9 - 10 December, 2014 - Barcelona

[fivetimechamp]

There's a swift, fleeting moment, between his toes breaking the water's surface and the waves he'd created closing over his head, where he imagines himself on vacation. On a break from the hectic stresses and mundanity of everyday life, floating high above a sea of lights. Free to be himself, to relax. To lose himself in those self-indulgent fantasies only possible when daily training and errands, practice and diet, aren't demanding every second of his undivided attention.

He floats on his back, spread-eagled in the water, letting it buoy him, letting his thoughts trickle along whatever path they most wish to take –– which, these days, means they wander along a well-worn path from sleepless nights and newly-opened gates. Life and love –– two words he's neglected for over twenty years, that suddenly knock at the door of every thought, nudging him further down the path before he even recognizes he's headed that direction. 

Whispering, for the first time, in glimpses and sidelong glances, of a tomorrow past today.



"Ah-choo!"

A sneeze brings him out of tantalizing reverie, and he sinks further into the water to sniffle, the moment broken. It turns out even Barcelona's cold in December –– not the bone-deep freeze of St. Petersburg or Moscow, a thin wind biting through coats and scarves and jumpers with ease, but still probably a little cool to be lazing in a rooftop pool, here at the official hotel for the Grand Prix Final. Still, it's peaceful up here, and the water is heated even if the air isn't, and he has no place special to be. Yuri is still sleeping off his jetlag –– that's why they got here early to begin with. They have all of tomorrow to practice and acclimate before the Final begins. 

Steps, and the gentle tinkling of crystal against glass, distract him before the words even come, but then, Chris is a prodigy of distraction. He's made it into an art form.

"I thought, other than me, only a Russian would be stupid enough to get in the pool this time of year." That robe is scandalously short, and Victor allows himself an amused moment of picturing Chris, and the accompanying distress, at the baths at Yu-topia. "I guess I was right."

And dark glasses, even at night. Victor can't hide his amusement. "Chris!"

"Hi, Coach Victor." From anyone else, that tends to sound like an insult, but from Chris it only feels like a fond nickname. They've known each other too long and too well to stand on ceremony, so Chris' complaint that Victor is in the way of his skinny dipping rolls right off Victor's back like water droplets. 

"Don't let me stop you. I'll even take photos for you."

It wouldn't be the first time.

And just like that, the illusion of a vacation is over, drowned and smothered by the dozens of photos Victor finds himself taking of Chris mugging for the camera like he was born to do it. Sometimes it's difficult to remember that this sex bomb was once an angelic-looking little boy with golden curls, the sort Victor could picture most clearly skipping through a Swiss meadow full of flowers, but Chris has become a force to reckon with in his own right. 

He can't imagine a skating season without Chris. They've shared the podium so many times it's almost begun to feel like tradition. 

But then, it's already been eight months since he came to Hasetsu, too. How much time does it really take to change the things that can't be imagined?

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[theglassheart]

The last thing Yuri is expecting -- pillow clutched up to his face, letting those words fall out in the silence, small enough to be lost, to just evaporate in the silence and the darkness pressing into his closed eyes and filling the small room, where this admission of weakness already too early could be eaten by all of these things, an old, open sore but still unseen by anyone else -- is for the door to suddenly go flying fast open, light flooding in everywhere, the silence filling with Victor's voice.

To look up and see the disorienting sight of Victor giving little jumps back and forth, with his small black swim shorts, a white towel draped over his head and shoulders, complaining -- and asking for a bath? -- while Chris is standing in the doorway to one side of him and just a little behind, running his hand up through his hair, looking amused about all of this, asking, "Yuri, can you make coffee, too?"

[fivetimechamp]

Yuri doesn't move right away –– he's not even sitting up! "You were still asleep?"

That's absurd. They're in Barcelona! The Grand Prix Final is only days away! Now is the only free time they'll have for socializing and relaxing and seeing the city: today, perhaps tomorrow. And Yuri is still asleep??!?

It can't stand. Not when Victor is freezing and finding a fresh wave of energy or when Yuri looks so cute lying there all rumpled and warm. Warm like Victor wants to be. He wants it against his cold skin.

And if it gets Yuri up, so much the better, right?







...Which is about all the reasoning that goes through his head before he tosses the sodden towel aside and leaps for Yuri with a happy cry, barely even noticing Chris grabbing a pillow and doing the same.

[theglassheart]

Yuri is already not prepared for how to answer the well of chagrin that rises at Victor's first question -- he hadn't been asleep right when the door opened, but he hadn't been awake long before that, a question without answer when Yuri's eyes had first gone to Chris and someone else hearing whatever that answer might be. Which makes him utterly and absolutely prepared for the way Victor suddenly decides to throw his towel to the window or the ceiling and come leaping for him.

The screech of surprise he lets out at the coming onslaught of first Victor, then Chris in the air right behind him, is already undignified, which makes the one when Victor suddenly is landing on him, and then Chris right after, even more so. As he's stuttering in shock while the water from the pool soaks into his sleep sweats instantly, slapping hard against whatever last dregs of sleep and fuzz were left in his brain. "You-you're freezing!"

There's already trying to curl up and pull away, shoving at the both of them. "Quit clinging to me!" And if shock wasn't enough, the blood rising in his face. Shocked cold stealing his sleep warmth with a stab through cloth and skin, there's also, needing to be clear about: "The both of you!"

Because it's not even Victor, and Yuri's brain isn't even to processing Chris's hands except with a flashing red light and a need to attempt to skitter backward even faster.

[fivetimechamp]

He's awake, isn't he? And warm? And devastatingly adorable when pink in the face and scrambling like he might be able to out-run his own embarrassment?

Victor is still shivering, but it's as much a conceit now as actual chills, cool arms snaking around Yuri's middle and damp hair burying itself into the hollow just beneath Yuri's chin, while Chris and his long legs and long arms and deep laugh surround them both. What's not to love?



(Well, fine. If he had his way, he could probably do without Chris being here.) "But you're warm!"

Protested with melting charm, as if he can't imagine why Yuri would be questioning this, rejecting this. "The water was cold!"


No onsen here. The best he can hope for is that bath, and the one here in the hotel is far too small to have Yuri in it, too, which negates much of a bath's immediate charm.

And Chris, to whom Yuri is being rude, and who likes rude, reaches out one hand to grab a pillow and smush it down on Victor's face in a way Victor can't help but feel is a little disrespectful. "You're going to make me go get my own coffee, Yuri? Victor, I thought you taught him better manners."



Victor's response, whatever it is, seems exclusively meant for the pillow covering his face, but the hand that smacks at Chris is probably eloquent enough to make up for it.

[theglassheart]

There's a sputtering shake as there's wet hair accosting his neck and his jaw, shoving more ice in already jangled nerves, and Victor's mouth is pressing words into his shirt, which is his skin, that is again just getting soaked with even more of that water from his face, hair, everything, making Yuri sputter and his heart jump up and down too rapidly for breath. While Chris is dogpiling him, them, in a fashion Yuri is not certain he ever needed to understand the term for more than Maccachin and Victor, or things on tv, in books, from an akimbo of long bare limbs in bronze, to the hand smushing a pillow on Victor's head suddenly.

The last of which Yuri can't even entirely compute beyond a vague -- not quite loud enough to have any hook, against the siren wailing on constant deafening repeat in his skull, and his skin -- about how that should not be happening to the top of Victor's head. By anyone. Ever. Because, Victor. Except Chris is, also, barely a foot away. And. That screaming alarm is very much still screaming at that, and the still constant, drilling need for the back of the bed to just let him go tumbling off it.

Which has him pushing at the pillow, and Chris's grip on it, and Victor's head beneath it, and Victor's hand escaping from under it -- which how is there so much of them everywhere -- but Victor is one hand down and Yuri tries escaping harder in that realization, fully jumping at anything now. "Yes! Yes! Fine! Coffee! I'll make coffee, but you have to get off."

[fivetimechamp]

It's less fun to be in a wet pile of limbs on the bed when Yuri is wriggling his way out from underneath them, seemingly without caring if he topples straight off the mattress and onto the floor in his haste to get away, but Victor can let him go, reluctantly, if it means he can get a hand free to grab at the pillow covering his face and push it back at Chris. "One cup!"

As delighted as he is to see Chris, this is still their space. "And then you can go distract someone else, Chris, so Yuri can get some sleep."

Some more sleep.

(Or a shower. Or...

Well, it's a lot of time between now and tomorrow morning.)

"Oh, me too." Chris is nodding, but he winks heavily and grins across the rumpled sheets at Victor. "I need plenty of sleep before a competition."

(Victor's just going to choose to ignore that emphasis.)

Rolling onto his back, he watches Yuri scurry away, the back of his neck a bright beet red, hair all mussed, pajamas loose on his hips and shoulders. "Give him the regular, Yuri. If he's up all night, maybe he'll be less disruptive tomorrow."

[theglassheart]

Victor relents, and it seems to be some unwritten and unspoken, sign that Chris does, too, and Yuri finds his way off the bed somehow between too much speed and too much need to be anywhere a few feet away, while both forgetting and not forgetting the foot, or two, space difference between being on the bed and finding the floor. Which he manages while trying not to groan as Victor flops himself back fully on to his back on Yuri's bed. Yuri's blankets. Yuri's ... everything.

His bed is going to be soaking wet between the two of them.
His sheets probably are, and the pillow he had been using only minutes ago.

Yuri gives a brief look at his own clothes, dry in some places still, but soaked sodden and sticking to his skin in so many others. Across a blotch of the front of his shirt, and around his waist, and a good portion of his lap, and yet not his calves, or across his shoulder, where it feels dry, or his arms. He doesn't look all too unlike he might if he'd been surprise jumped by Maccachin on the beach.

He'll need to pull out other clothes before he sleeps, if sleeping is a thing, which it has to be, in his soaked bed. One of the two next to each other, making Yuri's eyes linger for a second on the other bed, as he picks up the package for the coffee maker. It's not that he thinks Victor, even causing the problem, will sleep in the now soaked bed, and it's not that they haven't shared a bed, in the other hotel or even in Victor's room, here and there, back home. . .

But the thought, combined with Chris on his bed with Victor -- and the comment, that sounds like it implies nothing about sleeping at all in here, Chris suddenly makes from there to Victor, unable to be missed in the small space -- makes the skin going up Yuri's neck and his ears fry even warmer. Like it had already forgotten the ice bath feeling of them landing on him. Even while being half soaked.

Yuri focused on the getting the grounds into the paper filter and pouring water in.