There have been times, over the last eight months, when he's wondered if he did the right thing.
If maybe it was a stupid thing to do. Abandon his career without seeing if he could push the peak higher, give up everything he'd known and loved and worked for, a lifetime of it. Two decades of nothing but ice and athleticism and art.
All because he fell in love with a boy who didn't even care.
All because he was stupid enough to call that love, and to think that maybe it was returned. Flying halfway around the world because he thought Yuri had asked him to, because he thought that video was a love letter and not just a video. Because he thought it was somehow different than the hundreds of other times skaters had filmed themselves practicing his routines.
Of course he'd wondered. How could he not? When it was like pulling teeth to get Yuri to even look at him, let alone talk to him. When it became painfully obvious that the only person in love here was him, and that Yuri was at best totally oblivious and at worst simply didn't care. He'd thrown himself into Eros and Yuri on Ice once it was clear that was what Yuri wanted from him, and he'd done his best. He had. Aware every single day that he was only falling harder and harder, but knowing it was only him.
Until now. Until Yuri did that flip, and the world flipped upside down, and he was wrong, or he was right, and it doesn't matter but now he has no idea how he could ever have thought it was the wrong choice, when Yuri is so carefully reaching for him, when there's only the slightest brush of his fingertips against Victor's forehead and it stops his heart and breath dead.
It's not romantic, like in poems and books and movies, a heart skipping a beat. It hurts. Slams like hitting the ice or the wall. Knocks the wind out of him so violently he's a little afraid he'll never breathe again, that he might die, right here, on the slightest of shy touches, and traumatize Yuri so badly he'll have to spend approximately the next decade in therapy.
But it's impossible to breathe, when Yuri's hand lifts, and shifts, and his thumb is tracing over Victor's cheek, and Victor's heart, apparently getting the message that he would prefer to live through this, starts violently up again.
His breath is shaking. Belatedly, he realizes his whole body is shaking, and he's never felt so fragile, like a touch even a little more firm might shatter him into glass shards. His hands slipping up from Yuri's hips to his waist, fingers spread wide, and they're trembling, too.
It's absurd. It's the pad of one thumb. A single thumb should not be able to do this to him, but then it shifts again across his skin and the sound he makes now is painful in a different way, dredged from months and months of longing and not having, of every time Yuri never reached for him, of every time he never realized he wanted to be touched. Tipping his face up to him, unable to keep himself from pressing towards that hand, suddenly desperate for it, for Yuri to never stop touching him, for Yuri to realize, know what he's doing to him, but all that comes out is a name that's almost a gasp: "Yuri."
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Date: 2017-04-15 06:27 pm (UTC)If maybe it was a stupid thing to do. Abandon his career without seeing if he could push the peak higher, give up everything he'd known and loved and worked for, a lifetime of it. Two decades of nothing but ice and athleticism and art.
All because he fell in love with a boy who didn't even care.
All because he was stupid enough to call that love, and to think that maybe it was returned. Flying halfway around the world because he thought Yuri had asked him to, because he thought that video was a love letter and not just a video. Because he thought it was somehow different than the hundreds of other times skaters had filmed themselves practicing his routines.
Of course he'd wondered. How could he not? When it was like pulling teeth to get Yuri to even look at him, let alone talk to him. When it became painfully obvious that the only person in love here was him, and that Yuri was at best totally oblivious and at worst simply didn't care. He'd thrown himself into Eros and Yuri on Ice once it was clear that was what Yuri wanted from him, and he'd done his best. He had. Aware every single day that he was only falling harder and harder, but knowing it was only him.
Until now. Until Yuri did that flip, and the world flipped upside down, and he was wrong, or he was right, and it doesn't matter but now he has no idea how he could ever have thought it was the wrong choice, when Yuri is so carefully reaching for him, when there's only the slightest brush of his fingertips against Victor's forehead and it stops his heart and breath dead.
It's not romantic, like in poems and books and movies, a heart skipping a beat. It hurts. Slams like hitting the ice or the wall. Knocks the wind out of him so violently he's a little afraid he'll never breathe again, that he might die, right here, on the slightest of shy touches, and traumatize Yuri so badly he'll have to spend approximately the next decade in therapy.
But it's impossible to breathe, when Yuri's hand lifts, and shifts, and his thumb is tracing over Victor's cheek, and Victor's heart, apparently getting the message that he would prefer to live through this, starts violently up again.
His breath is shaking. Belatedly, he realizes his whole body is shaking, and he's never felt so fragile, like a touch even a little more firm might shatter him into glass shards. His hands slipping up from Yuri's hips to his waist, fingers spread wide, and they're trembling, too.
It's absurd. It's the pad of one thumb. A single thumb should not be able to do this to him, but then it shifts again across his skin and the sound he makes now is painful in a different way, dredged from months and months of longing and not having, of every time Yuri never reached for him, of every time he never realized he wanted to be touched. Tipping his face up to him, unable to keep himself from pressing towards that hand, suddenly desperate for it, for Yuri to never stop touching him, for Yuri to realize, know what he's doing to him, but all that comes out is a name that's almost a gasp: "Yuri."