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“Oh, Victor will want to see this, too,” Mila says, one morning, as he comes into the rink. “Hey! Victor! We have a surprise!”
They’re clustered around her tablet, Georgi looking curious, Yuri carefully scornful. He can’t see the screen from here, but that doesn’t matter. Victor knows what the video is because he’s watched it dozens of times, has memorized every swelling chord and inside edge.
He pads over anyway. Three dozen and one can’t hurt.
STUNNING COMEBACK!!! KATSUKI YURI PERFECT SP AT 2015 JAPANESE NATIONALS
“It’s nothing special,” grumbles Yuri, with a too-deliberate turn of the head, and Victor -- doesn’t disagree, precisely. Who ever titled the video was obviously overexcited. He’d watched Yuuri’s old programs in the months after the Grand Prix, daydreaming about a call that never came, and for the most part they were of a piece: beautiful, shaky, uneven. This one is not so different. Victor could have ticked off the flaws: the amateur choreography, the shocked half-wobble after a landed quad salchow, the sloppiness of an edge. Yuuri, his news alerts told him, had not had a coach since last year’s Grand Prix. It showed.
Without a coach, he had come back to Tokyo, carrying two deteriorating quads and his own hastily-patched together choreography. Without a coach, he skated like a man possessed. He skated like he needed to be skating, like no force on earth could have pulled him off the ice.
Victor had watched him and felt envy bubble up in his throat.
“He’s not bad,” Georgi is saying. “Do they have his free skate up yet?”
Mila gives a put-upon sigh, saying, “No,” as though it’s the worst thing in the world. Victor doesn’t disagree with that, either. “But he did well. He won the competition by over ten points.”
Yuri makes a dismissive noise. “Big deal. So he beat everyone at his shitty nationals. The minute he tries to bring that crap out against real competition, he’s going to get crushed.”
He punctuates this with a dramatic kick away from the boards. Ah, teenagers.
“He should be at Worlds, then,” Georgi says -- barely looking up, they’re all too used to Yuri by now -- and Mila frowns, tapping her finger against the screen. “I don’t know,” she says. “It depends on what the selection process is–since he missed the entire Grand Prix --”
“The committee has some leeway to deviate from the rankings,” Victor says, with a wave. At least, that’s what the one Tumblr post with all the exclamation points had led him to believe.
Mila’s smile is mischievous. “Since when do you know so much about Japanese skating, Vitya?”
He shrugs back at her -- caught -- and lets the smile play around his lips for a moment. “My point is that he’ll be there. The federation doesn’t have another skater like him, and they know it.”
*
These are the things Victor knows about Katsuki Yuuri: he is five foot eight, twenty-four years old, born and raised in Hasetsu, Japan. His family runs a hot springs. He is a Junior Grand Prix and junior world champion, placed first the previous year at NHK Trophy, was his country’s representative for men’s singles in both Vancouver and Sochi. Fans and experts praise him for his expressiveness and artistry, but he is inconsistent in competition, likely due to nerves. There is a montage of his skating career on Youtube set to “Apologize.” He is an excellent dancer. He does not like to take commemorative photos.
As his inspiration and role model he cites one Victor Nikiforov. Twice, in two separate interviews.
Despite this, Victor has not heard from him in over a year.
He’s not unaware that his preoccupation with one night of drunken festivities, and one grainy Youtube video, is bizarre at best. He’s not unaware of Yuri’s disdain, Yakov’s exasperation, Mila’s curious concern. But Victor, while he has always been conscious of his audience’s reaction, has never cared overmuch about their approval: he replays and replays the now-famous routine over his lunch break, mentally overwriting the choreography with an attention he hasn’t given to his own programs all season.
Well. Not to the free skate, at least. When he was first choreographing his own short, he had -- well --
Finally performing Eros in front of Katsuki Yuuri himself is enough of a reason to carry on until Worlds, isn’t it?
He hears footsteps over his shoulder: Yakov’s unimpressed peh as he comes to a stop behind Victor. “That boy won’t get anywhere without a proper coach,” he says. “And I don’t mean Cialdini, either, judging by how that one worked out.”
Be my coach! he hears again, as though they are back at the banquet, Yuuri’s arms around him as he gazes enchantingly up at Victor. Not just a inebriated whim after all. Sometimes, when you are drunk, you say things you don’t really mean; sometimes you say things you most emphatically do.
Yakov sighs. “You’ve got some ridiculous idea in that head of yours, don’t you, Vitya?”
He sounds as though he very much does not want to hear the answer.
Victor smiles beatifically. “Don’t be silly, Yakov,” he says. “Who ever heard of retiring in the middle of a competitive season? Can you imagine what the reporters would say? All the wild rumors that would start?”
He shuts his phone and rises from the table, leaving a spluttering Yakov in his wake.
As it turns out, nothing quite so drastic is needed. “He’s been asking around,” says Chris, one evening over the phone. Victor leans back against the counter and listens. “Not for a coach -- everyone who could actually help him is already engaged, anyway -- but he’s asking to train at other top rinks. ‘As a favor.’”
“Has he asked you?” Victor asks, meaning, why hasn’t he asked us?, but maybe he’d already decided that Yakov, famed even among coaches for being rigid and competitive, would refuse him. Or maybe --
-- maybe, divested of the champagne and the stripper pole, Katsuki Yuuri is surprisingly shy. Maybe (the events of the last twelve months rewriting themselves in Victor’s head), having asked Victor to be his coach and not gotten a clear reply, he hadn’t wanted to presume.
“-- from my coach this morning,” Chris is saying. Oh, he hasn’t been paying attention. Whoops. “Apparently he hasn’t had much luck–something about the rinks not wanting to deal with the hassle–but I think I’ll do it. I’ve been wondering what our old dance partner has been up to.”
Victor sets his hands, abruptly, down on the counter. “Could you hold off on that for a bit, actually?” he says, not entirely successful at keeping the pleading out of his voice. He swallows. “And -- you wouldn’t happen to have his email, would you?”
The offer is already writing itself in his head. He’s sure Yakov won’t mind.