Thankfully, the hotel shuttles, taxi ranks, and passenger pick-up areas are a reasonable distance away from each other. And months of ballet training give Yuri an advantage in dodging lightly through the terminal's crowds, even with a full backpack bumping against him the whole time. Soon enough, he's outside in the grimy Moscow air, scanning the rows of slow-moving vehicles in the traffic lanes, slightly out of breath but with his heart pounding as if he'd been running sprints all morning.

Then, finally, his eye lands on a small, weather-beaten car that is as green from rust as it is from paint, and his heart gives an extra leap.

At almost the same time, the driver of the car -- a man perhaps a few years older and a few inches shorter than Yakov Feltsman, with a worn cloth cap and a thick, greying beard -- slowly gets out of it, and as he turns and catches sight of Yuri watching him a smile lights up his face. 'Oh, Yuri!' he calls out.

'Dedka!' And then Yuri Plisetsky, the fierce and driven Ice Tiger of Russia who will stop at nothing to be the best in the world, is running at full tilt to fling himself straight into the arms of his grandfather --

(crack!)

-- having momentarily forgotten that he isn't five years old anymore, and that it isn't a good idea to expect someone with back problems to catch you in mid-air as if the two of you spend hours every day working on lifts and throws.

Not, perhaps, the long-awaited reunion that either of them might have hoped for. For a moment, both Plisetskys are hunched over on the pavement in the middle of the road outside Sheremetyevo International Airport, as Nikolai tries to make the world stop spinning around him and his grandson flails anxiously beside him, stammering apologies as he pats and rubs ineffectually at the places he hopes he hasn't hurt too badly. But it isn't all that long before they manage to help each other into the car, and leave the airport behind them for the too-short drive to the competition hotel.