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fivetimechamp) wrote2017-03-05 04:45 pm
fivetimechamp) wrote2017-03-05 04:45 pm
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Let's get hotpot! 6 November, 2014 - Shanghai, China
Probably he should be more bothered by what Yakov said –
– but it's difficult to worry too much about a cranky old Russian coach when he's in Shanghai, and it's competition season, and Yuri has two of the best programs he's ever choreographed up his sleeve to wow the judges with. He has no interest in discussing with Yakov whether or not he plans to return to competitive skating, or if he ever wants to come back to St. Petersburg, or his own skills as a coach.
(All right. That last is a bit of a lie: Yakov is the best coach he knows, and there have been more times than he'd anticipated when he'd wished he could ask the old man's advice.
But he's not pretending. He never was, and he isn't now.)
And, anyway, his focus is on Yuri.
As it should be, as a coach. Over the last eight months, he's gotten attuned to the shifts of Yuri's moods, his nervous tics, the tells when he's feeling stressed or uncertain, and right now, Yuri is distracted. He's been lost in thought since their arrival interview, and quiet during their walk through the Shanghai streets, although not uncharacterisically so.
Sometimes Yuri speaks loudest when he uses no words at all. It's another thing Victor's learned about him, noted, kept in the back of his mind for afternoons like this. Yuri gets nervous near competition, and there's already mounting pressure to succeed after the failure of the last season. There's a nervous energy Victor can feel humming under the arm he's got slung around Yuri's shoulders, distraction in the short, one-word or belated answers to Victor's comments. He's not even sure Yuri notices when Victor's steered them into a hot pot place (almost universally agreed upon as the best one by the fans he'd asked for recommendations on social media), or when they're seated in a private booth, or when Victor orders.
It's all right, Victor decides, smiling gently across the table at him. Yuri's been able to overcome his nerves on the ice, and they both have absolute faith in the programs they've built together, practiced together, perfected together. Tomorrow, Yuri will seduce the whole of China, and everyone else watching: Victor has every certainty in his ability to win.
He could hardly be more confident if he were skating them himself. "Look, Yuri!"
(But he still needs to find a way to distract Yuri tonight.) "Shanghai crab! Drunken shrimp! Duck blood!"
Everything looks so colorful and delicious, he almost doesn't know where to start: hands up, an expression of pure bliss settling over his face.
"Doesn't it all look great?"
(I feel sick when I see you playing pretend-coach)
– but it's difficult to worry too much about a cranky old Russian coach when he's in Shanghai, and it's competition season, and Yuri has two of the best programs he's ever choreographed up his sleeve to wow the judges with. He has no interest in discussing with Yakov whether or not he plans to return to competitive skating, or if he ever wants to come back to St. Petersburg, or his own skills as a coach.
(All right. That last is a bit of a lie: Yakov is the best coach he knows, and there have been more times than he'd anticipated when he'd wished he could ask the old man's advice.
But he's not pretending. He never was, and he isn't now.)
And, anyway, his focus is on Yuri.
As it should be, as a coach. Over the last eight months, he's gotten attuned to the shifts of Yuri's moods, his nervous tics, the tells when he's feeling stressed or uncertain, and right now, Yuri is distracted. He's been lost in thought since their arrival interview, and quiet during their walk through the Shanghai streets, although not uncharacterisically so.
Sometimes Yuri speaks loudest when he uses no words at all. It's another thing Victor's learned about him, noted, kept in the back of his mind for afternoons like this. Yuri gets nervous near competition, and there's already mounting pressure to succeed after the failure of the last season. There's a nervous energy Victor can feel humming under the arm he's got slung around Yuri's shoulders, distraction in the short, one-word or belated answers to Victor's comments. He's not even sure Yuri notices when Victor's steered them into a hot pot place (almost universally agreed upon as the best one by the fans he'd asked for recommendations on social media), or when they're seated in a private booth, or when Victor orders.
It's all right, Victor decides, smiling gently across the table at him. Yuri's been able to overcome his nerves on the ice, and they both have absolute faith in the programs they've built together, practiced together, perfected together. Tomorrow, Yuri will seduce the whole of China, and everyone else watching: Victor has every certainty in his ability to win.
He could hardly be more confident if he were skating them himself. "Look, Yuri!"
(But he still needs to find a way to distract Yuri tonight.) "Shanghai crab! Drunken shrimp! Duck blood!"
Everything looks so colorful and delicious, he almost doesn't know where to start: hands up, an expression of pure bliss settling over his face.
"Doesn't it all look great?"
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As Victor's hand finds his stomach, and Victor's head, the section of his pillow left on that side.
While Victor in his head leans in until their noses and foreheads are almost touching, finger touching Yuri's lips, because his head somehow thinks it's fun in his exhaustion. Mixing up what's happening while Victor is drunk, maybe with how Victor was when he first arrived. Before Victor had dropped that act as though it were a facade he'd been wearing only the first few weeks, too. An act that faded without comment or recourse into everything they'd become.
He wants to blow a breath out his mouth, between his lips. Heavy and hot and loud. Wants the image to go away. To stop sitting in the middle of his head, replaying on slow motion. Frantically trying to connect to something else he doesn't know the shape or sound of. Only feels the need under it. A question and an answer, neither of which he knows. Neither of which he cares about by the half-dozenth. Crushing his eyelids together, even as Victor is sighing contentedly next to him. Mumbling a word that's very too lost to hear.
Making Yuri want to pull the pillow out from under him. So he doesn't have to share.
So he can press and dig it into his own face without sharing that, too.
Sleep comes after a million replays, of the things in his head, sliding, slipping, merging, melting. All of them Victor. All of them about the few hours and how much he really does need sleep, which sidetracks him into the slip and slide for tomorrow's skate, every fear about messing up if he doesn't sleep, can't even keep his eyes open tomorrow, and snakes back to the words Victor was saying earlier. Which circles and circles and circles, until whenever the floor drops away again.
But after a million replays kindness is not what he finds in the dark.
He slips, and slips, and slips, but can never truly slip away from Victor's hand. That keeps pulling him back. Holding him there. Until Victor is curled around him, until Victor's words are a blur of Russian against his skin, and somehow it doesn't stop where it starts. On the nape of his neck, soft hairs and sensitive skin, that make him shiver and shift in his sleep.
They slide outward. Along the side of his neck. The line of his shoulder. The round of it. Victor's lips making the only part of him that exists that S curve from the lower bend of his neck to off his shoulder. Stealing every thought, every breath, one fire-laden foreign word at a time. Too many to translate, too hard to think, to fight the war of keeping his own mouth closed, eyes tight, each one making it harder and harder to breathe, making his lungs, now made of fire and not air, compress heavier and heavier and heavier.
Until he wakes with a strangled gasp.
A gasp that trying to use his lungs, makes him acutely aware of the real weight on his chest.
Which takes a second of startled confusion to realize is ... Victor's head. That Victor, still heavily asleep if his deep breaths and solid weight have anything to say about it, has somehow made it to the corner of his chest and shoulder. Almost, but not quite, over his heart. Weighing into his bones, making his breaths softer, shallower in response. Because Victor can't leave him alone, in his head or his bed.
The next slide down isn't long. He's exhausted and everything under his skin is beginning to itch with it. Which makes it worse when his eyes snap open some indeterminable time later. For a reason ... he can't place. He can't remember if he was dreaming this time, and it's when he's trying to figure out if it was a noise or Victor -- that he realizes Victor is actually a bit further away. Maybe almost a good half a foot. Not pressed along any side of him. His hand still on the blanket over Yuri. But only that.
It's surprising enough Yuri tests shifting slightly, but nothing happens. Enough for him to start wondering if he lifted the blanket carefully enough, and Victor's hand with it. If. If he could. Finally. Just go to bed, in his own bed. Escape. Curl up. Find it in the dark, even without his glasses ... which seems to have gone somewhere else. He can't even remember taking them off.
But he skates without them just fine. He can navigate a small hotel room to his own bed and fall on it and die until he has to skate tomorrow without them, too. Which means he has to try it before his window passes, which suddenly feels like it's seconds before Victor might shift or jump to life. It's quiet, silent, still. Holding his breath. The movement of starting to lift the blanket, and Victor's hand off of him, and inch for the side of the bed in tandem.
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And Yuri, of course. It's a strange and relieving night when he doesn't dream about Yuri, about the programs they're working on, about walking together, talking together. Yuri on the ice. Yuri on the ballroom floor. Yuri pressed all along his skin, saying things he never would, Yuri's smile, and hands, and mouth.
Dreams he's not proud of, but wouldn't chase away any more than he can't.
But whatever he was dreaming goes directly out of his head the second his eyes blink open, sleepy and only half-seeing, but it's just enough: enough to feel a shift in the bed next to him, Yuri slipping away, under a blanket lifting up, and no. That's not all right.
It isn't even a thought process, only a reflex: reaching for Yuri's side, and finding the top of his arm, with fingers that are a little too tired to be strong or anything other than just there. "Stay."
All of it happening in a blur of still-asleep, and he never really breaks the surface, but it's just the most natural thing in the world to shift and loop his arm around Yuri and push his face into Yuri's shoulder and simply slide back into whatever he wasn't dreaming from there.
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Before he sags into the arm back around him, the bed beneath his. The blurry darkness around him every freedom he can't have (...and doesn't he know, already, hasn't he learned it well enough, about not wanting things he can't have? Isn't that the entire theme of his life?) Victor pressed against him, breath warming Yuri's skin through Yuri's shirt. Stirring it into too much focus. Snapping and hissing wires, still not dead, still just as much under his command as where Yuri gets to go.
Helpless. Hopeless. Defeated. Aching. Certain for a second this is what hell is,
but at the same time the whole explosion makes the edges of his eyes burn and tear,
while his head blurs too many things from the night, into tomorrow behind and coming soon.
But he doesn't move. Doesn't try to. His head is too heavy, and everything that is only feels exhaustion in every alive, alert, pulsing thrumb, while Victor's breaths are sleep-heavy, and his arm is a belt. Because he can't run away from Victor, any more than he can run away from tomorrow morning (... and maybe the worst part is that, even agonised, he's not entirely angry, entirely disappointed, entirely un-wanting of either).
Sleeps is hard, exhaustion as aggressive and demanding and powerless to be fought as everything else tonight, and when it comes it's the boulder again. Smothering, unforgiving, demanding weight. Shoving, slamming, pushing him into a darkness, with greedy and careless hands, where warmth blooms forever at his shoulder, forever at his chest, forever in every part of his body he knows and has never cared to even pay attention to. But it brings only darkness.
Sends him tumbling further and further out, further and further under, into it without any further assault.
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It's the first thing he notices, when his eyes crack open, feeling full of glue and sand. It's brighter than it should be, and brighter than he's used to, and it's when he's blinking at the window, where nobody closed the drapes last night and the early morning light of Shanghai is flooding in that he notices something strange.
That the other bed is empty.
He blinks at it, lizard-slow, while his brain tries to gain some sort of footing, but it keeps slipping and sliding, wanting to let go again and drift back into sleep, but if there's one thing that could wake him the hell up without so much as an apology or gentle nudge, it's that his skater is missing on the morning of the Cup of China, and he's pushing himself up, rubbing the heel of a hand into one eye, before it even really registers.
Yuri isn't a naturally early riser. He gets up to run, because he has to and because Victor makes him, but Victor has been up before him almost every day of the last eight months, and it's not like Yuri to wander off without telling him.
Probably. He actually has no idea what Yuri's like at competitions away from home, yet: this is their very first one. Maybe he is up. Maybe he went for a run, or a dip in the pool, or for an early breakfast.
Making Victor reach to turn the bedside clock to see the time (early, still, plenty of time) and consider his options –– stay here? go down to breakfast and try to find Yuri there? –– only to pause with his fingers an inch from the black plastic as something next to him shifts.
A soft rustle against the sheets. Weight dipping the mattress.
That isn't his.
None of which prepares him for the surprise of looking over, and seeing a dark head there against the pillow, or the way everything stops in a long hiccup of confusion, while his heart slams against his ribs and stumbles all over itself trying to –– what. Remember?
He can't. Can't even try. Each attempt at explaining this getting clotheslined and choked, sucker-punched at the sight of Yuri. There. In his bed. Black hair muddled against crisp white pillow. Shoulder gently lifting and falling with his breath. Peace and quiet at jarring, jagged odds with the cliff of bewilderment Victor is currently windmilling off, like a shoe planted itself in his gut and pushed.
It was never going to happen. He knows. Knew. Everything Yuri didn't want, that he stopped pushing for, asking for, expecting. Yuri and his string of no no no no no panicked on the beach, Yuri who ran from him every time he reached out, Yuri who looked like his head was going to melt right off his shoulders with the heat of his blush every time Victor got too close, suggested too much.
So he'd put it away. In a back pocket. Chalked it up to wanting different things. (Yuri wanted to win the Grand Prix Final, and Victor wanted Yuri.) Focused on coaching, on growing trust, on learning everything he could, and being as satisfied with that as he knew how to be.
But. Now.
Running a hand through morning-mussed hair, and wondering, trying to work through it, while his mind keeps trying to throw him straight back into bewilderment.
(And –– with a dawning sense of delight that's too stupid to be careful, too sleepy to be smart, too thrilled to be worried ––
How can he make it happen again?)
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Until something shifts, too steadily, too solidly.
Makes his awareness flicker, and then his eye lashes.
A confused hum, soaked deep in his throat, when he's pushing up one hand. Because there -- was there something he was doing? Feeling like someone is sitting on him, every muscle compressed down. Because someone did. Had. Someone who .. Yuri squints, every thing stinging, everything too bright suddenly as the stinging clarifies as light, and there isn't actually a weight on him rising. Because.
Because Victor is front of him? Awake. It's morning?
Victor, who is too bright with all the light around him.
"Oh," Slipping out his lips, barely audible, all sleep, while rubbing his eyes.
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A popping bubble of surprise in his head, if not actually on his lips, as Yuri shifts again. Lashes a dark and fluttering smudge against pale skin, his hair gone every which way, face slack and soft and when he moves, Victor almost jumps.
(He does notice, somewhere in the back of his brain, that as the sheet slips down, all it exposes is the shirt Yuri was wearing last night. He might not be dressed, but Yuri is, and that's ... relieving? Disappointing?
Something he only acknowledges and pushes away again in less than a breath.)
Watching him pull himself toward sitting, with a sleepy mumble, rubbing his eyes, and it! Is!
So damn cute!
He thinks his heart will burst and overflow, and the temptation to reach out and gather the warm and mussed and yawing lump of Yuri, sheets and rumples clothes and messy hair and all, directly into his chest and never let go is an increasingly desperate one. All thoughts of how this even happened have flown directly out the window: he is charmed.
"Good morning, Yuri!"
And delighted! He has absolutely not the faintest idea of what happened to bring this about, but Yuri, sleep-soaked and puddled in sheets and early morning light and miles away from anything like he's ever seen before, is perfect.
It is, perhaps, the single best morning of his entire adult life: Christmas and Easter rolled into one, the way he felt the very first time he stayed on wobbly colt legs for an entire circuit of his town's rink when he was small.
Something fond and warm in his chest expanding so widely it feels like something has to crack and spill sunshine all across the bed. "I'm glad you got some sleep."
He has no idea what they were doing last night –– there's a dim recollection of a restaurant –– but it doesn't really matter, does it? Yuri is here, within reach, in this bed, and looking so messily adorable that it's absolutely all Victor can do not to reach out and hug him like the teddy bear he looks like.
At the moment, self-restraint seems like the most useless of concepts.
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He's not suddenly covered with Victor, and Victor is ... talking about being glad he slept?
Making Yuri's eyes close, again, confused, and then blink open, looking at him again. Not even positive he slept. Though he woke up, so he must have. He's not sure if his definition of some and Victor's do anything like comparable. But Victor is far too awake for what Yuri was expecting. He looks happy. Which makes. That makes no sense. Even the fact Victor is easily upright to sound so excitable makes no sense. Especially when everything is so bright and so solid suddenly.
Which is the main thought, when Yuri looks around him, trying to locate his glasses.
Certain they were here, with him, on him, at some point last night.
Did he take them off? Did they fall off? Where.
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Mussed hair, bleary eyes, flushed cheeks, and the way he's patting around himself, looking for something –– oh, his glasses.
Victor's not sure where they are, only knows he's not sitting on them.
But that reminds him: "Yuri."
All his amusement tied up in that one word, warm and fond and just on the edge of a laugh. "What are you doing over here?"
In his bed, he means. Not that it matters in a hotel, and not that he minds –– quite the opposite –– but it was a surprise, despite being a nice one, and last night is foggy. Well ... last night is ...
Pretty much a blank slate.
But his memory is poor at the best of times, so it's possible he just forgot whatever chain of events led to this delightful result, so he'd like to be reminded.
What they were, and if they can, at some point in the future, be replicated. "You slept in your clothes?"
How strange.
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Mouth still somewhere in the heaviness, first is, "何?"
Fingers nearly on his glasses, but head turning back to look at Victor while reaching.
Except Yuri's mouth stops where it starts, as he's sitting back up, because his cursory glance of Victor becomes just as instantly not as cursory, and just as suddenly not on Victor. Because Yuri is positive that Victor had pants when Victor drag him on to this bed. But. Victor does not have pants. Which is not as bad as it could be. But when did that even. How.
There might be a little too much to pushing his glasses back on, under his hair, hitting the bridge of his nose. He doesn't want to think the thought that collides next in his head. About even having had a single stitch less clothing. A thought that swims in his head, knocking into and dragging up something to clear. Victor's mouth brushing down from his neck, across his shoulder. Speaking ... and more? Was there ... ?
Yuri frowns, focusing back at Victor and the light, and his far too clear face. "How are you not even hungover?"
Yuri felt hungover from the whole night, himself. Like somehow it'd been poured into him vicariously. Had he actually slept at all? Even more, how was it that, now in perfect focus, Victor didn't look more than like his hair was mussed up? Like he'd just put his hands in it and fluffed it. Not even like he'd slept on it. The rest of him carelessly all but completely bare, bright smile and clear eyes.
Yuri just wanted to fall back to his pillow, with a sound of disgust, and pull the blanket over him.
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That would explain the gap in his memory, at least, but he feels fine now. A little tired, perhaps, but it's difficult to focus on anything that could be wrong when there is so much right (if bewildering) happening right in front of him.
Yuri. Here is his bed. (In all his clothes, but still.) Looking more annoyed than anything else, and definitely not the blushing, stammering, uncertain innocent who Victor had to consciously stop flirting with, who would probably have sunk into the floor in embarrassment if this was even suggested.
And even since then –– but it's been nothing like this, has it? He'd stepped back, re-focused himself. Coach, not lover. Even if, lately, the lines have felt more and more blurred.
Was that it? Did he say something, do something, ask something last night? The somethings he's been trying to pretend aren't there, eating away at his ribs and lungs and stomach ...
But Yuri wouldn't be looking at him like this if he had, would he? He wouldn't be just this side of annoyed, sounding like all he wants to do is roll his eyes or throw his pillow at Victor.
So maybe it was just a late night. Maybe it really is as innocent as it all appears to be.
He has no way of knowing, and it doesn't seem like Yuri is interested in sharing, so he just smiles, and shrugs. "Well, we have plenty of time for breakfast before we have to get to the rink for the morning practice. "
Thank goodness. He's starving.
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Which just tastes sour to hear, and makes his teeth meet, and reminds him, sideways, that his mouth is actually kind of sour, and he wants to brush his teeth at some not too distant point. Another thing he hadn't gotten to do last night. Which turned out to be absolutely everything he could have ever wanted or expected to do.
That all gets thrown under the bus again when Victor mentions practice.
His heart contracting with recognition. Morning. Day. The China Cup. The Prix Qualifier. Catching him maybe liked he'd fallen off the bed, except he's sitting still. (He's had far experience with that feeling lately, hasn't he?) Practice, and then, Eros. (Tomorrow Yuri on Ice, no matter how well or terribly today goes.) With everyone else. With everyone watching. With. But. Away from here. This room, and this bed. Victor said something about breakfast, and before, but all Yuri suddenly wants is to be there. To be on the ice. To feel the bite on his cheeks, the weight on his feet, the air whistling.
(To be allowed to run. Just from here to the rink. Now. Instead of eating.
Or sleep. Even though it's probably fully impossible by this point already.
Sunlight thick in the room. Catching on Victor's hair, and his shoulders.
Adding the faintest shadows to his face while he's smiling.
... why does he have to notice now?)
"良い." Yuri drove his fingers up into his hair, itching his fingertips and clipped nails against his scalp, trying to push back something, but not sure what it was or which. He just needed a moment. He needed to think straight. He-- "I should shower. Unless you--" He left it as an opening, eyes shifting over to Victor, kicking himself as he did. Making it an option. Wanting to know. If Victor wanted or needed anything first. Of him, of the bathroom. If he needed to use it, or wanted to go first.
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(and the next month and a half)
–– are about what Yuri needs, and that includes the hotel bathroom and shower, the gym, the breakfast buffet downstairs or food sent up, or whatever else he needs.
"Do you want me to order any food up while you're in there, or do you want to go down to breakfast once you're finished?"
It's a bit of a coin flip. Yuri might want the chance to socialize with the other skaters (that friend of his, the Thai skater, he's here, right?), but he also might prefer to keep to himself. The last time Yuri competed at this level, Victor barely knew him, and hardly paid attention to anything but his skating: two years ago at this time, all he knew of Katsuki Yuri was that he was a skillful and artistic but inconsistent skater who mostly kept to himself. At no point was Victor wrestling for the gold with him, so it hadn't seemed pertinent.
Now, he wishes he could go back and learn everything he'd missed, watch everything he hadn't seen ... but there's no use in wishing for a second chance, especially when it wouldn't make a difference. Without knowing what was to come, his focus was always going to be on his own career.
It feels a little strange to wonder what someone else might need, the day of a competition, but a good coach would know, and he will accept being nothing but excellent, even in this arena.
It's too important for Yuri.
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But one foot goes down and the next, and he's standing. Starting to walk to the bathroom as Victor's bouncing off another question, and it's too fast, the way he looks over his shoulder, hearing the question, even as some part of him is certain Victor has changed his mind about letting him up, which makes him react too fast.
"Downstairs," exploding out of his mouth with too much force,
when even comparing the idea of out of this room and being stuck in it longer.
Which just combines to make him vanish behind that bathroom door. The door hitting the jam, and Yuri's back the door, and he's clenching his eyes at his absolute stupidity. He lets his head fall back against it, eyes on the ceiling, unseeing, before he's groping for where he vaguely remembers that light switch was. Not wanting more darkness. Not liking the way it makes something in him sieze even more. Tightening the skin on the base of his neck, until light takes it all
Making him push off the door, and look at himself in the mirror.
He's a mess. He needs to start getting ready. Brush his teeth. Take his shower. He looks like a mess. Eyes dark, and hair everywhere, and -- are those circles under his eyes? No? Yes? Yuri squinted at himself, and leaned closer to the mirror, pushing his glasses up into his hair. Then, sighed. Outside the small room, Victor was doing whatever Victor was doing, looking like he'd already spent however long it took to look like that, except like he just woke up that way. And Yuri looked like a train had run over him in his sleep. Lack of sleep. Whichever.
(A train with a far too perfect face. Who.
Yuri cringed, forehead and nose wrinkling, and turned away from the mess of his reflection to the shower. He needed to focus. He needed to focus. Focus. Direction. A list. Shower. Teeth. Hair styled back. Breakfast. China. (China, China.) The name catching in his teeth. He only had a few hours. Only a few hours and then it would be up to him. To show everyone he belonged here. He was a different person than the one that crashed into the ice two years ago.