Yuri does, at least, retreat briefly to the bench where he'd dumped his backpack. He pauses long enough to reply to Mila -- told yakov about pipe and your gross saggy bras, now bleaching my fucking brain kthx -- and shuts off his music before putting his headphones away. A moment's rummaging in his bag, and he comes up with a pencil and a battered copy of Eugene Onegin.
Eugene Onegin. The frivolous St. Petersburg dandy who attempts to seduce a young lady out of boredom, kills his own best friend in a pointless duel, and ends up loveless and alone after the sadder but wiser young lady rejects his heartbroken, remorseful appeal to her to take him back. A bunch of romantic bullshit; no wonder that mopey bastard Tchaikovsky made an opera out of it. If he didn't have to read it, you wouldn't catch Yuri cracking the spine.
(It's not the first, second, or even the third time that Yuri has been through this old warhorse. But it's a different experience in a classroom with more than a dozen other students all sweating over its stanzas than with a personal tutor who won't let you get away with mumbling your way through it. So he can't entirely half-ass this reading.)
He could sit on the bench and review his assigned pages without making so much as a peep, as Yakov doubtless would want. Or he could take the book back over to the wall, where he could stretch and keep an eye on the ice.
He reaches to the wall just in time to see Viktor's spread eagle, and hear Yakov's grousing in return.
'Different, different -- you think that Sochi was more of the same?' Yakov throws his hands in the air. 'Tch, just another damned Olympics; they happen every year, so tiresome, just down the road, hardly worth lacing up my skates.' His hands go back on his hips, but when he continues something has softened slightly in his tone, the sound of ice settling on a frozen river. 'If it must be different for Worlds, after Sochi, then let it be the tease for next season. Not the end of the ballet, but the last scene before the interval -- something for the audience to talk about over champagne before they return to their seats.'
Yuri thinks of the ballet studio covered in water, and snorts quietly into his jacket. Leaning on the wall, he shifts his weight, and extends his back leg out straight behind him.
no subject
Eugene Onegin. The frivolous St. Petersburg dandy who attempts to seduce a young lady out of boredom, kills his own best friend in a pointless duel, and ends up loveless and alone after the sadder but wiser young lady rejects his heartbroken, remorseful appeal to her to take him back. A bunch of romantic bullshit; no wonder that mopey bastard Tchaikovsky made an opera out of it. If he didn't have to read it, you wouldn't catch Yuri cracking the spine.
(It's not the first, second, or even the third time that Yuri has been through this old warhorse. But it's a different experience in a classroom with more than a dozen other students all sweating over its stanzas than with a personal tutor who won't let you get away with mumbling your way through it. So he can't entirely half-ass this reading.)
He could sit on the bench and review his assigned pages without making so much as a peep, as Yakov doubtless would want. Or he could take the book back over to the wall, where he could stretch and keep an eye on the ice.
He reaches to the wall just in time to see Viktor's spread eagle, and hear Yakov's grousing in return.
'Different, different -- you think that Sochi was more of the same?' Yakov throws his hands in the air. 'Tch, just another damned Olympics; they happen every year, so tiresome, just down the road, hardly worth lacing up my skates.' His hands go back on his hips, but when he continues something has softened slightly in his tone, the sound of ice settling on a frozen river. 'If it must be different for Worlds, after Sochi, then let it be the tease for next season. Not the end of the ballet, but the last scene before the interval -- something for the audience to talk about over champagne before they return to their seats.'
Yuri thinks of the ballet studio covered in water, and snorts quietly into his jacket. Leaning on the wall, he shifts his weight, and extends his back leg out straight behind him.