GPF Banquet, 9 December, 2012 – Sochi, Russia

[fivetimechamp]

He's never quite sure how long he should stay at these things.

It's not that he doesn't enjoy the banquet – he does. After winning his fifth consecutive Grand Prix Final, the champagne tastes all the brighter, and the company around him is more delightful than ever. He enjoys seeing his peers and companions, sharply-dressed and relaxed for the first time in months, the strain of competition dropping away, even if only for a single evening. The food is tasty, the attention warming, the evening sparkling, the room filled with all the brightest stars of their world. Yes, he enjoys the banquet.

But there's a part of him that itches to make his excuses, and leave. To trade out this suit for a loose part of pants and a warm shirt; these polished shoes for the clean glide of his skates.

He can make the program even better. He can perfect it.

So there's an element here, too, of detachment. He notices it with the others, too – with Chris, who fell short of him, again, and JJ, full of boundless confidence. Eventually abandoning polite small talk and gossip to dig into their craft, to discuss music selections and jump compositions, to compliment and rag on each other. No one used to being off the ice for long.

He talks less, but thinks more. Already working through the choreography in his head, even as he laughs over champagne, and greets his friends.

It is who he is. The champion. And tomorrow will be more of the same.

Comments

[theglassheart]

Everything hurts. The muscles of his back constricting tight. Arms biting into unyielding porcelain. Knees still throbbing from the drop, skid, half tumble into the floor and toilet in that absolute dark. That he would give his soul back to the attack of the darkness, dizzy and daunted, upside down, inverted, forever falling, if he had any control over anything left.

But he doesn't. Only seconds where he can hear his harsh breathing, and minutes where everything is acid and pain.

Champagne does not taste good coming up. Neither does anything else. He doesn't know how many desperate pleas to the universe happen, while nothing changes. While he's chained to that spot and wrung out until nothing else is coming up, vacating him like a fleeing flood of fans. Until it's just the rasp of his air, and the churn of his lungs, and he's not sure he's ever hurt this much, ever, and pain has defined his life in some amount for years on end.

Pain that was worth beauty. Pain that paid at the end.

There is no beauty in this. It's a miserable thing, almost without end.




Until it is. Cheek sweating against the rim, but his breath has calmed, even if his throat won't stop burning, but the idea of water is the idea of moving is the idea of torture. He just wants to curl up in a ball and die here. Right here. Against a toilet. In the dark. In a Russian hotel bathroom. Where his body won't stop trying to wring itself dry even though nothing is coming anymore.

Which he gives into for a while. The fugue of pain. The pervasive smell of vomit, that stays with him even though he finds the woozy strength to flush that toilet several times, fumbling blindly for the lever. He gives himself to the darkness, feeling more fragile than a leaf, every muscle in his body vanished, except when he shifts, except when it's a crescendo of pain that no piece of music or movement could properly express.


When he can finally move, though can feel the wrong word, when he's all but crawling to the bed. Water is too, even a few feet from the toliet, but the tile is too cold under his knees and the porcelain hurts under his cheek. He wants the softness. He wants to curl up and just die. Dying has to be worse than this. He really doesn't know how he makes it to the bed, crawling like a massive slug lump of himself, across the floor and then somehow, traversing gravity, as it pulls at his stomach again.

Except he makes it. Somehow at least on top of the blankets, in the muddle he'd thrown back to get to the bathroom. Unwilling to move to straighten those covers, or cover himself. Breathing still acrid, and using far too many muscles, making his whole body throb.

Eyes closed, just breathing, just existing in that malaise of darkness that tangles around him in loops.

Coalescing, and pulling him down, down, down.



While something tickles at the back of his head, the base of his neck. Soft, but annoyed, it flickers. Filters through in his name. Yuri... Soft, but drawn out and annoyed, too. Except not annoyance. Playful annoyance? It's hard to make any stick, have definitive lines, but he knows that voice, knows the face that shapes and shades his world.

Knows almost better than his own. He's looked at it more than his own, it feels.

Bluring, blending blue and green, perfect grey and silver, a smile like gold, brighter than a flood light, when it slides through his ears, through his whole body, like wind and rain and cherry blossoms dropping in spring and the gentle rain of monsoon season, never ending, forever clinging to you. Words, slipping through on it, until they in his very muscles, his very bones, every agonized breath and that darkness growing so heavy on him everywhere, blacking out the world.

You're leaving me already?



How cruel.

His eyes blink, and droop, even harder, hand reaching for a light beyond him, even as his shoulder screams, creaking like a door coming straight off the hinge. "I'm right here," hoarse and unhinged, and barely more than a whisper. Reaching, reaching, reaching, but never finding, sliding through the light, like it dances from him, darkness sliding, sliding, sliding, everywhere. But he needs to tell, has to tell, panting, unable to reach, to speak, grasping sand in ghost-like fingers as it falls through him -- "I'm right here."

But just soon as they form, desperate and softer than snow fall, he isn't, too.

[fivetimechamp]

In the end, he waits longer than he'd ever admit to.



There's a chair by the window that he takes, once his vest is undone, and the top few buttons of his shirt are loosened, and his shoes and socks are left by the side table, and maybe it's a little bit on purpose, sure. Maybe he knows how he looks. He's always been particular with his appearance, with what it suggests, what it implies, as well as what it declares, and this: a little undone, but still dressed up, still taking care, is carefully constructed to appeal.

He knows that sitting by the window, with the lights of Sochi scattered along the ground below, and the dim lamps in the room, scrolling through his phone, it's nearly romantic, like a prince waiting in a tower to be delivered.

(Well, he's always had a flair for the dramatic.)

It's an hour later when he decides that he may as well shower, get the sweat off, and change into something more comfortable than the dress pants and complementing shirt: he puts it off for longer than he should, but in the end, he gets up to strip the vest off, the shirt following directly after, undoing his belt as he heads to the bathroom and flicks on the lights.



He showers with the bathroom door ajar.

(Just in case.)




But there is still no knock by the time he shuts the water off ten minutes later, hair streaming, and eyebrows furrowing, slightly, first at the door, and then at his own reflection, foggy in the bathroom mirror.


The hot water makes him tired, so he digs out a pair of sleep pants, a soft t-shirt, and puts them on, pretending he isn't tuned like a tripwire for the sound of a faint knock, or someone stopping outside.

Winding up back in that chair, after shaving, brushing his teeth, folding his clothes and packing them, drinking a glass of water, opening his suitcase to first unpack and then repack his clothes.

Holding off for five minutes, only, before he gives up, and turns the light out.




But, just another five.




Surely, in only a few minutes...?




Until he looks at the clock, and realizes it's well past two, and that if Katsuki Yuri was going to come to this room and make good on every promise and insinuation he made on the dance floor, he would already be here.



It's not often Victor feels like an idiot, but there's a degree of viciousness in the way he switches off the bedside lamp, and something of self-pity in the way he curls into his extra pillows, wishing they were Maccachin, who didn't have a fickle or unloyal bone in his body. Trying his best not to imagine how the weight of a dark-haired head would dent them, or to listen for the quiet, even sound of someone else breathing. The rustle of sheets, as someone else turns.

Not closing his eyes, and picturing someone just out of reach of his fingertips, but close enough to warm them.

(But it's still another hour or more, before he sleeps.)