Work Text:
Yuuri changed a lot since he was a kid.
To Victor’s shock - and extreme delight - when Yuuri was younger, he was a little too much for his parents, who had a hard time occupying an eight-year-old running around the inn, sliding sticky fingers along the walls and hiding in guest rooms, in addition to actually running a business. Mari, as a disgruntled teenager, had absolutely no desire to preoccupy him from the time he got home from school to the time he went to bed, which left him to roam freely, a habit that cumulated in the one time when he ran into the kitchen and tripped his mother, resulting in a massive pan of miso soup coating the kitchen floor, seeping into the woodwork.
After that incident, his parents decided that it would be in everyone’s best interests for Yuuri to find a pursuit to get rid of some of his energy. After about a week of searching, they found a nearby ballet studio that Yuuri could walk to after school.
Within a year, ballet had become a fixture in the Katsuki household, with Yuuri’s irrepressible energy devoted not only to the sport but also to excitedly jabbering about it at home. Most days, it was typical for dinner conversation to be dominated by a lengthy discourse on ballet, a subject that Yuuri’s parents knew little about but Yuuri was delighted to inform them of.
When asked, Minako would say, without prevarication, that Yuuri was an annoying little shit when he was young, mostly because he insisted on training for four hours a day and she didn’t have the heart to say no. However, sometimes, while watching him leap into a flawless jeté split, she’d hide a smile behind the strands of her hair, and turn her proud gaze to the oiled, wooden floor.
As his teacher, Minako noticed that Yuuri was remarkably quick in achieving the grace characteristic of ballet dancers. But ballet, when Yuuri was young, served entirely as a conduit for his excess energy, and thus, Yuuri had little time to showcase any emotion other than unrepentant joy in finding how high he could jump and how far his legs could take him.
And, for him, figure skating was the same. Minako introduced him to the sport, his parents indulged him and his restlessness yet again, and Yuuri found another home. He delighted in figure eights, in twirls and Ina Bauer’s and gentle leans, his small hands lightly dusting the surface of the ice as he giddily reached towards it. For Yuuri, who knew nothing more, there was no truth other than beauty in ice skating - it was less of an art and more of a miracle of physical exertion, the heat of his heart bouncing in his chest and the chill of the substance that made it do so swimming along his skin.
And so, Yuuri begged his parents to take him to the Junior Grand Prix when he was fourteen, so he could see other people that loved that feeling, too.
It wasn’t his first time seeing Victor Nikiforov - he and Yuuko had spent more time than he’d like to admit watching him on TV - but it was his first time seeing Victor Nikiforov in person, where he was not close enough to reach, but close enough to touch.
And so, when Victor started skating, his hair whisking behind like a silver wind as he completed his first step sequence in his SP, Yuuri couldn’t stop staring, and, for the first time in his young life, it wasn’t about the way skating made him feel - it was the way the artistry made him feel.
Yuuri was not an artist at age fourteen. Yuuri’s skating was exceptional for his age group because he incorporated elements of ballet in his routines and lost himself in the exhilaration of movement, but, watching Victor, Yuuri realized that it was possible to lose yourself less in the performance and more in the art of skating, in the art of telling your story, in how you felt, and how you wanted the world to feel.
There was something in Victor that belied any beliefs he ever had about ice skating before; he had thought it to be brilliant but imperfect, had thought that there was a limit to how much of someone you could see while they coasted on glass, and how much of that person’s art was lost in translation, in the technicalities of scoring and in their reflection in each person’s eyes.
Before Victor, he had thought that stories were not so easily told without words.
When he thought back on that memory after his first Grand Prix, he’d found himself dwelling on an art history class that he took in high school; they had talked about Rodin and his sculptures, and how he so perfectly imitated the human form that people accused him of pouring wax over live models to form a base; that he had the molten drip cover mouths and eyes and slip into throats, screaming open, frozen, burning monuments towards a transitory moment in art.
Victor, Yuuri felt, left those wax statues on the ice every time he moved. He left his emotions wrapped up in his performance, pieces of his mind and heart for the world to devour, as they replayed his dancing over and over and over again in an attempt to digest all that Victor had so freely given.
When Yuuri had come home from that Junior Grand Prix, he had come back different in a way he couldn’t explain to Minako or Yuuko or anyone else who asked. Yuuri, when he skated, started feeling things - things that Victor had stirred in his chest, things that Yuuri hadn’t known were there but now couldn’t control, could no longer prevent from taking over his arms and legs and his skating entirely.
And so, when he skated, his PS scores went up because he couldn’t fight his own feelings, now that they had made themselves known, and his anxiety soared up with it, because despite the years that he had spent skating and his newfound passion for it, Yuuri Katsuki was nowhere near Victor, and now, when he was skating with everything that he had and everything that Victor’s skating had shown him, he felt even farther behind.
His skating, Yuuri later realized, when he had Victor and thinking didn’t hurt, made him vulnerable, for to perform wholly, with all of one’s mind on open display, is to mean it wholly, and to fail, to be seen as lacking, is an attack on one’s entire person, and everything they are. Yuuri couldn’t stop falling until he stopped defining himself by his skating, and he couldn’t stop defining himself by his skating until he stopped comparing himself to the person who defined his skating in the first place.
Victor could act with earth-shattering confidence, could feed the world bits of his soul because he knew himself entirely and knew his own worth long before he’d strapped on a pair of skates, but Yuuri Katsuki, before Victor, never knew himself at all.
He was glad that was over now. Yuuri looked over to Victor, whose face was pressed into a pillow with a sticky puddle of drool steadily building next to his mouth.
Yes, he was glad that was over now.