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Once, on a winter day so cold that ice encased the trees like glass, Yuuri skated on the surface of a pond.
Yuuko’s idea. She smiled, her mittens clapped around his hands as she dragged him off the frosty bank. “Look, look!” she gasped, and her laughter rang in the air like windchimes. “It’s so beautiful!”
It was. The setting sun behind the trees, her chapped lips and rosy nose, the bleeding pink of her sweater as she spun through the gold and the silver and the snow.
Yuuri had to keep wiping his glasses. They slipped down his nose, smudged with fingerprints and fog. Their breaths hung in the air like hopeful clouds, and that was beautiful, too, but it made it hard to see everything. Yuuri wanted a camera. Or not a camera—more like a magic spell. A secret wish that could leave a perfect imprint in his head, better than memory.
Because when he looks back, when he remembers taking flight into the January sky, there’s only a ghost of elation in his fingertips. He remembers the sensations of safety, sincerity—clarity, the kind he only ever knows while skating—but it’s not the same. It’s not the same as living it.
I’m never going to be this happy again, Yuuri had thought. And so far, he hasn’t.
***
The trick about skating on natural ice is that there isn’t any way to know if it can support you until you step on it.
Sure, you can check the temperature all you like. You can read the weather and consult the color and consider any omens good or bad, but organic things have organic flaws. There’s a risk inherent to trusting anything that isn’t manufactured specifically to be safe.
And it’s a strange comparison, but—when Victor’s fingers (so soft and yet so cold) skim the inside of his thigh, Yuuri’s thoughts fall down like white, white snow.
***
Skating is flying. Fighting hand over fist with gravity even when your feet are on the ground. Four edges, two points of contact, holding onto the world like a bird taunting the sky.
Well, he’s found another way to fly now. He’s balancing on bedsheets, fingers gripping, head spinning from the vertigo—this grasp, the sweaty clasp of hands into the bed is the knifepoint, the edge of the blade and he is falling.
Oh god oh god, he understands now what Victor meant about the music made with bodies. His breath is a knot in his throat and a gong in his chest and the shriek of fireworks exploding in his spine. His body is an orchestra and his back is a bowstring and when Victor runs his fingers down it he sings.
“Yuuri,” Victor breathes, hazy, beaming; just, “Yuuri, oh Yuuri—”
It’s cute, Yuuri thinks; cute the way he smiles with every single muscle in his face, from the corners of his lips to the faintest wrinkles around his eyes—that’s Victor for you, always has to go the extra mile—the way his jaw is slack, the way his hair is tossed against the pillow like frost—the way he always looks, glittering and grumbling and gorgeous, grinning with that glow that never shows in photographs, lazy and languid as a cat, stealing all the bedsheets when he sleeps, morning breath and mismatched socks and all—
Yuuri holds him. Digs his nails in because the world is cold and Victor, his Victor, is the tree under the ice. Everyone can see the glimmer and the glass but underneath is this extraordinary ordinary sight that only Yuuri gets to see. Only him. Only Victor, melting in the heat and sending arms up to the sun, pressing kisses into Yuuri’s neck like thank you, thank you, like the words that linger at the crossroads between three languages and two countries and the airports and endless huffs of car exhaust. The walls that blocked and the bridges that build and the smallest, sheltered places where miracles bloom.
“Yuuri,” Victor moans, like it’s the only word he knows, and Yuuri quivers at his voice, vibrates at the frequency that pulls molecules apart.
***
They hold each other, after.
They pull the sheets off the other bed—unslept-in and unsoiled—and burrow into each other like rabbits. Moonlight and streetlight tiger-stripe the floor and the soles of Victor’s feet. He’s too tall for the covers to shield them, so they lay, bare and vulnerable, against the mattress.
It’s astounding, astonishing—Victor’s feet, the literal foundation of his grace, the arches that bruised and the ankles that bent, the heels that upheld him as he spun his way into the history books—there they are. Ten infinitesimal toes, crooked and ordinary, on soft cotton sheets in a hotel room in Barcelona.
Yuuri doesn’t realize he’s crying until Victor’s thumb is catching the tears that are slipping down his cheeks.
“Don’t,” Victor pleads. “Don’t, Yuuri, please—don’t start crying, I hate when you cry, Yuuri—!”
Yuuri shakes his head. The tears keep coming. He wipes his eyes with the backs of his hands like a child.
And now Victor’s panicking again, in that same strange serious way he does whenever Yuuri cries. It’s funny how he drowns in it, like Yuuri’s upset upsets everything in the world, like he’s searching for some life-raft of kisses and kindnesses that will bear them both to shore.
“W-was it—” Victor’s practically trembling. “Did—did I do something—?”
Yuuri laughs. He can’t help it. It bubbles up between his sobs and chokes him for a minute. He’s mad, frequently, about Victor’s frantic dash to fix him whenever he’s unhappy—how Victor thinks in wild romantic gestures, how he never stops to ask him what he wants, much less give it to him, much less—
But those complaints are for a different time. They don’t exist here, in this room, in the gold and silver stripes of city lights through window panes. This is another world entirely—a beautiful, fragile, soap-bubble space, where the rules that govern the world where they skate and the world where they live don’t apply. Everything is soft here, and kind, and bright, and charming, and bursts under pressure like champagne.
Yuuri puts his hands over Victor’s.
“Just… tell me that you’re here with me,” he says. And it’s all that he wants, and nothing that he wants, but he doesn’t know how else to phrase it. Make me believe this is real. Don’t let this be a dream. Stay by my side and never leave.
And Victor—stupid Victor—doesn’t say any of that. Instead, he lifts Yuuri’s fingers to his lips and says, “Of course.”
He kisses the ring on Yuuri’s hand. And for a moment—for one measly moment—the light catches, and it shimmers like a star.
***
Barcelona.
He holds the word behind his lips like chocolate. It melts; coats the back of his throat, drips delicately into the furnace of his gut. He’s careful not to breathe too deeply, speak too loud. He’s afraid that if he opens his mouth too wide, this feeling might float from his lungs and dissipate, dissolve into the silver air like a prayer.
Beneath them the city sleeps. Twirling cathedrals and curving avenues and glimpses of glistening light, all hushed. History is heavy here. Foreign ghosts are walking with them, watching through the night.
There’s precedent for this, Yuuri thinks. We’re not the only ones stuck in a moment, here.
The city is in the room with them. It pushes close and begs a space in the bed. Yuuri finds he doesn’t even care. The dead don’t carry cameras. And even if the walls themselves bear witness to the memories he makes, well, at least the story they tell will be sweet.
Barcelona. Yuuri never thought a word alone could make him shiver; could make him feel so much more than happiness.