'...a soldier?' It's strange, how Yuri's voice sounds far too harsh and loud in his own ears, even though he feels like he's barely repeating the word above an exhale of breath. Maybe it's because something deep within him has suddenly gone quiet, dead silent and entirely still, and so any sound that fills the space left behind would ring through him like the echoes of a shout. 'Me?'
Five years ago. Five years. Ten years old, and leaving behind everything familiar, the things he loved and the things he hated, for an uncertain promise, the chance of a lifetime. A narrow dormitory bed and a gruelling schedule, hour upon regimented hour of endless critique and sparse praise. Flickering images from those days still slip into his mind once in a while, some half-recalled instruction or correction now drilled into his core. He remembers the pressure of the training sessions, the intensity of everyone around him, the concentrated drive and the passion, all keeping his own insecurities and fears at bay...and the anger, of course, bringing everything into focus as it always did.
(But he hadn't always been this angry, had he?)
To be invited to Yakov Feltsman's summer training camp at that age had marked him even among the junior skaters as someone to watch with envy and distrust -- or so he had thought at the time. He can't remember the young teenager that Otabek Altin must have been then, in that place. He can only remember who he was, and what it had been like: unforgettable it itself, because he had never been able to forget it.
'I had just moved my home rink from Moscow to St. Petersburg.' Memory rushes to fill the vacuum left by the silence inside, and somehow it comes out of his mouth as words that no living soul, not even his grandfather, has ever heard him say aloud. 'I was desperate. I decided that I wasn't going to complain until I was good enough.'
He hadn't complained. He'd taken everything they'd thrown at him. He'd done what he had to do. And of all of the people in that one novice class, he and Altin are the ones standing here today, with the sun-streaked city of Barcelona spread out before them.
Almost as if they've closed a circle, somehow. As if this moment had been suspended in time, waiting for them to catch up to it.
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Five years ago. Five years. Ten years old, and leaving behind everything familiar, the things he loved and the things he hated, for an uncertain promise, the chance of a lifetime. A narrow dormitory bed and a gruelling schedule, hour upon regimented hour of endless critique and sparse praise. Flickering images from those days still slip into his mind once in a while, some half-recalled instruction or correction now drilled into his core. He remembers the pressure of the training sessions, the intensity of everyone around him, the concentrated drive and the passion, all keeping his own insecurities and fears at bay...and the anger, of course, bringing everything into focus as it always did.
(But he hadn't always been this angry, had he?)
To be invited to Yakov Feltsman's summer training camp at that age had marked him even among the junior skaters as someone to watch with envy and distrust -- or so he had thought at the time. He can't remember the young teenager that Otabek Altin must have been then, in that place. He can only remember who he was, and what it had been like: unforgettable it itself, because he had never been able to forget it.
'I had just moved my home rink from Moscow to St. Petersburg.' Memory rushes to fill the vacuum left by the silence inside, and somehow it comes out of his mouth as words that no living soul, not even his grandfather, has ever heard him say aloud. 'I was desperate. I decided that I wasn't going to complain until I was good enough.'
He hadn't complained. He'd taken everything they'd thrown at him. He'd done what he had to do. And of all of the people in that one novice class, he and Altin are the ones standing here today, with the sun-streaked city of Barcelona spread out before them.
Almost as if they've closed a circle, somehow. As if this moment had been suspended in time, waiting for them to catch up to it.