#leobeka

Relationships: Otabek Altin & Leo de la Iglesia, Otabek Altin/Leo de la Iglesia, Otabek Altin & Yuri Plisetsky Characters: Otabek Altin, Leo de la Iglesia, Yuri Plisetsky Rating: T Length: 6012 words (ongoing) Chapters: 2/6 Additional tags: Motorcycles, Major Character Injury, Hurt/Comfort, Blood, Non-Chronological

Summary:

“You crashed?”

“Not really,” says Otabek—which is a lie, so he corrects himself. “Sort of. The bike’s fine.”

“I wasn’t asking about the bike.”

Five near misses Otabek has on his bike, and one crash too close for comfort.

i.

It begins in Toronto, in the winter after Otabek’s sixteenth birthday, when the snow is slick on the ground and the days are short and Otabek does not head straight home after his Saturday morning rink session.

There’s a DriveTest centre forty minutes away in the other direction, and he counts the stops as the bus rumbles along through the snow. He’s barely been able to focus that morning; his brain has been blanking in the worst possible way, and with every spin and twizzle and backwards crossover his mind hasn’t been on his form or his speed or shoulders away from your ears, Otabek, but on right of way rules and gear shifting. He has a well-thumbed copy of The Official MTO Motorcycle Handbook in hand, and tries to check through the pages he’s bookmarked, the ones with the questions he got wrong most often in the practice quizzes.

But his hands are shaking, and he can barely focus on the words, and Otabek stows the book away before he changes buses.

Before a competition, there’s a point where you can’t practice your jumps anymore, and you run out of time to go through the motions of an entire routine; where you have to trust in your body and mind and the things they have trained to do. As he stands outside the DriveTest centre in the north of North York and gathers his resolve to step inside, Otabek sends up a wish and a prayer on the wind that it works the same today.

Sixty-three days later, he gets on a motorcycle for the first time.

Otabek is heavy, the weight of his head like an anchor where it rests on Leo’s knee.

Leo’s been amused by this since the day they met, that someone who packed up his life to chase a dream halfway around the world could be so steady, so slow-moving in the everyday. Otabek is the sort who’s perfectly content to sit still when he doesn’t need to move, to speak only when necessary or prompted, every tiny motion deliberate, every word precise. You’d almost think only his body was fifteen; his mind pushing fifty, already a grown man.

It makes him laugh to think about it. Boring is the word he’s heard rinkmates and common acquaintances use. Laughing, so he knows they don’t mean it unkindly: Come on, Leo, he’s too boring for you. And much as Leo hopes he’ll one day be a master of the witty clapback, his answer is never a zinger, never particularly caustic, or cryptic, or surprisingly profound. Only this: Otabek’s great, and a smile that says he means it from the bottom of his heart, regardless of how little they understand.

He doesn’t need to tell them, or anyone, how much he loves the pleasing irony that a boy from a country whose name means the land of the wanderers might teach him that happiness is no more than this—being able to be where you are and finding, somehow, that you don’t want to be anywhere else. Otabek is fifteen, but he’s wise, and steady, and when the world moves too fast Leo loves knowing that some of this quiet that helps Otabek stay the course is now his to keep.

It’s why he won’t trade Sunday mornings for anything, not money or medals or record-breaking high scores. Sunday mornings are for sitting on the floor of his room and blithely ignoring the bed and the beanbags and the couch in the living room one door away, because no sitting-surface is more relaxing than the floor, when you get right down to it, pun absolutely intended—or, well, Leo sitting and Otabek stretched out across the carpet like a gigantic, frowny-faced cat, sometimes talking, mostly just listening to the music wafting upward at low volume from Leo’s phone. They take turns choosing: nineties pop, quiet instrumental jazz, obscure postrock tracks that twinkle and undulate and sound just like floating in space must feel.

Leo watches, one eye on his Instagram feed, the other on Otabek’s face. By the fifth or sixth song, Otabek’s eyelids droop, close, open again, the gaps growing longer with every repetition. By the eighth or ninth, they stay shut, and his breathing has petered out into the gentle rise and fall Leo always waits for, the pattern that tells him Otabek can’t be any more at ease than this.

The world moves fast—as do they, learning to fly—but Sunday mornings are for counting all the slow things he loves best in the world. Waves breaking on a beach at low tide. Sunrises. Slow dance scenes in movies. Instant replay—how it shows you the way a body curves precisely coming down from a jump, a scything leg, the precise angle at which a pair of arms opens. The way Otabek breathes.

Pairing: Otabek Altin/Leo de la Iglesia Characters: Leo de la Iglesia,  Otabek Altin, Ji Guanghong (cameo) Rating: General Audiences Length: 18974 words Additional tags: Hurt/Comfort, Sickfic, Established Relationship, Domestic, Sleepy Cuddles

Summary:  “If that thing’s reading 38.4 F, there is definitely something wrong with it.”

“Why do thermometers even still have Fahrenheit settings,” Otabek mutters as he switches the setting to Fahrenheit and jabs it back in Leo’s ear.

“Beka, I’m home!”

Otabek takes a moment to turn down the heat on the element and the music on the radio before crossing the tiny kitchenette to the doorway, and he leans out ready to say hello. But the master bedroom door’s swinging half-closed even as he looks out, and he shakes his head soft to himself. He can give Leo half a minute to catch his breath from the stairs and put out his skates.

And then he sees the shoe rack right by the door, missing one pair of trainers, and narrows his eyes.

He has to get back to the stove, to make sure nothing sticks or burns, but once he’s there, pushing the food around the pan once more, Otabek takes up his phone.

To: Leo de la Iglesia Shoes off?

Barely thirty seconds later, a photo pings back: Leo’s trainers hooked over his fingers and his socked feet wiggling in the air.

Pairing: Otabek Altin/Leo de la Iglesia Characters: Leo de la Iglesia,  Otabek Altin, Leo de la Iglesia’s Coach Rating: Teen and Up Audiences Length: 2288 words Additional tags: Kissing, Alcohol, Established Relationship, Post-Canon

Success tastes rich, and bonfire-hot, the thrill of lightning after a long night chasing storms. But pushing himself the way he did this afternoon for his free skate—edging out that medal by less than two points, in the end—has worn Leo down. Adrenaline keeps him sharp for the gala performance, but no sooner has he swept his way off the ice than his legs turn to jello, and it’s all he can do not to fall asleep on the bench once he sits down to take his skates off.

“I don’t wanna stay too long,” he admits when Nadine hands him his suit bag, and she pulls him into a quick, tight one-armed hug.

“If you can get through all the sponsors in an hour I’ll cover for you after,” she says. “You tired?”

“That’s putting it lightly,” Leo says with a wry grin, and Nadine squeezes him once more.

“Suit on, one hour. And get Altin to do your hair.”

Pairing: Otabek Altin & Leo de la Iglesia Characters: Otabek Altin, Leo de la Iglesia Rating: General Length: 1905 words Additional tags: Post-Canon, Long-Distance Friendship A/N: A little fic to christen the Otabek & Leo tag ♥ prompt by @miyafuta and title from Vienna Teng’s Never Look Away, suggested by @delicadenza

Prompt: "Haunt Me: one character watching over the other”

Summary:

Support across oceans and continents is hard; when you know a person but barely know them, when the distance is just that bit too great.

Yet for Leo, Otabek cannot help but try.

Otabek’s coffee has just finished filtering when his phone buzzes and a tiny Instagram icon drops into the screen. He taps the notification and takes up his mug while he waits for the app to load. It's strong, dark, reviving, but too bitter, and he grimaces. Fool on him for trying another coffee brand; he's adaptable about many things, but coffee is his morning comfort and he can’t stand it if it’s not right.

Leo's Friday night Instagram posts always come within the same ten minute span week to week, and Otabek waits for them with impatience. He’s normally content to let life take its own pace, when it comes to other people; and he drives himself hard enough and far enough to eschew any restlessness at his own failures and setbacks. But these videos captivate him. Skype and social media are all very well for staying in touch, but Otabek dislikes distance. People are more precious when they’re close,and getting to see all of Leo, and even just a fraction of his hard work—

Otabek will pursue that with no care for patience or sensibility.

Pairing: Otabek Altin/Leo de la Iglesia Characters: Otabek Altin, Leo de la Iglesia Rating: General Length: 1012 words Additional tags: Pre-Relationship, Impending Separation, prelude to Long-Distance Friendship A/N: Just a tiny gen pre-canon Leobeka for the soul ♥

Prompt: “things you said at 1 a.m.”

Summary:

It’s a strange phenomenon: how in this moment, at 1:03 in the morning cast in the shying light of the street lamps, Otabek looks so comfortably rooted in San Francisco, when Leo knows two weeks from now he’ll be gone—

—gone, and not likely to come back.

It’s too hot to sleep, tonight, and Leo and Otabek have decamped to the rooftop with their pillows and Leo’s tiny portable speakers. The stars are half-hidden in the wake of the city lights, and despite the hour, there’s still traffic noise drifting into the neighbourhood. Night is never quiet, never lonely out here. Night is never the world holding its breath, as Leo imagines it could be someplace more remote: somewhere where there’s space to blink between the houses, where sound gets swallowed up by the black carpet of midnight wilderness, where you can reach out into the night: and reach, and keep reaching.

Pairing: Otabek Altin/Leo de la Iglesia Characters: Leo de la Iglesia,  Otabek Altin Rating: General Audiences Length: 2926 words Additional tags: POV Second Person, Non-Linear Narrative, Inspired by Poetry

Summary:

today you get a telegram

quiet and unobtrusive, like he just sat down beside you and took out his headphones to a comfortable silence where you didn't need to say a thing. You don't even notice it until an hour later.

On a boy who touches the world with sunlight.

(after Tony Hoagland’s The Word)

Down near the bottom of the crossed-out list of things you have to do today,

is car → gas, scrawled hastily and clumsily with your left hand.

You wrote it while holding the phone as he called you in your expiring parking spot; you forgot your headphones at the apartment and forgot you were in the car and could use the speakerphone because this is the way the two of you have always talked. You mutter if I can read my own handwriting later, and he chuckles, and you think of how he is left-handed and writes with looping script easy as a laugh with one hand, yet still scribes neat, practised strokes with the other, and would have none of your trouble at all.

The city hums past in streaks of chrome and loud chatter and the clamour of high summer. His voice sweeps over you, a sea breeze languid and sweet like cola, and it lets something in your heart simmer down and quiet its beating. This heart has been all over the world, restless and relentless as you chase your dream. There is a pull in it now that will never settle, even as you put down your roots and let them grow deep. But you have things you remember, on those restless days when the thought of uprooting yourself once again crosses your mind.

A song comes onto the radio, a bubbling remix with swirling beats that sounds like dancing feels when you’re with him. You wind down the window and let the breeze rush in, and laughter carries in through the window.

When he reaches out to steady you, it is sometimes as a call and his voice washing lyrical over you. Most other times, it goes something like this:

today you get a telegram