Yuri freely and happily sells his soul to be the best, sealing the bargain with a kiss on the hand of a prima ballerina. He works harder than he's ever worked before, pushing and straining and bending his body in ways he never could have imagined even a month ago.
"Yakov and I have finished your free skate program," Lilia tells him on some Wednesday – Thursday? Yuri has stopped paying attention to days – before punctuating with, "higher."
Yuri has been holding the arabesque for almost thirty seconds now, and the thigh on the leg he holds elevated, ankle at the level of his eyes, is burning intensely. Yuri relishes in the pain and lifts it all the higher, correcting the fatigue in his slump.
"You'll be skating to Allegro appassionato in B minor,"she says. "There will be four quads."
"Six," Yuri says through his teeth.
"Don't get cheeky," Lilia responds, not missing a beat.
"I'm not being cheeky—"
"Higher," she says, and Yuri flinches, lifting his extended leg back skyward.
"I want six quads," Yuri says. "At least four in the second half."
"Switch."
He drops his leg back to earth with perhaps too much eagerness, then folds back into an extended arabesque with his alternate leg raised.
"This is your first senior season, Yuratchka," Lilia says. "You don't need to show off to win."
"I don't just want to win," Yuri replies, jaw tight, struggling to maintain the illusion of effortless grace while the muscles in his back and legs scream with tension. "I want to break the world record. I will break the world record."
"Greedy," Lilia chides. "There's a fine line between ambition and avarice."
"I want six quads and two combinations."
"You don't have the stamina for six quads and two combinations."
"I will by the Grand Prix."
"Yuratchka Plisetsky, as your trainer, I am telling you that you are being too ambitious. Victor wasn't even doing six quads at fifteen. You simply do not have the experience and the skill to pull off a program like that."
"Then what the hell is the point?"
Lilia doesn't answer, but Yuri can feel the weight of her judgmental stare settling over his shoulders.
"What's the point of my entire season if I insist on being obvious? I didn't start skating to take it easy, Baranovskaya."
"Then why did you start skating?" she demands, unsmiling.
Yuri opens his mouth to respond but finds he has none. He feels almost embarrassed to realize that he doesn't even remember why he started skating. He spends a while searching through the recesses of his memory. He'd loved it once, hadn't he? He has memories of blinding sunlight on the snow, of wind in his face, of the sound of his scarf flapping as he flies across the little pond—
There's a jolt of pain from somewhere very deep in him, and Yuri banishes all such memories at once. If he'd loved skating, he doesn't anymore. He doesn't need to.
"To be extraordinary," he answers, somewhat belatedly, but with enough conviction to convince himself, nearly. It may not be truth yet, but Yuri feels like he can make it the truth if he works at it enough.
Lilia stares down at him imperiously, arms folded over her chest, the fabric of her sweater rustling as she shifts her weight to her other foot.
"Six quads, two combinations," she says after a lengthy pause of her own. "Entrechat. Fifth position."
Yuri drops his leg, something like satisfaction swelling in his chest.
"Fifth position!" Lilia barks, and Yuri's body snaps back into focus. "And one-two-three—"
Hatred has a name and an obnoxious, punchable face in Jean-Jacques Leroy.
Lately, Yuri has been seeing him in his dreams, cocky and hateful, and he spends the entire morning after burning with fury. Or maybe it's muscle fatigue.
In the quieter moments, Yuri can hear Yakov's nagging voice in the back of his head, lecturing him about the proper balance between training and recovery, but he tamps it down every time. Right now, the only thing in the world that matters is that he nails his last quad toe, and if he has to stay up until two in the morning, stealing extra ice time while the rest of China is asleep, so be it.
He has convinced himself it's the reason he took silver the last time. If he can nail that sixth quad, if he can flawlessly move into the transition and the spin, he could have done it, he could have beat the bastard.
But his legs feel like they're on fire, and this is his third time running through Appassionato so his lungs are about to collapse and sweat is pouring down his face, streaking his hair. He'll just finish the routine one more time and then cool down with a jog back to the hotel—
But it's not even the loop that takes him down, but the salchow just before it, one that he hadn't had any problem with in competition. He lands on the outside edge and his ankle twists hard and sharp to the left, and Yuri screams and collapses and goes skidding across the ice on his side until he hits the wall with a loud, echoing THUMP.
Heart thundering, head spinning, but almost totally immobile, Yuri frantically gathers his thoughts and assesses his body. God, please don't let it be broken.
He flexes his toes in his skate. A jolt of pain, but no, not a break. Just a bad sprain, if he had to guess. Fuck. He can't get a sprain now. The men's singles are the day after tomorrow.
Slowly, slowly, Yuri sits up and curls his body around itself. It's not just his ankle that's in pain, he realizes. It's his thighs, his calves, his ribs, his chest. Everything hurts. His whole body is a maelstrom of aches. And now he has a sprained ankle.
He doesn't bother to get off the ice. He tugs the laces out and slowly— "Shit," he sobs when he pulls too hard, "shit, God that hurts, fuck, fuck," —extricates his foot from his skate.
It's definitely sprained. Yuri's entire body starts to shake. It is, but it can't be. Not now. Not when he's less than thirty hours away from competition.
He squints his eyes shut and leans back against the wall, willing himself to calm down.
It's fine, he tells himself. Fuck the sprain. The worst of the pain will be gone by morning. He'll skate on his sprain if he has to. And he does have to. He'll fuck up his own ankle if he has to. He'll fuck up his entire body for the rest of his life if he has to, and go out in a blaze of glory with a gold medal around his neck.
He's trembling. Not from the pain, he tells himself, just because he's sitting on the ice. He bends forward and buries his face in his hands. Tears prickle at his eyes, not because he's sad, he tells himself, but because he's angry.
He keeps his burning, bruising ankle pressed into the ice while he struggles to put himself back together so he can leave the rink with dignity. He won't be caught by the paparazzi crying and limping. He will not be so obvious. He must not.
He comes in second anyway. He falls during his free skate because his ankle hurts so bad. At least he's able to get back up.
Yakov yells at him in the sit and cry, but Yuri is inured to it by now. His score would make some skaters he knows weep with joy, but for him it's nothing but that ten-point fall deduction.
Yuri trips and stumbles when he and Yakov head out of the rink together, shouts in pain, and crashes into a row of folding chairs stacked against the wall.
"Yuri!"
Yakov catches him by the arm before he hits the floor and immediately steers him to a nearby bench.
Any anger on his coach's face is gone in an instant. "Where?" he asks at once.
Yuri grinds his teeth. His ankle is still burning. "It's fine."
"Where, you little brat?"
He shuts his eyes tightly, head thumping against the cinderblock wall of the hallway. "Left ankle."
Yakov crouches down in front of him and pulls his skate off carefully. Yuri hadn't gotten a good look at it until now. It's ugly.
"God in heaven, boy, this thing is already purple! How long ago did this happen?"
Yuri doesn't answer.
"Did you just skate on this?" Yakov continues, volume rising. "Did you just fucking do your free skate on a sprain this bad?"
"I managed it, didn't I?"
Yuri is used to seeing Yakov angry, used to seeing him go red in the face and shout obscenities at him when he's belligerent or mouthy. But this is the first time Yuri has seen him so angry that he actually goes cold.
"We're getting an MRI," he says.
"Yakov—"
"I swear to God, Yuratchka, if you fight me on this, I'll pull you out of the Grand Prix myself!" He pulls out his phone, stabbing at the screen to hail an Uber, probably. "What the hell were you thinking? You can't skate on a sprain like that!"
"It's fine, old man! If I can get a silver medal—"
"To hell with the medals, Yuri, you could have done permanent damage!" Yakov roars. "We don't keep people off the ice for sprains as a punishment, we do it because skating is physically taxing and dangerous and you could rip your tendons in half and never walk again!"
Yuri grips the edge of the bench, eyes burning. He knew all that, of course.
Uber apparently hailed, Yakov shoves his phone away and rounds on Yuri, deadly. "This has got to stop."
Yuri averts his eyes. "I don't know what you mean."
"Fuck off, you know exactly what I mean. You think I don't see this self-destructive spiral?"
"I'm not—!"
"Shut up, Yura, and let me finish."
Yuri bares his teeth and tugs his Team Russia jacket tighter around his shoulders.
"It started when you came back from Hatsetsu. You went from caring about nothing to caring about everything. One whiff of competition and you lose all sense of restraint and moderation. This is not healthy, Yuri. This is not how you succeed."
"Not competing was not an option!" Yuri shouts. "If I'd told you about the sprain, you would have kept me off the ice, and that wasn't going to happen!"
"Yuri, for God's sake, you're fifteen! You have plenty more seasons to come!"
"I don't care about next seasons, I care about this season!" Yuri's voice keeps getting louder and louder. "I have to break Victor's record and beat Katsudon and win the gold on my first senior season, because otherwise why bother?"
"Do you even hear yourself, you stupid boy? There's more to skating than being the best!"
"Not for me!" Yuri stands up to punctuate his point, which turns out to be a bad idea, because with only one skate his center of gravity is off and he lands hard on his bad ankle. A choked groan rips out of his throat, unbidden, and he topples over. Yakov catches him immediately and sweeps him up into both arms.
"Nn – put – put me down—!"
Yakov doesn't listen. He carries Yuri down the hallway despite his thrashing and protesting, right through the lobby full of the pair skaters who all get a good look at his purpled ankle, of-fucking-course, and into the antechamber to wait for the Uber.
Unsteady silence falls harsh and heavy between them. Outside, the smoggy streets are clogged with cars and pedestrians and people on bicycles. Yuri keeps his head turned away from Yakov, not because he's trying to hide the fact that he's crying, but because Yakov pisses him off and looking at him will only make him angrier.
"Yuri," his coach says eventually, fury deflated into a worldweary sadness, "I promised your mother I'd look out for you, and I can't do that when you're like this."
Yuri's throat tightens, but he stays angrily and decidedly silent.
His ankle heals in time. It hadn't been terribly severe in the first place, which Yuri could have told him. He has three longs weeks until Barcelona, and Yakov only agrees to keep him enrolled on the condition that Yuri stop overexerting himself.
The longer he doesn't train, the longer he's left alone to his thoughts, the darker and smaller his world becomes. Everything starts to feel like a chore, from getting up in the morning to eating to hiding from his shitty annoying fans. He puts up the expected front when people are looking, but when they aren't, the mask drops off and reveals that it isn't even hiding anything – just a Yuri-shaped void where he used to be.
Yuri isn't even sure why he's sad anymore, or if "sad" is even the right word, or if it even matters that he's sad. He doesn't know what he is or what he's doing when he's not throwing everything he is into skating.
Bareclona is nice, at least. Yuri likes the sound of soft Spanish chatter, likes the golden lights of the city. He'd like it more, probably, if he could remember what joy felt like.
And then, one day rather like all the others, something different happens.
Yuri Plisetsky had the unforgettable eyes of a soldier.
What the hell does that even mean?
It's ridiculous. It doesn't even make sense, really. It's—
Well, it's unexpected.
Everything about Otabek Altin is unexpected. What kind of figure skater rides motorcycles around in a city a thousand miles from home? Although perhaps the more interesting question is what kind of figure skater goes with him?
He hadn't planned on it, but Yuri spends the rest of the day with him. He hadn't been expecting to, but he falls into their conversations a though they were quicksand. Time slips through his fingers like water. It's nighttime before either of them realize it, and the streets of Barcelona are shining gold outside their café window.
"Wait," Yuri says, "dumplings."
Otabek gives him a strange look.
"That was you, wasn't it?" he asks. "The dumplings. Back in Moscow."
It takes a moment for the light of recognition to flicker alive on his face.
"Wow," he answers. "I didn't think you'd remember that."
"Of course I remember," Yuri says, grinning lopsidedly. "You don't forget dumplings like that."
He smiles. It melts all of Yuri's edges. "My mother's recipe," he explains.
"I remember," Yuri says. "They made a shitty day into a good one."
He cants his head to one side. Yuri suddenly finds himself red-faced, embarrassed to admitting something so deeply personal about something so trivial. He stirs his coffee self-consciously.
"Well, good," Otabek says after a lapse of silence, and Yuri looks up to find him smiling again. "That was why I made them. You always seemed sad, somehow, in those days."
Yuri isn't sure what to say to that, so he doesn't say anything. Otabek keeps talking.
"Like under the polished surface there was something broken in you. I suppose I just related to it. And I wanted to mitigate it with dumplings."
Yuri laughs, surprised. Then he is struck with the realization that it's been – what, weeks? Months? – since he last laughed at anything.
"This was not how I thought this day would go," Yuri admits.
"Then I'm glad I could make your day a little less obvious," Otabek says, and there is something very warm in the pit of Yuri's stomach at his words.