{ The China Cup GPF Qualifier, FS } November 7-8, 2014 - Shanghai, China

[theglassheart]

If Yuri thought the night before this one never ended, he was wrong. It's this newest night that feels like it never ends. Oppressive, pressing, darkness, digging into his eyes, his mouth, his nose, his ears, while Victor breathed heavy and easy in the adjoining bed. Yuri had tried to sleep. Turning this way, turning that way, staring at the backs of his eyelids toward the ceiling, pressing his face into his pillow. He tried and tried and tried (and most of all found himself trying not to let his breathing race so fast it might wake Victor).

The evening had been bearable, if not entirely enjoyable or unenjoyable. Less stressful than the one before it, if only marginally, while Phichit and Victor drug him from place to place. Too late for museums or anything with middaytime, there had been rather quick tours through the Yu Garden, the Oriental Pearl Tower, and the Jade Buddha Temple, and in the cases of closed doors, pictures with their iconic buildings. As well as everything else that looked interesting between them.

It took forever, and then it was just over.

He'd enjoyed some of it, but none of it stuck for long.
Not even the late calls from his family and Yuu-san had.

Not with the Free Skate looming. Not with every single person he was skating with gunning for where he was standing, and every person watching wondering if he could somehow pull out o f himself the miraculous performance that had seemed to come from almost nowhere. Like it hadn't even belonged to him. How many times had he performed Eros and it'd never been that?

How badly would it be when (if - when) tomorrow couldn't match it?
What would they say about him, then? What would they say about Victor, then?

Yuri would fall asleep only to startle awake what could only have been seconds later, nerves sharpening with each new jolt, until it felt like ice was splintering more and stabbing up harder through every part of his veins, until each second asleep seemed to only contain the certainty he would fall, he would fail, he would forget. He could never reach whatever he'd touched for that brief two minutes and eighteen seconds.

It'd been a fluke. He'd only dreamed it. He couldn't explain it. He couldn't sleep.
Every minute in that dark reaching, but, also, clutching his pillow.
Eyelids clenched tight, or eyes open, staring at the other bed.


Over and over, he counted his breaths down.
Over and over, he repeated that he had and he could.
Over and over, he told himself this was all in his head.

Over and over, he slipped right back as soon as it finished.




That morning comes at all only changes the color of the sky.

Breakfast is a blur, piling food into himself, like maybe it would give him any solidness. Weigh him to the seat, to the ground, to reality. It should be impossible, but his head feels even heavier than his body. Hot water had shaken some tension from his skin, but none at all from his mind. It hadn't mattered whether he was in the bed, in the shower, in a booth, at a table.

His foot tapped under the table, all the way up to his knee and thigh, and in the moments he could make himself stop, his fingers drum against the side of his thigh or the seat instead. Desperate to try and keep it from Victor's sight, when Victor won't stop looking at him, smiling like that, talking about how Eros was perfect, and what he should do as soon as they arrived at practice.

How would he look when he realized Yuri couldn't reproduce what he done. Couldn't even look at the things that compounded to get him there. Words Victor'd said, but entirely in a different way than he'd said them. That Yuri'd blown them out of proportion and reality out there, during Eros. What would he do if Yuri couldn't place at all?

What would he do when everyone no longer was cheering his name as the reason Yuri had done so well? When there would only be that gut-wrenching pity on every face and Victor's name was smeared with his failures the same as his already was? Why was he even going to put himself through that? Why was Yuri?





Practice is a comedy of uncertainty.
He doesn't even want to return to the wall and Victor during it.

His feet hardly feel like they belong to his body, and thinking about love doesn't produce his love, his family, Hasetsu, or Victor, it brings up more and more knots in his guts. It tears up the ice under him with images of last year, of every fall, of every day spent in his bed, avoid being awake, avoiding the rink, Celestino, Phichit. The flip of what that could -- will -- look like again.

Except at home. Except with his parents, and Minako, and Yuu-san, and his family.

Their sad faces, their disappointment, as Victor's back went vanishing away in the background of his loss.

Even the ease of his long earned and long loved turns seems to be slipping from him when his focus won't pull itself together. At full speed it makes it a fumble of something he hasn't fumbled in half his life, even if he doesn't fall. It's better the next time, and gone the third, but it still there. He can do this. He can. He's done it how many hundreds and thousands of times.

It makes him sloppy. It makes him reckless. It makes him stubborn. It makes him hesitate.

It ends all too soon. The alarm sounding for them to come in, and he trails in.

Comments

[fivetimechamp]

Yuri stiffens, but Victor waits –– he's learning to wait, all over again, like he did those first few weeks when it seemed like everything he did pushed Yuri a step too far –– and after a breath or two, he relaxes again. Not enough, because Yuri's sitting up when he should at least be leaning against the headboard, and Victor's mulling the thought over when Yuri's voice breaks through the fog, and he cracks that eye again, half rolling his head to try and look up.

Was he talking? Probably. A running list of everything that's wonderful about this, the way he does when he's somewhere new that's amazing, or has just bitten into an especially delicious new food. It's such perfect bliss that he should be shouting it from the rooftops, extravagant in his joy, and he would be, if it weren't also so relaxing. "You feel good."

That's not enough. His arms shift, and tighten, fingers firm against the bare skin of Yuri's back, and he's starting to shift, too, head pushing up towards Yuri's chest, using his weight to coax Yuri into leaning back towards the pillows and headboard. He might be close enough to use them as a brace, or he might be too far away: Victor's not sure he cares, either way, just wants more of Yuri's fingers in his hair and more of Yuri's skin under his hand and Yuri's heartbeat under his ear. "You should relax more, Yuri."

It's almost back to his old wheedling tone, but there's no sly look accompanying it. "But don't stop, I love it, it feels so good."

Sighed against Yuri's chest, now while his eyes slid shut again, and his hand has slid further up Yuri's back, the other arm still wrapping his waist. "It makes me want to fall asleep right here." He's so comfortable. The most comfortable he's ever been. He wouldn't have thought Yuri could be so soft to lie on, after that first month when he leaned out, but he's perfect, and Victor just wants as much of it as he can get. "But you should be the one getting sleep, not me."

[theglassheart]

Yuri's fingers stop running through Victor's hair when he moves. Not pulling away, but letting his hand cup Victor's head where it had been, curled over his hair, while Victor seems to be shifting it to look up. Even when the newness of something as simple as that, just leaving his head there, cradled against Victor's head, just holding itself or Victor's head, while Victor moves, is something so small and so new it feels like it wobbles about, coltishly new, like spring and newborn animals, in his chest.

He doesn't seem to get there. Upward. To make it to looking up at Yuri for answering, and Yuri forgets it for a flood of surprising warmth at Victor's first words. When his head ducks, and he's blinking, even when it wouldn't help him in the slightest to avoid anything, given Victor is right beneath his face already, but it's habit. He can't stop it, and his heart is giving that same pleasantly painful, impossible but real, swoop and stumble in his chest, that leaves warmth at the top of his cheeks and pooled in his stomach between Victor's hand on the skin of his back, and Victor's face pressed to his stomach through his shirt.

He feels good? Him? When he can't even stop touching Victor's hair, getting lost on the feeling of it slip, slip, sliding soft and silky between his fingers? Doesn't want to stop any second he does, has, can't stop? When Victor is the one who is perfect, even more this close up, his skin as soft as petals over dense, lean muscles? When Yuri's entire body seems to have become non-existent except for where Victor's face, and Victor's hair, head, and Victor's hand are making him truly real and still solidly here? He? Feels? Good? He? Shouldn't? Stop?

Something as delighted as bashful as ridiculous just colors through all the light in his chest, the sputtered thoughts trying and failing to form and hold in his head, to pull him away, to douse it out with a whisper of cold. The warmth in his face. If his hands weren't busy, and Victor weren't in his lap, he thinks he'd be pressing his hands to face. It might actually help something that Victor keeps talking, and the next bit has more sensible bits scattered in it, making his brain reach for some of the sense.

At least until Victor is suddenly leaning into him, all but headbutting him in a fashion all too like his comparing Victor to Maccachin earlier. As though somehow he could get Yuri to move, to lay down, if he just prods at him, or tips him over, from that spot, in his stomach, without actually coming off of him, or even looking. At Yuri, or the bed, or the floor, or anything. It makes him remember being lowered on the bed and kissed earlier, but that does stop the laugh that comes out because of what is happening.

"You're going to make me fall off the bed." How is it, his own voice makes that sound so funny?

As though there's nothing better in the world than that eventuality? Even though it would hurt a lot, if he tipped backward off?

It reminds him, without warning, of a million moments strung together, his own rare but true laughter like a golden string tying them together, caught somewhere between Victor and Hasestsu and Maccachin and the roll of too many unexpected golden summer days, beach trips and days trips, to truly lay the absolutely familiar, absolutely loved, feeling to any one day or one moment.

[fivetimechamp]

"Nooooo." Drawn out and certain into Yuri's shirt, but his arms tighten just in case. Yuri's laughing, and he can feel just as much as he hears it, bubbling in his chest, shaking against Victor's cheek, new and intoxicating. Not nervous, not quiet and uncertain, not picking his words as carefully as picking out a password he doesn't know for a bomb that could go off any second: laughing. Relaxed and happy, even if he's tensing up at the prospect of being pushed off the bed. "I wouldn't do that."

Well... he wouldn't do it on purpose, anyway. "You're too cute to push off the bed."

If he's pushing in the wrong direction, the thing to do is to reverse course, isn't it? Pull onto, not push off of, so he settles his weight back and starts dragging Yuri more towards the center of the mattress, instead of back. "And I don't want to have to get more ice, so no more falling."

It couldn't be stern if it dressed up in uniform and yelled at a line of cadets, because of course he's go get more ice if Yuri needed it. He'd get more water, more food, anything at all that might be asked for that he has to give. As long as he can come right back here afterward, he wouldn't mind at all.

[theglassheart]

Yuri doesn't believe that. About the not pushing him off a bed. Which Victor absolutely might do, but more out of excitement and forgetting than on purpose. He was smiling as his hand caught for balance on Victor's shoulder and then the bed, as Victor starts tugging him the opposite direction. Toward the middle of the bed, and Victor's body currently taking up that space.

Which Yuri might be more helpful to even helping or not helping, if his shoulders hadn't come in and his head ducked a little again. It's not even probably just the hundredth time Victor has called him cute. Voice a dozen ways that most made Yuri roll his eyes, the diminutive, and write it off as a part of Victor's over exuberance. But it sounds -- no, feels -- different to hear him say it again. Like this. After, during, all this.

That Victor thinks he's cute. That way? Somehow?

(That begs the question, in s loop too persistent to not exist and too loopy to have claws, what is not cute enough to not push off a bed, and who and how many in the world might not agree, given he's never even been put on a bed by anyone else. Never let, or wanted, or felt this drawn to all of this with anyone ever before.)


He doesn't try to keep Victor from moving him though, even if it does make his bones ache and his ice pack fall. It's strange and strangely endearing, but amusing still. Victor unwilling to let go of his middle, to even look back up, not even for pulling him closer into him, or the bed, or everything, while proclaiming his muddle of words still muffled more into Yuri's body than said up to him. The warmth just keeps splashing around in his chest, rocking itself back and forth in cross hatches that make ripples of it, instead of clinging ice dust.

Maybe it is teasing, but maybe Yuri lifts his hand and brushes it over Victor's hair and the back of his head, at the same time, fingers sliding through the very ends of it again (and, how did he ever stop?). "Was that supposed to help something?"

Not that he meant it that way, but after saying it? He thinks this all, just here, has helped a world of things.

[fivetimechamp]

Yuri's teasing him, but Yuri's still running his hand over Victor's head and slipping his fingers through Victor's hair, so Victor's going to call it a win. "It helps me."

Because he's selfish about this, and has been since the second it first exploded in his chest, so long ago it feels like a separate lifetime, such a short time ago it feels like he blinked and two years flipped by like someone skimmed through the book holding them. He's not the same person he was before, and he used to hate that, but now he doesn't. Now, he thinks he prefers being the kind of person who Yuri can tease, the kind of person who can hug Yuri and not be pushed away, who gets to see everything the world doesn't. Everything past the mental weakness they still throw at him, like those words are darts and Yuri's fragile heart is the target. Everything past the talent that paints beauty and music on the ice, only tainted by those same uncertainties.

He gets to see the work Yuri puts in. How training soothes him. The person who runs to the Ice Castle, or to Minako's ballet studio, or, sometimes now, to Victor's room, to work through all the thoughts running around his head. This person, who laughs at Victor's antics as often as he laughs at Maccachin's, who is full of more warmth and love and affection and humor than any interview or program or profile could ever show. His Yuri. The one no one else in their world sees.

How could he be anything but selfish? Is it so impossible to understand?

He's dragged them both towards the center of the mattress, and that's good enough, but not good enough, because Yuri's been toying with his hair and letting him hold on, and Victor has to shift enough to push up and find his neck, his jaw, his cheek to kiss.

But not letting go. Why would he ever.

[theglassheart]

Yuri's not at all certain how that can be true, Victor's short retort that is as far from sharp as possible.

But he's even more certain that maybe it doesn't matter, because, before he can answer, Victor is climbing upward on him. For a given definition of it. It's half like Victor is finally coming up, and half like the weight of Victor has intensified and any part he manages to get to on Yuri is just be steadily drug down more to where Victor's center of gravity is, on the bed still, and how Yuri's is barely steady at all, and none of that holds at all, because Victor is kissing him.

Against his neck, and his jaw, and his cheek, and Yuri doesn't even quite know why, but he's laughing, again, before he knows it's coming, maybe even before he realized it's happening and happened, and still happening. One of his hands more than half buried into Victor's soft, soft hair and the soft, soft, thin skin of the back of his neck, and the other somewhere stuck between them, while he's pink and smused, and his head is ducking, but that only puts him even closer to Victor's face brushing his, Victor's mouth dusting kisses on him, not away from it.

The soft, almost ticklish brush of his lips, and the beautiful color of Victor's eyes, half out of focus when his glasses get knocked up, awkwardly, for a moment. When his heart skitters just a little, giddy overwhelming delight, and he almost just leans in to kiss Victor, finally right there again, because it'd barely take the tilt of his head. He doesn't know how or why or where, but he still can't help teasing Victor more lightly. "Isn't that selfish?"

[fivetimechamp]

"Maybe."

He was just thinking it, so he knows it's true, but Yuri's not throwing the word at him like Yakov does, not following it up with that man thinks of nothing but himself!, and there's still that near-giggle in his voice that pops bubbles in Victor's head and his chest and leaves him feeling giddy and delighted.

And anyway, hasn't he earned a little selfishness, a little moment to savor this? Two hours ago, or three, it was never going to happen, and now it has, is. Is there anyone in the world who wouldn't be a little selfish, in this moment? Especially when Yuri is pink and laughing, and his fingers have sunk deep into Victor's hair and curved lightly at the back of his neck, and he's not trying to get away, only ducks closer, which only makes Victor want to be even more ridiculous, even more extravagant.

Chase that smile and turn it into something wide and brilliant. Tug that laugh out until it's breathless and sparkling. Nuzzle that ticklish spot on Yuri's neck until he's wriggling and relaxed and all wrapped in Victor's arms, against him. "I've always been a selfish person."

Also true, even if not like this. When what Yakov said used to be true, used to be Victor, and not even Victor could argue it, or would. He is selfish, and occasionally thoughtless, and forgetful, and occasionally finds it difficult to understand other people, all their foibles and flaws and bewildering feelings.

But not like this. Nothing he ever cared about for himself holds a candle to everything that Yuri is, everything he would do for him. Anything. Everything. Even before today. "But it helped you, too, see?"

Pleased with himself, while he's nuzzling his nose into Yuri's neck, and chasing it with his mouth, running all the way up toward his ear. "I saved you from falling. You should be more grateful, Yuri."

[theglassheart]

Yuri wouldn't have picked seflish anything more than a joke, and maybe it's why he'd make a face at Victor's second statement if he could. But the problem with that isn't not agreeing. It's that Victor's nuzzling into his neck and everything feels light and silly. Self-absorbed, he might agree, sometimes, but not selfish, but definitely not now, right here, when all it is was a joke Yuri made without questioning it and Victor agreed to shamelessly.

But there's no face he can make, and there's some wiggling, because Victor's nose and his cheeks are being rubbed into delicate, ticklish skin and it does, it tickles, and he's trying to pull away as much as he's not trying to actually pull away at all. His balance and his hip, hips, upper thighs hate it, hate the rock and shift, that evades the tickle without actually trying to escape it or pull away, squirm.

"You saved me from you pushing me off the bed," Yuri replied. "I don't think that's that same thing."

Except. Except he doesn't think Victor's wrong at one of those words.

That Victor always helps more than Yuri ever knew he could. All along the way. In ways that were so foreign from familiar was left on the other side of the globe, and yet he still did. Help Yuri. Save Yuri. From his lack of direction this year. From giving up on the skating he loved so much, and everyone, except Yuri's own had, had so much potential for. From his own head, even if what that looked like was today.

Was screaming and sobbing until everything in his head had gone suddenly so very quiet, elastic, set free.

Was laughter, and calling Victor's bragging ridiculous, while Victor laid half over him, making him forget he'd been afraid.

[fivetimechamp]

Victor is shocked. Shocked. "I wasn't pushing you off the bed!" All indignance, except for how it lacks any fire or snap, is just a melting wounded reproach.

(Maybe he was. But it certainly wasn't on purpose, that would have been a waste.)

It probably loses a little credibility with with arms still around Yuri and his hand on Yuri's bare back and his face buried in the crook of Yuri's neck, too, but he doesn't care. It's finally starting to feel like Yuri's relaxing, and it's starting to feel like Yuri's remembering that Victor is just Victor, still, someone Yuri knows and trusts, and that means he's happy to keep going, keep egging, keep coaxing Yuri out, make him laugh, make him tease. Pull out that affectionate exasperation that Victor has started to crave in a way that's probably not usual, is it? Is this what love is, is this how people act? "I just think you should lie down and be more comfortable."

Ice his hip. Relax. Let the day start seeping out of his muscles and joints. Even if those bruises and achy bones will feel better tomorrow, resting them tonight will help.

And, selfishly –– because they've determined, both pointed out that he's selfish, and he'll admit it –– because he loves this, wrapped around Yuri, with Yuri's hand in his hair and Yuri's laugh in his ears, but it could be better, still. Go from perfect to more so.

As long as Yuri doesn't freeze up again.

(But if he does, it's alright, they can ease their way out of it.)

[theglassheart]

Yuri's exasperation is fond. Maybe even more.

It's not like he really needs to defend that Victor started pulling him into the center of the bed after being told he was going to push Yuri off the bed if he kept going his first direction. The details don't really matter, when most of all Yuri is trying to find some way to press his smile to something manageable. Lips pulled in and pressed between his teeth and looking up and then down, unable to really stop it, that smile, at Victor's declaration of abused innocence.

Because Victor is impossible. On a daily basis. Not just ... all of this. But this, too.
Impossible and artlessly innocent, to a wounded kind of defensive whining.

Before today, it would have been somewhere near him, possibly with the widest blue eyes of pleading and declarative innocence, squishing into his face, to demand all his attention for the innocent defense. But it's not before today. It's today, and it's being cried into the skin of his neck, and it's all just as amusing, just as endearing, and impossible, and childish, and absolutely not real, and not important, and so very Victor, even like this.

The point that follows is the truth and he does buy that. It might have been at the base of it when Victor started. Yuri couldn't remember now if or whether he'd said something about it when he started to do that. It'd devolved into its own thing, which was normal enough, too, and it wasn't actually a bad point. He'd been laying down earlier. Before. It's a speculative thought, that makes him say, "It might hurt less."

Not a complaint. More an absent, maybe even slightly tired of being real, agreement. It hurts. Existing. Sitting. Breathing.


Victor half on him. But he saves that one for the last spot on the list and he doesn't let go. ... Doesn't want to be let go of?

[fivetimechamp]

"See?"

As if that was the point all along. (It was. Sort of. Mostly.) A note of satisfied triumph in his voice, even as he's stretching up to push a kiss against Yuri's throat, because neither he nor Yuri is actually moving.

He could, again. It would be pretty easy, with his arms around Yuri's waist and his own weight already settled. Could just haul him down, next to or even on top of Victor, and hold him there, like he had already twice before.

But a little different. There's still a difference between dragging Yuri into his lap, and tugging Yuri down onto a bed, and he's sure the thin line between them is probably one that would have Yuri floundering and red-faced and anxious again to have crossed, so he shouldn't.

(Maybe only as a last resort.)

Still, his hand sneaks out from under Yuri's shirt to go searching around for the ice pack that got dropped, and he turns his head a little at Yuri's neck to look for it, until he finds soft terrycloth and a corner of plastic that he catches between his fingertips to tug a centimeter at a time until he can grab the whole thing in his palm and press it gently against Yuri's hip. His other hand is dropping to the mattress behind Yuri to brace himself, and he finally pulls away far enough to smile up into Yuri's face.

It doesn't feel like a normal smile, though: it feels almost dopey, eyelids heavy, too full of his own success and Yuri's warmth and how good it feels to be this close without Yuri running away to manage any cockiness. "As your coach, I really suggest it."

And as ... whatever he is now, he wholeheartedly requests it.

[theglassheart]

He does, though. Start letting go. Victor. The fingers against his bare skin coming off, drawing so much attention to his skin there, finally feeling the air and his shirt, while still pulsing with the touch just lost, the heat evaporating faster than his breath or attention can try to hold even the flicker of the memory of it.

It's for a good reasons, Yuri realizes, when he's looking down the same way Victor's head is turning from his neck, not touching that anymore, too, a strained ache that joins the other, and so they are both looking down as Victor's now-free hand finds the ice pack and holds it against him instead. There's an insane second where, as Victor shifts again, to look up at him, Yuri is devastatingly certain in every cell of his body, he'd rather have Victor touching him than Victor holding the ice pack touching him.

But it only exists for the flaring brilliant ache of a second, before everything, everything, slides completely.

Parts like the sand or the sea dividing on a line,
between everything that was only seconds ago secure,
and this, now, where Victor is staring up at him, so warm, so beautiful.

Inescapably and impossibly beautiful. Pushing into all of his thoughts. Filling all of his chest. With Victor's face. The way his hair looks graceful and perfect, even for being mussed from being pressed into Yuri's stomach and fluffed from his fingers. The way his face is just ... perfect, high cheek bones, and graceful hollow of cheeks that drops to his perfect smiling mouth, all over looked the wide smooth set of his half-obscured forehead.

The delicate summer white peach of his skin, the silver fall of his bangs, as liquid as it is like half a layer of ice, over the warmest sunlit blue eyes, komorebi of the sea, of the early winter sky, just as hypnotic in the barren open as flitting, like a dazzling streamer, behind strands of shifting hair.

Yuri's not even sure his body knows how to work.

That his heart has forgotten how to beat and his lungs how to expand or compress.

There's nothing but the stunning face in front of him, and blindingly pleasedness Victor looks. So beautiful. Beyond beautiful. Beyond any of the words that do and don't work in the two languages he has, or even the spare pocket change of Victor's own. There was no wonder why this face ensnared a universe of souls. Yuri's whole body, soul, fought against the flickering reality trying to turn itself back on in his head. Losing even in the realization of anything other.


His heart returns with something of a stab of motion -- or maybe it's that he returns, and it's been marching to this sudden escalation the whole time? He doesn't know. He doesn't want to know. Doesn't want to look away. Even though he's supposed to be answering. Just agreed he should move, hadn't he? That he should be treating his body better? That he needed to think about skating tomorrow?

Like there was a tomorrow. A more than this second, more than just wanting this.
Wanting to lean in, to kiss the light that shining up from the inside of Victor, getting all over him.

When his mouth says, "You're in the way," but it sounds wrong in his ears.

Too distant. Too soft. Too breathless. Too --

[fivetimechamp]

Yuri doesn't say anything, and doesn't say anything, and doesn't say anything. Only stares at him, wide-eyed, with a flush of pink growing brighter at the tops of his cheeks, like he's forgotten how to speak, or how his mouth even works. Paused in a caught breath, eyes tracking across Victor's face, and Victor's sure he should probably be concerned instead of delighted by this turn of events. Shouldn't he? Wouldn't that be the kind thing to be?

But he's selfish. So selfish. Wants the giddy realization that Yuri is stuck on him, on his face, is looking at him like he was hit by a car named Victor. People have been staring at him for as long as he can remember, since even before he was first the Junior World Champion and then took the senior division by storm, and he's used to it. Used to the lingering glances, the whispers, the blushes. It's useful, and he enjoys it: is well aware of how he looks and how effective it can be, has a lifetime of evidence to support his vanity.

Yuri has never looked at him like this before. Yuri had remained the one person he wanted to affect who stayed unaffected, never seemed to notice anything about him other than his physical presence taking up space somewhere near Yuri, in his way or next to him or always just behind him.

Nothing like this. Like he can't look away. Like he's forgotten how to breathe as much as how to speak, and Victor's smile is probably getting a little too smugly delighted as comprehension sifts in, as Yuri finally finds a few words that don't sound like anything he actually means. "Am I?"

He wants to flirt, wants to push that look, whatever it was Yuri was just thinking, feeling: shove it higher and harder. "Should I move?"

[theglassheart]

He's nodding even as his fingers tighten into Victor's hair and around the back of his neck like they have a mind of their own.

Like he was somewhere in the backseat of them, only catching what they were doing on the replay, even though it's his own hands, and he feels it instantly. The slide of fingertips into silken hair, that gives so little purchase without pressure. It's instantaneous, with the words, and even then, it's like the words and the action only process a second late. The suggestion, questioned as a smooth almost joke, about whether he was in the way, whether he should move.

(Should let go of even more of Yuri.) (So Yuri can lay down.)

The beat of the answer is yes, soft but bone-deep exacting, and nothing about laying down. Everything about moving, but nothing about moving away. Even when Victor's smile -- still perfect, still beautiful, a subtle shift to a different shape, a different facet of his face, that unfiltered warmth flitting sideways and smug, almost but not a smirk -- has turned familiar to the edge of teasing, and toward something, something else.

When in his life had he ever not been in awe of, in love with, this face -- Victor?
How had he ever thought he'd buried it down, or moved beyond it? That it could ever be less than the sun?

His heart is in his ears, harder just because it seems impossible not to try and just as insane as earlier, jumping over a chasm of sudden stillness, tingling tightening across all of his skin, when leaning in feels as devoid of option or existence beyond, just like throwing himself up, up, up into the air earlier. The laughter has faded away, the shower of kisses and accosted mouthing and nosing of his skin, left in raindrops and puddles echoed all around him, to electric quiet steaming in his head on this face.

He wants that, too. He wants everything that Victor is. He always has. Whatever Victor is, has done, managed, winged through with ease, Yuri is only human, and maybe it sets a depth charge in his so needed giddy peace, but he can't not kiss Victor now. Try.

[fivetimechamp]

He's not sure Yuri actually hears him, or understands him, because Yuri nods, but his fingers are sinking deeper into Victor's hair, and he's just pulling Victor closer in a way that looks nothing like wanting him to move.

Get out of the way. Let him lie down.

All of it feeding Victor's smile, and this hungry, sharpening thing in his chest that bites down every time Yuri reaches for him, tugs him closer, gives him this look, this one on his face right now, that feel like it's going to sear Victor's shirt right off his body.

Yuri. Looking at him. With undisguised, naked want.

Leading Victor to realize he's about to get kissed just before it happens, and with anyone else he probably would have recognized it, but he's still not used to this, the idea that Yuri might want to kiss him, that Yuri would bend down to him and pull him in closer and kiss him. It strangles that thing in his chest, all sharp edges and yawning, gaping need. Ruining him on a single kiss, and isn't that ridiculous? Chris would never let him live it down, if Chris ever knew.

But he doesn't care. Wants to be drowned in it, throws himself willingly into this undertow. Pushing up onto his hip to sit up and lean into Yuri, leaning into him. Fingers tightening on the towel around that ice pack on Yuri's hip, and he knows already he's about to forget it entirely, all his best intentions and boundaries.

But how could he be expected to think of anything at all, when Yuri is kissing him? Why would he want to?

[theglassheart]

It's soft. Simple. A prayer. Touching the dawn.
Or any of those things he'd just compare Victor to.

The touch of his lips, like pressing against the skin of a bubble.
Another popping in his head. Because. He's kissing Victor. Again. He is.

It's crazy how he gets here, before reminding himself, he's allowed to touch Victor, has been touching Victor.

That keeps telling him but don't stop everytime he does reach out, does do something. Victor. Tangled up in that rippling, expansive, unaware-absolutely aware thing, that wants to touch all of the face he's been staring at. Like it would be possible to brush his fingertips, and thumb -- and the dangerous, giddy slipped image of, his lips -- across all those pieces of Victor's face that make him more than any piece of irresistible art.

Victor is shifting and Yuri almost whimpers, a tendril of something like sliding through his ribs, impaling his lungs, an impossible almost whine of denied complaint, before he realizes it's not away. Victor's not pulling back. Not untangling Yuri's fingers. That Victor's shift has only moved him higher up and brought him even closer in.

When it's the brush off the oddest thought, spinning out, a leaf or a flower petal, sliding and gliding and spinning slowly on the breeze, on this touch: since when did Victor start listening to him?

[fivetimechamp]

It's so gentle, this kiss, and he thinks he's going to break on it. Everything tightening all at once in a held breath, every nerve and cell and thought and heartbeat bending towards Yuri like light bends towards gravity, like a flower bends towards the sun. When has he ever cared so much about anything? When has he ever cared so little about absolutely everything left in the world, beside this?

Beside Yuri. Finally. Impossibly. In his arms, and –– when his fingers lift from the towel to his neck, cold palm against warm skin, and then slid into his hair at the back of his head –– under his hands. Bending towards him. Like Yuri's the flower, and Victor's the sun.

He doesn't know how it happened. Why, or when, or what it was, that made this different but not different, when Yuri feels the same but everything, everything has changed, and he still wants to know, wants to keep asking until something makes sense, even knowing it doesn't, won't. Can't, possibly. Maybe he'll never know. He's not sure it even matters, not really. All he has to be certain of is his own feelings, and he's known those now as old friends, old enemies. Old certainties, that now have to be questioned, thrown out, re-established, because here they are: Yuri's mouth soft as petals on his. Yuri's fingers in his hair, and his own sliding through Yuri's. The quiet of this room, only interrupted by the pandemonium inside his head, his chest. Real, at last. It must be: fantasy could never hurt this much.

[theglassheart]

This kiss -- fleeting, golden, fragile thing, that it feels like he could place his heart on a scale against -- is nothing like the million stories of kisses he's seen, or heard, or read. The daily simplicity of his parents, or long-time couples in college. It's not like the amorous explosion of old opera's and modern movies.

It's not those. It's something else. Something. He doesn't know. If there's a word for it. Maybe that makes it wrong, and the thought tangles a little in his guts, even when it doesn't stop the rest. This feeling like placing his fingertips on the glass after the first snowfall as a child. The golden burst into darkness when the sun sinks over the Genke, rippling everywhere as it vanishes.

The humbleness of resting his forehead on the ground, to something bigger.
He doesn't know if it's foolish, wrong, only that it feels, felt, impossible to deny.
That he's not sure how to be anything but wrong though.

Like for a second he'd lay his heart, his soul, whatever Victor wanted in his hands if he wanted it. Without his even having to ask. He's not sure that makes him any different from anyone else in the world -- that anyone else couldn't, wouldn't offer that and so much more -- but no one else in the world is here. Except Victor.

Who keeps saying him. Victor wants him.
That Victor's waited for him. No one else. Him.

Yuri pulled away gently, rosy and flustered at himself, at his own actions and thoughts. The space of a breath, only enough to look at Victor this close, without letting go, trying not to break the fluttering feeling, like a bird with trembling wings, and apologize.

[fivetimechamp]

This kiss is so chaste, so careful and fragile, it's like nothing else he's known so far. Maybe the closest thing he's ever come to truly finding that center of Agape: perfect and achingly precious in its purity. In Yuri's.

Yuri, who at almost twenty-four, is still naive and innocent. Yuri, who is touching him like he's the precious thing, the fragile one. It feels like he's uncurling Victor's fingers one by one to gently place that so easily shattered heart of his into Victor's palm, tucking his fingers back around it.

His, to keep safe. His to protect. To adore, to care for.

It's nothing Victor knows if he's ready to do, or capable of doing. His lack of experience with this hasn't changed since that day on the beach, but he's still willing to try. His best. Better than his best. He can be whatever Yuri needs him to be. That's nothing that's changed.

Feeling it like the loss of air when Yuri pulls away, and Victor's hand slips from his hair, to the side of his neck, to his collarbone, to the spot on his chest where he can feel Yuri's heart thumping steady and strong against him palm. (It feels so much more robust than he knows it truly is.)

Leaving him here, feeling bare and sliced open, with his eyes fixed on Yuri's face. Serious brown eyes, under those familiar half-rimmed glasses, his hair gone shaggy and rumpled now that it's dry. Smooth skin, features so familiar he can't remember if he always thought they were this beautiful, or if it's partly because he's associated beauty with Yuri for so long now that he can't tell the difference between his heart and his skating and the way he looks –– but he thinks it's true. That he is beautiful.

Which is probably why it bubbles up to his lips, while his hand slips back along Yuri's chest and throat to run the pad of his thumb over his lip, softly. "красивая."

A pause, and his smile turns a little warmer, fonder. "Beautiful Yuri."

[theglassheart]

Victor's hand drops from his hair and finds it's way to over Yuri's heart, where it's still marching at a faster than anything normal outside of practice or performance or anxious pace. Like it's on a constant quest to find a way through his lungs and his ribs, to lay itself against the palm laying against Yuri's shirt, and his chest, and his skin. Maybe it wasn't too wrong, if Victor is still there, staring at him, like this.

Hands unsettling as simple and easy as it had settled, back up his throat while Yuri swallows, and Victor does that thing Yuri is starting to feel, with a slightly harder beat to that heart of his, has gotten suddenly far more constant. Victor's palm and fingers are slightly curled around the bottom of his face and his thumb is running over Yuri's bottom lip. The soft warmth, pressure, texture, friction.

Making it harder to breathe in realization, even before he's saying something Yuri doesn't catch.
Following it up with English that Yuri isn't certain makes it any easier to breathe either.


When Victor is calling him beautiful and it makes him search Victor's face for why he'd say that. That even when nothing has shifted in those peerless bright eyes or the nearness of Victor, Yuri knows what the world sees when it looks at him. Quiet to point of near silence. Compact. Mousy. All but sexless. He blends with ease into the background of anywhere he goes, and people don't notice him before or after he does.

Nothing like Victor, or Victor's face ... nothing like Victor, right there, right in front of him, who has written the book on that word just by his every breath. Smile. Pose. Wink. The kind of beauty you could only find a match of in the miracle of nature. The kind of hot that made you climb the walls, but didn't give you any relief from the heat. You couldn't miss Victor even if you were blind, and no one was or ever had be. Not to or for Victor.



Yuri's smile falters, a little, or maybe it just shifts to a faintly awkwardly little press.

He doesn't know why for all of that, but it doesn't change that he doesn't want to look or pull away.
(That maybe somewhere so far deep down it's by his throbbing ankles, he almost does want to believe that Victor believes it.)

[fivetimechamp]

Yuri's looking at him like he's waiting for the punchline to the joke Victor just started, mouth pressing, eyes unbelieving. Like Victor might be lying. Like Victor might have said that without thinking it's true, for some incomprehensible reason clear only to Yuri, and Yuri's too-critical opinion of himself. "You don't think so?"

Palm slipping to the back of his head, thumb warm along his jaw, while Victor leans to nudge their foreheads together with a smile that's small but no less certain for it. "I do."

Has for so long he can't remember when he didn't, or if he didn't. He can't remember what his opinion of Yuri was from before the banquet, but he thinks he had thought it was a shame that Yuri's skating didn't match the potential that was obviously there, the few seconds of perfection that remained unmuddled even after his falls, his mistakes.

But it doesn't matter what he thought before –– there is only after and how it changed everything. "You've made me a fool."

Everyone he knows, or who knows him –– even the ones who figured him a fool well before any of this ever happened –– would agree with that. Dropping his career, leaving his home, flying to Japan without a single glance back over his shoulder: foolish. Thinking he could be a coach, and coax everything out of Yuri that he can see even just as a shadow of itself: even more so, possibly.

The way he has to lean to kiss the corner of Yuri's mouth, his cheek, his jaw, his ear, his neck: has there ever been such a fool as him who's lived? "Your eyes, and your mouth, and your hands ..."

Traced in light kisses across his skin. "The way you make music when you skate."

Like tonight, when it seemed like that waterfall of piano notes, glissades flooding up and down, came not from the speakers, but from Yuri himself, telling his story, his love story, the story of him and the ice and how he discovered love. The perfect rhythm of poetry. The exquisite precision of a ballerina en pointe. The soaring triumph of a soprano's aria: "Beautiful."

Pulling back enough to press a kiss to his mouth, before looking at him with this feeling, this mix of pride and helpless adoration all jumbled together, knotting and clearing and growing in his chest. "Didn't I say you seduced me?"

[theglassheart]

Victor doesn't back away and he doesn't take his word back. Not either of them, in English or Russian. Not that he's entirely certain it's the same, just that it's not taken back either. It's not the first phrases of Russian to get swallowed in this room, into silence or sound or something wholly more ... physical. Especially not when Yuri can feels his cheeks heating for Victor correcting his, apparently, incredibly obvious knowledge to the contrary.

When his forehead settles against Yuri's and his eyes are even closer, making Yuri's heart ache fiercely against the bonds keeping it there in his chest only. He can't imagine that anything could make Victor into a fool -- but that's a lie as much as it is the truth, when dozens of moments slide through, of Victor in Japan, nowhere near the ice, a barrage of faces, antics, whines, wheedling, laughing, being sillier than a child -- none of it really sticking, because Victor hasn't stopped talking.

Has started kissing his face, his skin, making Yuri shiver and his fingers tighten, while he starts intoning a list.

Like helping Yuri to know he had body parts was going to help. Even though the whole part where his skin was giving a soft swell of surprised warmth every place his lips landed, isn't hurting the shorting out between his ability to form those thoughts. The impossibility to not list toward each touch. He can guess well enough the point of the list, but he's not sure it helps him to understand at all.

Not certain there's a way to translate words in clear English,
or an idea that translates just as fine in either of his,
to anything that makes sense in his brain.

That Victor thinks his skating is beautiful on the ice is something he'd come to grudgingly accept, then recognize, then almost hunger for the approval and celebratory sight of. He knows. It's the only reason this whole year even happened. That Victor saw all of this in him, still there. Somehow. That he came and made it flourish into something so much more.

But that Victor thinks that about him. Him. Just him. Sitting here. That seems ludicrous, even when it's splintering on the lips against his skin. Falling apart, with all denial and logic, when Victor is kissing his lips, again, and his whole body presses toward that on an instinct it can't be possible to have ingrained so soon, can it?

"Yes," Yuri says, quietly, like it's a recitation that he had heard, memorized. Both times. Whether he believed it or not, he'd never have forgotten it. It'd gotten looped into his dreams, and Eros the first time already, and if he hadn't been busy with so much else last night, it probably would have been there, too. He couldn't even imagine what his head might do with all of this now.

[fivetimechamp]

"Then you should be more trusting of me."

Teasing, while his fingers slip along Yuri's skin and into his hair and he can savor the way it slides between his thumb and the knuckle of his forefinger. Soft, silky. A little coarser than his own.

Teasing because he knows Yuri trusts him, even if Yuri doesn't always believe him. "How could you not believe me? Have I ever lied to you?"

Not knowingly. Not ever about anything big. Not ever about anything that meant something. Even keeping this to himself wasn't really a lie: his offers had been rejected, but they didn't vanish from existence simply because Yuri decided he didn't want them. Maybe the closest he's ever come to a lie being what he said in the garage today, and even that was a half-truth: if Yuri had failed, it would have been his failure as a coach. Yuri has all the tools he needs to succeed, it's Victor's job to make sure he can use them, to make sure he's in a good enough place, to make sure he's whole and happy and healthy and ready.

(But he never would have resigned. Not now. Not when they're so close. He said he'd help Yuri win the Grand Prix Final, and he meant it.)

He's still fun to tease, though, like this, and also in the way Victor leans closer, barely a breath away from kissing him again, with a sly smile and eyes sparkling even under their heavy lashes, under the fringe of his bangs that's covering half his vision with a silvery mist. "Oh, I'm hurt."

[theglassheart]

"No, you aren't." It's out of his mouth, again, before he's thought it out. A habit of response, that would sound more exasperated if he could breathe in something more than the soft breath from Victor's own words on his lips. It makes his chest tighten and everything inside of it churn, even when his brain doesn't need to overthink it to know that answer.

Victor isn't hurt. Victor is laughing at him. Teasing him. Again. One of the three most familiar faces Victor has. The first being the face he makes while critiquing every bit of skating Yuri does of his programs. The second, that had only really returned with his public coaching debut and his suits Yuri had never even seen the like of, swam between a sort of -- distant?-- cordiality and an absolute glow of perfect showmanship with anyone who saw him, like they'd always been the best of friends.

This was the one he'd gotten used to even before the second came. The laughing one. The teasing one. The one that wanted Yuri, or anyone it was settled on -- but Yuri, by inundation and proximity, most -- to come play with him. To be in love with and delighted by whatever new thing had stolen his heart, his focus, his attention.

Most of the time is was exasperating.

Except somewhere, somewhen, maybe in the early summer he realized as much as it made him roll his eyes -- with the infinite patient, or universal pleas, for when it would end, whether it was exuberant shouting and being drug along like Victor was the tide, or pouting and childish whining -- he'd all but started smiling at it, too. Started thinking of it less as insane and more as just a thing Victor did, part of who he was.

Yuri thinks it's a feat of will (the kind that would blow away in the breeze if Victor so much as did lean in and kiss him again; because as much as he doesn't know how to believe, he wants ... so much. This. Victor. To believe it. Even for just a second.) that he manages to keep his gaze up and add on like he hadn't stopped. "And you're in the way from laying down."

[fivetimechamp]

"Ah!"

Mouth dropping open in theatrical hurt, hand retreating from Yuri's hair to his own chest, like he's been struck, and he gives Yuri a betrayed look. "When did you get so cool?"

It's all part of the game, of course: Yuri has no more wounded him than he thinks Yuri really wants him to move away, but it's the accepted line, the next step in this little dance, this thing that's hovering right on the smoking line between game and inferno.

He could push it over. Not tip, or nudge, or ease: push. Lean into Yuri and burn those words right out of his mouth, that coolness, that disaffected patronizing affection like Victor is just a toddler tugging at his sleeve for attention. He could flip this table over and set it on fire, in a manner of seconds.

If he wanted to, he could. But there's something to be said for keeping the game going. "If you really want me out of the way ..."

Accompanied by a heavy, heartfelt sigh, as he starts shifting to give Yuri room. "Who am I to say no?"