Archive of Our Own

He doesn’t remember the first time he steps out onto the ice.

Such a strange thing, really, to behold. Shouldn’t such a monumental moment stick out in his brain like a massive, glittering, unignorable monument? Most of his memories are colored with shades of silver and gold, tinted chilled with crisp rink air. It is his greatest accomplishment, his most remarkable failure, and everything in between. And, yet, he can’t remember how it begins.

He's born, of course. Perhaps it’s best to start here. A particularly cold Christmas day in Moscow; a mother, a father, neither of which particularly parental, to be sure, and with no idea where this tiny, screaming baby would travel outside of hospital walls.

He does remember becoming aware enough of himself and others to come to a few shining conclusions. Shortly after meeting Yakov and exactly a month following his parents’ divorce:

1. You will go far.
2. You will do it almost entirely on your own.
3. You will love one thing and one thing only for the rest of your days.

These are the rules of life. Like numbers, they are steady. Like ice, they are true. Like Victor, they are real, and these things, his rules and his own flesh and bones and bruises, are all that he can be sure are real. And with this, as always, time goes on.

x         

Victor is nine years old.

He is watching his mother curl her hair in her vanity, lined with yellow lightbulbs, as his father’s tall shadow bickers with her from the corner. Something about money, something about reputations, something about some things that Victor doesn’t understand. Victor doesn’t think that they even like each other, really.

It’s alright. He doesn’t care too much, anyways. He doesn’t see them very often.

Victor is nine years old, and he is very smart. He is tall for his age. He likes to read, when he has the time. He likes the music from The Nutcracker when it’s the season for it, the color blue, warm soups on cold days, and dogs.

Victor is nine years old, and he likes plenty of things. The only thing that he loves, however, thrumming rare excitement all up his forearms and down electrifying to his ankles, is skating. Ice is solid, and real, is there against your back when you fall, and along your blades when you glide. It is Victor’s, and he loves it.

His father huffs out something that’s supposed to sting, and storms out of the room without saying goodbye. The clamp of the curling iron goes click against itself, and just like always, time goes on.

x

“I just never know what to get you, Vitya,” his mother sighs, blowing out smoke from her cigarette, “all you ever want for your birthdays are new skates.”

Victor shrugs. “I love new skates.”

“I know,” she mutters, reapplying her bright lipstick in the rink glass, “but don’t you want something different this year? Boys your age like that new comic book, the one they’re selling out in the park. Wouldn’t you like something like that?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t you like them?”

“I like them just fine.”

“Well, ‘tis the season, and all. I was thinking you could meet my new boyfriend afterwards. You know, the one with the leather jacket.”

There’s hardly a birthday or Christmas where she doesn’t have a new boyfriend, but Victor tries hard to nod along and look like he’s listening. These visits, although rare, seem to make her happy enough; if only because he’s someone to rant to about one of her life’s many apparent woes.

She sighs. “I just worry about you. Those big blue eyes, wasted! You could have yourself a girlfriend by now!”

“I’m twelve, Mama.”

“Yes, yes,” she says, waving her hand like it’s unimportant. “Anyways. I’ll get you that new comic book, then. Be good.”

Her hand in his hair combs up static, and he wrinkles his nose at the too-close smell of smoke that clings to her coat. St. Petersburg is too far, she says. She doesn’t quite get why Victor would rather practice his triple axel than go out to fancy dinners or run around the city with boys his age. He can’t explain it, and doesn’t really want to. He doesn’t meet the boyfriend, that time, and he doesn’t see her the next year, either.

x

Victor is sixteen, and has just won Gold at the Junior World Championship.

It is the happiest he has ever been in his entire life.

“Yakov!” he shouts, is hugged so hard that his brand-new medal digs uncomfortably into the back of his neck. He doesn’t care. The dig reminds him that it’s there. That it’s real. He grins so widely that his cheeks feel like they’ll split at any moment.

“Wonderful boy,” Yakov mumbles into his shoulder, the most emotion he’ll ever show in front of so many people. Victor laughs. The ceremony, of course, is long, with the lavish banquet that evening wrapping up the days of competition in swallowing festivity. His legs burn with exertion, and his hair keeps getting caught in the buttons of his shirt. Everything is perfect, everything is bright.

“Congratulations!” the French skater, Marie, tells him. He tilts forward at her strong pat on the back, and has to work hard to not stumble. She’s won bronze in the women’s event, an athletic skater with a genuine talent for jumps but a persistent bent leg in her spins that’s keeping her from gold or silver. “I don’t know how you do it. I’ll bet your parents are very proud!”

Victor laughs with no bitterness. He shrugs. “I’m not very close with them, to be honest.”

Marie frowns, untwisting her hair from its complicated braid so that it falls across her shoulders. She’s pretty, thinks Victor, although in recent years he can admit he’s been less interested in the fall of a girl’s hair than the particular angle of Jacob MacDonald’s shoulders, skating laps with a Canadian flag draped across them.

“Sorry to hear that. They can be a pain, sometimes, no?”

She loops arms with him as they walk, and Victor tries not to be too surprised. People don’t usually come this close to him; not people his age, anyways. His rink mates, he thinks, are a little scared of him. Marie tugs him this way and that, accent lilting in her chatter in a way that reminds Victor a little of Jacob MacDonald. He pictures the swoop of his hair against his forehead and his chest flutters a little.

“Suppose so. That toe loop of yours is stunning. I hope someone’s told you that before.”

Marie guffaws, loud and unattractive unlike most of the girls Victor finds himself speaking to. Girls clambering for his attention, mostly, entranced by his hair or his eyes or his general collection of awards and abdominal muscles.

“Oh, you flatterer. I learned it by copying you, after all,” she says, raising an eyebrow. “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.”

“I didn’t! Not really, anyways. You make it your own.”

“Liar.” She grins, mischievous. “Thank you, though.”

As they turn the corner, she lets out a heaving sigh. The beauty mark under her left eye twinkles with the motion, as she tilts her head back. Her hair is so long that it threatens to brush the floor. Victor finds himself utterly delighted; he’s intrigued to find that he likes her. She doesn’t seem intimidated by him, in fact seems averse to presenting herself as anything other than exactly who she is, which is apparently someone who couldn’t care less about complimentary pleasantries or shallow conciliatoriness.

“I could have done better. Do you ever feel that way, after a performance? Like you let yourself down?” She then laughs, shakes her head. “Oh, who am I kidding. You’re the best.”

Victor hums. “You think so? Ah, well.” He sits next to her on the hard floor where she’s sank to. They stare out the large window looking out across the falling snow outside. The tempered glass blocks out the chill, makes something warm out of something uninhabitable. And it’s nice, because strangely, the silence between them isn’t uncomfortable, like it sometimes can be with the people who so clearly want Victor to like them without ever attempting to know him in return.

“I always feel that way,” he shrugs. Marie turns her head towards him, long blonde hair tossing over her knee in separated strands of wheat. “But I know my abilities, the science of them, and I understand the numbers, and so I try not to dwell on the letdowns. Or else, I’d never want to compete again. And I’m not the best, not even close. We’re all good in our own ways.”

He thinks for a minute. “Nobody’s the best,” he amends.

Victor knows each and every technical and biological flaw that he carries, each and every time he makes his way to center ice. He notices when his leg is not entirely straight, and this hypercriticism translates into the way he views others, too. He is scrutinizing and over-focused, knows this is a trait he must keep at least partially under cover, lest he unduly offend the masses who never quite seem to grasp his particular brand of honesty. Marie feels like someone who might understand, though. She’s got a blisteringly bright medal wrapped around her neck, and yet is sitting legs crossed with a boy she’s met twice, staring blankly out a frosty window. Perfectionism at its finest. Understanding at its core.

“Nobody? That can’t be right. If nobody’s ever the best, then what is there to work towards?” Marie asks, tracing the indents of her medal.

“I’m not sure it’s about working towards anything in particular. We have goals, yes. Win Junior Worlds, okay. But, after this, I will have another goal, and another, and when I am finally out of goals, where will I be?”

Marie stares at him. Her beauty mark blinks at him, listening.

He shrugs. “I could never give up skating. When I’ve run my goals dry, I’ll skate myself off the edge of the earth.”

Marie laughs. “In this very costume, like a crazy man. Skating your way to the grave.”

“Oh, no, I’ll never die. I’ll become an ice vampire. Haunt the rink. I’ve always loved horror movies. Yakov would try an exorcism, and I would haunt him even harder.”

They snort in tandem at the ridiculousness of the whole thing; stoic Yakov eternally bothered by a ghostly visage of Victor in a dark blue flower crown and sparkling free skate sleeves. Victor tries to imagine a life without skating, in all seriousness, and fails. There is nothing concrete on the other side. He slides his fingers through the sand of it and cannot grasp a singular grain.

“I sometimes wonder if I’ll love anything as much as I love this,” Marie says, on a laughing sort of breath. She says it casually, as though she has not just put into words the very fibers of Victor’s heartbeat since the unmemorable moment he’d first laced up his skates. “Teenage boys just can’t compare. I don’t want a ring, I want a medal.”

Victor looks across at her strong side profile, at the straightness of her nose, and thinks that he may have just discovered what they call a kindred spirit. Rare. Maybe even real.

“I understand.”

“I knew you would. Without this, there’d be nothing left,” she says.

Marie smiles at him, knocks her shoulder against his. “Look at the two of us. Sixteen and so solitary! My older sister would scold us. She’s getting married next fall.” She springs up, offering Victor a hand down to pull himself up with. “I’ll make sure to show you the pictures next year.”

In April, Marie Durand turns seventeen, and in May, she falls out of her beautifully one-of-a-kind triple toe loop and tears her ACL. Marie retires. Time goes on.

This is a lesson in permanency, and in its lack.

x

Chris teaches him the joy of competition. Truly. It’s fun, skating against someone who so desperately wants to win, someone who genuinely has a passion for it, and most importantly whose personality isn’t quite as grating as Jean Leroy’s. Most of the skaters Victor has grown with have either called it quits or fallen short of the certain grandeur of senior seasons and demanding physicality. Chris can keep up. Well, for the most part.

They pilfer bottles of expensive wine to ignore their coaches for a night and feel like what they suppose might be real young adults.

“You know,” Chris muses, voice groaning with his long-limbed stretch across the carpet, “you’re not nearly as wise as you think you are.”

Victor huffs out a laugh. He digs at the cork with their makeshift screw; it doesn’t seem to be working very well, although he’s sure that’s just the previous bottle messing with his perception. They got that one open, anyways.  

“Everyone thinks that the sun shines out of your bottom. Whatever the saying is, anyways. I mean, I’m obsessed with you, sure, but it’s embarrassing when other people just roll over for you!”

Victor shoots the freed cork at Chris’ forehead, and although he misses, Chris whines at him, a little incoherently.

“We’re old, now, Victor. So very, very old.”

“Have I ever told you how much I adore your melodrama?” Victor wonders aloud.

Chris rolls over onto his stomach. “Oh, hush.”

 He fiddles with the hotel comforter hanging woefully off the bed, and blows up into his hair so that his blond bangs flip briefly towards the ceiling. “Seeing all those new skaters in the juniors makes me miss it. Don’t you miss it?”

Victor looks at him like he might be crazy. Miss it? “Not at all.”

Chris rolls his eyes. “Pardon me, Nikiforov. I forgot that you’d be winning gold either way.”

Victor makes a vague gesture with his hands as he speaks. “Well, there’s no point in missing it. And it looks like someone’s feeling a bit snippy today.”

“Just because there’s no point in it doesn’t mean I can just stop feeling it. Jeez,” quips Chris, humming as he takes a long drink from the bottle. “Time is scary. I need to find a boyfriend before I start falling off the bone.”

Talks like these baffle Victor, and always have. Chris, especially, always mentioning the next hopeful conquest, the next person who he’ll find any number of odd places with the strangest, most outlandish colors about them to give him four months of debatable bliss. Or, more accurately, blissful sexual gratification. Victor is twenty-two years old, and has learned a lot about the joys of tumbling attractive young men in hundreds of cities worldwide; he still doesn’t understand what Chris could possibly mean when he says that he feels lonely without it.

Loneliness is something felt only when one stops long enough to feel it.

Along the same vein as nervousness, a senseless and hindering emotion that seems to Victor to be entirely manmade. Not like anger, not even like that vague pitting sadness, entirely created by the mind by nearly zero biological happenstances. There is little to no science behind it. What is loneliness but a philosophy? Intangible things are only useful when they can be tied to a solid thing, Victor thinks, and have no use except for dulling down Chris’ flamboyance into a muted hum.

“You’re ridiculous, my friend,” Victor sighs, shaking his head. Chris gives him that kicked puppy look that means mostly that he wants someone to be sympathetic towards him, yet knows that sympathy is not a particular gift that Victor possesses. “Didn’t you just break it off with what’s-his-name? The one you met in Egypt?”

Chris groans, throwing a hand over his eyes. “It was Morrocco. At least, I’m pretty sure.”

“I don’t get it. You’re so… yourself. Why do you need another one right away?”

Someone like Chris has plenty to focus on, Victor knows. Although he’d vehemently refused to take university courses like most of the rest of them, with his training schedule, assignments and gallivanting about the globe, there should be no time for things such as underwhelming movie romances. Victor doesn’t quite understand the yearning for such closeness. It was nice while you had it, briefly, but it was even nicer to not have to be overly careful to spare someone’s feelings that you couldn’t comprehend.

“I want to be cared for! Cared, Victor! Really cared for, you know, not just like Mama or Papa or coach. Cared for. Preferably while naked.”

Victor shakes his head, amused. “Yagatka. I think that you’ve had a bit too much wine.”

“I suppose you’re right, though I hate to say it. Hate, hate.” Chris laughs. “Hate. I love you, though. You’re my best friend in the world. Even if you are a bit of a robot.”

Victor still isn’t entirely used to such expressed affection when he’s not expecting it. It doesn’t come quite as naturally to him, receiving at least the deep, gooey bits. Chris seems to see something in his silence, and rolls his eyes, kicking at Victor so that he squirms away.

“Accept it, jackass,” he says, laughing now, “people love you.”

x

You are an artist, yes, but first, you are an athlete.

There is music, too, beautiful lines, flourishes of the hand and rhythm to it all. Screeching crescendos of violin and heavy drumbeats depending on the program, metaphors explained through choreography and scrunched eyebrows.

It hurts, more often than not.

Your lungs constrict with the cold, your cheeks flush and burn and you can never find a comfortable temperature, no matter what you wear. You wake early, meticulously plan each meal to best utilize each muscle and bone sewn into your skin to their fullest potential. You stave off each illness with the surety of years of consistency; you will not miss a week simply because of a cough. You do not speak to your parents anymore, although every now and again your mother’s Facebook alights with a new relationship status update, and you respond by maturely not congratulating her. You stretch. You skate. Your ankles are calloused beyond repair, and bruises inlay like ivory against the satin of your kneecaps. It is grotesquely physical, and aligns with that unsatisfied part of your brain that has always preferred evident results.

You visit the physical therapist, and he cracks your spine back into place. The ballet studio and she attempts to bend you into having natural flexibility after all these years, when you both can plainly see your legs’ stubborn refusal to collapse on their own. And so, you must force them to.

You feel a bit like Frankenstein. A bit like the Scarecrow.

You are an athlete. This is your life. You are an artist, too. One comes naturally. Which that is depends on the day.

x

Makkachin is being uniquely annoying when it happens, although Victor supposes this isn’t especially rare.

“I’ll feed you in a minute, you great monster,” he scolds, scratching the underside of his chin even as he says it. Scrolling through mindlessly distracts him from the now ever-present barrage of questions bouncing around his skull. What now, is a favorite of his awful, awful brain.

Victor is twenty-seven years old.

He groans, flopping backwards onto the couch cushion.

When he finally sees him, stopping his thumb sliding against the screen, relatively tiny against the pixelated ice and minimized against the blue light, Victor is. The light of the lamp glows, radiating. Victor is warmed. Victor is underwater.

Yuuri Katsuki.

He knows the name. An awful Grand Prix, frankly, rookie mistakes unbefitting of a JSF skater with such experience, with such talent in his lines and his jumps and expression, really-

And then, of course, the banquet.

The wine was only responsible for so much of Victor’s blush, this he remembers.

All of it hazardously folded together, layer by layer, ought to leave Victor in the sort of position to scroll entirely past such a video, and yet although he attempts to blame it on his own ego in seeing his routine replicated, he finds himself lacking in conviction.

He sees a fellow skater, of course, and with this, his flaws; sees each lack of connection and recalls issues that have translated from the disastrous Grand Prix to this pixelated demonstration, and he sees. Well. He sees much else.

His heart trips over itself. He is taken aback. He is, most fascinating of all, surprised.

Yuuri skates with imperfection, with a humanity that speaks itself into his long, elegant lines and natural sort of balance. He’s a fast skater, leans towards deep edges and grades of execution rather than pure athleticism. His eyes close with it, sometimes, and Victor brings his phone closer to his face to inexplicably try and view their color. Although he knows that they’re brown, that they are big and shining behind his glasses. It’s an exact replication of Stay Close to Me; the choreography, of course, the music, the themes and executions of it, but it’s something so incredibly different that Victor questions if they have anything in common after all. That the same young man with the deep brown eyes could drunkenly and brazenly charm a room into debauchery, and yet skate with such… vulnerability. Unselfconscious and entirely reserved all at once. Victor feels reckless. Makkachin barks.

“I shouldn’t, should I?”

He barks again.

“You really think so?”

Victor loops the video no less than thirteen times following, and only stops when Makkachin grows tired of his remissness and plops himself down next to his waiting food bowl.

The next hour, he dials Yakov’s worn-in number.

Oddly enough, he thinks of Marie.

x

At first, it is in glimpses only.

It’s like trying to catch sunlight in your hands; you see it streaming through the windowpanes, but when you clap your hands around it, all you’re left with is emptiness.

Hasetsu is nothing like he might’ve expected. Well, he guesses, it is, really, it looks just like the pictures online, after all, chilly and clinging mist and the most picturesque hot springs that do wonders in unworking wound backs.

There are more unexpected things, too. Mari, for instance, is funny; jangle your bones tactless, vulgar and outgoing and sarcastically biting. She is nothing like her brother, or at least Victor thinks so most of the time. They are each other’s mirror in other ways, smaller and more important ways. Yuuri’s mother is hospitable and pleasant and gently inquires about the deepest parts of you that you didn’t even realize were there. His father is mischievous, although he hides it behind friendly politeness. The whole thing is very impeccably charming. When he’d decided to sign away what he knew of ice and glory to coach a Japanese skater recovering from a disheartening season, he’d known notably little of Yuuri as a person. What he sees of him, now, is slightly terrifying.

It is terrifying because he is impossibly real, and because there is no reason why he should be so incredibly interesting. If he were this interesting all along, then Victor has been wasting his time chasing medal after medal even after the point where boredom had begun to wear itself into the gold, because all along, there would have been some young man in glasses being interesting all by himself, with Victor not there to notice.

“Phichit and I were roommates in Detroit,” says Yuuri on one of their humid evenings, when Victor’s sure he’s begun to wear down the enamel of his odd shyness, “we used to have this-” Yuuri laughs, “this thing, where we thought it would be bad luck to actually buy a shot glass? We thought somehow Ciao-Ciao would look at us and know.”

Victor laughs at the thought, the two of them sneaking paranoid past Celestino for a handle of Tito’s, and somehow, through both of their laughter, Yuuri manages, “Wait, wait. Ok, ok,” he snorts, “ok, so we had this can of hairspray, and once it was empty, we took the cap and used it for our… you know.”

“Your crimes, of course.”

“Hey, we were eighteen! Roughly.”

“It’s older than that in America, no?”

“And Japan. And Thailand.”

“So-”

“Anyways.” Yuuri grins at him, “the cap had a hole on the bottom, and so to keep it from getting everywhere, we just. Duct taped it shut.”

“Duct taped?”

“Well, and to make it worse, the only duct tape we had was American flag print. Patriotic, at least. Plus, the cap was probably about a double anyways.”

Victor snickers. “I can imagine all the fun had with such a thing.”

“Fun is a strong word. After the second time, I think we were scared off forever. Even the smell makes Phichit sick, nowadays.”

Victor laughs some more at this, at the absurdity of a younger Yuuri and playful Phichit navigating teenager-dom in Detroit. Getting caught sneaking out and taping up holes in a makeshift shot glass. Like this, Victor can see his resemblance to Mari, older sister and younger brother both quietly rebellious and quick-witted. What he’s noticed, as of late, through peeks like this, although Yuuri is still a bit more reserved than he’d expected, is that Yuuri is an onion.

A poor metaphor, perhaps, but accurate all the same.

Peeling back the layers of him is taking time. Layers that Victor hadn’t known were there, or rather, quite so thick.

In getting to know Yuuri, in trying to peel back his layers to get to the core of him, Victor is slightly uncomfortable to find that, when he looks in the mirror, he has unintentionally stripped back some of his own layers, as well. His skin feels more paper-thin, these days. Yuuri knows that his mother smoked cigarettes, although he doesn’t press for more information. Minako knows that his back pain stems from a phase where he’d tried to convince himself that he could be flexible.

With time, as the months elapse, these glimpses of Yuuri become something that Victor covets. Victor does not covet. Coveting is for the tangibles; it is certainly not a good idea to covet a human being, who could so easily lose every ounce of spark that makes him special. Somehow, though, Victor doubts that.

Because, he is special. In snatches that stand out inexplicably in the back of Victor’s mind. Things that should be entirely unremarkable:

- When he is anxious, something that he is familiar with being, Yuuri envisions the feel of the ballet barre underneath his palms.

-He had a dog. Victor loves dogs. Makkachin puts his head on Yuuri’s lap and Yuuri tells them not that he has a dog, but that he had one.

-He is very smart. Yuuri helps Yurio with his tutor’s homework and is patient, gently correcting, when he does so.

-Yuuri is loved. His family looks to him for advice. He still wears the friendship bracelet Phichit had made him for his graduation, and the wall above his desk is plastered with push-pinned photographs of him smiling with adoring friends over the years. From the day somebody laced up his first skates to today, he has been loved into existence.

By the end of the year, Victor swears, he will crack the onion straight down to its center.

x

As always, time goes on.

Snow falls, birthdays pass, skating seasons elapse with medals and glitter and excitement. There are big, big moments, with flashing cameras and burning hot lights, there are nights of wine and victory, and no matter how hard he tries to distract himself with these things, Victor is rather afraid that he might be in love.

It is becoming terribly obvious.

It is deep brown eyes. It is effluent concern for his well-being; what is that, that someone who relies on you to coach them ends up coaching you? It is Yuuri, of course, because at this point, what isn’t?

Before he can catch up to it, Victor is twenty-eight years old, and he is in love. Probably. Certainly. Oh, god.

“Victor,” comes the call from across the rink, “I don’t like that last spin. Don’t you think it’s a little ugly?”

Victor grins. It is exhilarating. Someone who tells him no. It is ugly, too! How marvelous to have somebody who dares tell Victor Nikiforov that his choreography is ugly! It is addicting. Yuuri skates over to him with his hands on his hips, looking for all the world like a suspicious mother goose about to wrangle the ducklings into line. Victor tries very hard not to swoon.

“What’s gotten into you?” Yuuri asks, the corner of his mouth checking up into a smile. Victor pulls him in by his forearm, leaning over the wall and digging his cold nose into Yuuri’s warm neck.

“I get bored.”

Yuuri hums, “Hm, I know,” he says, tilting his head up to try and escape the chill of a chasing nose, “but you don’t have to take it out on the poor program.”

“I could take some other things out on you, instead?” Victor lightly pinches Yuuri’s hip, and he yelps and grabs his hand, squeezing.

“Ha! You wish. Come and tell me how to fix that leg on the toe loop.”

Yuuri is kind, he is authentic. He shows Victor documentaries about human anatomy on his laptop because he knows that he’ll like it. He is accommodating and avoids conflict. His bedsheets are soft cotton and he listens to Radiohead, of all things. He is entirely unconvinced of his own talent, and yet is confident in his body and in his physical abilities; he watches videos of himself with a frown and, off the ice, he actively avoids people’s attention. Well, he certainly tries to. Unfortunately for Yuuri, he is also extremely likeable, and he draws people to him no matter his attempts to hide behind more gregarious figures. When Chris and Victor travel with him, he surreptitiously squeezes himself between them to form two solid walls of noise.

Yurio gives him a look, sometimes, when Yuuri’s not facing him and therefore can’t see the undoubtedly lovestruck gaze he’s saddling him with.

“I don’t know what you’re so stressed out about,” Yurio says, narrowing his eyes. He flips through his algebra workbook like it’s personally offended him.

“I am not stressed out,” Victor insists, stubbornly refusing to help him after such a quip. “Besides, kótik,” he says, just to annoy him, “It’s not like I’m repressed or anything.” He holds up his hand, glinting with a ring that he’s never removed for more than fifteen minutes since the day it’d been given. He’s aiming for smug, and thinks it might read more like desperate.

Yurio scoffs. “Then, why are you freaking out? You’re both obsessed with each other. It’s gross. Whatever.”

“You need to learn to respect your elders,” Victor grumbles, burying his face in his hands.

For all his bothering, Yurio has a point. Victor is entirely at a loss over the sudden flutter about his heart whenever he thinks of himandYuuri. It’s odd, because as always, when he just thinks of Yuuri, when he’s around him and when he’s not and wishing that he were, there is only the warmth that he’s come to be so familiar with. He’s got a singular, dark freckle just above his lip, and Victor has stared at it for a thousand hours. He has kissed it, countless times, and so why on earth is he freaking out? Has he done something wrong that he’s forgotten about, that his subconscious is reminding him of, encouraging him to feel guilty over? Maybe he’d killed a man, and it had been so traumatizing that he’d blocked it-

There’s a hand snaking across his back and into his hair, and Victor startles. Yuuri raises one perfect eyebrow as Yurio bursts into laughter. Victor glares, even as he leans backwards against Yuuri standing behind his chair.

“Who are you two gossiping about now?” Yuuri rests his arm around Victor’s shoulders, and as he breathes out, Victor feels the warmth in the room swell. His face heats up against his will. This is getting to be a tad outrageous. As Yuuri and Yurio speak, Victor gives into the more petulant part of his personality and follows the urge to press his face into Yuuri’s side, seeking comfort like burrowing into a warm winter coat. Yuuri’s hand comes up to scratch against the short hairs at the base of his neck. Inhaling fresh laundry detergent and crisp ice, Victor ponders.

It does nothing to slow his heart.

 It is an odd thing, he supposes, probably causes some undue stress on the psyche, to shift an entire world view in the span of a year or two. He’s gone from one extreme to the other. It ought to make sense that his head is spinning with it.

In the end, it’s the godforsaken triple toe loop.

It’s in practice, rink empty in the early morning but for the two of them. If Victor were to step outside the sliding doors, Yuko would be brewing hot coffee with an episode of her tv drama playing on the screen above.

“Lean a little more into the music, see,” Victor says, swirling his right hand in a ring around motion. “Maybe a da, da, da, not so much a da, da, da.”

Yuuri tilts his head, and the motion has a strand of his dark hair flopping down across his forehead. “I feel like I could backload two of the jumps. Stamina-wise, at least.”

Victor nods. It’s a good suggestion; and he’s right. He tends to, anyways, when point values are closer with the competition, although Victor prefers when he sticks to what they’ve trained rather than split-second calculations in that rattling mathematical brain of his. It works, but it’s a queasy sort of balance. “You could,” Victor agrees. “But I prefer your expression, Yuuri. Judges tend to focus more on jump values, these days, but your skating is more than that, you always look so beautiful when you’re yourself. Do me a favor, hm?”

Yuuri rolls his eyes good-naturedly. “Maybe if you were judging.” He sighs. “We’ll see.”

“If all you skated for were jumps, you’d be J.J. What could be more convincing than that, darling?”

Yuuri, bless him, takes it in stride, shaking his head like he’s particularly exasperated even as a reluctant smile peeks out and dimples his left cheek. Victor’s sure that he’ll intend to follow through with humoring Victor the entire way to competition, too, and accidentally throw the whole conversation away in a singular moment of fatigued panic. Victor knows that he himself will clench his fists in anticipation, and that he will clap louder than anybody else, barring perhaps Yurio, when he inevitably lands them in the last half with long, deep lines and soft knees.

With this, Yuuri pushes back to try again. It’s crisp, clear and expressive, and Victor knows that he’s smiling, watching Yuuri attempt to follow his slightly self-concerned plea (it’d be a grievous loss, truly, if the world and, more pressingly, Victor had to watch as Yuuri Katsuki relegated himself to a jumping machine for a few measly points). It’s beautiful, until it isn’t, because the moment before Yuuri’s skates cross to jump, Victor’s skin tingles with a blaring sense of wrongness. Oh, no. Well, that’s not quite right. Before he hits the ground, Victor’s skating across to him with a particular heaviness in his chest.

He has a wonderful view of Yuuri’s head striking down against the ice. The sound it makes would not be out of place in a horror movie. Victor comes down on his knees, sliding right next to him, and tries not to look too terrified. There is blood on the ice, and Victor panics.

That is, he realizes, precisely how Marie would have sounded when she hit the ice.

“Ow,” Yuuri gasps, unfolds his legs from where they’ve fallen awkwardly under him, and Victor’s breath returns to his lungs. I think I have just discovered religion, he thinks, unspeakably relieved to hear Yuuri’s voice, to see what he knows to be brown eyes squeezed tightly shut, thank God, thank God.

“That’s a good sign,” he mutters. Distantly, he sees his hand move of its own volition to grip Yuuri’s knee. The anterior cruciate ligament is located in the middle of the knee, between the thigh bone (femur) and the shin bone (tibia). A torn ACL can occur if the knee or lower leg is twisted, or if the lower leg extends too far forward- 

“Ow,” Yuuri repeats, more emphatically, and Victor lets go.

“Sorry, sorry,” he says. “Is your head alright? Ah, sólnyshka, go slowly.”

Yuuri winces as Victor helps him sit up, pressing a palm to the side of his face. Crystals of ice melt into the blood seeping steadily from the mostly shallow cut through the tail of his eyebrow. Victor threads his hair back from the wound with a hiss, wills himself to remember that head wounds bleed the most, that it doesn’t mean anything particularly horrifying.

“Fuck,” says Yuuri, softly. Victor presses a light kiss to his opposite temple, concerned by his shallow, quick breathing. “Ice never gets any softer, does it?” he tries to joke, but it’s too shaky to win itself a laugh. Victor still feels like he’s been drinking energy drinks nonstop for a week, heart hammering against the walls of his anatomy.

Yuuri leans heavily against him as they come to stand, saying something deprecating about the massive bruise that’ll likely form against his side in the morning. Victor hovers, he knows he does.

The purpling of a bruise, the eventual shift from black and blue to an inevitable sickly green against the skin, is familiar and biological; it is scientific, tangible, and impermanent. It does not mar a person for longer than a week or two, maybe three. A bruise doesn’t change anything fundamental, nor does it alter any massive happenings of the universe, there is likely no butterfly effect stemming from the singular fact of a time-elapsing bruise.

All of this he knows to be true, and yet. And yet, Victor cannot stop staring at it.

Evening breeze against the window, laughter from down the stairs, laying in Yuuri’s bed, Victor watches his stomach rise and fall as he sleeps.

Lit by the soft lamp yellowing against the walls, Victor rucks up his shirt and traces with his fingers the perimeter of a deep, staining bruise. The Bends plays off the Spotify tab open on Yuuri’s still open computer resting next to them. The Bruise demands his attention.

You are an artist. You are an athlete. You forget, sometimes, that he is, too. To you, he is something else entirely. You forget that skating is not an extension of his body, not an extension of yours, either, but an unforgiving sport attached to a cold, unforgiving surface engineered to remain unyielding. Skin yields. Bruises are impermanent, yes. But, then, so is he. And, maybe that’s where the terror comes from. The idea that, somehow, there is a boy in the world named Yuuri Katsuki, and he understands you entirely, and he has seen you in a way that nobody else ever has tried to, and that this wonderful boy loves you. This boy is here, in bed with you, and trusts you to look after him. He trusts you to handle his hurts and juggle his joys, he trusts you to care for him. He is not permanent. Your heart constricts with this impossibility, you close your eyes against it.

“Sweetheart,” he says, quietly. You halt your palm where it now splays against the expanse of mottled purple and yellow. “I’m ok.”

He removes his glasses so that you can see the flecks of deeper color. He is lovely in the low light, and his face is entirely free of bruises.

“How are you real?” you ask. He snorts, ugly and short, and brings your hand away from his side to lay kisses against your knuckles. “You are too good to be true.”

He looks at you, for a second, and the look is a little sad, before he laughs, bright and familiar.

“Victor,” he says, “sweetheart, sweetheart. When did you get so serious?” he turns the music up, and plants a whopping, cartoonish smooch on your lips. “My sweetheart.”

“I will always take care of you. You will always take care of me.” The butterflies living in your stomach stir. “That’s how this works, ok?” He kisses you again, this time for real, and against your lips, eyes wide open, eyelashes brushing eyelashes when he pulls slightly back, “I am real. I am not going anywhere.”

Fake Plastic Trees is not the most romantic of songs, traditionally, perhaps, but you have never felt more in love than at this particular moment, and you cannot help but thank Thom Yorke for his strength, the strength that you feel you must borrow from him in this stunning minute. You feel, perhaps, that you should do away with each and every rule and certainty and emotion that has not aided you in arriving directly to these very coordinates, skin against marvelous skin, and a beautiful boy teaching you how to love something warm and easy and human who has built a home upon the hinges of your ribcage.

Victor Nikiforov is twenty-eight and three quarters years old. He is very smart, relatively tall for his age, and will skate until his ankles shatter into dust. He likes soft pajama pants against his legs, snowy mornings in St. Petersburg. He once had a mother and father, both, and no longer misses them much. His life is colored in shades of gold, and he is sure of few things.

1. He has gone far, and still has a long way to go.
2. He has been helped, no matter how he tries to escape it.
3. He has loved one thing and one thing only for most of his life.

The fourth, of course, has been amended. It is, of course, the most important. It is, as follows:

4. He would do anything in the world to earn even a sliver of Yuuri Katsuki’s smile.

Yuuri laughs like a bell when Mari lets Makkachin into the room, soaking wet with melting snow and plopping down between them with a bark like a revved engine.

“Your toes are freezing,”

“That’s Makka!”

“Oh, sure, blame the dog, Vitya.”

Victor Nikiforov is twenty-eight and three quarters years old. He is loved. He is in love. It is a cold winter’s day in Hasetsu, and although no one could have known, back from his very first day in the world, Victor Nikiforov has grown to be a lucky man.

The butterflies have settled. His heart has slowed. Yuuri smells of pine soap, and Victor lets the feeling wash over him with the steady anatomical assurance that, nevertheless, he will always have a can on a string in the form of one real, imperfect boy with brown eyes and a freckle above his lip.

No matter the winter, he will always have a home to return to.