Moscow: Rostelecom Cup, GPF Qualifer Short Program (1.08)

[yuri_plisetsky]

The Rostelecom Cup is the last event of the 2014 ISU Grand Prix of Figure Skating series. In the men's figure skating division, two competitors -- Otabek Altin of Kazakhstan and Christophe Giacometti of Switzerland -- have secured their places in the Grand Prix Final. The remaining four slots will be determined by the final standings of the six skaters competing in Moscow, based on their scores in previous ISU Grand Prix events:

- Michele Crispino (Italy): 3rd Place, NHK Trophy
- Yuuri Katsuki (Japan): 2nd Place, Cup of China
- Seung-gil Lee (Republic of Korea): 2nd Place, NHK Trophy
- Jean-Jacques Leroy (Canada): 1st Place, Skate Canada
- Emil Nekola (Czech Republic): 3rd Place, Skate Canada
- Yuri Plisetsky (Russian Federation): 2nd Place, Skate Canada

As the competitors arrive in Moscow, two particular skaters are the focus of much press and fan speculation. Fifteen-year-old Yuri Plisetsky is making his senior debut in his first major competitive event in his home country, after a strong showing at Skate Canada in Kelowna, British Columbia. At the same time, Japanese skater Yuuri Katsuki has arrived in Moscow with his coach, the long-reigning world champion Viktor Nikiforov, and based on his remarkable performance at the Cup of China in Shanghai...

...but all of this is only to be expected from the official press coverage.



On the ground, the reality is a little more complicated than that.

Comments

[yuri_plisetsky]

In his need to get up and move around, the first thing Yuri does it to take the bag of melting ice into the bathroom and empty it into the sink. His hip is about as good as it'll be for now, and the cold isn't doing anything except to make the ache turn inward.

Lilia's door is open to him. She'd said as much, and she wouldn't have said it if she didn't literally mean it. But this isn't really something he can take to Lilia, is it? She'd probably just tell him that he shouldn't read so much into one reporter's comment, that it doesn't matter to anyone who really understands their art, that it isn't something Yuri should worry about because it isn't something he can control. And Yakov (who isn't here; who's dealing with the fact that he'll be looking after one more skater tomorrow) would have even more choice words to share about the idiocy of the press -- as if it wasn't something that they all lived with, day in and day out. As if Yakov himself hadn't spent most of his working life cultivating his skaters' images and reputations, the faces they all showed to the world, the internationally envied strength and prestige of Russian figure skating. How could they ever understand, even if they wanted to?

(The dark secret shame, hot and thick in his chest, is that he really wants to go home. He wants his grandfather. Wants to know that he's all right. Wants to curl up next to him on their worn-out sofa, resting against Nikolai Plisetsky's warm, solid bulk, and tell him everything. About Viktor and his dog, and Katsudon, and Yakov and Lilia, and everything that had gone wrong during the short program, and how he's sorry, he's sorry that he hadn't skated Agape like he'd wanted to today, that his grandfather deserved better than that, so much better, and he'll work harder to do it right next time...and when he finally ran out of words, he could just sit there and not say anything at all, because he wouldn't have to. And maybe this horrible weariness inside him could go away for a little while.)

He can't go to Lilia's room. He can't go home. And it's probably cold enough outside to freeze his balls off, because it's Moscow in November. But he can grab his jacket and jam his feet into his sneakers, and go wander downstairs for a little while. Maybe buy a candy bar or some other cheap snack from the kiosk in the lobby. Give himself something to do so he doesn't go running out screaming into the night.

He stuffs his keycard, his wallet, and his phone in his jacket pockets. Right now, that's all he needs.

[theglassheart]

It feels like it’s both an agonizingly slow crash that keeps slamming through his center and absolute less than a second, before suddenly Victor squeezes him tighter, again and then is gone. His words make sense, but Yuri can really only stand there as they sink in, while Victor is picking up the phone and Yuri can only assume calling for the cab Victor just said he was, had to.

When he’s just staring, and he doesn’t know the words, and. He didn’t hug Victor. Seconds ago. Which seems to catch up like something large cracking from up high, only to fall and go smashing. Too late. When it all feels too late, and everything else is moving so fast. Too fast. The dizzying spill of fear and pain that blur together at the thought of that being the last chance, when something in that still cracking, still crashing certainty knows he can’t just walk over and hug Victor to change that.

Isn’t certain that if he could manage to do just that, he’d be able to let go.

Not while he’s watching Victor right his suitcase and the bag that slides on top of it. When everything is in it, everything is gone from the room, and it’s only the breath of however many minutes or seconds left, before that’s Victor, too. Victor’s voice is the only sound in the room, not even the air, and he still has to blink to focus, even when the only thing he’d been looking at was Victor.

There’s another nod, gaze slipping to one side, before coming back to Victor’s face. “Okay.”

The idea of walking Victor down to his cab, to the thing that will bring this all to an end, to watch him vanish entirely from this sudden upside down tilted night, is a pervasive pain. The idea of saying no and just watching Victor walk out the door less than twenty feet from them, right there, at the front of their — his? his room, now? — is worse.

Yuri takes small breaths walking down the hallway with Victor and the soft sound of the rolling suitcase, trying to reach for anything that will make this even out, taper at least to a manageable roll, but there’s a problem with trying to find anything like to hold on to, ground into. He finds it in the elevator, while the numbers are counting down so fast.

When he’s trying to tell himself it’s fine, they’ve done this.



But they haven’t.

No matter how he looks at, how he twists it.

They haven’t. In the greater part of a year the furthest he’s been from Victor has been what? The opposite side of an airport, recently? Half of Hasetsu, before the Qaulifiers, for the summer and spring? Because when Victor decided he wanted to go so much as a town away Yuri was no longer cajolingly invited to attend things, but all but kidnapped into acquiescence. Not days or nights away. Not weekends. Not competitions.


When had that happened? How? How many months now?

Had he ever spent that much time with anyone before? Ever?




Yuri needs to stop. He has to stop. Before he can’t breathe at all.

This isn’t about him. It’s about Victor. It’s about Maccachin. Victor deserves this, and more. Anything, he could want, could need, right now, if Yuri could give it to him. Or just not stand in the way of it. Victor’s done so much. For so long. He’s never asked for something this important. He was never going to have to tonight. He'd done so much, given so much, every single one of those suddenly painstakingly clear days.

Yuri just had to make it through the next few seconds — minute, if it’s even that long? — and then he can go somewhere and give into being stupid and selfish. Whatever that was, whatever it even looked like, when the last time he'd ever been it, without Victor, felt like a whole life, was nearly a whole year ago.


But only once this part is done.

[fivetimechamp]

The cab is already waiting by the time the elevator door slides smoothly open: he can see it through the lobby, past the glass doors leading out into a snowy Moscow night. He rolls his bag to the door ––

And then there's nothing else to do, and no time left. He should have spent these moments going over what Yuri should expect and focus on for tomorrow, but his time has run out. He can almost hear the cab driver grumble under his breath as he turns, eyebrows furrowing, grasping for the few seconds he has left. "Ask Yakov anything you don't understand."

Yakov may have agreed to look after Yuri for him, but Victor's under no illusions about how poorly the two of them might communicate with each other. He's familiar with Yakov's ways, but Yuri isn't, and the last thing Victor wants is for all of this to end ignominiously, in failure, because Yuri was shy or uncertain or Yakov was too brusque. "If you're in trouble ––"

Two quick steps, and his arms are around Yuri's shoulders again, cheek pressed to Yuri's hair, and he has to go, but he has to say this, first. "–– just hug him, and he'll help you."

Yakov might seem like an impenetrable wall, an unscalable mountain, but Victor knows better. He remembers being just past childhood, when everything seemed too big to handle. He remembers being eighteen, nineteen, twenty, and not knowing how to say what he needed, but the way Yakov always seemed to know, anyway.

Even tonight. (He can still almost feel the pressure of that hand on his back.) "Sorry, Yuri."

Whispered in Japanese against his ear, the first time he's said it aloud tonight, but not the first time he'd thought or felt or meant it. "Even if I'm not here, I'll always be with you in spirit."

And then there really is nothing else to say, or do, and the cold Moscow air is biting his cheeks while the snow kisses them, and then the door of the cab is slamming, and then the hotel –– and Yuri in it ––

is gone.

[yuri_plisetsky]

The hotel's creaky old Moslift monstrosity is taking longer than normal to make its way up to the eighth floor. So Yuri leans back against the corridor wall, and pulls his jacket hood up over his head. (If it wasn't the middle of the night, he'd have his sunglasses on as well.)

Outside the room, it's a little easier to breathe. He's going somewhere, doing something. Not just sitting and watching the numbers change on the clock-radio.

Tomorrow. Numbers. Third place. Fifteen fucking points behind that prick JJ; almost twelve behind Katsudon. (And Lee's only six points below him, so he can't ignore that threat entirely, either.) He's got to make up the difference somehow, or his senior debut season might end with a bang right here. It's too late at night to be messing around with mathematics, but he'll have to change something about his program tomorrow if he's to have any hope of knocking one of the three of the off the top of the podium. It's something he can file away to discuss with Lilia tomorrow during warmups: one question that he won't have to deal with right now.

Finally, the doors open, and Yuri shuffles in, punches the button for the lobby, and slouches against the side. It's not likely to be a total zoo downstairs, since the reporters will all have gone out to file their stories and the competitors should be sacked out in their rooms for the night. Maybe he'll buy two candy bars while he's downstairs -- something chewy and comforting and tooth-rottingly sweet, like Ptichye Moloko, would be good. Yakov had said not to eat too many pirozhki tomorrow, but he'd never told Yuri not to eat his feelings with chocolate tonight.

When the floor settles with a lurch that he can feel in his stomach, and the doors creak open onto the ground floor, he stuffs his hands in his pockets and steps out, stopping for a moment to inhale some of the lobby's cooler air. The hood of his jacket blocks his peripheral vision, but he can still see a few people hanging around the front desk, coming and going through the entrance. He's not exactly dressed for stealth, so he'll have to make this quick --

-- but that's when he sees who's standing in the lobby. All by himself, facing the entrance. Alone.

[theglassheart]

The world plays through a sieve Yuri can't seem to get his hands around, can't remember why he's supposed to, as he stands there. Staring through the glass doors. At the empty space where the cab, and Victor, aren't. Where the snow is falling. While the people in the lobby who've been watching him, or not watching him (them, when there was a them), still are or aren't. Are existing. Too many eyes. Too much movement to his stillness. His inability to move. To breathe.

Just enough to press at all the edges of Yuri's inability to forget them, salt stinging against fresh blood.
He doesn't want to care. He doesn't want to look away. Doesn't feel like he could. He should. ... But.




The cab doesn't come back.

(Isn't coming back.

Victor said, to hug Yakov?

Victor's gone. Just. Gone.
The cab won't come back.

Victor said, he was sorry?

He's just gone. For real this time.
He was always going to go
eventually, wasn't he?

He said -- )

Yuri has to swallow. Has to ball his fingers up in the pockets of his black and blue country jacket, still layered right over his Eros costume. Everything. Everything so out of sync. Out of sorts. The snow is still falling outside the doors, and the cab is still not coming back, and he tries to tell himself, he does. It's not the same thing. Victor didn't leave him. Victor went to Maccachin. Victor went where everyone, including Yuri, said he should. Wants him to. And he does. He still does, needs him to get there in time, which only hurts more.

(Since when does anyone listen to him?)

It's too fast, too layered. Victor trying to tell Yuri no, while Mari was still on his phone. Victor's voice, in a hundred unknown words, pleading with Yakov. Victor saying, thank you. Victor saying, I'm sorry. Victor saying he needs to eat, and he needs to sleep. Tomorrow a million miles away from when it had seemed real, and two breaths from happening in that late night gloom outside the glass doors. He doesn't want to eat. He doesn't want to sleep. He doesn't want to move, exist, breathe.

He doesn't even want to think about skating at this second. Or even changing.
Like if he dares any of those it will make everything else take out the very last strut.

Somewhere the large crowds are getting out, day one is ending, and people will be coming back.
People in anther world, who don't know how much has happened in how little time. Barely to hours since.

(He wants to call home.
He wants to know if there's any word, any update.
Desperate to know. Terrified to hear. If Maccachin is-- )

It's too late and he still has no words, and he didn't hug Victor goodbye (twice), and he didn't say anything real, not after telling Victor he should go, maybe an hour and, but not even to two, before he did, so fast, everything so fast, and maybe it's good Yuri didn't, so Victor couldn't see how weak he really was, and how it's all he can now do to hold his breath, hold every muscle in his body still, and will himself not to cry now. (Not now, not here, not yet.)


In the middle of this too well-lit foyer of a too nice hotel.
Where people were watching him stand there, alone.
While he watched the darkness consume the snow.

[yuri_plisetsky]

Katsudon is standing in the middle of the lobby like he's been turned to stone -- or ice, more likely, because he doesn't seem to notice or care that he's right in front of the doors, and if anyone goes in or out he'll be blasted in the face with the cruel cold of a Moscow winter night. And it doesn't take Yuri more than a second to figure out that if Katsudon is here in the lobby by himself, that means that Viktor is gone. Left. On his way back to Japan, to be there for his dog.

Which means that Katsudon is on his own.

But it's the expression on his face that makes Yuri freeze where he stands, because...because it's wrong. That's the only word he can think of to describe how strongly every gut instinct he has rebels against it, that desolate emptiness that's too sharp for grief and too numb for loss. It's wrong in a way that strikes through and erases and rewrites something deep inside of Yuri's core, and suddenly every other priority he has at this moment pales in comparison to the overwhelming need to do something, anything, that will take that look off Yuuri Katsuki's face.

In his pockets, his hands clench into fists. Or rather, one hand clenches into a fist, and the other hand tightens around the thin piece of plastic he'd been toying with not a moment ago: his room keycard.

At first, it's another thought to rebel against. He can't drag Katsudon back to his own room. There's nothing for them there but a window and three walls and a bed; nothing that could make that (wrong) look go away. And there's really nothing for them outside the hotel, either, out in the cold and the snow that would only solidify that frost in their hearts. There's no possible escape, inside or outside, because they're still --

(we're still in Shanghai)

-- and that's when everything slams into place, as impossibly possible as a quad axel. He knows where they can go. All he needs is a door to get them there, and he has the key to that door right in his hand.

It'll work. It has to work. He'll make it work. He's kicked his way through plenty of doors before; this one won't be any different. And he'll kick Katsudon through this one, too, if he has to. Because he has to.

Yuri's left hand is still clenched around his keycard, but he takes his right hand out of his pocket and uses it to flip his hood back and away from his face as he stalks across the lobby with his gaze locked on his prey. He doesn't call out or try to get Katsudon's attention from a distance, because there's no point in wasting his breath or his strength. Instead, he steps right up and plants himself in front of Katsudon, glaring up at him with an near-feverish intensity in his eyes.

'Katsudon.' It's not Yakov's commanding bark, but it has an authority of its own. If he has to be the one making decisions for both of them, to get them where they need to be, he can't falter in this. 'You're coming with me. Right now.'

[theglassheart]

It's a washing, sloshing sea of everything, in between the snow and the darkness, when that familiar teenage snarl and Yurio's face appear between Yuri and the door. Enough of a confused surprise, and an onslaught attack he'd expected earlier, in a completely different hall, that Yuri startles and sways slightly in both catching himself and his equilibrium in the seconds after it.

Yurio's stereotypical teenage glower makes everything else focus down, and the why could be any reason.

The why for the reason Yurio is here, or talking to him, or looking at him the same way he has all day, but Yuri feels it mostly through too much. Doesn't really feel it at all. A jangle close and distance at once. Not beyond that first blush of shocked startlement. He doesn't argue -- though his gaze darts back to the door and the dark, when the cab and Victor aren't, before back again -- and it could be Yakov or Lilia wants something. Victor said to listen. Victor trusts Yakov.

(Victor's gone.)

He's not sure how connected and even if his shoulder can droop, but Yuri turns from the door.

[yuri_plisetsky]

It's like watching someone try to walk underwater. Slow and heavy, barely coordinated. No real understanding in his face of anything that's going on, like he can't even manage enough of a reaction to be surprised. The Star Hotel could be on fire and actively burning down around them, and he probably wouldn't even blink.

Fuck it. Whatever. If Yuri has to think for both of them, too, he can do that.

Admittedly, he knows he should be more patient, more considerate, in how he handles this next part of his plan, but he's hyperaware of everyone in the lobby -- the front desk clerks, the scattered other guests, people who can identify their team jackets and might be able to figure out who they are if they don't know already. Another skater, another coach, another reporter could walk by any minute. Already they're starting to attract attention, heads turning to look at them, remnants of interest that could develop into something Yuri can't fully trust himself to deal with in a way that doesn't involve creative combinations of Russian and English expletives. So he doesn't try to take Katsudon by the wrist or arm and drag him along; instead, he gets a hand behind him to steer him from the back, like a life-size puppet with a pork cutlet brain, and propel him across the lobby.

'We're getting out of here,' he says, low and tight, as they move. 'Just keep your mouth shut and walk.'

(He probably doesn't need to say that much -- right now Katsudon doesn't look like he knows what words are, let alone how to make them come out of his mouth -- but the last thing he needs is to try to come up with explanations for where they're going.)

The ride up seems to take a lot less time than the ride down. Yuri has his card out and ready, his face set with concentration, as he pushes Katsudon down the corridor. By the time they reach the door to his room, he's pulled up a picture in his mind's eye...of opening the door to his bedroom in St. Petersburg and finding something more than his bed and his cat on the opposite side. As he reaches around to slide the card into the reader, and the little LED light flashes red-red-red and then green, his mind is a single point of focus: Please. Please be there.

And when he opens the door, it is.