By thirteen, he's forgotten the surge of joy in his chest when he lands a perfect triple loop.
He's forgotten a lot about joy at thirteen. Life has reduced to three parts: practice, not practice, and sleep. At thirteen, Yuri finds he looks forward to sleep the most, because at least he dreams in color while everything else is in shades of gray.
Yakov has seen the changes in him, and every few months, he tries to bring it up.
"Will you be spending Easter with your grandfather?" he asks as Yuri bends forward over the barre and lifts his right leg up and up until it is straight up in the air.
"Probably," he answers, holding the split. One, two, three…
"Looking forward to the break?"
"I guess." Seven, eight, nine…
"You know you can leave a few days early if you like. You've been training hard. The season doesn't start for months."
Yuri drops his right leg and lifts his left.
"It's not a big deal." One, two, three…
"I think it might be a bigger deal than you care to admit," Yakov says. "You think I don't see your phone buzzing during practice? How many messages does your grandfather leave you every day?"
"This really isn't any of your business," Yuri growls, losing count.
"Your posture is off, Yuri!" Victor sings from across the room.
"Shut up!" Yuri barks at him, almost losing his balance. If there was a day when he looked up to Victor, Yuri can't remember it anymore. Turns out all those sayings were right about meeting your heroes.
"Yuratchka, go home," Yakov says. "That's an order from your coach."
Yuri drops both legs back to the smooth wood floor and stares up at Yakov in stunned silence. "What?"
"Go home," he says. "Recovery is just as important as training, and you've been neglecting it."
"I'm recovering! I recover! I do those stupid massages, don't I?"
"I'm not talking about the massages," Yakov growls. "What day is it next Thursday, Yuratchka Plisetsky?"
Yuri's mouth forms a thin, hard line.
"Answer me."
"Her birthday," he answers, voice smaller than he'd intended it to be.
"And if I had to guess, that's why your grandfather keeps leaving messages for you during practice. Have you even answered any of them?"
Inexplicably, frustratingly, humiliatingly, Yuri feels his eyes start to burn with the threat of tears. With every ounce of strength left in him, he fights them down. He will not cry in class. He will not.
"I don't want to go back," Yuri says. He doesn't think he could bear it.
"You remember introduction to sports medicine."
"Yakov—"
"After a serious injury, what's the first step?"
"This is a stupid metaphor," Yuri growls at him.
"Rest the afflicted area until the worst of the pain subsides, you little brat," Yakov finishes. "Well, it's been ten months, hasn't it? So what's next? Gentle stretches to the damaged muscles."
"This isn't a torn ACL!" Yuri bellows at him. "My mother's fucking dead!"
The whole room quiets. Yuri is too angry to be upset at himself for screaming.
Slowly, Yakov crouches down in front of him. Some in the room pretend to go back to their stretches, others stare openly.
"It's not so different," he says. "Take it from me. You've got to confront the pain before it turns into something worse."
"Yakov—"
"Go home," he says. "I've already cleared out your schedule for the rest of the week."
Yuri could punch him. He has, once or twice in the past, although Yakov's reaction has only ever been to say he should integrate more strength training into his warm-ups. Furious but impotent, Yuri storms past him, ripping off the oversized sweater insulating the leotard.
That evening, he jogs all the way back to Uncle Anton's apartment, and mercifully, he doesn't ask why Yuri spends the whole night crying.
Everything about this place is wrong now. Memories of too-bright sunlight on the snow, of wind on his face and his heart racing in his chest, are all tainted by the small marble headstone under the tree by the lake near his childhood playground.
In the spring, the whole area is green and fragrant with freshly blossomed flowers, and Yuri hates it for reasons he can't explain.
"It was an odd choice on her part, don't you think?" Grandfather asks.
Yuri doesn't answer.
"But this is what she told me," he continues. "Right here, under the tree near the lake. I think she did it because of you. Do you remember how you used to skate here every day during the winter?"
Yuri hates this. He hates talking about it, even casually. Why should anyone be compelled to remember the dead? It's not like it can achieve anything but pain, useless and directionless.
"That was a long time ago now," Grandfather says, sounding sadder every second Yuri stays quiet. "I suppose you might not remember."
"I remember," Yuri says. He makes sure his tone communicates that he does not like remembering.
"She loved to watch you skate," he says. "Maybe that's why she wanted it to be here."
"She can't watch anything now, she's dead." And it's not as if he'll ever lay a blade on this godforsaken pond again.
There's a pause, then a sigh.
"I know, Yura."
"Can we go home now?" Home is not much better than out here – everything in that house is still a reminder of her; her shawls still hang in the open hall closet, her books are still piled on the shelves – but anything is better to the way Yuri feels right at this second.
"You don't want to say anything to her?"
"I'm not a fan of talking to slabs of granite like you, dedushka," he says, and turns on his heel. Grass whispers against his bare ankles as he heads back up toward the ramshackle little house at the top of the hill.
"Yuri," Grandfather calls after him, but Yuri doesn't look back.
After Yuri's screaming outburst about his dead mother, his rinkmates start avoiding him. Even Victor keeps a wide berth, which surprises Yuri if only because he didn't know Nikiforov was capable of ever shutting the hell up.
Most of the interaction he gets over the next few weeks is limited to sympathetic glances from a distance, which is annoying, but strictly speaking preferable to the alternative. Yuri got bored with his rinkmates months ago. He's on a different level than most of them and everyone knows it. Only Victor is ever able to really keep up with him, and honestly, Yuri can manage without him.
This is all to say that it's surprising when he opens up his locker after practice and finds a small tupperware container with a sticky note on the lid.
Yuri frowns at it for a few moments, then glances back at each of the other five boys changing out with him. None of them notice he's looking. Yuri turns back to the tupperware, hesitates, then peels the sticky note off.
My mother made these for me after my father died, and then every time since when I've been sad. Maybe they'll help for you?
The handwriting is awful. It's not signed.
Yuri sticks the note on the inside of his locker door, pulls the tupperware out and peels off the lid. Inside are a half-dozen dumplings of some kind – Yuri is hit immediately with the smell, and his stomach growls reactively. Is that mutton?
He sticks his nose inside. It's definitely mutton. He loves mutton. There are subtler flavors, too, that he can't quite identify, spicy and intriguing. Yuri is suddenly very hungry.
He looks back to the other boys in the locker room. Was it one of them? If any of them can make dumplings, he certainly wouldn't know. Maybe it was Yakov? Then again, Yuri's had Yakov's cooking, and had barely escaped that situation alive. Which one of them has a dead father? Yuri's never gotten to know any of them well enough.
"What's that smell?" Victor says, appearing abruptly at his locker. Whatever embargo had been in place in their relationship out of respect for Yuri's mourning is apparently only as strong as the smell of mutton. "Ooh, dumplings!"
"Fuck off, Nikoforov, they're mine." Yuri slaps the lid back in place.
"You're not going to share? You're awful! And here I'd been being so nice to you."
He's practically mooning over the tupperware. Yuri hugs it a little closer to his chest.
"Tell you what," Yuri says, "if you agree to choreograph my short program in my first senior season, I'll give you a dumpling."
Victor gives him a slightly puzzled, slightly offended look. "You've been asking that for weeks now and I've always said no. You really think I'll cave for one dumpling?"
"I really do," Yuri answers.
"Well, you're right, I absolutely will."
Yuri opens the tupperware again and hands him a dumpling. Victor beams.
"Pleasure doing business with you, Yuri! Dasvidaniya!"
He leaves, taking and overlarge bite of the dumpling. The last thing Yuri hears him say before he leaves the locker room is "ooh, mutton!"
Yuri grins. What a difference a few dumplings can make in a day. Now he has lunch and a gold-medal program for his first senior season. He even feels…
Yuri doesn't know what he feels. Something, certainly. It's warm and nice. Most people, even those closest to him, tend to let him handle his pain on his own. Yuri's not used to gestures of kindness like this.
He plucks a second dumpling out and takes a small bite. God, it's good, and the sound it pulls out of him is positively indecent. How long has it been since he's had a home-cooked meal?
He's about to ask the remaining boys if any of them made it, but before he can one of them hurries past him, red-faced and flustered, the new boy from Kazakhstan whose name Yuri can't quite place. He means to ask him the next day but never does.
The long and the short of it is that, two years later, Yuri flies to Japan to make good on his dumpling deal with Victor. It's not a journey condoned by his coach, and it may not technically be legal, but Yuri doesn't care. It strikes him as much more important that he drag Victor back to Moscow and force him to hold up his end of the bargain.
A lot of things happen while he's in that little backwoods prefecture, some of them interesting, but most of them deeply and profoundly annoying. Victor gets a new boyfriend, which is obnoxious, and it's Other Yuri, which is even worse, and then there's this whole exhibition skate thing that sort of happens out of nowhere, and the whole thing just ends up being a pain.
So far as he can tell, there's only one good thing that happens in Hatsetsu: Yuri loses at skating for the first time in his life.
He was angry at first – livid, actually – but by the time he's dragging his bag back to the airport to take the first flight back to Moscow, he is filled with a new sensation. It thrums behind his ribs and in the tips of his fingers, and it's only after twenty minutes of waiting at the terminal that he realizes it's determination.
It's not something he's used to feeling. All his life he's been the best by simple inertia, because no one else around him has been good enough to be a threat.
But now there's Katsudon, who, for his numerous and hilarious faults, might be one of the best skaters Yuri's ever seen, and now that Victor is staying in Japan to coach him, he won't be getting any worse.
A potent, venomous mixture of anger and adrenaline starts pounding through his veins. It's not cold like grief, it's white-hot and red and black and it starts eating away at him all at once. Yuri is going to beat Katsudon. He'll train morning, noon, and night every day until the Grand Prix if he has to. He will. He must. Because if he doesn't, then what the hell is the point of him?
If there's some part of Yuri that is frightened of these new waves of crippling anger and ruthlessness, it swallows itself up in its own wake.
Maybe he's burning now, but it's better than being frozen.