Pushing back onto the ice, Victor laughs. Yuri is the best sort of distraction, the kind he knows and is familiar with. Arrogant skaters, with their too-fragile hearts sewn onto their sleeves. New ones, year after year, gunning for records that were just shattered, for scores that had been unimaginable only months before.
The whole game has changed, and it's changed during his time, and he loves it, the kind of challenge he knows and can meet, and surpass. All his training in elegance and artistry from a decade ago now braided up with the physical spectacle everyone expects: it hasn't been possible to win without at least one quad in years. A sea change that had wiped out some of the greatest skaters in the world, because they couldn't adapt while he thrived.
He understands this world. Even the nagging worry that keeps itching at the back of his neck like sharp and biting fleas is one he understands. He's comfortable with the way it keeps him up at night. Is used to obsessively and coldly dissecting his own performances and abandoning them as soon as they become predictable. He hates being bored, and refuses to be boring.
Which is perhaps why he can't give the other thing up, the one he pretends doesn't exist, that has him up and running at five in the morning instead of sleeping. He hates it, feeling off-balance, when he has never known anything but perfect movement since childhood. It leaves him feeling stupid and clumsy, when he's used to brilliance and grace, and it unsettles him, but he can't figure it out, and that fascinates him.
But he can still take refuge here on the ice, in the well-known choreography of Stay Close to Me, where even after a year a and a half there's still room for perfection.
It's even a relief to watch Yuri and Yakov bicker, like a reminder that the world is still spinning in the same direction it always has, as familiar as his fingers working at the laces of his skates when he's finished, and sitting on a bench just outside the rink wall.
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The whole game has changed, and it's changed during his time, and he loves it, the kind of challenge he knows and can meet, and surpass. All his training in elegance and artistry from a decade ago now braided up with the physical spectacle everyone expects: it hasn't been possible to win without at least one quad in years. A sea change that had wiped out some of the greatest skaters in the world, because they couldn't adapt while he thrived.
He understands this world. Even the nagging worry that keeps itching at the back of his neck like sharp and biting fleas is one he understands. He's comfortable with the way it keeps him up at night. Is used to obsessively and coldly dissecting his own performances and abandoning them as soon as they become predictable. He hates being bored, and refuses to be boring.
Which is perhaps why he can't give the other thing up, the one he pretends doesn't exist, that has him up and running at five in the morning instead of sleeping. He hates it, feeling off-balance, when he has never known anything but perfect movement since childhood. It leaves him feeling stupid and clumsy, when he's used to brilliance and grace, and it unsettles him, but he can't figure it out, and that fascinates him.
But he can still take refuge here on the ice, in the well-known choreography of Stay Close to Me, where even after a year a and a half there's still room for perfection.
It's even a relief to watch Yuri and Yakov bicker, like a reminder that the world is still spinning in the same direction it always has, as familiar as his fingers working at the laces of his skates when he's finished, and sitting on a bench just outside the rink wall.