Yuri was late to practice. In his defense, though, it had been a long flight, and a seemingly endless trip to the athlete’s village, and no sooner had he gotten to his room than Junichi was knocking on his door, peppering him with questions about how interviews had been and whether he’d managed to land a flip yet and by the time Yuri managed to actually eat something and change into practice clothes, he was supposed to be at the rink to start off ice warm-ups, and by the time he was there to start warming up, everyone else was already out on the ice. 

So in the end he only got a weak warm-up in, nowhere near the amount of time he actually should have given it, and then an even weaker amount of time to actually get a feel for the ice. 

And not just any ice. The ice. The main rink. Olympic rings below him. A scattering of spectators and media up in the stands to watch him, to speculate and criticize. It made Yuri want to throw up. 

(How was it, just earlier today, that he’d managed to be excited for all of this?)

Seeing Victor standing at the other end of the rink, staring blankly at him, wasn’t any help. And Yuri didn’t have to wonder anymore if he had it in him to go up to his soulmate right away and reopen everything between them. He knew now that he didn’t have the courage to do it. And he was frankly relieved that Victor was the first person off the ice now that practice was over—while Yuri himself was still all the way at the other end of the rink—because that just meant he could put everything off for just a little bit longer. 

Tomorrow, Yuri told himself. I can talk to him tomorrow.  

Because one thing was for certain: even if Yuri’s cowardice and anxiety were swallowing him whole now, the moment he had seen Victor he had known in his soul that he didn’t want to let Victor go. He knew Patrick was right, that if he waited around to long, then Victor would move on. He had seen it in the way Victor was skating, before he’d come onto the ice. And Yuri didn’t want that. He wanted Victor to be happy, yes, but he wanted to be the one who made Victor happy. He wanted the life that Victor’s short program described. 

The first tear slipped out before Victor could stop it. Hot and fast, down his cheek. It landed on the back of his hand. There was a thing, in movies, where they would replace sound with ringing after an explosion, muffle all the voices. Victor had always thought it was laughably unrealistic. But it was happening to him now, and yet it still somehow felt laughably unrealistic. 

We need to stop dating. 

He swallowed, as if that would get rid of the lump in his throat, but the second tear still came, just like the first one. He could see the vague shape of Yuri sitting next to him. The ugly pattern of the hotel carpet on the floor. The door, just beyond his reach. 

We should break up.

He felt more than saw Yuri brush his bangs away, and on instinct more than anything else, he slapped his soulmate’s hand away. 

“Victor—” Yuri started. 

“I—You—” Victor tried. It was surprisingly hard to speak around his tears. “Where is this coming from?” 

He was twelve again, in the car with his mother as they were hit, and he was fine, and he was fine, and she was falling apart. 

Vitya, she whispered. Brushed his cheek with a trembling hand. Tu es blessé. 

Non, Maman, he wanted to say. C’est vous. 

But he was here, in a hotel room, with Yuri. His Yuri. His soulmate, Yuri. 

“It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, actually,” Yuri said, “and don’t tell me you haven’t been thinking about it, too. I know you have. You know this is for the best, same as me.”

Victor could laugh. He could cry. He did cry, tears coming harder and faster than they had before. For the best? He felt like his heart was getting ripped out. Actually, that was accurate. That was what was happening here. 

“I’m so excited I could die,” Theia said, collapsing into the chair next to Victor.

They were all at Colonel’s, and it was mid-October now. Leaves on the trees were changing. There was a sharp bite to the air. Skate America was a week away. Victor had been working on perfecting his programs for his season debut for the last few days, with help from Celestino. He was a different kind of coach from Yakov, Victor had discovered, but not in a way that was necessarily…bad. When he critiqued Victor’s performances he was sure to highlight what Victor had done well before going on to break down what he thought needed improvement. He ended all such comments with “Overall I think,” like if he was making a suggestion more than telling Victor to do something. It was nice. It was friendly. It threw Victor off balance until he had got used to it.

“What happened?” Victor asked, straightening up. He had been watching some of the videos from last season of the skaters he was going up against at Skate America.

Theia squealed. “Maria’s coming!”

“Who?” Victor asked, just as Yuri at Patrick returned from where they’d been loitering by the counter, chatting with Donald.

“Theia’s girlfriend,” Yuri said.

“And soulmate,” Patrick supplied.

Yuri snagged a mac-bite from the basket on the table and waved it dismissively before taking a bite.

“Girlfriend is the more pertinent—and important—title.”

May 2017

“Nice ceremony today,” Victor said around his toothbrush. 

He leaned against the door going to Yuri’s bathroom and watched his soulmate scroll through photos from the afternoon on his phone. Or maybe just Insta. Catching up on everything everyone had posted and tagged him in. Yuri glanced up at him and gave him a quick smile before turning back to the screen. 

“Yeah, yeah it was. Can’t believe Theia’s graduated.”

Victor turned around and spit into the sink. 

“Can’t believe she’s moving to New York,” he said. 

He thought he heard Yuri laugh, but it was hard to tell as he turned on the faucet and rinsed the remaining toothpaste out of his mouth. It’d been a rough year, but the two of them figured it out. They weren’t dating. Victor had played with the suggestion when Chris asked at one of the banquets this year, but Yuri shot it down and Victor, in the end, agreed. What use did they have for a label? In their own way, they were as committed to each other as they could be. Anything more was too hard with the distance. They weren’t anything but soulmates, but that was okay with Victor. He didn’t really need anything from Yuri besides the promise that Yuri would keep taking his calls, keep seeing him, keep loving him tomorrow as much as he did today. They had that promise of back and forth with each other, together and apart, and that seemed more reliable than any label ever could be. 

But it did mean when they were in the same spot at the same time, he got to spend a little extra time with Yuri, alone. They made sure to carve it out for each other now. He finished up and turned around, looking back at Yuri, and just...stared. 

They’d been caught after StS2 by Phichit. Not as soulmates, but as a couple. Or an almost-couple. Their friend (for reasons Victor barely understood, relating to cleaning or something) had taken photos of his room before he left for Skate Canada and had lots of questions about why literally nothing was out of place when he came back. Like, not even moved even a centimeter out of place. Yuri broke down and told Phichit that he and Victor were sort of seeing each other when they could, and Phichit had gone insane. Or so Victor had heard. Yuri relayed all this to him the day after, and riddled the story with profuse apologies that Phichit found out at all, since, walking back from the party at Over the Rainbow, he and Yuri hadn’t yet been certain they wanted to be public in any way, shape, or form. 

But once Phichit knew, it seemed pointless to try and hide it from their other friends. And now a fair few people knew that he and Yuri were something now, if not quite an item, Chris happily chief among them. That fateful banquet conversation had come, after all, after Chris caught Victor leaving Yuri’s room at the Grand Prix Final. Even without the label, Victor had tried to impress on his best friend that he was serious about Yuri. But serious, for Chris, meant plenty of joy and plenty of questions. Questions which grew into concern by the time the European Championships rolled around in the spring, because now that Chris had found his soulmate, he wouldn’t stand for Victor settling for anything less. Not after he knew Victor spent so long searching and longing and hoping for his. 

But Victor and Yuri had talked about it; they agreed to let Chris stew, even if Victor sometimes felt guilty about it. It was just that everything seemed too likely to snowball—and word too likely to get out—if someone like Chris knew too too much.