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It takes a full day for Yuuri to really understand what’s going on. It takes three days for him to believe it. Or - it takes the same day happening three times. He wakes up late three times. He forgets his lunch three times. He flubs his jumps in three days worth of practices and develops the same bruise in the same pattern in the same spot. He doesn’t know how it’s happening, or why exactly, but he is randomly looping parts of his life and he would like for it to stop. When he does begin to believe it he sits down and tries to recall everything that happened to him on the last unique day he can remember.
He had a paper due.
He cried in the library’s third floor bathroom.
He got bubble tea with Phichit.
After an hour he remembers the coin.
All the looping has to have something to do with the golden coin he found underneath the benches at the back of the DSC locker room. The repetition only started happening to him after that. That and the bubble tea, but Yuuri is 95% sure it isn’t the bubble tea.
He probably shouldn’t mess with the coin.
It’s probably dangerous.
He brings it with him to Sochi.
---
“Time travel, yes,” Minako’s unusually calm voice repeats back to him from the other end of the call. Yuuri is vaguely aware he’s being placated. He doesn’t care, because apparently he is now able to travel through time. He’s read manga about this before. He is living in a manga right now. “When I was younger I called it time leaping.”
“Time leaping,” Yuuri repeats.
“Yes,” Minako says. “It only happened when I jumped. Quite a difficult thing to avoid when you’re a professional dancer, Yuuri, can you even imagine?”
He can. For him it happens. It’s been happening when he falls. It started with just the fast falls – the hard ones, the botched quads – but by the time he boarded the plane to Russia it had become a leap for every fall. Quite a difficult thing to avoid when you’re a dime-a-dozen figure skater who faked his way into international competitions. Yuuri’s short program is tomorrow. He seriously doubts he’ll ever be able to finish it if he has to relive every failure over and over.
Minako tells him to be careful and to get some rest. He doesn’t.
---
He throws himself out of bed in the morning just so he can sleep.
---
After practice that afternoon Yuuri draws third. He breathes a sigh of relief that it’s not first and rubs the coin in his pocket. It hasn’t really been a good luck charm so far, but maybe things are going to change. Maybe it will be one in the future.
“I’ll be coming before you this time,” Christophe Giacometti claps Yuuri on the shoulder and leers before walking away. It’s the first time he’s said anything to Yuuri since juniors. Viktor Nikiforov draws fifth, but he only smiles at the group and doesn’t say anything to Yuuri at all.
Yuuri watches him leave and then deliberately trips over his skates.
---
“I’ll be coming before you this time,” Christophe Giacometti claps Yuuri on the shoulder and leers before walking away. It’s the second time he’s said anything to Yuuri since juniors. Viktor Nikiforov draws fifth again. This time when he smiles at the group Yuuri manages to make eye contact with his clavicle instead of the ground at his feet. It’s progress enough. Viktor has very nice clavicles. On the way back to the locker room to change into his short program costume Yuuri steps as carefully as he can.
---
In the end he has to do his short program four times, but by the last iteration he’s in second place going into the free skate. Only Viktor has a higher score than he does at this point. There is nothing that can ruin this for Yuuri. This is his dream, he realizes as he half-listens to Celestino give him pointers and reassurances. This is over a decade of Yuuri’s dreams coming true. Viktor gives Yuuri a picture perfect smile and a little wave when he breezes past wearing his crisp national team tracksuit. The back hallways of the arena are crowded and Viktor smiles and waves at plenty more people than Yuuri, but that’s okay.
Yuuri is in second place at the Grand Prix Final, at a Grand Prix Final where Viktor Nikiforov is competing too.
This is Yuuri’s dream.
He makes his way so carefully back to his hotel room Celestino asks him if he’s injured.
---
Something ruins it.
---
He doesn’t know how many times he’s done this now. Or how many times he’ll have to keep doing this again. Yuuri sits slumped against the edge of the bathtub in his hotel room. He’s supposed to be standing just to the side of the rink right now. He’s supposed to be waiting for Christophe Giacometti to finish his free skate. Celestino is probably out of his mind with worry right now wondering where Yuuri is. Yuuri had to turn his phone off.
This is the third time he’s chosen to do this.
Logically he could end the looping by refusing to skate, right? It will end his career, certainly it will, but maybe that’s what the universe has been trying to suggest to Yuuri all along. Yuuri doesn’t belong here. This is the Grand Prix of Figure Skating. This is the Final.
Yuuri is Yuuri.
He doesn’t belong here.
He stands up just to fall anyway, because he can’t just. He can’t just not do it. He can’t just not skate.
He holds onto the golden coin and opens his eyes to his alarm blaring.
---
Every time Yuuri decides to skate he falls. He mostly continues to choose to skate anyway. It’s what’s expected of him. It’s habit. It’s, most importantly of all, him. Yuuri might have a complicated relationship with competition, but he loves skating, loves it so much.
Sometimes he tries to get on a plane back to Japan, but it never amounts to anything. Vicchan is already dead. Nothing he can do can change that and it’s ridiculous to try.
So Yuuri skates, and Yuuri falls, and Yuuri does it all again.
---
He gets a little comfortable with it, strangely. He starts to use his lack of a future as an excuse to do things he would never otherwise do. When Chris smooths his hand across Yuuri’s lower back as they wait for Mickey to finish, Yuuri does not leap. He does not squeak. Yuuri gives Chris’s ass a healthy spank and walks away to see what Cao Bin’s doing.
It starts to get a little fun, almost. Like a vacation from reality. Yuuri tells Celestino he wants to skate to his own music next season. He calls his sister and tells her he loves her. He tells JJ to stop being such a douchebag when he tells Mickey to get ready for last place.
He looks Viktor dead in the eyes.
That’s when the flood starts.
---
“Viktor! Wait, just a moment!” Yuuri shouts and waves his arms like he’s screaming at Phichit from across the quad, and not at Viktor Nikiforov, king of the ice and also of Yuuri’s daydreams.
Viktor waits. Yuuri didn’t expect it to be that easy.
He prepared himself for more resistance, frankly, over the last two leap cycles. He doesn’t really know what to do with Viktor’s immediate acceptance. So he panics.
“I just wanted you to know that I love you,” Yuuri says, fast, his English tinting with an accent he’s worked hard to suppress over the last five years in Detroit. “And I have so many posters of you I have to rotate through them because I don’t have enough space on my bedroom walls to display all of them at once.”
Viktor blinks at him.
Yuuri throws himself backwards.
He doesn’t always leap immediately after falling, but this time he does. He starts to think maybe the universe really is on his side after all.
---
None of the others remember any of the previous loops once Yuuri leaps to a fresh new patch of time. This is wonderful for Yuuri, because if he was brave before he starts to act like a complete fool after his first confession to Viktor ‘I Am Beautiful And Gracious And Wondering Why You’re Talking To Me’ Nikiforov.
“Your technique is phenomenal.”
Viktor’s face freezes.
Yuuri trips himself over a chair.
---
“If I get silver will you be my coach?”
---
“I’ve masturbated to you.”
---
“If I get gold will you be my coach?”
---
But Yuuri still chooses to skate. He doesn’t always skate his actual program. Sometimes he does old routines he likes better; sometimes he ignores everything completely and does whatever he wants, program elements be damned. He starts to end his skates by trying to do a quad flip. Eventually he lands one. He misses how Viktor reacts because he’s too busy crashing into the boards out of surprise.
---
And then he gets a phone call.
“Yuuri,” Phichit asks. “Are you time leaping?”
---
There are few completely secluded places to talk in the maze of hallways in the training center surrounding the rink. Most of the doors are locked and Yuuri would be too nervous to use some stranger’s office anyway. There’s one empty bathroom he can think of, but Yuuri would rather get hit in the face with a skate than go back there.
He settles on a bench outside what looks like a weight room. He stares nervously at the passerby until they go away. Yuuri is grateful, but also shaky and sad. So sad. He’s such a fucking disgrace.
“Before coming here I’d only seen real ice twice in my life,” Phichit’s voice presses against Yuuri’s ear like a smile. He’s so cheerful for someone who could have been stranded because of Yuuri’s careless overuse of his only way home. “But I heard the stories about the days when humans used to dance on it. All I wanted growing up was to watch that in person. I worked toward that goal as hard as I could. I researched time periods, and temporal trajectories, and finally last year the advisory board granted me permission for this trip. …And then I went and lost my leap device!” Phichit chuckles. “The advisory board isn’t going to be so happy about that one. So stuffy. Like your English professor last year, Yuuri, do you remember?”
Yuuri hiccups because his voice isn’t steady enough to laugh. He doesn’t know what’s happening to him, and that’s saying something considering what the last week – month – year of time has been like for him. “Why didn’t you go directly to Russia,” he asks Phichit, “If you came back to this time. This time on purpose. You had to have enough material to know that’s where Viktor would be.”
Phichit clicks his tongue twice. “I didn’t come back to this time for Viktor, Yuuri. I came back here to see you.”
“What,” Yuuri breathes.
“You don’t know what a dream it’s been, Yuuri, all this time. Not only do I get to watch you skate in person, but I get to skate too! I get to skate with you!”
Yuuri holds onto his phone so hard he’s distantly afraid of cracking his knockoff Makkachin-print case. He begins to cry, so hard, and when Celestino finally finds him he refuses to explain why.
---
This is going to be Yuuri’s last leap. He repeats it to himself in the mirror of his hotel bathroom, clouds of steam rolling out of the shower behind him. He can’t keep wasting Phichit’s precious time. Even if Phichit says he doesn’t mind, Yuuri won’t be that selfish.
Beyond that, something inside him knows this is it. This is his last chance.
He thanks Celestino for being his coach over breakfast, catches him off guard.
He nods at Mickey as they pass each other in the lobby, and Sara with him.
He scoots just out of Chris’s reach when Chris tries to hug him, but shakes his hand before they all crowd onto the ice for warm ups.
He goes back to the bench and just sits on it. Yuuri listens to his program music, and sits, and thinks about what it’s going to be like moving forward through time again, and if he’s really ready. He doesn’t think he’s ready.
During their phone call Phichit told him nobody is.
“Katsuki, is it?” he hears quietly over the music in his ears and his own thoughts. He pulls his earbuds out and turns his head to the right, and sees Viktor Nikiforov wearing all of his costume but his skates. “Oh, don’t let me bother you. I’m only passing.” He flings a smile at Yuuri, and Yuuri has seen it enough times now to know it’s a diversion.
“Wait.”
Viktor stops.
“Just a moment,” Yuuri says, patting the bench next to him. He nervously pushes up the bridge of his glasses. He scoots to the side when Viktor flops down next to him, much less gracefully than Yuuri would have expected. Before Viktor can say anything else Yuuri asks him a question. The only question that’s mattered to him since just before he got to Russia. “Viktor. Do you ever feel like you’re stuck in time?”
He expects a response. Maybe not a real one.
“Every day of my life,” Viktor says.
---
Yuuri does his assigned program. He stumbles. He stumbles a lot. He gets back up. And, because a little bit of that no-consequences leap-past-it mist still clings to the edges of his mind, he changes his last jump from a triple axel to a quad flip. He steps out of it.
He doesn’t fall.
The crowd roars.
---
When the official hangs the bronze medal over Yuuri’s neck he starts to cry and doesn’t bother trying to hide it.
When Yuuri turns to watch Viktor accept his gold medal he almost falls off the podium. Viktor is kissing his gold medal, like he usually does, and his lips look soft against the cold metal. But while he’s kissing his gold he’s staring at Yuuri with wonder in his eyes.
---
At the banquet that night Yuuri walks through the crowd surrounding Viktor, says, “Will you be my coach?”