Chapter Text
Yuuri, there’s a foreigner to see you.
He’s in the onsen.
He sank into the hot water with a sigh. It was good, after a trip like that, to have a chance to soak. This wasn’t the first onsen he’d ever been in—you go to enough NHK Trophies, have enough Worlds and Grand Prix Finals and even Olympics in Japan, spending your whole day on the ice, and someone eventually points out to you that there’s a domestic tradition of really hot water that will undo some of the chill in your bones—but after a long two days of travel, it was definitely in competition for the best. Hasetsu was further out of the way than he’d originally thought when he’d booked the tickets. But if what he’d seen on that YouTube stream was real, it was all going to be worth it.
Yuuri Katsuki—or Katsuki Yuuri, he supposed, it was always a good idea to think of someone’s name the way they thought of it, if you wanted to do more than merely bark at them in passing—was worth it.
There had been no music on the video. That was, oddly, the first thing that he’d noticed. When you read the title, you assumed there would be music. How else could you tell that it was what it said it was: Japan’s Ace, Katsuki Yuuri, Tries To Skate Viktor Nikiforov’s Stammi Vicino FS? He’d expected to hear the by now not merely familiar but actively overdone strains of Italian opera assault his ear before watching Yuuri break into motion. When Yuri had…
Ugh, that was going to be annoying. Yuri Plisetsky, Katsuki Yuuri...he was going to have to figure out a way to differentiate them. Or at least he would if all of this went the way he was hoping it would.
When Plisetsky had shoved the phone in his face and demanded he watch it, it had been just one of the dozens of times that Yura had demanded something of him in the last days...weeks...years. Plisetsky had two settings, prickly indifference and active hostility, and that went for revered elders of the trade and younger rinkmates alike. This time, at least, there’d been a payoff. A rather large payoff. But he was getting ahead of himself.
When Plisetsky had demanded he watch it, he’d assumed there would be the kind of trappings he would have included if he were trying to put out a video that challenged the living legend of men’s singles figure skating—scratch that, of figure skating in general. Not that that was a situation he was ever likely to face, given the circumstances, but still, he’d assumed there would be fanfare, and music, and editing—maybe even trick editing, to cover up lapses in what was after all a very difficult program—and certainly at least commentary of some sort.
Instead there had been silence, and a constant camera angle from what was clearly the side boards of a small rink—not small in the sense that you couldn’t skate an ISU-standard routine on it, but small in the sense that his rink back in St. Petersburg was large: lacking all the amenities and all the additional space that went along with an internationally ranked figure skating program.
All the amenities that Celestino Cialdini in Detroit had, and that apparently Yuuri...Katsuki was not availing himself of at the moment. It wasn’t a huge surprise that they’d split; Cialdini was widely known to be arranging some kind of co-location agreement with Phichit Chulanont to grow the Thai skating community, which wouldn’t really be possible if he was also still coaching his other senior male singles skater as well.
But it was odd nonetheless that Katsuki had chosen to do this at a no-name rink that only reading the tags of the video itself had revealed to be in his hometown. Though to be fair, it wasn’t that strange to go home in the offseason, especially if a skater had just split from their coach…
Anyway, he’d been surprised by the silence, with only the breathing of whoever was filming and the slice of the skates on the ice breaking the stillness. If the video hadn’t had the title, he would have still recognized the routine after the first few motions—it was his after all—but it was still striking that there was no music.
Or rather, there was no music except for Katsuki himself, as he moved through the routine with a grace that had never been there before in any performance of the program, not the one that had just won gold at the Sochi Grand Prix Finals a couple months ago, not the one that had won the same gold at Russian Nationals a few weeks ago, not even in any of the practices leading up to those competitions in the final production of it that had just won gold (again) at the World Championships a few days ago.
He’d watched video after video of the Stammi Vichino free program, breaking down every element and every detail of the technical aspects, working to make it perfect.
He had never seen it performed like that.
He could hear the music through Katsuki’s skates; he could see the longing in Katsuki’s limbs; he could read the emotions in Katsuki’s every movement, even though he never made eye contact with the camera.
It wasn’t, actually, exactly the same. The step sequences were better: more fluid, perfectly timed to the music, almost hypnotic as Yuuri flowed across the ice reaching out to a love that passed tantalizingly out of reach. The jumps were a little worse—the quad flip was absent, downgraded to a triple, though as a triple it was high GOE, and there was a shaky landing both on the quad salchow at the end of the first jump combination—but he could not in all honesty say that he didn’t believe it was better overall. The PCS at Worlds had been high—chronic overscoring for the living legend, if you asked him, not that anyone did—but there would be no justification for this one not being higher, and it would have been an open question whether that would have counterbalanced by the downgraded jump.
Well, assuming it had been done by the “living legend” and not the skater who had just bombed both the Grand Prix Finals and then his own Japanese Nationals. Never let it be said that the judges were actually as blind to the reputation of the skaters as they were supposed to be. Usually to his benefit, but that was beside the point.
If all went well, it would be to Katsuki’s benefit as well, very soon.
Ah. A series of frantic footfalls suggesting someone running into the onsen. That would be him now. He let himself soak in the warmth of the onsen again for a last moment, before pressing down on the edge of the pool to lift himself up.
As Katsuki Yuuri burst into the room, chest heaving, he rose out of the water and extended a hand.
“Hello, Yuuri. My name is Yakov Feltsman. Starting today, I’m going to be your new coach.”