Yuuri could pinpoint the exact moment he became infatuated with Victor Nikiforov. He was twelve years old, sitting in Ice Castle Hasetsu with Yuuko and Takeshi, and Yuuko had insisted they watch the last bit of the Junior GPF. She had been a Victor follower for a long time, and she had complained that there was no way she'd be able to watch him skate at home. So the three of them sat and watched the skaters perform thousands of miles away.
They announced Victor Nikiforov on the screen; Yuuko screamed, Takeshi rolled his eyes, and Yuuri leaned forward, curious to see what made him so special. Sure, he had all the confidence of a sixteen-year-old athlete, and he was beautiful to look at, but so were a lot of people on TV. Why bother?
Then Victor stepped onto the ice, and Yuuri was caught in Victor's spell from then on out.
With that kind of love, it was easy to find a starting point. This love, though, this was different.
Yuuri can say where he started seeing Victor as a person rather than a living legend. It was a little more gradual—seeing his idol hungover and jetlagged and spend an hour with rice on his cheek certainly tarnished a little of Victor's perfect image—but the defining moment was at the beach. This was, surprisingly, a team effort. It was enough for Victor to meet him where he was and lay out that he was willing to be whatever Yuuri needed; but that was where Yuuri realized he didn't want Skating Legend Victor Nikiforov—he wanted just Victor, in any way that came naturally. From then on, he was real.
But that still didn't quite give him a starting point for this love.
Eros? Was that worth mentioning? Because that was a long time ago, but Yuuri can still remember a definite starting point—he was sixteen and laying in the darkness of his room. His mother called him a late bloomer; Minako-sensei called him "too damn shy". Regardless, there hadn't been anyone in Hasetsu who he had thought about romantically, much less been approached by. But there, in the darkness, he stares at one of his posters of Victor—long-haired and lovely with half-parted lips and heavy-lidded eyes—and he thinks, God, what if?
He scares himself that night with his body's reaction to that thought. Later, it's just another facet of his on-going infatuation.
But that's not the same, either.
This love is…calm. It's not clipping out interviews in a frenzy or frantic, hushed breaths in the dark or trying to reconcile the imagined Victor with the real one. It fills him easily, and it rests on him like a heavy blanket. It's simultaneously been growing since Victor's arrival and hits him all at one time. This love has the certainty that it's right, it's good, and it won't leave him. He starts to figure it out by the way he trails Victor now—not as someone desperate to be noticed by a skating god, but rather someone who knows that his place is with Victor.
There's no one point where he fell in love with Victor, but there's a point where he realizes he's been in love with Victor—the real one, the one that's nothing like the Victor he idolized for years—for a while now. It is—and it kills Yuuri that it took him this long—when Victor kisses him right on the ice, in front of thousands of viewers. By all accounts, that was a combination that should have killed Yuuri by embarrassment alone. But for once in his life, he's not busy thinking about everyone outside of him. He's not thinking about the tabloids or the judges or the cold or anything at all. All he's aware of is that Victor's lips are on his, and it feels like the most natural thing in the world. It isn't until Victor pulls away that the shock hits him.
"That was the only thing I could think of to surprise you more than you've surprised me."
Yuuri takes a moment to take in the man above him, eyes warm and nose red and making a spectacle out of the both of them. And that's when he knows. That's when he realizes that this Victor—beautiful and frustrating and imperfect—has been the Victor he's been in love with for a while.
And that's when he knows that Victor loves him just as much.
