Author's Note: This story is a collaboration between me and Enigmatic Insignia.

~enigmaticinsignia

Despite retiring from the world of figure skating, Yuuri Katsuki found that he still couldn't get enough of the rink. Luckily for him, his fiancé Viktor had continued his career as a skating coach, which in turn allowed Yuuri plenty of opportunities to get back on the ice. Viktor's latest student, Otabek Altin, whom they had each competed against on more than one occasion, was more than happy to share the ice when Yuuri needed to 'get his fix', as he put it; as if it were some kind of a drug addiction. It was.

Looking out over the crowd from his spot above the bleachers, Yuuri breathed in the cold air and let out a misty breath with satisfaction. Normally on a late afternoon, the ice would be empty and Otabek would be practicing his routine, but today was the rink's free skate day and in turn one of the days that Viktor and Otabek used for his exercise regimen. No doubt, they were out jogging or doing various stretches to keep Otabek limber and in top form, thereby leaving Yuuri in the company of the couple dozen strangers frequenting a public skate on a Saturday Afternoon in Detroit.

With his skates draped over his shoulder and his hands in his pockets, Yuuri further descended the staircase leading down to the ice. He smiled softly to himself at the picture ahead of him, looking much like any other amateur skater who'd come for a few laps. The shouts of children and adults alike echoed through the space as the patrons skated around and around the outer edge of the ice. In the midst of the noise and familiar, staggered scratches of blades clashing with the surface, there was no reason for Yuuri to focus on one particular little girl marching on the other side of the rink.

"Dyadya Yura! Dyadya Yura!" a young girl's voice, which was, logically enough, attached to a young girl, called over from her perch at the wall. With a quick push and a stomp forward, she marched clumsily on her skates over to a blonde boy in a partial ponytail and faded snow-leopard print hoodie.

Rather than let her move too far away from the wall, Yuri weaved through the crowd, towards her. He slowed himself with a bend and pivot to one knee until he was in reach. "Yes. I exist. What the hell's it matter?"

At the same instance as he'd uttered the word hell, a woman hardly a few years older than Yuri leaned over the railing. "Yura! Language" Her eyes narrowed with the instinctive flash of an upcoming lecture. She wrapped an arm around the older child standing at her side—a preteen boy in headphones and a purple beanie who was staring at his phone in disinterest.

The little girl clung to Yuri's leg, burrowing her face behind him. He readjusted his weight distribution without calling attention to the disruption to his glide courtesy of a giddy child in a fluffy, white Hello Kitty hat weighting down his left leg. Yuri pivoted partway, turning so that he was now skating backwards and facing the increasingly offended woman through his own apathetic stare. "What? I used English."

The woman cupped a hand to the side of her mouth, the closest she could get to mimicking a megaphone in public. "I mean, watch your mouth!"

"Then give me a blin mirror!" he shouted back, at least partially censoring himself, albeit with all the subtlety of an iceberg in the Sahara, by switching the intended curse word with the similar-sounding word for a crepe.

The little girl pushed off of Yuri's leg with surprise. She skidded back across the ice, her eyes and mouth agape with astonishment. "Pancakes can be mirrors? How? Can they be strawed-berries pancakes?"

Rather than let her drift in the sea of random recreational skaters, Yuri slowed his glide, back to the young girls' side with an unamused."No. Arms up, don't watch the ice." He reached over her shoulder to physically adjust her stance. "Here. Don't move if you're not falling. Just feet. Only feet."

Following his instructions at least technically, the little girl tilted her head back, gazing straight up at Yuri through glimmers of amusement. "But pancakes aren't shiny!"

As they again passed the spot at the side of the rink where the rest of their group was standing by, the girl's mother raised both of her hands and clapped as loudly as possible. "Yay, Ninochka! That's perfect! All the gold stars!"

The louder she got, the more the boy at her side obscured his face behind his phone before, eventually, marching away from the bleachers entirely. "Whatever. I've got to pee."

It wasn't until Yuri and the girl had already skated past them that the woman fully registered what the boy had said. She blinked to attention and reached for his shoulder. "You, Misha, wait! Or, not." Her flailing did nothing. By then, the boy was already beyond reach, his fingers still clacking away as he strode away. The woman cupped both hands over her mouth and raised her voice all the more in exasperation. "Watch out for strangers!"

A couple of glides later, at the moment just before Yuri could have found himself lost in the shuffle of the doldrums that were the outer edge of a crowded skating rink, the little girl tilted back even further. Her feet fell back, placing herself nearly in parallel with Yuri's legs, so she could look at him directly from below with the sort of sugary sweetness that would melt the hearts of many an adult. "Dyadya Yura?"

Yuri, naturally, didn't seem affected at all. "No."

"But I didn't ask anything! Meanie!" she pouted.

"Yeah. Your point?"

"Can you really do a twirly jump? Mamachka said you do the whirly birds."

While speaking English in daily conversation hadn't been that much of a stretch, Yuri was considerably less fluent in little girl. All he could do was guess what the hell that was supposed to mean. "What, an axel?"

The girl, meanwhile, had no idea what that meant, and whined back under the assumption it was something else. "No, the spinny jumps! Do a spinny jump!"

With the other child now gone, but presumably not off in a ditch somewhere, the girls' mother opened the gate to join them. She shook her head back, her voice softening in anticipation of the blowback that always came from telling a kid no. "Oh, Ninochka, not here, it's not safe. There're too many people." At the tail end of this sentence, she looked away from her daughter, back up to Yuri, creases of a frown and pity invading her expression in a silent apology.

The girl either didn't pick up on this or hadn't cared to listen in favor of pleading more loudly. "Pretty please!"

It was bad enough, the woman thought, that her Ninochka had insisted on going skating with "Uncle Yura" in the first place. The types of memories it called to the forefront were bad enough for her, and she'd had so little contact with what had happened in the aftermath. If it was truly as hard for Yuri to be here as she imagined, her daughter might as well have been throwing a man covered in open wounds into a salt mine.

The woman held her hands at the ready to cover her daughter's ears, anticipating another shout, a glare—furious, indignant retaliation. Instead, Yuri simply nudged the girl forward into her mother's arms, pivoted, and answered into the open air. "Not at the center."

Yuri never stopped to see the flush of concern it brought to the woman, the color siphoned straight out of her. "You really don't have to."

"What, you want her to think you're a liar? Give her three years, she'll know on her own!" Yuri raised his chin and his voice, speaking up so his words would still carry behind him while he glided to interior of the rink. "Eyes up, Ninochka. You fall on baby steps, I'll break what you don't."

"Yura! Come back, it's ok, you really don't have to!" she tried to yell, not that it did anything. No matter how many times she shouted "Yura!" at his back, it was just another voice in an overcrowded free skate.

The sheer sound of other people rushing in circles by assured Yuri no one else was in the way. Preliminaries, Grand Prix, back in Moscow, or St. Petersburg, or in the middle of nowhere on another continent, any ice on stable ground could work the same. It always had been. The faint pop radio they had on in the background, some boy band nonsense he'd never heard in his life, was overtaken by the sheer volume of memories he'd never made.

"Feh. Like I can't. Like I literally f—king couldn't," he muttered under his breath. Then, he opened his eyes to a world only inside his head.

No matter how long it took him to get back here, or what idiots who couldn't even tumble right when they fell cluttered the surface, that call to move forward was the deepest, most intense seduction Yuri had ever known. Most of the time, it was all he could do to pretend he'd stopped noticing. Now, in this moment, he let it pull him, if only to make a small child shut up. Engrossed in that call, lost amongst the faces of strangers, Yuri had no way of spotting Yuuri Katsuki sitting on the bleachers not more than twenty feet away.

Yuuri's head dangled down, focused, at least momentarily, on the simple act of untying and removing his shoes. He set the first discarded sneaker at his side, his hand reaching for his skate to replace it, only to be distracted from a gasp in the crowd.

"Mamachka, mamachka, look! He can fly!" A young girl in a white cat-eared hat pointed her matching mittens towards center ice. Softly, beneath him, a few other voices had gasped in awe or shock.

Curious as to what, exactly, the crowd could be observing, Yuuri stood to face the ice. His eyes drifted naturally upwards to the young man skating in the center. As the figure moved along the ice, Yuuri could tell that he was completely focused and absorbed in his actions. It was the look in his eyes—a look that Yuuri had seen countless times. It was the look every dedicated skater had when they practiced a routine or performed for the crowd.

At first, he had started with a lower difficulty combination, moving from a double axel into a toe loop with what Yuuri could only peg as a surreal amount of grace amidst the previously clamoring, chattering crowd that had dulled their roars to mere whispers. Then, as he circled back through a brief serpentine to their starting point, it seemed the figure had found a rhythm, albeit it one that bore no resemblance to the music crackling in the background. Hardly a minute later, he had pulled from a spin, into a combination of a slightly-underrated attempt at a quadruple lutz, to a surprisingly stable triple salchow and onwards. The movements shook at points, over-rotated or under-rotated, but the strain was masked at least in part by the pure passion behind it.

Transfixed by the sheer brazenness it took to try this in such a cluttered space, Yuuri drew closer, directly up to the ledge of the rink. If he didn't know any better he would have guessed it was Yuri Plisetsky, but no one had heard from him in years, not since he was injured days after placing first in the Rostelecom Cup. Nonetheless, the grace of each movement was just so much like Yuri's style, it plagued Yuuri with its familiarity, like a ghost amongst the living.

Reaching into his pocket, Yuuri grabbed his phone and quickly began to take a video. If anyone could identify who this kid was, it was Viktor. While it was clear that the skater was a bit rusty, if the lack of a coach in sight was indeed indicative of him guiding himself through this makeshift routine, he at the very least had raw, natural talent.

Still in awe of what was happening in front of her, the young girl raised her arms, waving them up and down as if she was trying to imitate the figure at the center. "Do a whirly bird! A whirly bird!" In the girl's excited flailing, she slipped off the blade. Her knees buckled, and she started to topple forward.

"Ninochka, careful!" the girl's mother scrambled to wrap her arms around her in an attempt to block her fall, only to end up stumbling, too.

At the same time, the figure at the center launched out of the sit spin he had fallen into, interrupting the flow in favor of rushing to the girl's aid. "At least fall sideways, Nino-durochka!" he snapped.

While Yuuri wasn't fluent in the language by any means, he knew enough Russian to realize what the skater had said. He had, in essence, exchanged the usual ending you'd use to affectionally address a little girl named Nina and had, in addition, called her little and stupid.

"Don't call a child durochka!" the girl's mother argued back, which, unsurprisingly if Yuuri's instincts were right, didn't have an impact on the boy at all, who simply rolled his eyes to the scolding.

"She says what she sees, so will I."

Ending the video recording, Yuuri put his phone away before walking around the edge of the rink. The closer he drew to the small family group, the more he was convinced that the resemblance just couldn't be a coincidence.

Stopping at the gate, Yuuri placed a hand on the rail and the other to the side of his mouth and called at the top of his lungs. "Yuri Plisetsky!"

The attention of a clumsy child had been distraction enough that, it wasn't until that exact moment that he heard his name called from the sidelines that Yuri Plisetsky finally spotted Yuuri Katsuki. For a single, flashing moment, their eyes locked. Then, he turned away.

Nina's mother, however, had flipped her head over her shoulder the instant that Yuuri called out Yuri's name. "Ой, uh, hello?" She blinked a few times, seemingly stunned that someone was there in the first place. "Do you know him? Wait, no, that's dumb. You said his name, of course you know him, then…"

Suddenly noticing the woman he had up to then disregarded, Yuuri turned his attention toward her instead. He nodded back at her enthusiastically. "Yes! We skated together a few years ago but I haven't seen or heard from him since."

Yuri, despite having seen Yuuri standing at the edge of the rink next to someone that he was obviously acquainted with, continued to ignore his presence. Instead, he stared at the many, etched lines of the blades that had passed over the rink today, and muttered under his breath. "Yetitskaya sila."

As if it was a summoning spell for a tiny child to interrupt what he meant to be dwelling on, Nina chirped up again. "You know what? I'm gonna be a bird, too. I'm a pen-wing!" She raised both of her arms overhead in victory—or at least, she had tried to, before Yuri pushed them back down.

"Good. Penguins don't fly."

"No! Pen-wings have wings! Wings fly! Why can't they fly?"

"Because they're lazy and nature hates their useless, dumb flipper arms. You're a penguin, now. Go."

In the same second that Yuri had bent over to nudge Nina through a cleared path away from the center, Yuri was, by natural extension, facing directly towards Nina's mother. She, having noticed this, waved an arm over her head to flag his attention. "Yura! This way! Don't you want to say hi to your friend?"

Without a second's worth of hesitation, he answered, the only way he honestly could have—by snapping. "Nyet!"

Frowning, Yuuri released a small sigh. After all these years, Yuri Plisetsky had finally resurfaced, but he clearly wanted nothing to do with him.

Katya's body language curled with the inevitable, oncoming apology. "I'm sorry, whatev—"

Whatever the woman had been about to say, it was abruptly cut off by Yuri slamming his foot, blade and all, into the guard wall. He reached over the side of the ledge, stabilizing himself with the bottoms of his palms so he could press himself against the wall and straight into Yuuri's face.

Subconsciously taking a step back in a defensive gesture, Yuuri held Yuri's gaze, in spite of that meaning he was meeting a glare that could have turned Medusa to stone right back while Yuri snapped at him. "Why the literal f—k are you still standing here? Go! Away! If I suggest, to the puddle rink in hell!"

For a moment, Yuuri hesitated, unsure what he could say, if anything. Yuri wasn't someone that you talked to like a long-lost friend. He was a raging ball of fire who burned everything he touched. Sometimes he raged out of control and other times, he burned dim. Yuuri had a feeling that he was only raging now to hide how dim his flame had become over the last few years. No one really knew why Yuri had stopped competing, but Yuuri suspected that it wasn't anything good.

When Yuuri refused to move or speak, lost in thought, it only gave Yuri the fuel to snap at him more. "Let me put this so even your empty pig brain can understand. Whatever spy detective crap you paid off to stalk me out of some sanctimonious bullshit need to feel like a "good guy", you should've spent looking for your balls!"

The sheer volume and contents of the yell made Nina's mother move aside, and press both of her hands over Nina's ears. "Ninochka, let's go get ice cream and your brother. Uncle Yura has a… a, something to talk about" She slid her grip further down to her hold her daughter by the arm and guide Nina towards the next exit door.

Nina turned up the wattage on her pouting from mild disappointment over penguins to the verge of full on sobbing. "Why? I wanna stay."

"He needs his privacy, Ninochka. We need to go."

"But why?"

Ignoring the commotion of the little girl being lead out to the mats, at the end of it all, the one thing Yuuri could think of to say to the living mystery that had appeared before his eyes was one, simple truth. "Viktor's been worried about you."

There was no telling how Yuri would react to the statement, but it was true. Viktor did worry about Yuri and what had happened to the young protégé. Over the years, he and Yuuri had both tried reaching out to Yuri via phone, letters or email – they'd never received any replies. Even their wedding invitation had been sent back, but Yuuri realized now that it was likely that they had a very old, no longer valid address for Yuri, considering he was in Detroit, Michigan instead of St. Petersburg.

Yuri's foot dropped, planted stagnantly behind the rest of him. For a brief reprieve of a second, he silenced, too. Then, Yuri shook his head, twitching the thought away.

"Viktor. Feh," His eyes shifted aside, briefly, structuring the thought and also, in implication, conveying that he didn't think Yuuri was even worth watching, anymore. "It's all I remember from you. Woof woof woof, Viktor, Viktor, Viktor. Parading like you're him when all you are's his obedient little bitch."

Lacking even the most basic sense of understanding for the context that they were currently in, Yuri stretched up, planting one of his knees directly on top of the ledge between the bleachers and the rink. He swung his other leg there as well, so that he was now crouching atop the barrier. He yanked Yuuri forward by the collar of his jacket, towards himself. It was unexpected enough that Yuuri ended up falling straight into it, off balance and open for the verbal onslaught. In a sense, if Yuri was a ball of fire waiting to rage, then, against his will, Yuuri had just neatly packaged himself as kindling.

"What did you think this would do, huh, asshole? Seeing me? That I'd be another fake mark of success to fetch for precious master Viktor? 'Look at me, Vik-chan, I found the poor fairy for you after I finished licking your shoe. Vik-chan, I'll put my head up your ass for you if you're into that. I can fit, I promise. I don't even need to take out my spine to fit the rest of me, too, I never had one'!" Yuri shouted increasingly louder, his fury and overblown mockery building to a crescendo. He shoved Yuuri backwards by his jacket, deeper into the area behind the rink, and vaulted the rest of the way over the rail, landing cleanly on the foam mats. With the addition of Yuri's skates to his height, they were almost exactly at eye level. "Whatever you think Viktor thinks is nothing. What, in that air pocket where your head would be if it wasn't up his ass, would you get from standing here, wasting your time with my spit in your face? That pat on the head from him? Relief? To watch and think, 'yeah, sure, I'm a talking doormat with a food fetish, but, at least I'm not that guy?'"

At first, Yuuri let Yuri pour his heart out onto the rink's padded floor. It seemed to him that with no other outlet or target, Yuri was unleashing what was likely years of pent up fury, anger, frustration and sorrow on the first target he could find. The thing was, Yuuri was far from the pushover he'd once been. He didn't blink, or quiver, or show any signs of cracking—a fact which seemed to only make Yuri all the more venomous.

Yuri poked at the center of Yuuri's head and jabbed there repeatedly, each one longer than the last, as if marking the spot he intended to drill into Yuuri's skull. "As if gold and titles change souls, loser! Even now, you want to shrink, tail between your legs, put the cow in coward. You doubt, and snivel, because even with your peanut pig brain, you know; no title or record or codependent relationship can make you alone anything but the pathetic, anxious sentient sack of shit you were. That was my medal, little bitch!"

There it was, thought Yuuri, the moment it slipped out—the reason why he was the target.

As rival skaters, there had always been the unspoken challenges between Yuuri and Yuri; who would get Viktor as their coach, who would get the better routine, who would win the Grand Prix. Yuuri had always viewed the rivalry as healthy, as a way for them both to reach for higher goals and to push themselves farther. It seemed now that perhaps Yuri hadn't felt the same, or at least, didn't anymore. If Yuri had competed in the Grand Prix Finals as originally planned, there was no doubt in Yuuri's mind that Yuri would have given him a run for his money—but the show down they had been building up to had never happened, and it seemed that the other Yuri, the little Russian Punk, was clearly hung up on the rematch that had never been.

Once he'd fallen to the realizations of what he had said, Yuri tried to override his own last words, snapping over himself. "Go choke on his d—k. Da yebal ya!" Literally speaking, he'd said that he didn't care. Literally, the translation was closer to saying that he fucked something.

Lost in a huff, Yuri took a step past Yuuri and reached down, untying the laces of the crummy, overused skates with the rink's rental number's sticker peeling off the back. Dropping his gaze to Yuri's feet, Yuuri couldn't help but notice the crackled leather and fading logo, identical to every other pair still on the ice. That, more than anything Yuri could have said or screamed or spit at him, made it evident that whatever had happened to the Russian punk these last few years, it had left him for the worse.

There were things that Yuuri wanted to say in defense of himself and of Viktor, but he knew that it was useless to. Yuri hadn't said those things to start an argument, he'd said them to push Yuuri away. Arguing now would only give him what he was looking for. Instead, if only for the sake of what he thought Viktor would want him to do, Yuuri kept on a brave face and offered something else.

"We come here almost every day, Viktor and I. Usually we have the rink to ourselves for training, but there are off days, of course." Turning to look out at the ice, Yuuri let his words drift between them. "I didn't come here looking for you, Yuri. I can here to skate in circles and enjoy the ice, just like you and your family. This was a chance encounter, but in the future, it doesn't have to be." Yuuri took a few steps forward, away from the rink. He turned his head over his shoulder for one last look back at someone who, moments ago, he might have mistakenly identified as a former friend. "Just think about it. For Viktor."

"Thanks for warning me, asshole. Of course it's to yourselves. Anyone else spots you. You'd be arrested for exposure," Yuri interjected without a second thought, or, for that matter, likely also without a first.

As Yuri walked away in nothing but his socks and irritation, he added one last snap, a symbolic match to the bridge Yuuri had offered to rebuild. "I'll think about my foot in your face." Then, to ensure he had the last word, Yuri stomped away.

With his bag of skates at his side, still sealed, Yuuri trudged back towards the front entrance. The urge to glide and enjoy the frost was gone. Now, Yuuri just wanted to have his fiancé hold him close and tell him how much he loved him. Still, it wasn't over yet. For Viktor's sake, there was something else Yuuri at least had to try.

At the door, Yuuri caught sight of the woman he'd briefly spoken to before the verbal onslaught, and the little girl Yuri had been skating with, just a few paces from the concession stand. The little girl was holding an ice cream, her meltdown having been prevented with the newfound addition of rainbow sprinkles, while her mother was tapping away anxiously at her cell phone.

Stopping a few feet from the mother-daughter pair, Yuuri offered a small smile and an extended hand in greeting to them both. "I apologize for not introducing myself before, I'm Yuuri Katsuki. I used to train and skate with Yuri."

The woman raised her head to him with a soft, reassuring smile that had clearly already been there moments ago. The one sign of her surprise was the sudden flash of recognition in her eyes. "A, so, that was you!" She snapped her fingers in realization, only to lower the hand back to her pocket in a nervous fidget. Her smile faltered accordingly, the tug of an apology pulling at her. "He's mentioned you, before. Though. Not on purpose, exactly. He, uh, yelled at you on his phone a lot, as I recall. Are you alright? He's. Well. I'm sure you know how, intense, he tends to be… My name's Katya Yolkin. Yuri's my cousin. "

Having, at this point, finally noticed the hand being extended to her, Katya reached out to take it. She shook it slowly, bracing to utter a sorry that never formed due to another interruption. The little girl at Katya's side raised her hand and her slightly ice-cream-coated chin to wave and smile at him. "Hi, Yuri! I'm Nina! I'm four! I skated, too!"

Katya looked back from Yuuri down to her daughter, her own smile softening from apologetic to calming. "And you did a good job, too, Ninochka. Now, use your napkin and shake his hand."

"Why not hugs? Does he like hugs?"

"Why don't you ask him?"

Nina bobbed upright, her head tilting back to look from her mom back over to Yuuri. She pushed her hat away from her face, so she could stare at him away from the tufts of white fur. "Do you like hugs?"

Feeling that there was essentially no other answer worth giving, Yuuri couldn't help but agree. "Of course. I love hugs."

Satisfied, Nina flung out her left arm. She snuggled into Yuuri with the hand that wasn't holding her ice cream. Her hand print left a small, white smudge on the back of his jacket, not that she'd noticed. She was too busy grinning proudly at her job well done. "You're welcome!"

With the hugs and hellos properly attended to, Nina returned to her ice cream, and Yuuri to his wallet. He pulled out a business card from the back pocket and offered it to Kayta. "I know he probably won't want it, but just in case he'd reach out."

For a moment, Katya hesitated, letting her finger linger against the edge of Yuuri's card. She looked down, set the card away, and took out one of her own, polite if doubtful. "Well. To be honest. I'm not sure, if he'll be up to talking to you, or want to. But, whatever questions you or your fiancee have, I could try to answer. You just have to promise me it's in confidence. Friend of a friend, to friend of a friend, nothing public. Here, it's my number."

Honestly surprised, this time in the pleasant sense of it, Yuuri smiled down at ivory-and-saphire—colored, embellished, lacy business card for the apparent owner of something called "Something Blue Custom Accessories", one Yekaterina Yolkin. Already, he could feel the relief it might bring to Viktor to have this emanating off the card

"I have to warn you, my fiancé is going to be very happy to hear that I found Yuri, he's been pretty worried about him since he disappeared. So please, don't be surprised if he calls you immediately."

With more hesitance than she had planned to show, Katya's smile broadened and faltered all at once, already laughing from doubt. "Well, that makes two of us to worry, then, I suppose." At the end of their pleasantries, Katya offered Yuuri a smile and a wave in parting. Again, it was a soft, restrained expression, the sort that never traveled up to the person's eyes, but it was there in intention if not in reality. "Have a good evening, Yuuri. I'll be sure to charge my phone."

Meanwhile, back at the rink, the few recreational skaters turned accidental witnesses who had been observing from a distance still kept a curious eye on Yuri until he was obscured by the bleachers. Yuri passed by another wall in the oval, his strides rushed and elongated, determined to leave without running into Yuuri again.

During this very different but equally problematic form of a walk of shame, Yuri came to a stop when he noticed someone in the stands. The until-then-missing Misha hadn't left for as long as originally thought. He held his phone in front of his face, typing something. Yuri turned from his original spot to march up the bleachers, up towards and then directly behind him. On the screen, Yuri could spot the tell-tale thumbnail of a video file, implanted in an in-progress tweet for Misha's Twitter.

Misha didn't lift his head when he heard Yuri approaching. He spoke towards the phone, though he'd meant it towards Yuri if the judgmental befuddlement on his part was any indication. "Holy shit, dude. What was that?"

"Ten wasted minutes of my life."

Yuri reached over Misha's shoulder, grabbed the cell phone from his hand, and strode effortlessly backwards to the top of the bleachers with the phone held as far overhead as he could, preventing Misha from reaching it while he deleted the draft off Misha's Twitter.

"Hey, wait, that's my phone—" Misha snapped to attention with the phone gone. He tried to flail a hand towards it, but he only hit the air. "What the hell are you doing?" He struggled to reach up, yet, thanks to Yuri's creative stretching, Misha was left only with flails and shouting while Yuri deleted the day's photos.

"Preventing your future as a paparazzo. Record me, again, and wish you were watching your own funeral."

"What does that mean, you old brat?"

With the last picture trashed, Yuri chucked the phone over his shoulder. The phone bounced off the wall, then fell with a thud onto the foam mats. "Shut your damn mouth or I'll hot glue your lips closed for you."

For a second, Misha froze in disbelief. Then, with the sort of panic one could imagine if it had literally been his own heart languishing on the mats, Misha raced to retrieve it, leaving Yuri to descend the steps.

Yuri stepped along the intended seats of the bleachers, as if a rock skipping across a pond. He watched over the unsteady drifting and gliding of the sort of amateurs who'd come try ice skating of all things on an early August afternoon. Every time he meant to turn away, he didn't. Maybe, no matter where he was or what he was supposed to be doing, he never could.

Even from here, he could still feel the ice calling back for him.