Championship, and he forgets about how the whole world is watching him at once, and when he emerges again out from the performance, they’ve made him a junior gold medalist at sixteen years old, with the highest score in history. 

Such a collection of flowers is delivered to his hotel room over the next few days that he almost doesn’t notice the bouquet his father has sent. It’s a sobering moment when he realises that his family is now as distant from him as his many fans. The media call him a star, but he’s more like an orbiting satellite, drifting at a set distance away from those he cherishes. Far enough to put up on a pedestal. Not close enough to anyone.

The attached note tells him that they watched his performance. It says that he was flawless, and has done them proud.

Viktor’s lips twist up into a bitter smile at the words. Looks like he’s become what they wanted all along, after all.

He keeps the flowers in a vase of water until long after the petals droop and wilt. He tells himself it’s not sentiment — but of course, he’s wrong. How can his romantic heart help itself? 

Dasvidaniya.

The media builds a cult around his name. Again, Coach Yakov is concerned, asking whether he needs an advisor to help him manage his image. Viktor surprises himself with how easily he slips into and expands the public persona that they’ve laid out for him. They say his performances ring with “the playfulness of a virtuoso”, so self-assured that there is never a moment of doubt, only perfection. With puberty behind him, he starts being increasingly outrageous, presenting himself as the ultimate bachelor of figure skating, the effortless genius whose Instagram posts are all fun touristy shots with Makkachin, never any reminder of the actual work he puts in to stay perfectly tuned for his sport.  

He starts to throw in little flirty lines in his interviews, and initiates a trademark wink at the camera that he then doles out just sparingly enough that the reaction is immense whenever he does it again. He walks into a hair salon and gets the haircut that will follow him all the way to his fifth Grand Prix victory, with bangs that accentuate his delicate temples and shocking blue-green eyes. Yakov snorts but leaves him to grooming the transition of his image, from pretty boy to beautiful man.

He dates, here and there. Figure skaters and other athletes are good looking people, and he genuinely feels something for each of the gorgeous lovers he picks up in various cities around the world. But he leaves them behind, every time. He’s not entirely sure why he does, nor why sometimes, he goes out alone to drink himself under the counter. It’s numbness he seeks, but from what, he doesn’t know.

And it’s not that he doesn’t enjoy winning. But as he unveils new programs for each skating season — he thinks in terms of on- and off-season time, not calendar years — he finds himself spending more and more time in his happy-go-lucky, playboy persona. It’s the only way to keep his head grounded amid all the praise and clamour of fans: just to continue reinventing himself, never resting on past performances, and so to surprise himself too, in a way.

People speak of his name, Nikiforov, as a benchmark of figure skating artistry. They praise his emotive body language, his deep engagement with the audience by always skating honestly, from the heart. Viktor laughs it off — he has to, because only he knows the secret, only he knows that inside he is still just performing what he’s seen. He is still just a boy who has never finished learning what love is, tracing out what he knows of it in blades on ice, as though love could be cold, as though it could be encompassed by the twin points of his legs, as though he could express himself when his self is just what other people have inadvertently shaped. 

It shows in his costumes too, which only get more self-reflexive as the years go on. The shimmery, translucent tunic that he has made for his fifth Grand Prix? To everyone else it could be a guardsman’s uniform, a band member’s attire. Really, he was inspired by a ringmaster’s outfit, and when he wears it he is drawing back the curtain on the whole circus of personas he has taken on for people to watch. Is he a strongman? A lion? A tightrope walker, laughing off the danger of a life spent walking a fine line, skimming the surface and teasing the reveal that there is nothing beneath?

Stay close to me is the title of the song he skates to, and the music urges his audience in swells and majestic crescendoes: please. I’d be so lost without you. As he makes his jumps, Viktor pictures his chauffeur, thinks of that kitchen he would sit in, all the places and people he has somehow left behind even as he tries to keep them close in his skating. Stay close to me, he tells them, holding out his arms, bowing his head humbly and even then skating backwards, away, always away. Always forgetting for a while, and then finding their memories again, sometimes at the bottom of a bottle.

Afterwards, the reporters want to know, “What can we expect from you next?” He pauses a moment too long before smiling cheekily and saying, “Don’t expect me to do anything but surprise you.”

He has the makings of a short program for next season on the backburner, but so far lacks the backbone that would really sell the choreography. Instead of youthful flair the routine is just that: routine, tired.

It sounds stuck-up or pretentious or jaded, but for a while now, nothing has surprised him very much.

That Japanese boy has skated his program.

The one who had that look of absolute awe when Viktor turned to him for a commemorative photo. The one who had thrown him off balance momentarily by walking away. 

The one who had surprised him once before, and is surprising him again.

Viktor watches him skate his program, the free skate that is secretly about his own sense of impersonality, of dissociation from the place he has made for himself in the world, and he sees it immediately. The way Yuuri brings his whole person into every movement, the unguarded, intimate way he dances across the ice. The way he transmutes the same steps into something pure, something dripping with a doe-eyed naïvete, something that says, stay close to me, because I don’t know if I have already lost you. I have been away for so long already. 

It’s different from watching Yuuri at the Grand Prix Final at which he tanked. Yuuri owns his choreography, speaking to him in a language only they seem to know.

In that moment, Viktor knows what’s next for him, and it’s inextricably tied to Yuuri Katsuki. He’ll return to where he started, making choreography about love and all he knows about it. And Yuuri — Yuuri will make it different. Better. Yuuri will bring it to life, in a way that he’s never felt he could.

When Yuuri bounds into the hot spring where he is relaxing, it takes Viktor all of two seconds to notice the slobber on his cheek where Makkachin has clearly favoured him with affectionate licking on their first meeting. Ridiculously, this is what settles it for Viktor: right then, he decides to find out as much as he can about Yuuri, because what makes Yuuri a great skater is also what makes him a great person. 

That’s what he tells himself he believes, but somehow he can’t stop his own cynicism from seeping out of him. He can’t stop himself from telling both Yuri and Yuuri, “I’m surprised you think you can choose your own image. From the audience’s perspective, you’re just a piglet and a kitten.”

What is Viktor to the audience? A looking-glass. Transparent, which fools people into thinking he’s open and has nothing to hide. Do they know they’re just looking back on themselves?

When he’s feeling particularly maudlin some midnights, he romanticises it a little. Every program he choreographs becomes a love song to the world, an open letter that assures them of their value, because they have that most human quality. The day he drinks till dawn before showing up late to coach his two similarly-named young protégés, he does not romanticise anything. He does not need to.

At Hasetsu, the inspiration comes flooding in with every new sight Viktor sees, every interaction he has with the people who know Yuuri. He becomes privy to a world that is starkly different from his own. Yuuri is surrounded by friends and family who know when to reward him with food or hugs (usually not after a sweaty staircase drill), and when to show some tough love so he can exercise and get back in shape. They know where his boundaries lie, and it’s undeniably clear that their support is the reason Yuuri has made it as far as he has in skating.

As expected, at first they don’t really know what to do with him except to treat him as everyone else has: like the living legend that he has strove to become. But Yuuri is different. Sure, he starts out apprehensive, but as the weeks go by and they spend more time at the rink together, Viktor notices him tentatively loosening up, watching him sometimes when he thinks Viktor is preoccupied, as though wondering what to make of him. 

“What do you want me to be to you?” he asks Yuuri, on the beach.

And Yuuri tells him to be himself, and he talks like he sees Viktor, under all the flashiness, aside from his public image. Against the sound of seagulls that takes him back to his childhood in St. Petersburg, Yuuri talks like he knows and admires the real him, inadvertently insisting that there is a real him, beneath all the glamour and charms.

Viktor has asked Yuuri to step outside of himself, show a side of himself in performance that he has never shown before. Yuuri asks him to just be. 

And Viktor can only think, Well. There’s an idea.

Practice continues. Yuuri throws himself into crafting his free skate program, and Viktor finds him exploring new combinations at random hours in the day. They listen to the track endlessly, sharing earbuds often, sometimes while they’re out eating ramen together. Hasetsu is a small enough town that despite the hype of Victor’s presence, they mostly escape the paparazzi.

It’s good publicity anyway, Viktor reflects; but then Yuuri has never been concerned about his branding on social media. If anything, over the weeks he only grows more and more centered, focusing on finding his authentic style. Except for when directly confronted, he can tune out all the rest. 

When Yuuri unveils the program to Viktor for the first time in full, it’s all there in the steps and the spins, even the order of the jumps. He can read the story in the music that is Yuuri’s body in motion; he can follow every upheaval, every tiny triumph and discouraging failure. It is an autobiography, and it is a swan song. It is a love song to the sport itself, a dedication for all that it has given Yuuri, a reproach for all that it has unfairly demanded. 

And it is clumsy, at parts. It fumbles deliberately, and it is achingly sincere. Every flash of Yuuri’s blades across the ice seems to carve the whole of his being into Viktor, perhaps across his rib cage. Like a spell aimed at his heart.

“Well? What do you think?” Yuuri has been waiting nervously for his response, suddenly self-conscious and tiny in the centre of the rink.

Viktor swallows past the lump in his throat. “Your free leg is still sloppy,” he manages, and steadies himself to rattle off a whole laundry list of other critiques, even though what he wants to say is that Yuuri’s charm lies in his imperfection. 

What with how differently their skating careers have turned out, it’s strange to think he empathises with the story Yuuri weaves. But feeling alone, and then finding people to hold on to? He gets that.

Yakov was interviewed saying he was a selfish man who would never be anyone’s coach, and the words are seared into Viktor’s memory, renewed with a burning every time Yuuri looks at him with those eager brown eyes, absolutely trusting to his benelovent help. Because Viktor can’t honestly be sure he’s not in this for some kind of personal redemption, or escapism. He came to Japan hoping Yuuri would restore something to him that he has never had — already wishful thinking. But Yuuri is doing that and more. When they’re together, out on the rink or going to visit places around Hasetsu, Viktor doesn’t have to think about who he’s pretending to be that day. There is no pretence when it is only himself, Yuuri, and Makkachin, riding bikes as the sun sets and the evening wind slips under their jackets. Or washing the sand out of their eyes on the beach, mussing each other’s hair under the spray of the water.

Who is he? With Yuuri’s help, he’s finding out every day. And part of who Viktor Nikiforov is, is his care for Yuuri: the more he gets to know of him, the more he cares. He’s already had to restrain himself from darting forward and catching Yuuri after noticing his bad weight distribution coming down from a jump. Dangerous to entangle two skaters; blades go flying and someone could get permanently scarred. Who knew Viktor even had the capacity to care for someone enough to be illogical about their wellbeing?

Or he’ll be packing up their music after a training session while Yuuri moves with a tired vagueness to the side of the rink, and Yuuri’s abortive moan as he removes his skates from bruised and battered feet is almost enough to make Viktor come over to offer to massage them.

“Hit the showers, Yuuri,” he calls instead, slinging his jacket over himself. “And take a dip in the hot springs after dinner, alright? Rest for your muscles is part of training too.” 

“I thought you said you wouldn’t go easy on me,” Yuuri calls back with some levity in his voice. At least teasing is still enough to override his pain.

“I’m not. Tomorrow, you’re not stopping till you nail that hip rotation part.”

Yuuri groans, and Viktor calls over his shoulder, “It’s how I show my love!” 

(He shows up at Yuuri’s door that night anyway, with a special Russian balm and Makkachin in tow.)

At his comeback competition, Yuuri is a nervous ball of energy. Viktor feels almost snubbed by the way he retreats back into himself, shutting out the audience members who are making him nervous, but also shutting out Viktor. 

During the warm-up, he meets Minako’s eyes across the rink. She gives him a look that blends concern for Yuuri with the question, are you going to do something about it, or shall I?

The solidarity she implies hits him hard. Viktor’s never been included like this before. He’s never been rooted enough in one place or cared enough for one person that he becomes an integral part of their support network. 

When Yuuri skates up to the side, Viktor asks him to turn around and hugs him. He almost stops himself, remembering that story Yuuri told him about the Detroit girl whom Yuuri felt intruded on his feelings. But then the memory of Yuuri initiating their first hug comes back to him, and he wraps his arms around Yuuri, tucking his chin over his collarbone. 

He wants to tell Yuuri to ignore everyone else, just skate to him, for him, the way they’ve done in practice. He’s not entirely sure how that comes out as “Seduce me with all you have”, but then Viktor’s always been better at bodily expression than verbal. 

When Yuuri comes back in for his free skate, his face is practically impassive. Perhaps this is what allows Viktor to slip without awkwardness into the role of coach at a competition: to care for his skater, ensuring he is in the best condition for performance. Even just to hold Yuuri’s windbreaker gives him obscure pleasure.

The chapstick he applies to Yuuri’s lips is the same kind he always uses. It feels like an anointing as Yuuri steps away from him, handing him his skate guards. 

Yuuri is impatient, impetuous, a whirl of shimmer and feeling. In the back of Viktor’s mind is a running commentary of critique, mental notes for the next coaching session, but in the forefront is pure, gut-wrenching supportiveness. It makes him hold his Makkachin tissue box over his face in fear for Yuuri’s performance. It makes him wince sympathetically as he sees Yuuri’s old flaws sneak back in under the pressures of competition, including the unintended stress from Minami’s idolatry. 

His heart misses about fifteen beats when Yuuri slams head-first into the wall, and as it stutters back from arrhythmia, it softens. It melts. 

He’s watching Yuuri be vulnerable and imperfect out there, and it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. Because he’s not seeing the skater anymore, Viktor realises; he’s just seeing Yuuri, and it’s impossible for him to look away from that. 

Afterwards, the hugs flow freely. Minako cries a lot, and Yuuri accepts congratulatory calls from his parents and former coach Celestino as they leave the rink. Viktor carries his duffel bag for him, never mind that the strap messes up his business suit.

Is this what it feels like? he muses wonderingly, without knowing exactly what he means by ‘it’ — love?

Yuuri links arms with him then, shoulder bumping his upper arm. Viktor smiles at him.

It’s Yuuri’s first real victory, and as they tuck into pork cutlet bowls late that night, Viktor is quiet and pensive. 

Yuuri’s mother fusses about his nosebleed even as Yuuri waves her off. His eyes are bright under a shock of black hair, and he’s grinning ecstatically for some reason, his smile unreserved.

Oh, Viktor thinks again, echoing his earlier realisation about Yuuri’s defiance, it’s me.

Viktor wakes up to the sound of Makkachin padding into his room, and drowsily reaches out to pat his poodle’s fluffy head. He holds up the covers for the dog to slip under. When Makkachin starts whining instead, Viktor shakes himself to alertness, leans over, and turns on the light on his nightstand.

“What is it, boy?” he murmurs, voice rough from sleep. “What’s wrong? I thought you were spending the night in Yuuri’s room.”

Makkachin jumps on the bed and steps all over Viktor, fully waking him up.

A chilling thought sidles into his brain. “Is it Yuuri?”

He stumbles out of bed, feet almost slipping on the cold floor. He moves helter-skelter down the hallway, still blinking the bleariness out of his eyes even as a cold sliver of fear worms its way into his chest. 

Yuuri’s door is open at the end of the hallway. 

“Yuuri, Yuuri, is it your head?” Viktor lowers his voice to an anxious whisper as he enters Yuuri’s room. All is dark but for the moonlight coming in through the window. “The med team said you were fine. Are you in post-concussion?”

He huffs on his fingers to warm them before touching Yuuri’s wrists. The younger man is perched on the edge of his bed, body ever so slightly tensed, one hand gingerly touching his temple. 

“It hurts a little,” Yuuri admits, “but no, probably not.” The quivering of his muscles relaxes as Viktor begins to move his thumbs in soothing circles around his wrists.

Makkachin, whose tail is beating worriedly on the floor, gives a little whimper, and Yuuri reaches out with one hand to pet his head. 

“Enough to wake you?” The alarm rises again in Viktor, and he’s about to get up and call an ambulance when Yuuri stops him.

“No, no, I couldn’t sleep.” He looks sheepish, almost child-like in the low light and without his glasses on. “Too wound up still… Excited. Why’d you come here anyway?” 

Before Viktor can reply, Yuuri answers his own question. “Oh right,” he muses, sinking his fingers into Makkachin’s fur. He cocks his head at Viktor as though loopily imitating the poodle. “Hey, don’t crouch on the ground like that, it can’t be comfortable.”

Viktor hasn’t even noticed, but at Yuuri’s prompting he sits on the edge of the bed too, putting his palm against Yuuri’s back as if to steady him. It’s so silent that they can hear the bed springs creak a little under his added weight. 

“What are you wound up about?”

Yuuri is quiet for a moment, continuing to pet Makkachin but looking just beyond him, as though remembering something else. Then he asks, with a curious strain to his voice, “Did no one translate my interview for you?”

“They were all making comments in Japanese after you finished. You sounded like quite the resolute champion. Inspiring.” 

“…Thanks. Though I was actually talking about—”  

“—Champions wear better neckties, though. Please let me burn that thing.”

Yuuri yawns and makes a pouty face at him. “But the colour’s like your eyes! Kind of. I like it.”

Viktor is glad it’s dark, because he blushes furiously and can’t understand why. He nudges Yuuri teasingly by the elbow. “Get some sleep, Katsudon, you’re dazed and confused.”

Giving Makkachin one last loving headrub, Yuuri swings his legs over onto the bed. “Night, Vicchan,” he seems to murmur. He leaves one hand hanging over the side of the mattress for Makkachin to lick at.

“I’ll stay,” Viktor says at the same time, then catches up on what Yuuri just said. “What did you just call me?” 

Incoherent mumbling. Viktor rolls his eyes. But he stays until long after Yuuri falls asleep, just being quiet and listening to the younger man’s breathy snoring.

This is how Viktor learns that he is falling in love: he watches Yuuri, and he just knows.