Complicity is surprising, and the two together gives him a bubble of strangled relief, like he might have found a foothold. It lasts all of a second, before Victor's arm is tightening against his chest and his side and Victor whispers that word that Yuri has heard a million times this years, in a million voices.

But he doesn't think this is one of them.

He doesn't even have time to fully question if Victor means the idea or the short program, or the mingled everything that raised to the references at this point, but it doesn't matter. Because Victor's next words burned themselves through his skin on contact. Yuri can feel the way his body goes rigid, almost curving, and his ears are heating. Even when that's impossible. Even when that's familiar.

Backward, forwards, Victor has used that word, but not like that.

Present and pressure, a demand and an order and a request and shouted directions. Seduce me and you'll steal every heart. Seduce me with all you have. Seduce me, as Victor made himself the impossible, never reachable, standard to which Yuri had to throw that program, to be good enough to even be a pale shadow of. But not that. Not past tense. Not even when pulled to his chest, just like this, and whispered in his ear, before the cameras last time. Not--

You seduced me.

A lie so scalding and so bald Yuri swears his entire body throbs in confusion and denial. (And undescribable, impossible yearning?) At the laugh. At the brush of his lips. At the words. All of it pulling at him, the way Victor meant for him to perform that routine. His blood at a boil, even when his heart aches in the cage of his ribs. Impossible and dizzying, when Victor is still talking, and Yuri has no clue what it even is, or was, because he can't make his mind leave the scorch of the earlier second.

The thing that is so categorically impossible that it feels like his ears are going to pop under the insanity of having heard it. Because. Because the impossibility of actually seducing Victor

(Victor who is never not Victor Nikiforov, even when he's more now, too.

Never not a god on the ice, not a worldwide icon, never not impossibly hot, in a way
he's been since before Yuri even had words, or press commentary, or social media
to use the words to describe it, that was a million times captured on camera,

Who chose his companions rare and seldom and never long.
Somewhere above the reach of even those like him.
Forever apart. Twinkling in the sky. Untouchable.)

It's always been greater than if Victor asked him to reach up into the stars and pull down the moon. It would be more likely. As art, maybe. A forever reaching. To make Eros even the slenderest sliver of what Victor would have made of it himself, always remembering what he told Yurio. That it was up to them to find a way to win with these pieces, because he would have. Obvious simplicity of who he was.

Like the obvious simplicity that Yuri would never actually seduce Victor.

Victor, whose last words seem so unattached to the implosion of Yuri's mind, the frantic fall of his heart, the heat everywhere in his skin that Victor will not stop touching. About everyone else loving him. Making the point for him. That Victor meant it the same way he always has. Seduce him, and the world will fall. (Like Yuri is falling. Like no one is strong enough not to fall against this, against Victor Nikiforov.)

"Maybe," Is a weak and choked word. Distorted and burned. Coughed up from a ruin he doesn't know how so few words has made of him. Pressed to Victor's chest, Victor's hand to his heart, and everything aside from the fact Victor is drunk, is normal. So long as he doesn't die right here, and make it easier for the world not to even have to see him.