Watch out, here comes some fluff. I couldn't resist even if it might seem kind of sudden :).
She had essentially told Victor that he had been her childhood idol. Which was just as mortifying as it sounded. It made her feel like she wanted to hide in her hotel for the rest of her time in St. Petersburg. She was so caught up in her own embarrassment that she hadn't bothered to look back at Victor. She only noticed when she was walking alone, Victor having stopped in his tracks. He stared at her with wide eyes.
"Wha...what's wrong Victor? Did I say something wrong? I'm sorry if you think that it's odd that I'm a fan, but…"
Yuuri trailed off as Victor began to take slow, casual steps. He slung his arm around her as they continued to walk, leaving her intensely conscious of his hand on her shoulders.
"Don't doubt yourself, Yuuri. I'm just so surprised that I managed to inspire you, because if you'd hear Yakov tell it, when I was a teenager nobody should have looked up to me. I admit, I behaved poorly. To be honest, after nearly ten years of Yakov, we're both getting tired of each other. I was even considering retiring recently, up until I saw the video of you skating my routine. That's when I knew that I had to keep going, so that I could skate with you."
Victor said that so very smoothly and casually that Yuuri had trouble discerning if he was joking with her or not. For all she knew, he was just playing with her. But what if he really meant it? What if she had somehow, impossibly, managed to inspire him the way that he inspired her? Yuuri nearly passed out because of how much blood was suddenly flowing to her already-red cheeks. She had wanted nothing more than to skate with Victor ever since she was learning to skate, and she had jumped at the opportunity, even if he saw it only as a publicity stunt. If he had been the one who wanted her to come and skate with him? She tried not to dwell on it because she felt too uncomfortable asking him about it. Yuuri felt her eyes beginning to well with tears, though she wasn't sure if they were from happiness that Victor had actually taken notice of her, or sadness from the possibility that he was just playing around. She stared back up at him, becoming aware of how closer they were.. Despite the warmth that Victor provided, Yuuri began to feel the acute chill of Russia at night and she started shivering in the cold. She leaned closer almost unconsciously, noticing every time her hand brushed near his on the walk back to her apartment.
The moment that she was in her hotel room, Yuuri threw herself onto her bed and took out her phone. Any calm that had she had managed to pretend to possess was almost instantly gone, and the full implications of what she had just done hit her hard. She had to tell someone about what had just happened. Phichit had better respond to her calls or so help him.
He didn't answer on her first call, so she called again. Yuuri just started talking before he could even ask what was going on. She had to get it all out before she exploded. Her whole trip so far came out in a disorganized blob that confused even her, and would probably be incomprehensible for her friend. She bounced from ballet to lunch to the walk back from the restaurant, then (almost as an afterthought) to her skating.
"I freaked out and then I told him that he was my skating crush and the next thing I knew he was hugging me and then I was crying and…"
Yuuri paused and collected her thoughts, starting over again and working her way through the dinner that had just happened. All her awkward moments and Victor's natural poise. The crush that totally hadn't gone away. Her secret hopes that he might be flirting back.
Her friend just listened as Yuuri released all of her emotions. Phichit wondered in the back of his mind how much she had skated today. She tended to have more trouble working through her emotions the longer it had been since she had hit the ice. Whenever Yuuri skated, she put her heart and soul into it, even for practice. That's what made her so entrancing to watch, but it also meant that she hadn't come up with many ways to cope with emotions except for skating. There was no need most days because of how much she trained anyways. Normally she could purge emotions almost as soon as they built up.
"Yuuri," he interrupted. "Have you skated since this morning?"
Yuuri cut herself off, mid-rant, noting that she hadn't been on the ice at all after lunch. Back in Detroit, she skating for a little while in the mornings. The skating competition schedule had impacted her schoolwork tremendously- because she was pursuing her degree, she left the rink for her 8 am classes most days, and did the bulk of her practice at night. She knew that she didn't have the healthiest way of dealing with stress or emotional problems, but normally that worked well enough for her. Yuuri ached to be on the ice again and very nearly hung up to follow that impulse, but she realized that she didn't have ice time here the way that she did elsewhere.
"Actually, I haven't done too much skating since this morning. They made me skate Stammi Vicino for them and then we did a lot of work on technique. Oh! That reminds me, Victor took a video of me. I'll email it to you now."
She sent him the video and waited for a few minutes so that her friend had a chance to watch it. There wasn't much noise coming from the other end, with the exception of a sudden squawk.
"Yuuri. Yuuri. Why didn't you talk about your routine first? This is literally the best I have ever seen you skate before. And since when were you able to land a quad? I know that all this stuff with Victor is a really big deal, but that's something else! I think only one girl had actually managed to land one in competition," Phichit gushed. Yuuri smiled at his enthusiasm.
"You should totally post some of it to Instagram. I'm sure that your followers would love it just as much as I do, and you're hardly ever on social media. It's not fair to keep this from the world!"
Yuuri chuckled, taking his idea into consideration. She didn't like social media because, for all the good and wonderful and innocent things there, there was a cruel darker side that popped up every once in awhile to remind her of why she tended to stay away. She was really proud of the way that she had managed to skate today though. She and Phichit continued to chat, and she heard a little bit more about how training was going without her, but she hadn't been gone very long.
When she had hung up with her friend, she opened Instagram and was overwhelmed by the flood of notifications waiting for her there. She looked through her feed; mostly selfies of Phichit, with a few pictures of other skaters sprinkled in there for good measure. Phichit wasn't really fair when he had said that she was never on social media; it hadn't even been a long time since she had posted, really. There was a picture of her on the podium at the finals, about a month ago now.
She could almost hear her Thai friend complaining though, so she edited the video down to the first minute. "Take two" she typed quickly, posting the video before putting her phone down and crawling under the covers.
The next morning Yuuri startled awake, looking at the clock and realizing it was already six. She scrambled to get ready, arriving at the rink half an hour later looking far from her best, but with just enough time to stretch properly and make sure she was warmed up. Yakov and Victor both materialized at seven o'clock on the dot, and she and Victor did a few quick laps before returning to Yakov for further instruction.
"Yesterday you worked on making your jumps more uniform. Today we work on shadow skating. We want the skating to be flawlessly together because the lifts aren't going to be comparable to those of the professional pairs skaters. A good rapport between the two of you can go a long way towards erasing your mistakes in the eyes of the audience. Your spins must be at the same speeds and every aspect of your jumps must be synchronized, but we need an emotional connection as well."
He had them start with basic footwork. Yuuri was disoriented with someone so close to her as she skated. The last person that she had skated with in a way even remotely like this was Yuuko. She felt paranoid of her every movement, terrified that she would get too close and cause an accident. She tried her best to match Victor's edges but her movements were always slightly behind his. Yuuri managed to sync up with him, but something still felt off, or missing. There were no technical problems occurring but she knew skating was lacking her usual emotion and passion. Was it possible that she had somehow used up all her excitement about skating with Victor before they even really worked together? With these basic moves it was hard to show emotion anyways.
Yuuri tried to inject some of the longing and confusion that she was feeling because of Victor into her movements, but only succeeded in offsetting their movements slightly. She sighed as Yakov told them to start the footwork combination again. This wouldn't work if they were trying to tell two different stories. Victor was skating with a lazy confidence. Yuuri tried to force a similar half-smile onto her face. With that calm and proud veneer, perhaps they could be king and a queen, regally observing their subjects gathered before them.
Yuuri could almost feel the change in their movements as much as she struggled to put on airs while she skated. Her devotion to the ice was usually paramount in her skating, and it was rare for her to try to put herself about it. But now she and Victor were on the same plane, their movements amplified by the other. Yakov praised them for their work, but it felt a little hollow to Yuuri. They were hardly a partnership yet, because Victor didn't seem to sense her at all. He continued skating as he always had, while she bent over backwards to please him. The routine that they were skating together was about a finally realized love, not a one-sided pining!
Yakov's criticism began anew with new footwork in a new pattern. Victor didn't even seem to notice what was being said; come to think of it, he had been very distracted all morning. He barely seemed to listen to Yakov, and it didn't seem like joking indifference. She wondered what had happened to put him out of it like that. At closer examination, the look in his eyes was almost unseeing and slightly worried, not haughty pride like she had first thought. A mask, then.
Things certainly didn't improve. They stood before Yakov as he ranted yet again about the importance of a good emotional connect when Yuri Plisetsky burst out of the locker room.
"Katsuki!" he screamed, nearly making Yuuri fall over. Yakov raised an eyebrow, but Victor didn't seem surprised. Looking back on this moment, it would make this morning's attitude clear, but as for now Yuuri assumed that he was really so far gone that nothing could make him react.
"What is this?" he growled, holding his phone out over the barrier. Glancing at Yakov, she hurried over to see whatever had gotten him so worked up. It was the video of her skating from yesterday.
"A video of me skating?" she replied, confused. Why was the other Yuri so angry about this? It's not like he was in the video. She was well within her right to post a video of herself to her own Instagram.
"Yes. A video of you skating. At this rink. And all the fans know who else skates at this rink!" he raged.
"Do you know what kind of rumors are going around social media right now? My fangirls literally won't leave me alone. There's a growing mob outside the rink. Everyone wants answers about why the hell you are in Russia."