The television is the cafe is an old one, and the volume on it isn't turned up very high, so the cascading piano notes that accompany the step sequence sound thin and tinny against the bare walls and floor. But even with the poor quality of the music, the flurry of flashing blades seem to ring out with a music of their own for those who have eyes to see it...and Yuri finds that his mouth has gone strangely dry, and his nails are digging into the thin fabric covering his palms.
This isn't the teasing seductiveness of Eros, where even months of work haven't quite been able to wipe away the impressions of Viktor's fingerprints all over it. Something entirely different is spilling out of this free skate, unwinding like bright ribbons across the glittering ice of a rink half a world away, and not even a certain amount of unevenness in the execution is enough to unravel the story woven into every turn and gesture, from the tensely gathered moment of an approach to the sweeping extension of an arm or a hand.
The seconds are slipping past, and only the hard plastic of the table against Yuri's side feels like it's keeping him from wanting to somehow climb inside that television as if doing so could make him be there, in the cold brilliance of the rink, to see how it ends --
Until the final jump quite literally stops the breath in his mouth.
A quad flip. Ending in a crash landing that Yuri can feel in his bones, a visceral sense of pain without the impact, but undeniably the right number of rotations for it to count.
The very last jump. At the end of the free skate. The signature technique that Viktor Nikiforov had made his own over the years, and here was Yuuri Katsuki staking his claim on it as if he were planting a flag on a mountaintop for all the world to see. Defying the announcers' expectations, the crowd's expectations...and Yuri has no words in any language he knows for the feeling that surges through him in those final moments, as the performance ends and the last notes of the music echo from the cafe television's second-rate speakers.
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Date: 2017-04-10 04:20 am (UTC)This isn't the teasing seductiveness of Eros, where even months of work haven't quite been able to wipe away the impressions of Viktor's fingerprints all over it. Something entirely different is spilling out of this free skate, unwinding like bright ribbons across the glittering ice of a rink half a world away, and not even a certain amount of unevenness in the execution is enough to unravel the story woven into every turn and gesture, from the tensely gathered moment of an approach to the sweeping extension of an arm or a hand.
The seconds are slipping past, and only the hard plastic of the table against Yuri's side feels like it's keeping him from wanting to somehow climb inside that television as if doing so could make him be there, in the cold brilliance of the rink, to see how it ends --
Until the final jump quite literally stops the breath in his mouth.
A quad flip. Ending in a crash landing that Yuri can feel in his bones, a visceral sense of pain without the impact, but undeniably the right number of rotations for it to count.
The very last jump. At the end of the free skate. The signature technique that Viktor Nikiforov had made his own over the years, and here was Yuuri Katsuki staking his claim on it as if he were planting a flag on a mountaintop for all the world to see. Defying the announcers' expectations, the crowd's expectations...and Yuri has no words in any language he knows for the feeling that surges through him in those final moments, as the performance ends and the last notes of the music echo from the cafe television's second-rate speakers.
All he knows is that he can't look away.