This is just an idea I've had floating around in my mind for a while. It turned out a little drabble-ish, but I think I got the point across that I wanted to. (I'm sure everyone knows this by now, but—in fandom anyway—the Japanese's Yuuri is spelled with two u's, the Russian's with just one: Yuri.)

Splitting Hairs

Victor leaned back in his seat at the kitchen table, watching the sun's slow rise through the tall windows in his living room. His apartment was mostly open, something he was particularly appreciative of on calm mornings like this one. After putting together his first coffee of the day, he'd turned all the lights off and retreated to this spot, relaxing to watch the dawn light up the room naturally.

He swallowed and exhaled contentedly. Sights like this one was one of his favorite things about being a morning person. There was only one thing that could make this scene even more beautiful…

And there he was. Victor's smile softened impossibly further as Yuuri stumbled in sleepily from the bedroom. His fiancé was not a morning person, but they'd gradually begun picking up habits from each other.

"I can't believe you still get up this early on your days off," he commented softly, taking a seat beside him. Yuuri's Russian was still stilted and strongly accented and, at the moment, rough with sleep, but he preferred to speak it over anything else, even in their own home. It was how he'd really perfected his English back in Detroit, even when the only other people he regularly socialized with—Phichit and Celestino—weren't native speakers either.

Victor just chuckled softly and rose silently from his seat. He'd only taken a few sips of the first coffee—which he'd (optimistically) made more to Yuuri's preferences than his own—and now he slid the cup over to him, pressed a soft kiss to his lover's temple, and went to make himself a second cup.

It wasn't as if they didn't keep up with their training at all during the off-season. But their morning jogs could be started a lot later when they didn't have to fit in a full day of conditioning or choreographing or—finally—skating through their programs over and over and over… But the off-season would be coming to an end in another few weeks and a true day off would be much harder to find.

"Have you given any thought to what you want your theme to be this year?" he asked, raising his voice just enough so that it would carry across the room, maintaining the atmosphere.

Yuuri hummed noncommittally. "I have…" he answered, though he didn't sound so sure.

Victor glanced at him as he made his way back over, silently urging him on. "I want to follow up last season with the next step… I want it to be about us. But… after Eros, I guess I just worry that it would be too similar. No offense to Chris, but I don't want to be that skater whose performances are all just variations of each other, clinging on to the one gimmick that made me successful."

Victor took a moment to collect his thoughts before answering. "With the right confidence boost, you would have been successful no matter what your routine was about. But I don't think you'll have too much trouble mixing it up. Love is so… multi-faceted."

Yuuri smiled softly. There was no rush yet. He still had plenty of time before he'd need to announce his theme for the season. Hopefully before then he would be able to come up with something a little catchier than On My Love, Part II. He stole another glance at his fiancé beside him, still sunk into his contemplative haze. He considered asking after his plans for the season… but decided against it. Victor had always specialized in surprises—what with his ability to change his style from theme to theme—and Yuuri found he didn't want too much of a sneak peek. He just hoped it wasn't anything too cliché like The Comeback.

…

To Victor, there was nothing more soothing than the familiar scrape of blades on ice. He tried to let that lull him back into the relaxed state he'd been in when he and Yuuri had first walked into the rink. But that was made a little more difficult by the extra voice barking orders at the barrier today.

Victor had known Lilia Baranovskaya for a long time. She and Yakov had still been married when Victor had first started working under his coach. He'd never been one of her students. Even in his junior years, Victor had preferred to do as much of his own choreographing as possible. At first it had been Yakov's job to smoothly fold in the jumps and points. And after a while that started becoming second nature to him too. But even once Lilia and Yakov had divorced—ending a relationship that, as far as he'd seen, had been tumultuous from day one—Victor hadn't felt any ill will towards the prima ballerina. She and Yakov had truly been kindred spirits… which was at least part of the reason their marriage was never going to last.

Even just last year everything had been fine. He'd been away in Japan when she had taken Yurio under her wing, but she'd seemed to be a good influence on the boy. He didn't even treat Yakov with the respect and deference he showed her. He'd always known Lilia's methods were strict. He'd thought it was good for him. Now, seeing those methods in person, Victor wasn't so sure.

Perhaps he just had bad timing. Everything else tended to fade away when he was on the ice. But he'd been on break long enough to hear what seemed to be her whole manifesto—that beauty is the ability to remake oneself over and over until perfection is achieved. It certainly fit with Yuri's theme for the season: Metamorphosis.

But seeing the younger skater working so hard… to the backdrop of this particular tune… it left a grimace etched firmly into his features.

He wasn't sure how long he stood there, water bottle frozen halfway to his lips, before Yuuri came off the ice for his own break. The Japanese man had not been in Russia for very long and, as the rink's only Asian skater, would always stick out a bit, but he was very inconspicuous when he grabbed his own water bottle and sidled up to Victor. Only Yurio knew him well enough to notice that the way he leaned right up against Victor in the middle of their crowded rink was a little out of character—but he was busy. Victor himself wrapped his other arm around his fiancé without giving it much thought. But then, it was his distraction that had drawn Yuuri over in the first place.

"Are you all right?" Yuuri used their closeness as a medium for privacy, trying to block out the prying eyes that had drifted their way. (And the less-than-productive thoughts about the kind of impression he must be making on his new rink mates.)

"Just thinking," Victor answered dully, not giving anything away. So Yuuri followed his gaze.

"Yurio's working hard," he commented.

"Hmm." Perfection was a myth. No one knew this better than Victor Nikiforov. He had not needed Lilia's instruction to fall into a pattern of recreating himself for every new skate season. He'd told himself it was to keep things exciting, for the sake of surprising his audience. But there came a point when he could no longer deny that it was really about self-exploration… If 'exploration' could be described as a desperate search to find something about himself worth holding onto.

…

It wasn't the jump. He knew Yuri thought it was his attempted quad as a junior that had gotten his attention, but Victor had been seeing bits and pieces of himself in little Yuri Plisetsky since some of the boy's earliest days working under Yakov.

Victor wasn't as much of an airhead as people thought. It was a convenient excuse whenever his genuinely terrible memory failed him, but he was very observant. He noticed—when most of his rink mates did not—that it was always the boy's grandfather who brought him to and from practice. Always. Then, as the old man's health began to struggle and Yuri grew older, he would take the bus by himself—just as Victor once had.

Victor's parents were not cruel. (They did not, say, promise to attend events and then never show. Not like Yuri's mother did.) Their distance was not even all that cold. They just weren't that kind of family. Later in his life, when he met Yuuri, he'd be awed by the Katsuki household. They were not particularly touchy-feely either, but their lives were full of little gestures that just… exuded warmth. There was none of that in his own childhood home. He never wanted for any of life's necessities. Well, maybe it was a little light on love, but his parents had always assured Victor he could come to them if he wanted to talk… he'd just never really felt inclined to.

To be fair, he never really needed to either. For much of his early life, Victor didn't have any serious troubles. He threw all of his energy into his skating. And he was on good terms with all his rink mates and competitors, so he was always surrounded by friendly faces… It wasn't until he was well into his teenage years that he understood what it meant to be alone in a crowd.

Perhaps loneliness—even if he hadn't recognized it for what it was at the time—had always been his motivation for success. Victor quickly became enamored by the roar of a crowd, and the subsequent hush that would fall over them as he first took the ice.

But as time went on, the audience grew harder and harder to impress. In his world, there was nowhere to go but up, lest you run the risk of fading into obscurity. There was no solution but to push himself harder. Yakov was pleased, at least. Victor wouldn't have traded his coach for any other, but it did eat at him a little, that the old man didn't seem to catch on to the rising air of desperation with each performance.

He'd already moved out of his family's home at this point, making the feeling of isolation's power all the more prominent. His parents had gifted him Makkachin—a sweet but rambunctious puppy—on his way out, so he wouldn't be completely alone. It helped, a little. It grounded Victor, to be so solely responsible for the wellbeing of another. But it didn't change the fact that his only human interactions all took place within the realm of the competitive skating world—where he was frequently drawn into his own thoughts. At first he visited his parents once a week… then once a month… until finally, his appearances were spotty even around the holidays. The same mild affection they'd always had for each other was still in place. But he found that they just… didn't have anything to say to each other. His interactions with the other skaters and their coaches soon became predictable, so he came to enjoy the buzz he created amongst fans online. What with the way he remade himself with every season, it always felt… new.

…

Now Victor lay awake, lost in the past while his fiancé slumbered peacefully beside him. It was quite the change—he'd always suspected that half the reason Yuuri wasn't a morning person was his tendency to let his thoughts take over and keep him up long after he should have fallen asleep. Yuuri…

Victor knew the man beside him believed his appearance had been something of a miracle that saved his career… But Yuuri had saved so much more. Just when Victor had begun to think that all the things that made him real might be truly irretrievable… There they were. Resurrected by a man who'd left all his dark thoughts and inhibitions behind, if only for a single night… and encouraged him to do the same.

Some might say he was splitting hairs… After all, he was competitive, but not like Yuri Plisetsky. He hadn't been throwing himself away for the sake of a medal. Their methods may have been the same, but their motivations were different… Or so he'd like to believe anyway. But it left him with an ache deep in his chest, to think of where his young rival would be in five years—if that—if he continued down this path. Yuri was unruly and harsh, but Victor didn't like to picture the boy the way he himself had been—lost and empty, not even able to pinpoint what he was missing that would make him whole again… if he'd ever been. After all, there were only so many Yuuris in the world.

He smiled down at the angelic face pressed up against his shoulder. He'd been able to redirect Yuuri's worries earlier, but he knew their conversation was far from over. Yuuri knew him too well to be dissuaded before getting to the true crux of the matter. It could be stressful at times… but it was something Victor loved about him. This intuitive understanding they had of each other, it only cemented in his view of what he and Yuuri were to each other. Something he hoped to represent with his theme this season: Soul mates.

He kept his sigh soft, so as not to wake him, doing his best to calm his mind. His relationship with Yuri had improved over the last year, but they were not at a point where he'd be able to have this sort of cautionary conversation with him successfully. Not only did he doubt the boy would listen to him, he was pretty confident it would only egg him on.

This realization was its own kind of stressful, but he found a sudden comfort as he settled into Yuuri's embrace a little more. There was one other huge difference in Yuri's case. A safety net. He had people prepared to catch him should he fall.

Review please!

I don't own Yuri! on Ice.

This is just something that's been bothering me since the first time I watched the series. Especially given how Victor's whole storyline is that he's burned out after caring about nothing but his profession for so long, Lilia's outlook just feels so… unhealthy to me. Yuri is young and needs someone who understands the world a little better to look out for him. To protect him from pitfalls that he doesn't have to ability to see yet. I don't know what any continuation of the series has waiting for us—if there will even be one—but I honestly can't see any path where Yuri doesn't crash and burn with this mindset.