There is none of the vicious return of insult in his response that Yuuri assumed might come from defending Yuri's skating to himself. He doesn't look comfortable with it, but he looks ... he looks like a lot of them do. Between the beginning and the end, between the doubts, the regrets, and the unsatisfied need and inability to look away from the podium.

He looks like Yuuri's seen how own face look so many times.

He looks like Michele Crispino and Emil Nekola and Seung-gil Lee. Like he didn't really place at all.

(He looks like what Yuuri thinks he might look like if he could collect his mind enough, fully grasp onto the shock of second place here in Moscow, not first, again, but still with a near four-point higher score for his program than he made in China, in the first slot. It's all words, gaining too much weight abstracted by feeling. Turning into stones in his guts that are there next an unexpected sudden boulder.)


He can understand the last words, too. About doing it at home. He didn't fail. He placed on the podium for the first day. But Yuuri remembers how much more devastating it felt to not place at home, to destruct at home, in his own country. It's harder. It hits home with more force. Somewhere between that and the lack of the yelling, Yuuri ventures something still on that path,

"You didn't seem--" There's the faintest hum of pause, barely there, not even half seconds breath, of uncertainty for what word, against understanding his thought. "--very yourself at the beginning."

The rage, yes. Yes, that was undeniably and absolutely qualified as something Yuuri associated directly with the boy who sometimes seems a bit demon-monster child at turn. But not on the ice. On the ice, he wasn't that boy. He was focus. Dedicated. His all was in his skating. Showing the world how good at everything he could so he was at so early an age already.


That ... hadn't been there when he'd started. He'd been somewhere else. In something else.