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i.
Here’s a secret. After the Grand Prix Final in Sochi, Viktor Nikiforov goes home, and, in between showing his dog every picture and video he has of the banquet, sets up a Google alert for katsuki yuri skater.
“He was a delight,” Viktor says dreamily, taking one of Makkachin’s paws to demonstrate. “He asked me to coach him! You know how I’ve been thinking about taking time off. Should I do it?”
Makkachin whines.
“You’re right,” Viktor sighs, and drops the paw. “He was very drunk. Lovely! But drunk. Maybe he didn’t mean it.”
He collapses onto the sofa. Makkachin clambers on after him.
“But he’ll be at Worlds!” Viktor brightens, sitting up; Makkachin yelps and scrambles for footing. “I’ll talk to him then, we can figure it out. Shame it can’t be sooner. Oh, damn, why is Russia in Europe?”
He knows full well he’s being ridiculous. Makkachin bears it in dignified silence, even when Viktor throws both arms around him and buries his face in his fur.
“He was very beautiful,” Viktor says, suddenly wistful. “Yuuri Katsuki. Who are you?”
“Who is Yuuri Katsuki,” as it turns out, is a hard question to answer. A top-rated Japanese figure skater, of course. Viktor runs his JSF page through Google translate. Birthday. Hometown. He stares, puzzled, at his short list of goals. “Don’t cry during competition”? The translation must’ve gone very wrong — he can’t fathom even the gist of the original.
A string of national titles during his career, a bronze at Four Continents. Qualified repeatedly for Worlds, but never medaled. This year was the first he’d made the Grand Prix Final. His short program had been rather weak, and — Viktor tries to remember. Had he watched the free skate? He can recall the acute discomfort of watching someone fail, and fail badly, but none of the specifics.
That, itself, is easily remedied. Viktor finds the performance on YouTube and settles in to watch.
He winces along with every fall and sits back four-and-a-half minutes later, frowning. There had been something there, yes, of the Yuuri Katsuki who’d asked him to dance: flashes, in the curve of an arm as he turned, the swift step sequence. But it had all been heavily muted — so much that Viktor could even feel a phantom weight settling on his own shoulders.
He goes through a dozen more videos. Yuuri, taking a hard fall at 2015 Worlds. Yuuri, flubbing a triple axel midway through his Sochi Olympics program. A failed combination jump. Quad turned single. Curled on the ice in defeat; shoulders trembling at the kiss and cry. On more than one occasion, he’d burst into tears even before the score was out.
Hmm. Perhaps that goal hadn’t been so mistranslated, after all.
Still, a contradiction: Yuuri is not a bad skater. His free program had been stunning, the year he medaled at Four Continents — having done badly on the short program seemed to have relaxed him. Even his senior debut had had something of a compelling grace through its awkwardness, and Viktor is, he must admit, quite demanding in his preferences.
And of course — Yuuri, dancing across that banquet hall. Viktor couldn’t have looked away if he’d wanted to.
“Makkachin,” he says plaintively, “this isn’t right.”
Sprawled comfortably across Viktor’s feet, Makkachin only turns his head in mild interest.
“He could be brilliant,” Viktor says, undeterred. “He could — oh, he could be so beautiful, it’d break your heart.” He leans forward, sinks his fingers into Makkachin’s coat.
Yakov had always thought Viktor too impulsive, and Viktor — well, he’d never really seen a reason to disagree.
He smiles. “And I’m going to help him do that.”
The Russian nationals come quick on the heels of the Grand Prix, which keeps him busy for a couple of weeks. A good showing, for Yakov: Mila takes gold in the women’s singles, while Georgi places second in men’s. His technique is fine, as expected, but his expression too tied up to some external figure. A point of contention between them: in all honesty, Viktor had always been a tad scornful of skaters who couldn’t generate emotion from within.
Viktor wins, of course, and the day after that, is informed by Google that Katsuki Yuri had placed 11th at Japanese nationals.
He’s just out of a shower when the email comes in on his phone. “What?” he shouts at the truncated preview, frantically clicking through with still-damp hands. Surely that’s a mistake. There aren’t two male skaters in Japan of Yuuri’s caliber, let alone eleven.
The article, in English, is short and unsatisfactory. The placement list, direct from the JSF. Katsuki had made no statements. No word on his future plans.
Viktor wanders out of the bathroom and sits. Eleventh. No Four Continents for him this year. No Worlds. Yuuri Katsuki is 23 now, in a sport that is hard on the body, and being cagey about the next season.
“He can’t retire,” Viktor tells Makkachin in sudden terror. “What a tragedy that would be.”
Makkachin curls into his side, the only warm thing in his apartment as Viktor starts to puzzle through a longer article in Japanese. This one is much more speculative. Had he been injured? He’d never done this badly even as a fledgling skater. Rumors, that he’d been nursing an injury even before the GPF. Rumors, that he’d ended things with his coach. Rumors, rumors, rumors, and nothing from the person he wants to hear from the most.
He drops the phone, despondent. “He can’t,” he says again, clutching Makkachin to his chest. “God. What a waste.”
Makkachin only licks his cheek in return.
He sleepwalks through the Euros. Yakov is wholly unimpressed. “What the hell was that?” he demands after, sitting in the kiss and cry. “Getting complacent, Vitya? You of all people should know that’s deadly.”
He does; that’s the problem. Skating demands, continually, something new in every performance, and he’s been wondering for too long now when he’s going to run out of something to give.
“Hey, Yakov.” He blithely cuts through Yakov’s tirade. “What if I took the next season off?”
Yakov stares, perplexed. Viktor is rather pleased — Yakov’s known him long enough that he’s quite hard to surprise now. “To do what?”
“Oh.” He waves vaguely. “I haven’t decided.”
“You don’t know?” Viktor can almost see Yakov settling back into familiar ground. “You thoughtless — if you had a plan, then maybe — but risking your career like this on a whim? Do you know how hard it is to come back after you leave? You’re not fresh out of the juniors anymore, you might only have one or two seasons left in you as it is. Have you considered the consequences at all, you idiot, or are you just —”
It’s amazing, really, the way Yakov can go on. Viktor smiles for the cameras and wonders, briefly, how Yuuri Katsuki is doing.
At some point, Viktor had added Yuuri Katsuki’s name in Japanese to his list of alerts. The pages that turns up are generally much more informative, but also at least twice as confusing. A weaker man might despair at the words dropped carelessly, the liberal sprinkle of nicknames and emoji. Viktor grows familiar with the shape of Yuuri’s name and tries not to take it personally when Google translate gives up on him entirely.
(It is probably premature to think about learning Japanese.)
But Yuuri, damn him, has apparently elevated evasion into something of an art form. As the season draws to a close, the only thing Yuuri’s Japanese fans seem certain about is that he will be returning home for the off-season.
Viktor is starting to think that Yuuri Katsuki will kill him.
In a terrible fit of irony, Worlds this year are in Tokyo. Viktor is pretty sure the cosmos is laughing at him.
He pulls it together to deliver a performance that satisfies even Yakov, and afterwards dodges questions about next season, about his feelings on being a five-time consecutive world champion — about everything, in fact. Even the reporters who like him are beginning to get a little short.
A week in Japan, while Yuuri Katsuki fails to send him so much as a messenger pigeon, then back to Saint Petersburg. The questions on his future are getting more intense; he throws graceful deflection to the winds and takes to outright avoidance. A shame about his dignity, but it seems a better option than admitting that he doesn’t quite know, himself.
He is looking for a sign.
In April, Viktor wakes up one morning to find that half his contacts list, a thousand strangers on Twitter and Vkontakte, and Google have all sent him the same YouTube link.
It’s early — too early, really. He’d fallen asleep on the sofa, with Makkachin curled warmly under him; his back’s going to complain about that later. He’d get up, at least, but Makkachin, still half asleep, whines when Viktor starts to move.
So Viktor settles back, sliding a pillow behind him as a concession to his spine, and watches the damn video.
The video’s been up for only a few hours; it has nearly fifty thousand views. The title and description are both in Japanese, but it’s Yuuri Katsuki in the thumbnail, and Yuuri Katsuki skating in the video. There’s no music. Viktor doesn’t need it when Yuuri’s moving to the program — to his program — like he can hear it somewhere inside him, like he’s lived inside it for months, carved it into his bones.
The video ends. He hits replay.
This second time, less blindsided, Viktor can see the flaws. The jumps, not quite as clean as one might like. The quads turned into triples. And still a hint of something holding him back — too focused, maybe. Concentrating so much on the technical elements of the piece, he’s lost some emotionality.
It doesn’t make the performance any less perfect.
He stops himself from watching it a third time, and tries to think.
“Makkachin. He’s been watching my program.”
Stupid, to be so pleased. A lot of people watch his programs, and fellow competitors most of all. Still, the thought of Yuuri, studying him like he’d studied Yuuri’s old performances. There’s something about it that makes him feel —
Well. Like he did the first time Yuuri Katsuki asked him to dance.
Viktor leaps to his feet and scoops up Makkachin in his arms before he can protest. “He’s not going to retire,” he declares. “I won’t have it, he’s too good. Anyway, he doesn’t want to retire, that’s what that performance meant. Don’t you see?”
Makkachin stares at him with large brown eyes.
“We,” he says, “are going to Japan.”
The decision made, Viktor spends ten frantic minutes standing in front of his closet, wondering which coat Yuuri might like better, and goes so far as to ask Makkachin for an opinion before he despairs of the concept of packing altogether. It’ll take him hours like this, maybe days, and surely he shouldn’t keep Yuuri waiting. “Aha,” he says, struck with a flash of brilliance. “I’ll send it all by mail! Yuuri can tell me what he likes in person.”
Makkachin’s tail thumps on the floor.
After that, the preparations go by in a flurry. He tells the apartment manager he’ll be away, indefinitely, could you please makes sure the place doesn’t fall apart, and feeds Makkachin the last of the cheese while clearing out the pantry. He’s never kept much food in the apartment, anyway. He gets nutritionist-approved meals delivered three times a week, snacks rarely, keeps a forlorn fruit bowl on his counter. It’s hard to enjoy the act of eating when it’s all being charted somewhere in pieces, protein and fiber, daily caloric intake.
He tells Yakov last, after he’s bought the plane ticket, sorted out Makkachin’s paperwork, and sent off a dozen boxes via FedEx. He’s always believed firmly in the power of fait accompli.
Viktor was born with the sound of Russian in his ears; he learned French from his mother, and along with it the bone-deep sensation of missing home. English came later, at the hands of a tutor whose mouth was as severe as winter. Viktor spent a long time trying to catch him off guard, without success, and only realized much later that might have been his father’s doing.
And yet, after all that, it’s the language of ice that he reaches for, when he’s bound for Hasetsu and almost giddy with it. He jots it down in pieces as the plane heads for the runway: a lone jump turned into a lift for two; a spiral, side by side, before merging back into a whole. Elements to emphasize Yuuri’s strengths, smooth and sensual, made to fit him rather than the other way around.
It’s quite sentimental. A week with Yuuri Katsuki, watching how he moves on the ice in the flesh, and he may have to rethink the whole thing.
Still, he tears the bones of a routine from his notepad, folds it carefully into fourths and tucks it into his breast pocket. Something like a promise, pressed against his heart, as a tailwind takes him into the unknown.
ii.
During his first week in Japan, Viktor becomes acquainted with the taste of katsudon, the force of nature that is the Nishigori triplets, and the fact that Makkachin’s coat is slowly going gray around the muzzle.
He also discovers that Yuuri Katsuki, drunk, is a very different being than Yuuri Katsuki, sober.
It’s not entirely a surprise. He would have expected to hear about it long before, otherwise, at the very least from Chris. Still, it’s a little like having double vision: the Yuuri behind his eyelids, open and flushed from the paso doble, and the Yuuri in front, shuttered completely like a stranger.
Viktor knows about masks, about performances both on the ice and off. The Yuuri who cries at the kiss and cry, who can’t land a quad Salchow, who goes red and unsteady when Viktor takes his hand in his own — there’s a sense of reality to him, a comfortable familiarity that comes with history. Yuuri has been this person for a long time, perhaps so long that he’s afraid to be anything else.
But this had been real, too: Yuuri looking at him with bright eyes, the line of his body pressed against his, his touch sure and certain on Viktor’s thigh.
Already the memory is fading into the distance like a dream. Viktor tugs Makkachin closer to his chest and finds one of the videos he’d saved carefully on his phone, back when all this seemed much simpler.
“It was real,” he says quietly into the soft fur on top of Makkachin’s head. “I know it.”
When Viktor wakes up, uneasy in the gray light of dawn, he happens upon the routine he’d scribbled down so hopefully in a plane out of Pulkovo, for him and Yuuri together. Almost unbearably naïve, to think about it now. He should toss it, perhaps; it was only an idle thought, anyway.
But he smooths out the crisp folds to read it one last time, and in the lines of black ink, the spaces between CoSp and ChLi, Viktor can still see the program: the tender shape of it, the graceful lines of Yuuri’s arm and free leg fitting alongside his own.
He wants that, he thinks, surprised. At some point, competitions had lost their flavor and he’d kept on as with old lovers, out of habit more than desire, and forgotten what it felt like to be hungry.
He thinks maybe he’s forgotten a lot of things.
So he keeps the page, silly as it is, slipping it into one of the myriad side pockets of his suitcase he never bothers to use. The morning’s coming on clear and Yuuri will stir awake, and they will run through the streets of Hasetsu with Makkachin in tow, and then they will skate. That’s easy.
More difficult, perhaps, to put into words what he’s come here to look for; he’s quite out of practice at it. But it’s spring, and he’s got nothing to do but to map out the shape of Yuuri’s wants and his own, and learn how they might fit into something unexpected. Beautiful.
They’ve got time.
The very next day, Yuri Plisetsky blows into town like a particularly irritated storm cloud.
“Come back to Russia,” he says at the rink, frowning darkly at Yuuri like he’s done him personal injury. “Be my coach.”
This is the way Viktor is used to being wanted: nakedly, without apology. Forward, certainly — subtlety has never been Yura’s strong suit — but it gets the job done. Everyone wants something from Viktor Nikiforov, champion skater, and the only question is what.
“What do you want from me?” he asks Yuuri, curious now. It’s been a long time since the Sochi banquet, when Yuuri had blurted out come to Hasetsu, and Viktor hadn’t thought to wonder if Yuuri had changed his mind.
It happens. Sometimes people find the idea of Viktor more pleasing than the person.
Yuuri’s first words are almost inaudible, but then he raises his head up. “I want to eat katsudon with you,” he says, “I want to win with you,” fiercely, and oh, that’s the steel that Viktor saw all those months ago, saw again flashing through Yuuri’s best performances.
There’s a fire in Yuuri’s eyes, one that could light up the whole world. Viktor can’t wait to see it happen.
“You’re pathetic,” Yurio says the evening before Onsen on Ice, having accepted the nickname with ill grace. “Everyone knows you came here to get laid. What, there weren’t enough guys to your taste in all of Europe? At least the Swiss perv’s a decent skater.”
“I’m hurt.” Viktor clutches his chest. “Wounded. How could you impugn my motives this way?”
“You’re a terrible coach,” Yurio says, spiteful. “He probably doesn’t even like you now. Changed his mind after he found out what you’re really like. Seriously, you gave him Eros? Look what he’s done with it.”
Yuuri had gone off somewhere tonight, muttering about practice. It’s true that Eros has been giving him trouble — more trouble than Viktor had anticipated, truth be told. He’s beginning to wonder, only half in jest, if he ought to just sit Yuuri down for a drink before the performance.
“If I’m so terrible,” he says lightly, “why do you want me to coach you?”
Yurio scowls. “Whatever,” he says after a pause. “Waste your time. It’s not gonna get anywhere. What do you even see in him, anyway?”
Viktor could answer that in a lot of ways. Yuuri, running through figures in an empty rink; Yuuri, pressing a careful hand to the top of Makkachin’s head when he thinks no one’s looking. He’s been working on the quad Salchow even though Viktor’s told him not to bother just yet, and after a full day’s practice still comes off the ice slowly, like he wants more, like it will never be enough.
If Yurio is a storm, the quick flash and howl of it, then Yuuri must be the steady, continental wearing of the sea.
Viktor is twenty-seven, now. Yakov would laugh in his face if he called himself old but sometimes he feels it, weariness laid in his bones all the way through. His endless optimism, at fifteen and sixteen and seventeen, had not considered the possibility that he would ever get tired. It had crept up on him anyway.
Yurio wouldn’t understand yet, Viktor suspects, so eager to make his mark on the world as he is; but it turns out that the slow work of building up gains a certain appeal when all your life you’ve been laying yourself bare in pieces.
“Why, Yurio,” he says instead of any of this. “Are you worried about the competition?”
Yurio flushes, a dark, ugly red. “Don’t kid yourself,” he spits. “I’m gonna wipe the floor with him.”
He won’t, Viktor thinks, watching Yurio storm out. He — probably won’t.
Viktor hopes he won’t, and that’s all he can do. Yuuri will have to fight for the rest if he wants it.
“Please watch me,” Yuuri says, and flings his arms around Viktor’s shoulders. “Promise.”
Not all of the hummingbird thrum between them is the beat of Yuuri’s heart; a strange feeling, when Viktor had thought he’d grown out of being nervous before a competition a long time ago. “Of course,” he says, because it’s easy to promise something you want to do anyway, and watches Yuuri make his way onto the ice.
Yuuri performs On Love: Eros like he means it, and Viktor lets himself be seduced a second time.
So Viktor stays.
In Hasetsu, the seagulls screech in the mornings and the air smells of salt, and the town might adore Viktor Nikiforov, living legend, but it loves Yuuri with an unmatched fierceness. He makes friends with the fisherman off the pier talking about the gorgeous form of Yuuri’s triple axel; down at the store, the owners press cool bottles of juice into his hand in exchange for pictures of Yuuri at practice.
Twenty years ago, Viktor had laced into a pair of skates and wobbled onto the ice, and it feels sometimes like he’d never had the chance to step off again in all that time. He’s used to measuring his life in the jumps he learned to land, the changes in his division, Nationals and Worlds and the steady four-year tick of the Olympic games. But now there’s this fragile thing between him and Yuuri that he wants to see flourish, and that means he has to be something else.
Only — it’s a larger leap than he’d thought, to shed the role of skater and learn to be a coach.
“What do you want me to be to you?” he asks Yuuri, staring out into the sea, because performance is easy. A brother, friend, lover — he could be those things, whatever Yuuri wanted.
But Yuuri is firm when he says, “Viktor. I want you to be who you are.”
That’s harder, Viktor thinks wryly. But maybe that’s good. He knows it’s new for Yuuri, prepping for the season like he means to win. It’s only fair that Viktor should face a challenge, too.
“I won’t let you off easy,” he says, holding out a hand; and Yuuri smiles as he takes it.
The start of another chapter, then. For both of them, together.
iii.
It’s a long summer.
In the past, Viktor’s off-seasons had been crowded. Ice shows, as he came more and more into demand; cardio, weight training, ballet; the weekend after he won Worlds for the second time and Chris took bronze, when they took the rail to Amsterdam and never even left the hotel room, too busy fucking or getting high or both.
Viktor still spends hours at the rink, watching Yuuri polish his short program and start to put together the free; he still skates — come on, Yuuri, that triple loop was abysmal — launching himself into motion because it’s easier than trying to find the right words for an explanation. His left glove begins to thin over the knuckles, and he digs up another pair from his things but the cold stays his joints just the same.
It should be familiar, skating and training and the scheduled march to competitions strung out in the distance. It is familiar. But there’s also this: Makkachin snapping at foam as he chases the endless waves into the sea; Yuuri, wiping at his sweat-damp forehead, heading into another pass in pursuit of a cleaner combination jump.
Yakov had set aside rest days like a science, calibrated for efficiency and optimal muscle recovery, and so had the coaches before him. Viktor declares rest days when the corner of Yuuri’s mouth starts to turn grim, when the skin stretched over his left Achilles tendon is rubbed raw, when Yuuri flubs the same jump for the third time and Viktor can see the telltale tension beginning to settle into his shoulders. He takes Yuuri to the ocean, cajoles him into trips to Fukuoka, snaps pictures as often as he finds himself smiling and uploads the best ones to Instagram: #hasetsu, #nakasu, #canalcity #hakata.
Irresponsible, maybe. Indulgent. Viktor is certainly nothing like any of the coaches he’d ever had.
But then, Yuuri isn’t anything like Viktor. They fit somehow, anyway.
It’s nearly August when Viktor brings up the matter of the exhibition program.
The Chu-Shikoku-Kyushu Regional doesn’t have a gala scheduled, but the Grand Prix events will. Viktor had been considering some of the exhibitions Yuuri had done in the past, watching and rewatching the clearest videos he could find on YouTube. Certainly, none of them are suitable as they are, considering the skater Yuuri has become. But there are several that’d be easy enough to rework, and it’d be easier on Yuuri, too, than having to learn something entirely new.
He’s been thinking more and more about costumes and program elements lately, shuffling around jumps and spins and seeing the performance play out on the back of his eyelids. But it’s time now to find out what Yuuri wants — what kind of performance Yuuri will choose as the best representation of himself.
“Yuuri,” he says, “have you given any thought to your exhibition for this season?”
They’re just finishing up for the day. Yuuri makes a vague sound through a mouthful of water, swallowing hastily and going inexplicably pink. “I have,” he says. “Viktor, I think it should be Stammi Vicino. Your free skate, from last year.”
Viktor experiences a sudden sensation that might best be described as a skyful of fireworks going off in his chest.
“It feels right, doesn’t it?” Yuuri is saying. “Practicing it helped me get back on the ice, and then the video, and you —” He gestures at Viktor, and then pauses. “But if you don’t like the idea, I can think of something else.”
That rouses Viktor in a hurry. “Yuuri, no, it’s perfect.” His mind is already filling with possibilities. “We’ll have to tweak the jump composition, a little less aggressive. I know you downgraded most of the quads before. But maybe for surprise — do you want to keep the quad-triple combination at the end? And costume! We should talk to my costume designer, there were a few different designs —”
“Viktor,” Yuuri says loudly.
“Yuuri!” Viktor answers, drawing a quick circle around Yuuri before he comes to a stop. “Yes?”
“I wanted to ask,” Yuuri says, and takes a breath. “If I make it to the Grand Prix Final, it’ll be because of you. So I — I mean, I looked up the lyrics once, to the music, and I thought maybe you could skate with me? At the Final. If — well, as a thank you.”
There’s a routine Viktor dreamed up first in April, trying to catch the high of a dance he’d had one night in December; here’s Yuuri, standing in front of him with his eyes very bright. Viktor’s been searching for a way to put those things together all these months, and still. Yuuri beat him to it.
He’s throwing his arms around Yuuri before he can think. “When you make the Final,” he promises. “We’ll skate together.”
Yuuri is, of course, a men’s singles skater. He and Yuuko had occasionally given the odd pairs move a try, he’d told Viktor once, but nothing very complicated, and increasingly less often as they got older.
Viktor is also a men’s singles skater, armed mainly with the experience of sharing tours with ice dancers and pairs skaters and quite a lot of downtime between performances, and the month after Georgi first started going out with Anya, when he talked about ice dance so much that Mila bet him she and Viktor could pull off a rotational lift, and could he then please shut up about those beautiful choreographic twizzles or whatever the fuck.
(They did, leaving Georgi sullen for a week, and nearly gave Yakov a heart attack in the process.)
But Yuuri wants this, and Viktor wants this, and if there’s anything Viktor’s learned from this entire endeavor so far it’s that enough enthusiasm can, in fact, solve every problem.
Sometimes it just takes a while.
“Ah, I’m sorry,” Yuuri says the second time their feet tangle together, dropping Viktor’s hand and taking a hop back towards the barre. “You’re just so — I’m not used to it, I guess. I’ve never really thought about ice dance before.”
“Yuuri,” Viktor says. “Relax. It’s just dancing, right? You know how to dance.” The flamenco, says a memory. Tango. Ballet, of course, that Yuuri had probably learned in this very studio. And, for some reason Viktor still can’t fathom but is not going to question — pole.
“Sure,” Yuuri says dubiously. “But that’s different.”
“Is it?” Viktor considers Yuuri, the tilt of his head and the line of his reflection in the mirror. He really is holding himself too tense. Maybe that demands a change of plans.
“Okay, we can work on the step sequence later, you’re right. Come here and lift me.”
“Lift you?” Yuuri sounds faintly alarmed.
“Well, I’ve been thinking, maybe you should be the one doing the lifting! It’s your exhibition, it’d make sense for you to take the lead.” He takes two steps forward, takes Yuuri’s hands and sets them at his hips. “I’m taller than you are, but that won’t bother you, will it?”
He’s teasing a little, crowding into Yuuri’s space, but then Yuuri’s grip tightens around his waist, and the breath goes out of him all at once.
Yuuri sweeps Viktor up, a swift curve as he makes a half turn. The ground is back under Viktor’s feet in a moment; his heart stays in his throat. “Oh,” he says, clutching at Yuuri’s shoulders. “Wow.”
“How can you be surprised?” Yuuri blinks at him. “You asked.”
“You’re always a surprise,” Viktor says, smiling into the side of Yuuri’s neck. “Let’s try it again. Maybe the hold under the arms, this time.”
They don’t end up changing who does the lifts, after all; but Yuuri loses the stiffness in his limbs and Viktor remembers the swoop in his stomach for days, and that’s worth all the time in the world.
Yuuri had agreed on commissioning Viktor’s old designer for the exhibition costumes. He’d even been the one to suggest that they resemble the original, Yuuri’s done in a gorgeous blue and Viktor’s a darker purple than before.
Viktor is not sure, then, why Yuuri won’t pick one of the many costumes Viktor already has around to wear for his solo exhibition in the meantime.
“Just take a look,” Viktor says. “I have so many! This one’s from my senior debut, don’t you like it?” He holds it up in front of Yuuri, imagining the crystals sparkling along Yuuri’s arms and the sweep of mesh fabric down one shoulder.
“Of course I like it,” Yuuri says, and tugs it gently away from Viktor’s hands. “I like all your costumes, Viktor.”
“Then what’s the problem?” He pouts. “We can get a new one made if that’s what you want, it’s no trouble.”
“It’s not about that.” Yuuri sets the costume aside, and his reflective look isn’t entirely focused on Viktor. “I just want to wear something of mine from before.”
“Which one?” Viktor says, mentally rifling through his catalogue of Yuuri’s past performances. “Not last year’s. Not anything from the ‘14 Olympics, those were terrible. Ooh, will it be the swan?”
“The swan,” Yuuri nearly yelps. “You know about —”
“I’m your coach,” Viktor says, opening his eyes wide. “I’m supposed to know about these things. Anyway, everyone does Swan Lake, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“It wasn’t a very good performance.”
“No, it wasn’t. But the costume was great!”
Yuuri barks out a laugh at that. “Not the swan costume,” he says firmly. “No, I think it’ll be the one from a few years back. I wore it for my free skate. Vivaldi. Winter.”
“Oh, I remember that.” Yuuri had made the podium at Four Continents with it. “Why that one? The program was good, but the costume was nothing special.” Just black pants, and a muted shirt under the suspenders. Even by Yuuri’s standards it had been unexciting.
“Minako did some of the choreography for me that year,” Yuuri says. He’s beginning to sound far away again. “This season, with everything so different — it’s good to remember, I think.”
Viktor can’t say that he gets it, exactly. He doesn’t always understand what’s going on inside Yuuri’s head. But he doesn’t have to know. He just has to make sure that Yuuri can be at his best, then let him do it.
“Okay,” he agrees. “But we’re definitely altering the shirt. More color, at least. Some crystals around the throat would be nice. And are you very attached to the sleeves?”
Yuuri misses gold by a hair at the Cup of China.
Yuuri misses gold, but he gets four full rotations on a flip Viktor hadn’t seen coming, and Viktor’s world opens up to the skies.
Viktor wants to: spread Yuuri out in front of him like a sunrise, run his fingers down the notches of Yuuri’s spine as he arcs into an Ina Bauer, press his ear to Yuuri’s chest and feel the echo of his heart as steady as the ocean, catalogue the taste of his mouth for the rest of his days.
Yuuri doesn’t hesitate now when he takes Viktor’s hand and leads him into the choreographic sequence, and it feels like a revelation every time.
A few days before they leave for Moscow, they do a run-through of both exhibitions, back to back.
“Viktor,” Yuuri says as they’re winding down. “I never asked. Did you have this music as a duet all this time?”
“Oh, yeah,” Viktor says. Already, the decision seems far off in the past. “I spent a while before last season trying to pick which to use for my program.”
“The duet’s nicer,” Yuuri says absently, then puts up his hands in apology. “Not that the original isn’t nice! It’s very nice.”
“I suppose,” Viktor says, amused. “I wasn’t really thinking about which one was nicer. They would’ve been for very different themes. I suppose I felt closer to the other one at the time.”
“You like this.”
Sometimes Viktor is pretty sure he and Yuuri are not having the same conversation. He doesn’t know if it’s a problem with his English, or Yuuri’s English, or if it’s just the way Yuuri is. Maybe communication is always this hard, and Viktor hadn’t known because he’s never tried before.
He tips his head towards Yuuri’s. “This?”
“You know. Picking the music, and themes, making sure everything works right and you’re feeling all the right emotions.”
“Yes, of course.” Viktor looks at Yuuri in surprise. “I couldn’t have skated all these years if I didn’t. Yuuri, what are you thinking?”
“I don’t know. It’s not important.” Yuuri waves a hand. “Don’t worry about it.”
Viktor frowns. “Yuuri.”
They’re at the entrance to the rink now. Yuuri reaches over and presses a finger to Viktor’s mouth. “Shush,” he says. “Let’s go win the Rostelecom Cup.”
Language, Viktor will think later. How impossible it is, to know that the words you’re saying mean the same to you and the person you say it to.
But that’s later, in a hotel room high over Barcelona. Now, there’s a lingering warmth on Viktor’s lips and Yuuri says win like it’s a gift for Viktor, the promise of something sweeter than anything Viktor’s won alone.
So. Viktor lets himself be distracted.
(“I wish you’d never retire,” Viktor says, and what Yuuri hears is —)
Barcelona is perfectly lovely, until it isn’t.
It’s lovely, because Yuuri had asked Viktor to take him sightseeing. They’d wandered through the streets side by side, Yuuri fitting neatly into the space beside Viktor, and some time after the sky had gone dark Yuuri had bought a pair of rings and slid one onto Viktor’s finger.
It’s lovely, because there’s an unfamiliar weight on Viktor’s hand and a matching one on Yuuri’s, and every glimmer of light off the gold sends a sharp thrill through his stomach. It’s a sign, he thinks — that Yuuri wants him to stay. That Yuuri knows, too, the way it feels to see a sleep-softened smile early in the mornings, to want to kiss the exhaustion from the corners of his eyes late at night, and all the ways he lights him up in between. That he wants to keep this, fever dream come real and even better than Viktor had imagined, once.
Then the day after that, Yuuri tells him that he doesn’t need Viktor, after all.
At some point, Viktor despairs, there must be a limit to how much one man can perplex someone else.
Viktor is seeing in double.
“Don’t try to sound like a coach now,” Yuuri had said, before he skated away to start his free skate, and set up an echo in Viktor’s ears: I want you to be who you are. I want —
In front of him, Yuuri moves, and one part of Viktor is remembering jump composition, watching the tucked-in position of Yuuri’s elbows and the flash of his edges off the ice.
Yuuri doesn’t need that anymore. Yuuri doesn’t need coach Viktor, to coax him into skating Eros and picking music to lay his heart upon. He had, once, and Viktor had thought that was all he could have; but he’d been wrong.
Don’t be a coach, he thinks, and the role slides off his shoulders like water.
He’s just Viktor Nikiforov now, and his vision is finally coming clear.
Viktor might be fluent in three languages, but Yuuri speaks in the extension of his free leg, the curve of his throat, and this is still the one he understands best. How could he have forgotten — that time Viktor first really saw Yuuri, movements so clear he might have been shouting across the banquet hall, and now, his body carving out meaning all across the ice.
I want, Yuuri says, and stay, and endlessly, Viktor, Viktor, Viktor.
Yuuri doesn’t need him now. He wants him anyway.
The quad flip comes, an invitation.
Skate with me, Yuuri says, the same ice, together, and Viktor says —
iv.
Let’s leave together
Now I’m ready.
Yuuri’s hand brushes tenderly against Viktor’s cheek, and it’s everything he wants.