November 16, 2014 - Fukuoka to Hasetsu
Mar. 26th, 2017 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theglassheartThe 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,
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.
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no subject
Date: 2017-09-27 11:51 am (UTC)It takes more than a few seconds for Yuri's shoulders and back to relax entirely down from the assumption Victor will move him anytime now, or move himself. Then, Yuri would retreat to his pillow and sleep, gritty and chasing his every blink, will be the only thing left. Except. Victor doesn't move. At least, more precisely, Victor doesn't move away. Victor never stops moving entirely, especially this close. The rise and fall of his chest and the beat of his steady, slow heart.
The fingers that continue to card, gently, slowly, through his hair, tugging his eyes back closed with the end of near every stroke against his scalp. The slight pause at the edge driving his eyelids to crack back open, hard sticking and unkind, with small starts back to full awakeness from the darkness, from drowning, slow pooling warmth of the touch rippling across all of his head, down his neck and into his shoulders.
It's not immediate, the sleep chasing him down like a wall of already raining bricks, fighting through the malaise of stressed fatigue, from things both planned for that and those that never could have been. The not moving, or being moved, causes question enough, even as quiet and stillness becomes the room, only broken by the sound of Victor or Maccachin breathing. It drags up memories of China, with paralyzed stillness and tortured confused, while Victor was wrapped around him from behind, drunkenly refusing to let him leave.
It seems impossible that was only a little over a week. The Cup's. Maccachin.
It seems all but impossible that he's here now, inside Victor's arms, pressed to his chest.
Yuri doesn't move, doesn't even open his tired eyes, but he listens to the slow, deep, even rhythm of Victor's breath. In, and out. In, and out. There's a world outside the bedroom door, and beyond his home and family, that would all but kill to be right where he is, here in Victor's arms and Victor's bed. Who might make more of either of those, or at least have something more to offer.
But he doesn't want to think of that, of them, yet. Again. Tonight. Not with the rusty hooks of darkness trying to pull him down and down. Not with the slow, steady breathing above his head, and the slow, steady heartbeat pressed itself against one cheek, that he only very barely rubs against Victor as he yawns again. His body trying to tell his mind to get with the program, as though all the rest of him except is ready, is already gone.
There's a soft count in his head -- maybe it was of Victor's breaths, or Victor's heartbeats, or even just seconds, just to make him focus on something that was nothing, that couldn't be chased in a circle, just to lull him to curl into the warm all around him -- but if he was asked later, he wouldn't be able to say if he even made it to ten before sleep came and stole the last of him left.
no subject
Date: 2017-09-28 03:15 am (UTC)Later on the following day, Yuuri receives a response to his message: a photograph, and a single line of text.
It's a direct message, not posted to any public account. Because in spite of Yuri's enthusiasm for documenting his life through carefully curated digital pixels, some pictures are not meant for the public eye.
(Some things don't need to be shared, except with people who understand them.)
The picture is angled slightly to take in the widest possible view of a fairly small space. An old kitchen table, covered in baking ingredients and equipment, dominates the frame. The labels may be in Russian, but it's easy to identify bags of flour and rice, a bottle of cooking oil, a container of eggs, a flat parcel wrapped in white butcher paper. Several plates and bowls of different sizes, scattered measuring cups and spoons, and a pair of worn but clean dish towels laid on a wire cooling rack all look ready to be put to use. Just visible behind the table is a cooking range that has seen better days -- or some equivalent of better days, for a block of workers' flats built in the later part of the Soviet era and hardly renovated since then.
The caption beneath the picture is simple. дедка says he's glad you liked them. testing second batch today.
There's no mention of the exhibition, or Viktor, or anything but the work in progress.
(Some things have to take priority, when you only have one day to make them happen.)