I don't own Yuri! on Ice.

Chapter 21: #SolidTen

(In which Viktor is the marshmallow to Yuurika's flaming mess.)

Soon enough, Yuri joined Viktor downstairs.

"So, did she sleep?" Viktor asked worriedly.

"Yeah, some," Yuri reported, forehead creased in concern. "Mila and I just left to give her space to change."

Viktor's eyes softened. "You okay?"

"Yeah," Yuri glanced at him with the corner of his eye, suspicion and gratitude at the sudden solicitude glinting through. "Mila and I watched Georgi's free skate on our phones."

"Yes? What did you think?"

"Being in love looks hella painful," Yuri summarized briefly.

"It doesn't have to be," Viktor shared. "With my first girlfriend..."

"I'm already sorry I asked," Yuri shot back. "Oh wait, I never did." He glanced at the elevator, spying Yuurika in the cab. "Well, time's up." He beat an escape from the ancient moron's reminiscing.

Yuurika disembarked the elevator.

"Oh, Yuuri." Viktor sighed, catching sight of her. "Did you even look in a mirror?"

"What? Oh." Yuurika tugged off her jacket and began turning it right side out.

"Not that." He gestured higher. "Where are your hair gel and contacts?"

Yuurika raised a trembling hand and met thick blue rims.

Mila ran up, breathing heavily. "Yuuri! You forgot these!" She dropped off the aforementioned items with Viktor, who began silently helping Yuurika apply them as they walked to the rink.

"I actually dreamed that the free skate was already over," Yuurika divulged.

"And that you performed to perfection?" Viktor hinted. "I didn't know you dreamt prophetically." His encouraging words were belied by his concerned glances.

"That's it." Once arrived and warm ups were completed (poorly), Viktor's mind was made up. "No quads."

Despite her bone-deep exhaustion, those two words galvanized hidden reserves of vitriolic spitfire in Yuurika. "Leave out my quads!? But that's what sets me apart!"

"As a woman, yes, but no one else knows that. Your specialty is your step sequences and presentation."

"I'd have no problem leaving quads out if we could be sure I'd score well without them and if there was a good reason, but this-"

"You've had too many close calls," Viktor interrupted her. "There was that fiasco of a breakfast earlier, the way you were dressed just now, and even before that when you allowed Guang-Hong to find your bra-"

"How did you know that was my bra?" Yuurika demanded, suspicious.

"I just know it wasn't Mila's," elaborated Viktor. "Mila never wears green. She says it's not an autumn's colour, whatever that means."

"Does she also have something against appliques?" Yuurika asked flatly.

"I don't know about that." He frowned and continued. "Anyway, I've seen what pushing yourself in the state you're in can do. Quads right now are not worth the risk. You just don't protect yourself enough, Yuuri. You don't realize the things I do."

"You're not my father, Viktor," Yuurika spat scathingly, searing him with a glare. "I already have a perfectly good one."

"But he's not here," Viktor pointed out.

"So you just step in, as a surrogate?"

"As a man, who's also older than you."

"What's that supposed to mean?" she exclaimed, throwing her hands in the air in exasperation.

"This isn't a perfect world, and you have... special circumstances."

"'Special circumstances'!?"

"Yuuri, you have to realize you're-" Viktor cut off.

This was it, then. The "You're only a girl" card.

Viktor caught the terrible look on her face. "Look, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have brought any of that up; it has no bearing on this." He sighed bitterly. "You're beyond exhausted, Yuuri. I don't want you to get hurt. I'm just trying to do what's best for you."

Yuurika, her attention span at the snapping point and clinging to his earlier remark, ignored his latter words. "So you have to hover over me and control my life because I'm a woman and young, is that it?" Yuurika put words in his mouth angrily.

"That's not what I'm doing!" Viktor ran his hands through his hair. "I can't just ignore -" He cut off, glancing at her sidelong. "What do you want me to be to you then, Yuuri?" His voice strained, matching the frustration behind her own.

Yuurika stared at him for three, four, five seconds, caught off guard. "You're my coach," she finally whispered fiercely.

They gazed at each other, both thinking the same thought.

Was he really just her coach?

Neither dared to ask aloud. Not here, not now.

They shouldn't even be having this conversation to begin with. Yuurika inhaled deeply. "Viktor, if you, as my coach, don't believe in me, how am I supposed to believe in myself?" She turned her pleading gaze to his face, waiting.

It softened. "Yuuri, I've never doubted you'll win," he told her guilelessly. "And I don't doubt that you will advance without quads now. That's why I'm asking this of you."

Yuurika made an effort to regain control of her raging emotions. "I trust you, Viktor." 'But I don't agree and I think you're in the wrong,' she left unsaid.

Viktor sensed it anyway. "Thank you," he said simply, with an overly serene air. He avoided meeting her gaze. "Oh look, your laces. Didn't you double knot them?"

"I did. At least, I think I did," Yuurika admitted lowly.

Viktor bit back a sigh of 'What am I going to do with you?', but not well enough. He bent down to tie her laces for her, a bit more tightly than was strictly necessary.

Yuurika watched him. She knew it bothered him that she didn't see his point of view, but she couldn't change her mind just by wishing. She wanted to make him feel better about it, even if just a little. Unconsciously, she extended a finger and rested it squarely in the part of his hair.

Viktor paused.

Yuurika rubbed the top of his head with one digit, gently and quickly, almost stroking. In scant seconds she was done, her back to him and facing the ice, steeling herself for her big show.

She glided out onto the rink.

Yuurika waited motionlessly for her cue to commence. She didn't start skating in the men's division because she had anything to prove- but gradually she had built up an internal obligation to do just that. Even if she weren't a woman, it probably would have been something else - for Japan, for those with low self-esteem. It was just her way - or maybe even the human way. Viktor just didn't understand.

So focused was she on her furious rationalizing that she missed the signal. Yabai! She jerked ungracefully into her opening gestures, catching up to the music. Her nerves had struck again.

With sudden clarity in a single heartbeat, her slip put the entire previous conversation into crystal focus. This was all happening because Yuurika was drop-dead sleep deprived. Which was exactly what Viktor had been saying - out of concern, not stupidity. And he was right - there were just some things it was much harder for her to do than other people: as a girl, a person struggling with anxiety, an older competitor, as a short person (though Yuri would have scoffed at such a claim, then clam up at admitting his own lack of height). But she had other abilities that came naturally to her to make up for all those, which her coach patiently honed and highlighted each day, along with shoring up her weaker areas. Viktor never doubted her - neither should she. If this was only because she was tired and worried (Though a small insistent voice insinuated that that wasn't entirely true - 'What do you want me to be to you then, Yuuri?'), she decided that ended now.

Her nerves, her remorse for how she reacted, all coalesced into one last-ditch push. Yuurika awoke her hidden drive (latent in all with the blood of Japan flowing in their veins) to live without leaving regrets. Her motions brimmed with a brand new determination.

She didn't attempt a single quad. But, all her triples - she had never landed them with such precision and grace since her first competition in what felt like a whole other lifetime.

The unlimited potential of Katsuki Yuuri was reborn on ice.

She knew her coach won't stay for long - her retirement loomed ever closer along with the moment of truth in the final. Viktor was Viktor, and she'd enjoy each day with him she had left.

As she spun to the closing strains, her thrumming transformative power, summoned by sheer force of will from drying reserves, slowly faded. All that remained was a sleepy, sore girl, gasping for breath, standing amidst a roaring, raucous crowd caught up in exultant cheers. Well, she'd done what she set out to do on the ice. Time to make amends off of it. She shifted, steeling herself to skate to the kiss-and-cry, when she saw a great-coated figure sprinting - sprinting, she'd never seen Viktor sprint before - to the entrance.

Dredging up the last vestiges of her flagging stamina, Yuurika pushed off to meet him, picking up speed. To her astonishment, Viktor burst through the gate and onto the rink. What could have happened during the scant few minutes of her free skate? Concerned, she hastened even more.

Just at the moment of interception, one of Yuurika's laces (the one Viktor had tied, she'd realize later) broke, and she flailed, spilling to the cold hard surface beneath her. Viktor, already committed to their course and leaning towards her, crashed down with the removal of his target. They both bellyflopped in sync and slid right past the other on their stomachs with their feet in the air, like a pair of beached whales. Everyone in the stadium gasped as one, quieted, then groaned. Coach and student turned over and looked up, assured themselves the other was okay, and burst into unbridled laughter.

Yuurika watched Viktor laugh unrestrainedly, head thrown back, tears springing in the corners of his squeezed-shut eyes, howling to the world. She laughed right alongside him, her own eyes open and filled with him, a rare unassumed vision of the true man behind the legend, the very real human she had grown to know and love. Love… the thought both shocked her to the core and failed to alarm her as much as she expected. She knew better than to form any expectations of… something she couldn't, wouldn't conceive of - Viktor was a professional, a gentleman, and most importantly, a true friend whose regard she wouldn't jeopardize for a thousand hopes. Besides, she wasn't even sure of the exact nature or tenacity of her broad and nebulous feelings (Was it agape? Eros? Something for which no name had yet been created). She didn't know the reason Viktor had rushed to meet her or what he had planned to do when he did. Regardless, she resolved to manage herself, as she had done her whole life, to cultivate her friendship with her idol-turned-coach, who she now knew to honestly reciprocate at least her platonic attachment.

Despite all that, she allowed herself, just this once, to drink up the miraculous sight of a Viktor on the ice right beside her, sharing the blinding coronas of light, the bracing chill, the echoing, roaring expanse of the stadium with her as naturally if it was what he was born for. As if they were always meant, from the beginning of time, to be lying there together, close enough to reach out and clasp. The ice brought them together, the ice brought them closer. All love is possible on the ice.

And as she saw him lower his gaze to meet her own, cerulean eyes slitting open languidly with an uncalculated, intense emotion bleeding through, just for an instant, she dared to make a desperate, futile wish that they would never have to leave it.