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It’s early morning when he gets back to Hasetsu, half of the sky still dark and the sun lazy in its ascent. Yu-topia is still when he arrives, and the rattle of the front doors sounds too loud, too heavy, when he slides them open.
Mari’s right there on the other side, cigarette in hand, seated on the foyer’s waiting bench like she’d been waiting all night.
And—two paws already on Victor’s legs—Makkachin.
Victor feels something in his chest give away.
It’s relief, maybe, something unfolding from its tight coil; he’d been more worried than he’d fully registered, had felt more than he’d thought. And it isn’t until it sinks in—that Makkachin could have died, but he’s fine, he’s right here, he’s licking Victor’s face—that Victor registers the fear that had been there, registers it so deeply and so abruptly that it chokes him.
Mari had been waiting; she stretches now, joints cracking as she eyes Victor like she’d been prepared for something else. Tears, maybe. Of relief, of surprise. But whatever Victor’s feeling is stuck in his chest with no way out, dense and sharp where his heart should be, and there are no tears, just a tired thankful smile.
Makkachin is fine. He’s right here, with Victor.
Victor is here. Yuuri is there. And Victor doesn’t know if Yuuri is fine.
"You eat yet?" Mari asks, getting up and stubbing her cigarette on a holder behind her. She doesn’t wait for him to answer before turning her back and walking over to the inn’s public kitchen, and Victor follows, socked feet padding quietly across the wooden floor. "Can you eat?"
The question is odd to Victor, and the confusion must show, because Mari shrugs, doesn’t wait for an answer yet again, doesn’t even wait out his thank you. "Nevermind—I’ll fix you something small. Try to eat."
Victor, for lack of anything else to do, sits down by one of the inn’s many tables. He’s good at waking up early whenever necessary, but not even he has been up so early as to see the inn so quiet and still. Most of the guests must still be asleep, the hot springs empty—and the fact gnaws at Victor, climbs into the empty space already there in his chest.
Unconsciously, he fists a hand in the front of his shirt.
"Did you tell Yuuri you’re here?"
Victor blinks, takes a while to comprehend the words in English. Slowly, like he has to pull the words out from underwater, "It is still night. In Moscow. I don’t want to distract him."
"He’ll think about it anyway," Mari says. She doesn’t offer anything else.
She doesn’t need to, because Victor knows she’s right.
By the time he sends the message, Mari’s done with the food, and she sets it down in front of Victor without a word, pretends not to look at him hesitating over his phone as she lights another cigarette.
I am in Hasetsu. Makkachin is O.K.
It’s intensely lacking, too succinct. It has none of the things Victor wants to say, but it strikes him, as he watches the ‘delivered’ pop up under the blue bubble, that he wants to call Yuuri. Physical action has always been Victor’s native language—more than thought, more than spoken words, may it be Russian or English—and he wants to be there, to be physically present. He wants to hear Yuuri’s voice, wants to hear for himself if it’s quivering, if it’s as resolute as it had been when he’d told Victor to go back to Japan, if Yuuri’s nervous, if Yuuri’s okay. There are too many questions flying around in Victor’s head all at once, and underneath it all is a constant string: Yuuri, Yuuri, Yuuri. Yuuri in Moscow. Yuuri the night before his Cup of China FS. Yuuri not sleeping. Yuuri fidgeting. Yuuri crying.
Yuuri crying because of Victor.
Yuuri had asked for Victor to stay, had asked for Victor’s support.
And yet Victor had left him alone in Moscow.
"He’ll be okay," Mari says, and the words come so abruptly it startles Victor. Her voice has gotten even quieter. She’s always been quiet, selective in her passions may it be Yurio or an actual band member. The Katsuki siblings were both more subdued than their parents, in retrospect, especially in situations like this, but she’s audibly and visibly somber right now, stubbing her cigarette in the holder on their table. "Don’t you think?"
At this, Mari finally looks at him—stares, like she knows exactly what he’s thinking.
She probably does. It’s nothing new to her, being worried for Yuuri, not the way it is for Victor, who struggles now with how much the worry is consuming him.
Victor, for a moment, can only look back at her. Words are failing him even more today, and it’s a helpless feeling, a vulnerable one, something he’s experienced time and time again since he’d come to coach Yuuri. It’s difficult to feel so lost, for once, to not know what to do or say, to have to dig around for answers even knowing that there aren’t any available. Words for Victor have always come in the form of questions and answers, but there is no answer to be found for this, for the helplessness that settles down on him now that he’s free to worry solely about Yuuri.
"He’ll be okay," Mari says again, and somehow it's not what Victor's expecting—for someone to understand on such a quiet level, to understand the churning in his stomach and the weight in his chest that won't ease no matter how many inhales he takes. She moves to get up, taking the cigarette holder with her. Victor’s breakfast sits untouched. "We just have to believe in him. What else can we do?"
Mari doesn’t seem to be the type who'd want to excessively comfort Victor, certainly nowhere as tactile as her mother is to him, but there is, looking at her now, a natural, quiet strength to her when one cares to search for it.
It’s something she shares with her brother, that quiet strength.
Victor knows that. He knows that with absolute certainty, but the thudding in his heart doesn’t bother to listen, doesn’t ease at all even as Victor physically shakes himself off, tells himself he has to believe in Yuuri. He wonders if this is how Yuuri feels all the time, if Yuuri, too, feels betrayed when his heart and his mind oppose each other so stubbornly.
But it doesn’t matter, not right now, because Mari is right—there are no answers to be found, no one to tell him what to be, and the only thing to do is believe in Yuuri.
So Victor waits, quiet and still, Makkachin beside him, for Yuuri’s reply.
It’s Yuuri’s father that eventually finds Victor right where Mari had left him, still in his coat.
Victor doesn’t notice until Makkachin moves from his side, and when he looks up, Toshiya’s leaning over to rub behind one dog ear. "Back to usual, aren’t you," he croons, laughing when Makkachin’s tail wags in response. Then, smiling apologetically at Victor, "I’m so—"
"No," Victor says, then backtracks, shaking his head in apology for the interruption. "No. Please."
Toshiya’s smile doesn’t waver. "I’m glad he’s okay."
He looks part worried, part relieved himself, and the realization further uncoils something in Victor—the realization that someone had been worried for Makkachin, someone that wasn't him. The realization that the entire Katsuki family must have been worried for him, for Makkachin, as if he'd been—as if he is—their very own.
"I am, too," Victor manages. "Thank you. For bringing him to the hospital so quickly."
"Tell Mari that," Toshiya says, happily lets Makkachin lick his hand. He moves on to give Victor a rundown of what happened at the vet, and Victor watches Makkachin’s tail as he listens. Makkachin is at home here, already, with Yuuri’s family—Yuuri’s family, who continually welcome strangers into what is essentially their home, who had never been less than accommodating, now that Victor thinks about it.
He wonders when that had happened, when Yuuri’s home and family had started overlapping with Victor’s own idea of home.
"I’ve never seen Mari so panicked," Toshiya’s saying. "We were all very scared. We couldn’t have another Vicchan."
For a moment, Victor thinks he might have heard wrong, but he’s heard Yuuri’s mother call him that enough times to respond to it, has even tried to get Yuuri to explain the nuances of Japanese nicknaming. So he says, the two syllables surprisingly familiar on his tongue, "Vicchan?"
"Yuuri didn’t tell you?" Toshiya blinks at him, eyes round behind his glasses. And then he’s getting up, and Victor, before he can think too much about it, follows. His limbs groan in response from the sudden movement after being still for hours, but he follows Yuuri’s father into the house proper, past Yuuri’s room and to the end of the hall.
The room’s mostly empty, nothing but a treadmill and—
"Vicchan," Toshiya says, and Victor doesn’t immediately know who he’s referring to. "This is Vicchan."
There’s a photo, on the shrine. A young Yuuri with a puppy, the leash still unraveled in front of him. Yuuri’s smiling—wide and bright, happy and glowing. Victor feels his chest seize forcefully.
"Yuuri was in Detroit," Toshiya says, reaching over to light incense. "He couldn’t say goodbye."
Victor thinks of the look on Yuuri’s face, again, when he’d told Victor to go back to Japan. He’d been sure, in no way second-guessing, and Victor should have known there was something there. Yuuri had not hesitated, had looked at Victor sure that he didn’t want Victor to feel the way he himself must have, had the situation been worse.
It’s a terrible thing, Victor’s beginning to realize, to not be there for someone when they need you. Awful enough with a beloved pet. Even worse with someone he’d promised to stay with.
"We couldn’t say no, when Yuuri asked for a dog. A specific one, too," Toshiya murmurs. "He looked up to you so much."
Victor had known that. Victor knows that. It isn’t an unfamiliar experience, to be on the receiving end of admiration, to be put on a glorified pedestal. It has its merits and its disadvantages, but it is, at the end, all the same—time is always limited for an athlete, and there’s never enough time to be a person, to be a complete, flawed human being, alongside being a perfect athlete. He’d brushed it off, because it didn’t hurt, for Yuuri to see the living legend aspect, for Yuuri to admire his coach.
Only Yuuri had tired of that, had rejected that, in his own way, when he’d refused to let Victor tailor himself especially for Yuuri.
Victor looks at the picture again, at the smiling Yuuri.
He’d only seen Yuuri that bright once, had only seen him glow like that in China, turning to Victor like he hadn’t just snatched the ground from under Victor’s feet with one unforeseen jump. Private and public are always separate for Victor, no matter what people may think, no matter how much the public thinks they know about his private life, but private and public had blurred, had stopped being concrete concepts, when Victor had seen Yuuri turn to him after his Cup of China FS—turn to him flushed and glowing, as bright as he is in this photo—and Victor, helplessly, hadn’t been able to find it in himself to do anything but kiss him.
He’d thought, as he’d ran to meet Yuuri at the kiss and cry, that he would do anything, anything in the world, for Yuuri to always look that happy.
Out loud, he says, half to himself, "I want to make him happy."
Toshiya blinks at him, surprised. "But you do."
Victor, despite himself, looks up.
His expression must be weird, uncontrolled as it is, because Toshiya smiles. "You always have," he says, gently. "Our Yuuri isn’t always the best at looking properly at other people and what they feel about him—sometimes he gets all caught up in his feelings—but you do make him happy."
Victor looks back at the photo. Quietly, he says, "Do I?"
There’s a hand on his back, a quick pat, and then Toshiya’s turning away with a nod. "I need to get back to work," he says, kind as ever. "You should get some sleep."
"I can't," Victor says, without thinking about it, but he knows it’s true as soon as it’s out.
Toshiya does, too. "I know," he says. "I’m still telling you to anyway."
There’s something about the way the Katsuki family embraces things like this, embraces things like fear and worry and happiness and love. They’re incomprehensible at the moment to Victor, too big for his heart, too heavy for his chest, but everyone in Yuuri’s family seems to work their way around it in their own little ways—around the concern they undoubtedly feel for Yuuri, has probably felt since Yuuri had first left for Detroit, around the relief that Victor thinks he might have seen in Toshiya earlier, when he talked about what the vet had said.
You do make him happy.
Victor, alone in the room, allows himself a sigh, runs a hand through his hair and exhales heavily.
He closes his eyes. He doesn’t have to wait long for his mind to wander to Yuuri—to his smile, to the way his eyes had softened when Victor had kissed him in China, to the way he feels, warm and soft, in Victor’s arms. He goes through every memory he has of Yuuri that’s easily accessible to his tired brain, and when he opens his eyes, lets out one more sigh, he says, softly, to the empty room;
"He makes me the happiest, too."
Minako comes over to watch with Victor.
He's showered and tried to eat and changed and done everything he could to feel marginally more himself by the time she arrives, but whatever calm he gains back in the hours he gets to himself is replaced by restlessness as soon as Minako starts typing Rostelecom Cup on the search bar.
They wait for the livestream to load in silence.
Yu-topia feels equally silent, as still as it had been when he had arrived earlier that morning. He knows there are guests, that the hot springs are as busy as they always are, but the noise is distant, comes to him in shaky waves, like there’s a barrier they have to get through to get to him. He’s never liked the suffocating kind of quiet, has never learned to make the most out of it, but sitting beside Minako renders the quiet almost contemplative.
He declines when Minako offers to get him a beer, and she leaves him for the most part alone.
Victor knows he’s been unusual since he’d gotten back to Hasetsu, but he feels weighed down by too many things—by lack of sleep, by worry, by the need to sit down and just think—to have the energy to smile and wink and play when all of him is barely functioning under the weight of thinking about Yuuri.
Yuuri, who’s so far away—Victor can’t help the part of him that searches for Yuuri rinkside, some naive hope that he’ll get a good look at how Yuuri’s doing. But the livestream connection is choppy, and all he catches sight of are the coaches. The coaches, minus him.
He doesn’t stop himself from overthinking, from coming up with every scenario he can think of.
By the time Yurio’s turn comes up, Victor’s exhausted all his options, and he lets the skater part of his brain take over, distracts himself by appreciating every flawless jump Yurio lands. Six jumps in the second half, with a body barely grown into itself.
Victor allows himself a proud smile.
Then he wonders what Yuuri must be thinking.
The good part about getting his overanalysis done is that it leaves nothing but space to focus on Yuuri when his turn comes up. But it’s difficult. It’s still difficult.
It’s difficult watching Yuuri struggle through the program—hard enough up close, harder from so far away. It’s a lot like being plunged underwater, watching Yuuri visibly struggle on the ice and be unable to do anything about it, before, during or even after. Yuuri pops his jump, does a single. He over-rotates.
Minako is strangely quiet beside him, and it occurs to him she might be watching him as much as she’s watching Yuuri.
Victor shakes his head to clear his thoughts away like he had during the Cup of China.
We just have to believe in him, Mari had said.
It’s uncomfortable, feeling so helpless, but that is how it’s always been, with being Yuuri’s coach. It feels uncomfortably human, but that's what it is, to be with Yuuri.
There are so many things Victor still doesn’t understand, still doesn’t know how to deal with. But this much—this much he can do.
Just have more faith than I do that I’ll win!
He’d promised Yuuri as much, too.
"He’ll be okay," Minako says, when Yuri on Ice slows down to just the piano. "Yuuri will be okay."
Victor doesn’t know whose sake she’s saying that for, but he says, "He will."
Minako smiles, sad and fond at the same time. "He’s always been so strong."
And Yuuri is—he’s strong and determined and stubborn and beautiful, and Victor, watching Yuuri take back points, one by one, stamina ever unwavering, loves that about him, loves that about Yuuri and more. He loves the fighter still left in Yuuri despite it all, loves it as much as the way Yuuri blushes when he hesitates, the way Yuuri’s eyebrows scrunch together when he’s concentrating, the way he never ever fails to surprise Victor.
The way he never fails to make him fall further and further in love.
Victor's brain stalls, then.
He’d known it, realized it to a degree, when he’d kissed Yuuri in China.
He hadn't had time to think about this, hadn't had time to think of things in the context of himself and his own life alone.
But the full extent of this realization douses him like something white-hot now, with no one to distract him from pursuing it; it settles in his chest and the knot in his stomach as he watches Yuuri finish his program, so clearly exhausted. And then it hits all at once—pride and relief and concern and love, so much of it, for Yuuri and Yuuri alone, unbridled and known, now that Victor allows himself to recognize it past the physical urge behind it.
Victor loves him. He loves Katsuki Yuuri.
And then he feels silly, because of course he does.
"You got your old coach to take over?"
It isn’t an accusation, but Victor still doesn’t know what to say as they watch Yuuri and Yakov on screen, as they all wait for the scores. When Yuuri hugs Yakov, it’s an apology that rises up first and foremost, but before Victor can try to push out the first syllable, Minako says, "Don’t apologize."
Victor closes his mouth.
"You’re going to apologize, aren’t you?" Minako continues, taking another swig from her beer bottle. "About leaving Yuuri in Moscow? You think you’re responsible, for what happened."
"I am," Victor says. It sounds like it’s been punched out of him.
"Not completely. Don’t be silly."
"I am his coach," Victor says. He doesn’t say, he asked me to stay by his side. And yet I’m here.
"Sure you are," Minako tells him. She shrugs. "And we both know Yuuri gathered himself there in the end. He hung in there."
Minako’s right, but the guilt and the worry remain.
Victor watches unseeing through Jean-Jacques Leroy’s program.
He feels childish, juvenile in how out of conjunction his brain and heart are at the moment. His brain desperate to think, to process, and his heart insistent on wanting. But it all begins and ends with Yuuri.
It’s something unshakeable now, eating away at him. He knows it will keep doing that until he actually sees Yuuri—until he gets to touch Yuuri again, until he gets to be with Yuuri again.
Yuuri places fourth, but he qualifies for the GPF—and Victor’s surprised to note, this time, that there hadn’t been any doubt in him, when it came to that.
Minako sighs, an exhale heavy enough for both of them, and shuts the laptop closed.
Much, much later, Hiroko approaches him. "Will you feel better if you waited at the airport?"
Victor doubts it, with so long left to wait, but it's even more agonizing to think about seeing Yuuri later than he could be, so he gets up and goes to get Makkachin.
"Vicchan," Hiroko says, just as Victor's about to leave.
He turns back. Her silhouette is tiny against the doorframe, her mannerisms hesitant. It's decidedly Yuuri-like, the way she holds her hands in front of her as she visibly thinks over what she’s going to say.
"Promise me you won't break Yuuri's heart."
Figure skaters have fragile hearts, Victor has always thought, has always known.
He would be a fool not to count himself within that.
He'd given Yuuri his heart, even without meaning to, and it's his, only his.
His to break if he so wants, but he trusts Yuuri. Yuuri makes him happy, and Victor would like it, would love it more than anything, if he could spend the rest of his life making Yuuri happy.
He wants to say, then, that to break Yuuri's heart would be to break his own.
Instead, Victor tries for a smile, manages a small one. "I promise."
She smiles back.
Waiting back at the airport isn’t much better than waiting back at the house.
There’s something disarming about waiting at the airport for someone. Victor can’t recall the last time he’d done this, if there ever had been a last time. He only ever stays in airports longer than he has to when flights get delayed, something that happens often enough with Aeroflot.
So he sits, time crawls by, and Makkachin runs in circles around him, no doubt privy to his growing restlessness.
He feels so lost.
It’s one thing to realize something, and another to figure out what to do about it. It’s tricky, figuring out what he wants, but it’s a kind of freedom that Victor doesn’t know what to do with. For all that Yakov has always reprimanded him for doing as he pleases, Victor can’t remember when someone had last directly asked him what he wants; it’s always assumptions, when everyone feels like they know you. Even Yurio, who’d known him for a couple of years, had bargained for Victor’s return to Russia as if his own personal choice had been out of the question completely.
When the press asks about his break from skating, it’s always a when, never a will you?, when they talk about returning. It seems to them a given that he’ll come back, a decision they’d somehow made without him saying a word.
But he doesn’t blame them, for assuming. Victor would be lying if he said he didn’t willingly let other people decide things for him; it’s the easy way out at this point, the mode of convenience.
It’s easier to surprise people, too, when you know the things they assume about you.
People always want to talk about what they want.
Yuuri had wanted him to be who he was, to just be Victor—and Victor thinks that’s as close as he’d come to being given freedom in years, when it came to skating. Skating is a performance art, in its own way, and to excel in it means to excel in the art of embodying something—a role, an idea, someone else's feelings, someone else's life.
And yet Yuuri—Yuuri who had every reason to expect a role out of Victor, to want more of the idea he'd already had of Victor, starry eyed and unsure as he’d been then—had asked for Victor the person. Yuuri, who’d idolized him, named a dog after him, had asked not for Victor the skater, not Victor the coach, not even Victor as the media saw him: just Victor the person.
And Victor the person had fallen in love.
It had been a sequence, if he thinks about it now: Victor the skater had fallen for the way Yuuri's body moved to the music. Victor the coach had fallen for the way Yuuri worked himself to the very last threads of his stamina. And somewhere between all of that, somewhere amidst Yuuri's stubborn drive and quiet competitive streak, he'd fallen for Yuuri—for Yuuri and all the ways he’s beautiful, for all the ways he’s wonderful, for all the ways he makes Victor happy and content.
It hadn't been about the ice at all, had not been about being a coach to Yuuri, and all it had been, at its root, was Victor being Victor to Yuuri, who wouldn’t have him any other way.
Victor had missed skating, for the first couple of months. He’d missed the attention, the first time he showed up in public as Yuuri’s coach. But it had been a fleeting want, more conditioned than it is personal after years of it, after riding the high of an impressive career for so long, and he’d found joy and contentment in watching Yuuri instead.
Right then, waiting for Yuuri, he misses Yuuri more than he’d ever missed skating.
That, Victor thinks, is the most telling fact.
He closes his eyes and imagines the press asking him; What do you want to do after this season ends, Victor Nikiforov?
Only he hears Yuuri’s voice.
I want to keep eating katsudon with you.
When Victor opens his eyes, it’s a clear decision waiting for him—he wants nothing more than that, right now, too, wants nothing more than to stay by Yuuri's side, for as long as he'll let Victor, for as long as he'll have Victor.
Forever, if such a thing exists.
He hadn’t noticed Makkachin wander away, and for a second, he panics—panics until his eyes follow where Makkachin had gone, and then he blanks out.
Victor’s running before anything fully registers.
He knows Yuuri’s running, too, but Victor’s entire body is warm; he’s not thinking properly, and all he becomes, in the minute it takes to get to Yuuri, is a creature that wants, that wants this, wants this so much it hurts just to wait for the doors to slide open for Yuuri.
And then Yuuri’s in his arms, and Victor’s no longer lost. Yuuri’s in his arms, and Victor feels the exact same way he had during Yuuri’s FS in China—like his heart could burst, right then and there.
"Yuuri," he says, and it’s a wonder how stable his voice comes out. "I’ve been thinking about what I can do as your coach from now on."
"Me, too," Yuuri says, and his voice is so close, so near, right there, right here. It’s Yuuri that pulls away, and Victor reluctantly lets him, drinks in Yuuri’s face instead—and it’s a wonder how much he can miss one person in such little time, even more so how much love, overwhelming, can fit in Victor’s heart right now.
"Please take care of me," Yuuri tells him, eyes bright, quiet strength all there, always there, "until I retire."
Victor feels even sillier then, to think he would ever have been able to leave Katsuki Yuuri, at the end of the season. Parting from Yuuri is incomprehensible now, the mere thought of it snatching the words further away from Victor.
So he lifts Yuuri’s hand to his lips and kisses it, shows his love the best way he knows how.
"It’s like a marriage proposal," he says.
When Victor hugs Yuuri again, holds his warmth close, says I wish you’d never retire, he thinks of forever—thinks of Yuuri, his Yuuri, and he thinks of a forever with Yuuri.
And he finds that there really is nothing he could ever want more, nothing that could make him happier, than this, forever and ever.
Not skating, not any other life.
Just Yuuri.