November 16, 2014 - Fukuoka to Hasetsu

[theglassheart]

The flights end up late, and it feels like he's chasing the ghost of a glimmer of light, one that he's already lost sight of, again, across an entire world of night. Leaving in the dark of Russia's night, and the windows never brighten. Even as hours and hours pass. He doesn't think he'll sleep, but he ends up sleeping in fits and starts anyway.

He didn't sleep well the night before, or the night before that. Which isn't all the unusual. Not during competition. But he wasn't forced by Victor to try to sleep during the middle of the day, and he didn't try to catch even a few hours sleep before his flight. He didn't touch the beds except to put his suitcase on it and fold things next to it.

Adding to those, his performance drained everything that was left in him.



He still dreamt shoddily. He dreamt he never made it.
He dreamed they recounted the numbers and he was too far under.
He dreamed and blurred the skate at Rostelecom with his one at his last Grand Prix Finale.

When he was luckiest, he dreamed of nothing. He simply slipped into that ebony, endless black. An embrace of pure exhaustion that didn't feel like sleep, and left him feeling more exhausted, more run over, but at least it didn't startle him awake in the middle of a panic, heart racing, eyes stinging, clutching the armrests, unable to catch his breath at first.

When he can't sleep, he stares unfocused out the window. Or at the barely there shape of his reflection in the double-paned glass of the window. Has the strangest, exhausted snippets of conversations. With Yakov, and Yurio, and Victor, so many times Victor. That start with words they've said, or might say, and ripple out from there.



Anxiety, and exhaustion, and too much waiting again, even more than before the skate. Unable to move from this spot. He looks at his phone more than he should, because he can't convince himself to let go of it most of the time, but he doesn't bother Victor. He's sleeping, he convinces himself several times. And when he might not be, with Maccachin, finally, he tells himself in others. Mostly he tells himself, he'll be there soon, closing the phone. Over and over. He can wait. He's made it this long.

There's so much time to wait, so much to say and he has no one else but himself to say it to. Which had always been true before, too, except now it isn't. Now he has so many things he needs to say to Victor. Victor, who still hasn't started lecturing him, and the longer that goes on, the more he starts to fret that is what is waiting for him in Fukuoka. Like skating to Victor at the side of the rink and it starting. Maybe when he walks in, then it'll start.



It makes his stomach tighten, even when he wants that if that's what it takes. If it'll put Victor back in front of him, he'll listen to the entire thing from beginning to end now. His stomach growls, after his exhausted anxiousness chases that tail for the next half hour, playing different tracks of that lecture, in the airport, with all of those people watching, and leaves him staring at the call button. Thinking about calling for another snack. Or another sealed meal, if he could.

(He's not going to eat the last Pirozh-katsu, long since cold, but wrapped up carefully in its brown paper bag, waiting in his backpack in front of his feet. It may have been given to him, a birthday present or congratulations, to be shared with Yurio, but that one, the very last one, isn't for him.)



What feels like an infinity of hours later still, the announcement overhead starting,
as the wifi finally picks up again, Yuri finally opens his phone, and starts typing,

We just landed.

Comments

[fivetimechamp]

This has been one of the longest days he can remember dragging by for more time than he cares to think too closely about. Sleep, after he talks with Yuri and waits up to first send his credit card information and then receive confirmation of the flight, is impossible. He waits for hours in the dark room, checking his phone for a message from Yuri saying he's at the airport, has boarded, is about to take off.

It'll be hours yet. Nearly an entire day. He should sleep. His whole body cries out for it, fatigue poisons running sick through his veins, but every time he closes his eyes and finds some shallow semblance of unconsciousness, it's anything but restful. Disturbed and fretful dreams: about Yuri, about Maccachin. They feature Yakov and Yurio and Minako, put him back in St. Petersburg, bring him back to a Sochi hotel room in a December better left forgotten.

It's not surprising for him to be up before the dawn even now, when he isn't the one training, but when he finally gives up and finds his jogging pants, his red and white Russian Olympic Team jacket, and trainers, morning is a word that could be only generously used. A few people are up and about as he jogs down the street, backpack of gear strapped firmly to his back, but not many: night shift workers driving home, a few early delivery drivers. It feels good to have something to focus on, a direction to move, even if it's only to remember to put one foot down in front of the other, over and over again, until his muscles warm and his breath begins to quicken. Something mindless, something he knows he can do: run for miles with no company but his breath and the soft sound of his feet hitting the ground.

(No Maccachin running in front of him;

no Yuri running after him.)

The sun is barely seeping light into the horizon when he reaches the beach and pauses watch it slowly lighten the sky. He should feel that way, lightening by increments. Maccachin will be fine, and he can get him later today. Yuri will go to the Grand Prix Final, and he'll be home tonight. Everything worked out. Everyone is safe and healthy and whole.

So why doesn't he feel it?

Instead, the slow bleeding of sunlight into the sky, seeping clear gold and white and seaglass blue along the edge of the water and into the night (so much shorter here than in Moscow, in St. Petersburg) fills him with dread, the guilt that's been gnawing at him now for a day and half across thousands of miles sitting cold in his stomach.

(How can he call himself a coach?)

It doesn't get any smaller the further he runs from the beach --

I just want you to be Victor!

-- and by the time he reaches the Ice Palace, it feels as if it has filled his entire stomach.

No one else is here yet, either, but the Nishigoris are used to Yuri coming by at odd hours, and his coach --

(that man thinks only of himself!)

-- is as welcome there now as he is. Nishigori himself appears around the second hour of Victor's practice, but he doesn't say anything, only lifts his hand in a greeting that Victor, now sweating and exhausted in a whole new way (but still burning to do something, push further, go harder) appreciates. Nishigori is a more perceptive man than he may at first seem, and there have been many mornings, afternoons, evenings, when Victor has enjoyed a chat with him over a meal or while skates are being sharpened, but he's not ready to talk just now.

But he also can't stay at the Ice Palance until it's time to leave to pick up Maccachin and Yuri -- although he does extend his time when a group of small children come for their lesson with Yuuko, and are thrilled when Victor Nikiforov opts to join their class for the hour. It feels like the first time he's laughed in an age, skating hand in hand with a four year old girl who can't stop blushing.

It doesn't lighten him up enough to fool Minako when he runs into her at the onsen, though. Although in every other conceivable way they are different, there's something about the narrow way she peers at him that reminds him irrevocably of Yakov...but Yakov would never haul him off to a ramen stand to discuss the happenings of the last few weeks over noodles so hot he starts sweating all over again just slurping up his first mouthful.

But it feels like the first break of relief: spicy noodles, hot tea, and Minako watching him over it all. She's coached Yuri for years, understands him in a way no one else in the world does, the way Yakov understands him. If there's anyone he can talk to about all these questions and uncertainties running through his head like veins of ice threatening to crack a boulder into shards, it's her.

Which is not to say she is always especially sympathetic. She's still annoyed with him for Shanghai, and this is the first chance she's gotten to really give him the earful she's been nuturing for over a full week, and he might actually feel abashed, if there were even a single moment of it all that he regretted.

(Other than leaving. Any moment up to that one.)

Once she's exhausted her annoyance, though, she's all ears and advice, and it feels like the first useful thing he's done today. Just as she focuses Yuri's movements, guides him towards more perfect precision, she guides his thought process now: What leaving Moscow meant. How he can do better. What Yuri will need from him now, as a coach, to be ready for the Grand Prix Final.

Little by little, the day rolls away, until it's time at last to find his coat and scarf and borrow the keys to Minako's car to go pick up Maccachin on his way to Fukuoka.

(the moment the vet brings Maccachin around into the waiting area and he sees Victor and goes into a mad scuffle of wagging tail, lolling tongue, and rapid feet, all leaning hard against the vet's assistant, who finds himself tugged nearly off his feet in Maccachin's haste to be in Victor's open arms, to lick his face, paws up on Victor's shoulders, while Victor hugs him and pushes his face into familiar soft curly fur, is the first time he can't actually hold back the wetness in his eyes and the tightness in his chest that cinches and cinches and cinches until he can't breathe, it's too big, until it breaks, cracking in a relieved sob he doesn't care if anyone hears)

Which all leads him to here, Fukuoka's airport, sitting in this hard plastic seat with Maccachin panting gently against his knee, waiting for the text that finally (finally, finally) vibrates his phone.

Making something jerk hard and painful in his chest in a way that feels like a sob that never reaches his throat, his eyes, before he's replying.

We're here waiting for you.