Chapter Text
Mikhail lands in Milan with elation buzzing just beneath his skin. Of course, he’s terribly nervous as well. He’s worked his entire life for this moment, to step foot on Olympic grounds. To compete on Olympic ice.
He’d sacrificed so much of his life for skating, funnelled money and time and pieces of himself into it without hesitation. Hell, his father sold his car for them to get funds so Mikhail could keep going. There had been rough moments that felt endless and highs so incredible that they hardly felt real. He’d almost quit more times than he could count. But then again, were you ever truly in love with something if you never stopped to question why you were still doing it?
Now, he’s here.
He’s practically vibrating with energy, anxiousness and exhilaration crashing into him the second he sets foot into the village. The atmosphere is so uniquely different to anything he could’ve imagined, charged with intangible emotions of expectation, history and pressure.
His thoughts won’t slow, racing with a constant barrage of lopping concerns, the same phrasing rising above the rest.
I’m at the Olympics.
He’s worked so excruciatingly hard for his spot here, and the weight of it presses down on him. The responsibility and thick pressure of making his country proud with his placement settle deeply in his chest. He wants it so badly it almost hurts.
He still wishes to enjoy his time at the village, as well. He can’t let the nerves carry him away or consume him entirely, can’t get too far into his own head about everything. He’d done that before, and it typically did not work out well for him.
He still cringes when he thinks about his Four Continents results, which ultimately weren’t too bad, not really. But following a gold medal the year before with a fifth-place finish was not exactly a glowing return.
Maybe it was the pressure of being a returning champion at anything that wasn’t the Kazakhstani Championships that had gotten to him. Or perhaps it was the expectation, or the fear of being watched and scrutinised.
Whatever it was, it certainly had not been productive.
So now, he resolves to strike a good balance, to feel the competitive fire without letting himself get too caught up in the sheer grandeur. It felt laughably unrealistic (for God's sake, he’s the fucking flag bearer for his beloved country), but he could at least make an effort.
He doesn’t particularly enter the competition with a medal on his mind, either. A strong placement is the goal instead, and he’s aiming for the top seven. It sounds like an utterly arbitrary number when he says it aloud, but it feels attainable.
Because he also knows who he’s up against, and that was many other fantastic athletes.
Yuma, Shun, Adam, Junhwan, and of course, Ilia.
The medals were going to be a bloodbath.
So his goal narrows, largely to be two clean skates. Diva Dance was not his best program track record, but if he could skate it clean, then scores would follow. He can walk away knowing that he did everything he could, and that the scores should (keyword being should) reflect the effort he put in. He couldn’t control a medal outcome, nor what others did, but clean skates were within his reach if he could maintain his composure.
Composure…at the Olympics…
With his country watching.
With all his years of skating leading up to this moment.
Well.
No pressure.
It isn’t a vacation, not close at all. There’s still plenty of practice, training and structure. Plus, vacations rarely come with the looming knowledge that you’d be skating the most important competition of your life in the following days.
But there were still moments to enjoy himself, too.
He watches some other events that he doesn’t get to see, talks to skaters he’s rarely spoken to and finds time to catch up with familiar faces that he doesn’t see nearly as much as he would like. He manages to steal hours with Nika and Luka, where they get to wander through Milan and pretend that things don’t mean as much as they do.
Then, there’s Ilia
And the simple, sheer joy that can come with being in the same time zone as him.
They still don’t see each other much. They rarely do. Such was the life of dating within the same-sex, same sport, different continents, different schedules that never quite align. The ten-hour time difference between Almaty and Virginia was brutal, even when it came to texting, and calling was worse.
That was nothing of the physical frustration attached to it, the ache associated with such a lack of touch, being denied the opportunity for something as simple as holding each other or waking up together. It bothers him more than he cares to admit most days. But it was simply not possible, usually, not even when they were at the same competition. Their schedules are packed enough that they have little time to spend together, and the luxury of a private room was not one that either of them usually got.
So this was something better.
Being able to text late in the night until they both fall asleep, phones slipping from their hands and onto rough sheets. Sending messages during the day that would be read less than several hours later, but whenever the other would be free again. It’s not perfect, but enough to feel more real.
Still, Ilia is busy. Like, horrifically busy.
Mikhail is, too, of course—but Ilia’s schedule is something else entirely. The screenshot of it that Ilia had sent him looked utterly suffocating. Each hour was blocked off, colour-coded sections stacked above each other to indicate practice, interviews, media, promotional shoots, meetings arranged by Ari for brand deals or something of the sort that Mikhail doesn’t quite understand.
There was barely any empty space at all, excluding time for sleep and meals. You’d think that Ilia was superhuman with how detailed his schedule was. It would almost be a little comedic that Ilia had texted him two separate times in all caps, “ARI SCHEDULED TWO MEETINGS AT THE SAME TIME,” if Ilia hadn’t seemed genuinely panicked about it.
But the biggest problem is not actually the schedule.
Instead, it’s what Mikhail notices the first time he sees Ilia in person. It’d been almost two months since the Grand Prix Final, which was the last time Mikhail had seen him. This was enough time for some small changes to occur.
Ilia’s hair is longer now. It suits him well. It always does. Ilia had that kind of face that makes everything look intentional. He looked great, no matter what he was doing (although Mikhail was partial to the sight of him lying in bed with his glasses abandoned on his bedside table, squinting at Mikhail through a phone lens).
But Ilia was so skinny.
Not in a way that anyone would necessarily notice unless they were looking for it.
Mikhail isn’t looking for it, but he’s not just anyone.
He sees it in the sharpness of Ilia’s face, the narrowness of his arms when he shrugs off his team jacket, in the diameter of his waist that looks smaller.
It’s not subtle at all, if Mikhail was being honest. It was actually quite significant and glaringly obvious to him.
The people just tuning into figure skating for the Olympics, who never watched another competition in their life and only knew of the skaters through whatever promotional content they’d encountered, wouldn’t know the difference. A regular fan wouldn’t notice it, probably. Hell, the other skaters probably wouldn’t notice it.
None of them were cataloguing the changes in Ilia’s body type from each competition, but neither were they dating Ilia Malinin.
Mikhail is. So he notices. And it sits wrong. He’s rather concerned, but he does not say anything. Not then. It isn’t his place to ask about it—or at least, that’s what he tells himself, even as his mind pushes back against the logic (as Ilia’s partner, was it not his place?)
He tries to rationalise it away, instead. It could be nothing. Everyone diets to some extent in their sport, and Mikhail hoped that Ilia wasn’t doing some intentional diet to lose weight instead, because he did not need to.
It didn’t make sense, though. Ilia’d been doing more than well in every competition with his muscular build that clearly provided him with power. It would be bizarre for Rafael, Roman, or anyone else on his team to decide he needed to change this right before the Olympics.
Wouldn’t it be?
Mikhail files it away, tells himself that it’s odd, and tries not to dwell on it.
It doesn’t work, because he sees Ilia again and again throughout Milan.
Over text, he is the same as always. He’s sharp and affectionate in a way that makes Mikhail’s heart still soar. Even when they call, briefly, Ilia sounds fine.
Tired, yes, but happy and excited.
In person, Ilia does not appear to be either of those things.
Mikhail tries to ask him lightly if he’d gotten the chance to sightsee around Milan, and Ilia snorts, sardonic and humourless. “Yeah, Misha. I’ve seen the whole fucking city in the three minutes I have that I’m not busy.”
The words hit hard, but the tone is worse. Ilia sounds utterly annoyed at him for even asking, and he’s caught off guard by the uncharacteristic edge behind them.
Mikhail just gapes for a second, and Ilia seems to realise it immediately.
“I’m sorry,” he says, quickly. “I didn’t mean to sound mad. I’m just—” he gestures around vaguely. “Busy. I have the team event, and Ari’s got me doing all this bullshit, and I’m just—”
He exhales sharply.
“Wound up?” Mikhail offers sympathetically.
“Yeah. I’m really sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Mikhail promises, and he does mean it.
Later on in the day, though, Ilia texts him.
i think i have a shoot walking around milan with alysa at some point. so ill see some of it.
wish i could pick what i want to go see
or go see milan with u :)
isnt it the city of love or smth?
Mikhail smiles fondly despite everything, because no matter how long they’d been dating, Ilia could fill him with this giddiness and lovesick feeling that kept everything fresh.
You’re thinking of Paris, he responds, instead of saying everything that he wants to.
Instead of writing a long paragraph professing his love and his desire to walk beside Ilia through unfamiliar cobblestone streets, hands brushing and pretending, if not just for a few hours, that they aren’t here as competitors.
He thinks about how sad it is that Ilia’s in Milan and is not even sure if he will get to see the city. He wonders how much press one singular person could possibly be doing before their event even happens. He understands that the ISU wants him to do videos because he’s the gold medal favourite and well-known in the sport. He supposes that it makes sense.
From what Ilia describes, it’s nothing to the press circuit that the US has him running, and it sounds like he’s basically the face of their entire Olympic promotion. It sounds like pressure that Mikhail could not imagine, even though he’s facing immense amounts of it himself.
He is, luckily, not plastered all over the TV of every person in Kazakhstan on every commercial break for the better part of a month.
So, that encounter with Ilia about seeing Milan is out of the ordinary. That is only one instance. But the unease continues to grow persistently.
When Mikhail watches Ilia at practice, he knows something is wrong. Technically, Ilia is still skating perfectly. Effortless, even. Textbook quad combinations, quad axels thrown like they’re nothing, edges deep and controlled like he’d been practising more consistently, but not always implementing in his competitions.
There’s something missing, too. Ilia looks vacant behind his eyes.
Truthfully, he barely looks present at all, and more so like he’s running on autopilot while his mind drifts somewhere else entirely. His jumps are executed well because they should be, driven by muscle memory more than intention.
He’s usually talkative and loud. He’s social, someone hard to ignore. Mikhail is used to seeing him attempt to talk to Yuma and Shun through broken English, his botched Japanese and enough gestures to make a game of charades. He’ll skate over to Junhwan and drape himself over him to the point where it sometimes flares jealousy deep in Mikhail that he knows is irrational. Ilia is friends with almost everyone, actually, and typically smiles on the ice during practice.
There’s none of that. At all. He keeps to himself and to his team, and he’s certainly not smiling.
Hell, when he steps onto the ice, he barely acknowledges Mikhail at all.
It’s the same off the ice, too, even when he’s with Team USA.
Which is worse, because Mikhail has heard firsthand how close Ilia is with the USA team. He’s called Chock and Bates the team parents, Alysa a great friend, and Amber the older sister he’s never had.
But now, Ilia stands beside them and looks detached. He’s dissociating even when standing right beside them, and every time Mikhail sees him, it breaks his heart a little more.
It makes him terribly sad that Ilia does not seem to be enjoying any aspect of Milan after spending so long dreaming of the Olympics. It’s different for him, Mikhail knows, after missing out on Beijing. Because the last Olympics just brushed the tips of his fingers and then flew away in a cloud, and so he’d dreamt of the perfect experience there in his head, and then the perfect one in Milan.
Frankly, Ilia looks miserable.
And Mikhail doesn’t know what to do with that.
Mikhail tries to bring it up to Ilia a few times, subtly. He tries to let him know that it’s okay to talk to him if he’s stressed, if he has complaints. Perhaps, Ilia is too in his head about that, too. It’s not like Mikhail would use anything Ilia told him to his advantage.
But Ilia remained as positive as ever.
At least, over text.
How was the rest of your day today, Ilyushka?
it was pretty good. i had a CBS interview. how was yours?
any practice notes?
Mikhail stares at the message longer than he should, because it should be innocuous.
Except it’s not, because a good day to Mikhail does not sound like giving an interview, and he knows that Ilia feels the same. He notoriously did not like giving them, actually. He stumbles through his response and gets frustrated by having to formulate proper phrasing for his answer.
So an interview is not a poor reason for a good day. He knows that if the day had actually been good, or if anything notable had happened, Ilia would’ve sent him three, four, five messages back to back explaining exactly what it was about it that was so great.
Mikhail doesn’t push it.
They eat lunch together one day with some of Team USA, Nika, Sofia and Gogolev (who was certainly only there because Isabeau begged him to come and he actually knew Nika).
Although this is a bit of an overstatement as well, because it is more accurate to say that Mikhail eats.
And he watches Ilia not.
The plate in front of him is full—very Ilia: chicken, fruit, salad, and a random assortment of other foods that don’t quite go together but seem balanced enough—and the food at the Olympic village has been actually quite good.
Ilia picks at it listlessly, though, cutting up random pieces and poking them around, taking maybe three bites before he puts his fork down and leaves the rest completely uneaten.
Mikhail notices. Of course he does.
He says nothing, again.
But Alysa does.
She leans in slightly, slowly, her voice low enough that he can’t catch it.
Ilia shakes his head, and his voice is a little louder than hers as he says, “I’m just not hungry.”
“You weren’t hungry at dinner yesterday either,” Alysa points out, not unkindly but with a refusal to drop it.
Ilia’s jaw tightens and locks. “I wasn’t. So?”
“You have to eat.”
There’s a pause.
Ilia stares at her, something unreadable flickering behind his eyes and a pursing of his lips before he looks down at his plate. He picks up his fork to eat another singular bite of chicken, then sets it back down.
That’s when he glances back up at Mikhail, and their eye contact holds for a brief second, in which his expression must give him away. It must reflect something like concern, because Ilia won’t hold the eye contact. He glances back down at his plate and then retreats into himself for the rest of the meal.
He doesn’t touch his food again, either.
Mikhail’s own practices have gone well.
He should feel relieved. He’s yet to run into any major issues or complications, despite the environment, even when he practices on the Olympic ice.
The success doesn’t quite settle easily.
He tunes in for the team event anyway. Most of them do, even if they don’t have a team competing. It’s solidarity, and he tunes in for the team men’s short programme.
Watches Ilia place second to Kagiyama.
He sees it immediately, the crack in Ilia’s composure. It’s sheer frustration and devastation, evident from the moment the score comes up. It’s like he collapses.
It isn’t even the individual event, just one segment of many for the team.
But it’s still a loss.
And Ilia doesn’t lose.
Not anymore, he doesn’t.
Yet he had, sort of. It’s not a true loss because it’s only one segment and not the two, which wouldn’t mean anything considering it wasn’t a real overall result…but it’s a small loss.
Ilia has another chance to win in the individual programme, but the U.S. and Team Japan are fighting neck and neck for the team event Gold medal. Maybe it’s worse for him to lose here, then, because there is a collective depending on him. Mikhail isn’t sure, only that it clearly freaks Ilia out, written all over his face.
They’re interviewing him on an American broadcast that Mikhail has pulled up through a VPN. He’s not sure of all of the words being spoken, but he can get the gist easily. More than that, he can see the visuals and hear the change.
Ilia’s voice is flat and controlled, his eyes dead, and his tone is one of careful neutrality. It’s not like him at all.
Mikhail gets a text not too long after, when Ilia is away from prying microphones and back on his phone again.
i fucked it, haha
Mikhail’s stomach plummets.
You did not. You did well.
i didn’t even crack 100
i sucked
how did i get on a team and manage to stop doing well?
The feeling of dread crawls its way back up into Mikhail’s throat.
Ilia has always been too hard on himself.
This isn’t new, nor is it surprising. Figure skaters are rarely assured in themselves, and instead tangle their self-worth up in their scores and placements.
Ilia is no different, and it’s wistful thinking on Mikhail’s end to hope that this would be the moment where he stopped caring. Ilia places too much of his own self-worth on his relentless need to improve, and his skating capabilities, and it’s the Olympics.
You really did skate well, ilia.
Don’t undercut your achievements.
there’s no achievement to undercut lmao
god i am embarrassed
anyway
what else did you do today? other than watch me lose
Mikhail tries his best to lift the mood, but it only works halfway. He offers Ilia enough redirections and details about his day, until it seems to stabilise him.
Or, it sounds like it does. He seems to type with less despondency after he’s showered, settled into bed, and Mikhail reminds him again and again that the score for the team men’s short programme was relatively arbitrary as long as the team itself won, which was the more important thing, that it wasn’t resting entirely on a single segment.
Then, Ilia stops messaging him back, and Mikhail reasons that he’s fallen asleep.
It would make sense. Emotional exhaustion, adrenaline crashing…pretty common.
So Mikhail gets ready for bed himself, and as he’s getting ready to turn off the lights, his phone rings.
The first thing he hears is a sob into the mic.
He sits up instantly. “What’s wrong?” he asks, certain it’s about the short programme again—
“They’re making me do the stupid fucking free!”
Ilia yells it into the receiver, splintered and jagged with emotion. Then he’s crying, harder again, his breath hitching and uneven.
“What?” Mikhail asks, pushing himself to his feet and already moving from his bed to a slightly more private area. “But I thought Andrew was supposed to—”
“Well, maybe if I hadn’t blown the goddamn short programme!” Ilia snaps. “They called me and my dad and begged me, because they said it’s me or we lose, and it’s stupid because I already lost earlier! Why do they want me?”
And then he’s really sobbing, clearly beginning to spiral as his words start to trip over each other in an uncontrolled panic.
“I wanted to say no so bad,” Ilia chokes out, a broken laugh cutting through tears. “I begged my dad to tell them no, and then they guilt tripped me before I even fucking could, and I’m so selfish—” he hiccups.
‘You’re not—”
“I know I have to do it,” Ilia pushes on, as if he hasn’t heard Mikhail’s attempt at an interjection at all. “Because if I don’t and we lose, it will be all my fault for turning it down and for messing up the short, and I’ll waste everyone’s time. But if I do it and I mess up again, then they’ll blame me too, and I just—” It fades into nothing but static.
Mikhail feels…useless.
Because Ilia is calling him in the middle of the night, less than a day before a programme that he wasn’t even supposed to skate, and there’s nothing that either one of them can do about it.
He stays on the phone, anyway.
Ilia’s already had a bad day, and this clearly did not help matters, but Mikhail tries to talk him through it the best that he can, at least until the crying eases into something softer and Ilia can breathe without it turning into hitched gasping.
Eventually, Ilia hangs up. He says that he needs to call his dad instead and talk about “the game plan” for tomorrow, since he’s competing at the last minute now.
Ilia just sounds so utterly defeated, and the flat affect is back again.
It makes Mikhail nauseous.
He thinks about Ilia and Alysa earlier as he lies in bed afterwards, staring at the ceiling.
All he can see is gaunt cheeks, too-thin arms and plates full of food.
The way Ilia’s eyes evaded his own.
Sleep doesn’t come easily, but the morning does.
If anything, it comes too quickly, since he went to bed late.
Mikhail texts Ilia words of encouragement and reassurance before he begins, then watches the warm-up on the television.
Ilia looks the same as yesterday. Distant. Tired.
And then he skates.
And it’s perfect.
It’s as if he’d never been nervous at all, like he hadn’t called Mikhail last night in the throes of distress.
Team USA wins, and they erupt around Ilia, cheers and celebration loud, and Mikhail finds himself cheering too.
He’s just so thrilled that Ilia did well despite what happened last night and the results from the short programme, and texts him to send a photo of his team's gold medal.
His roommate looks at him like he’s lost his mind.
“Aren’t you friends with both of them?” In reference to Ilia and Shun, or Kagiyama. Mikhail reins himself in after that, remembers what they have to be and the appearances that he has to uphold.
You deserve it, love.
You were spectacular, you always are.
Ilia gets back to him later, texting him in small bursts.
They’re utterly chaotic; filled with typos and half-sentences that barely made sense. They’re riddled with grammar errors and a mix of English and botched Cyrillic that gets worse the more he sends, because Ilia’s Cyrillic wasn’t great when he wasn’t drunk, and he certainly was tonight.
Mikhail can tell, but he loves it, because Ilia, drunk, is soft in a way that he is not often. He is affectionately sappy to the point of excess as he tells him how much he loves him. Says he wishes that they could spend every moment together, that they should split every gold medal in half so that they could each win every time, that he can’t imagine the Olympics or the success of the free skate without Mikhail’s help.
Mikhail reads them all with aching love in his chest because he loves Ilia just as much, and this is the Ilia he knows.
It doesn’t last.
Two days later, they attempt to have dinner again.
The individual event is looming over them, and Ilia is still busy, just like always. Mikhail has to carve out his own schedule around Ilia’s, fit himself into pencilled margins just for a chance to get to see his boyfriend.
Frankly, he wonders why he bothered, because it’s the same thing as last time.
It’s another meal of borderline silence, of watching Ilia pick at a full plate that he doesn’t eat.
He breaks his attempts at not bringing it up, finally asks, “Ilia, are you not hungry?”
There’s even the famed Olympic tiramisu sitting beside Ilia’s plate that goes untouched.
“Not really.”
“Did you have lunch?” Mikhail presses wearily. Ilia’s arms are covered by the puffy white jacket that he’s wearing that makes him look like a marshmallow.
“Uhm.” Ilia thinks.
Dread.
“Ilia!” Mikhail hisses.
“I’m sure I did!” Ilia protests back, perhaps too quickly. “I just—can’t remember what. Everything’s kinda feeling like a blur. I don’t know.”
“You need to eat, though,” Mikhail responds, too bluntly.
Ilia exhales, clearly irritated. “Thanks, Misha. I don’t need you to be my mom, too. She worries enough.”
“Well, I am worried about you.”
It’s like the words flip an immediate switch in Ilia.
He stands up from the table in a rush, chair threatening to scrape against the linoleum floor.
“So you think I’m not capable?” he snaps.
Mikhail looks around frantically, then up at Ilia, utterly baffled. “What?”
“I don’t need you to fucking look after me,” Ilia continues. “I’ve got plenty of people here who want to tell me what to do, and none of them ask me shit about what I think. I can look after myself, and if I don’t want to eat, I’m not going to fucking eat.”
“That’s not what I meant—” Mikhail tries, but it doesn’t matter, because Ilia is always walking away.
Mikhail moves to get up and stops. Because chasing after him would make it too obvious.
Because, as of now, maybe it just looks like Ilia got up to go somewhere in a rush, and not like a very odd argument. But if he chased after Ilia, that would change, and maybe people would think it was an argument.
He’s not really sure what to do, so he lets Ilia leave and stares back down at the full plate of food that Ilia has left behind.
Mikhail barely has enough of an appetite left to choke down the rest of his own meal.
They are on the ice for practice, and Mikhail turns to his coach, asks rather arbitrarily, “Do you think Ilia’s lost weight?”
And Alexei looks baffled at the question, because it came out of nowhere. He squints across the ice and, after a moment, says, “Looks like it. It’s probably not a good idea to change your body composition right before a major competition.”
He pauses, then shrugs.
“But that’s not your concern. Don’t get too caught up in the other skaters.”
Mikhail wants to scream.
“It just looks like a big difference, that’s all,” he replies, indifferently.
Ilia doesn’t speak to him once during practice.
Mikhail wonders if the lack of communication is his fault, because he said something to make Ilia upset earlier and didn’t approach him.
But, Mikhail doesn’t want to approach because he already mentioned Ilia once to Alexei and skating over to him might be too much.
He hates the mental gymnastics of this. It wasn’t this complex at other competitions, but it’s the Olympics, and everything is far more scrutinised.
Mikhail notices Ilia drinking a protein shake right after he finishes skating.
It should provide some comfort.
It doesn’t.
The pit in his stomach stays all the same.
The problem is that Mikhail knows he is thinking the worst.
If he trusts Ilia, he should trust that Ilia knows what he’s doing. He should be confident that Ilia is just not electing to be upfront about the intention behind his eating habits. That he’s maybe doing intentional weight loss under the guise of his coaches (which Mikhail would oppose, but that wasn’t his job).
Or maybe, that Ilia simply wasn’t very hungry.
It’s not like they eat most meals together, at the Olympic Village or otherwise. Mikhail has no idea what he’s eating during other times of the day. Maybe Ilia is getting plenty of nutrient-dense food, but he just isn’t around for them.
Maybe.
But he can’t just leave it alone.
Nor can he stop his brain from thinking of the far worse alternative.
Ilia Malinin is not the type of person to develop an eating disorder.
That’s what Mikhail tells himself because he has to. But it’s arbitrary as well, because anyone can go through anything. Anyone can spiral. Anyone can end up caving to outside pressure or expectations, read too much into others' opinions and start to think they need to change, start to do it in an unhealthy manner—
So the idea doesn’t bring much comfort at all.
He tries again.
Roman Skorniakov would not be the type of coach to do that.
This is easier to accept.
Roman receives glowing praises from Ilia as a coach and as a father. They have a close relationship that doesn’t really seem to be impacted by the coaching dynamic. Roman, who hugs Ilia after almost every single skate that he has. Their outside dynamic is great, and when Ilia does complain to him about something, it’s more fond than anything else most of the time.
Rafael and Ilia also appear to have a good relationship, even though Raf coaches many skaters, and Mikhail has never heard any of them say anything about abusive coaching practices either.
But Mikhail also abhorred the idea that if this was not true, then it only left the aforementioned thought as the bad option that could be true.
Which would be worse.
The saddest part is that deep down, Mikhail wonders if he could see it happen.
Ilia is chronically online, to a fault. He sees almost everything: critiques and criticism, praise and adoration and cruel utter hatred.
Mikhail is not one to check online religiously. He has socials, uses them to look at what people say on occasion, but mostly to keep in touch with other skaters while they are outside of competition.
Ilia lurks and lies most of the time about the extent to which he does it, which Mikhail knows because he’s seen Ilia’s feed.
Then, he’ll claim that the hate doesn’t impact him and that it’s truly not that bad.
Mikhail knows the latter is not true because he also has eyes, and he can see what people say when he checks, and he’s convinced that Ilia must be the skater receiving the most hate on a daily basis.
He also knows the former to be false, because Mikhail has seen the cracks. He has seen Ilia get very sad about the hate, sometimes. There are weeks or days that are worse than others, and he may call Mikhail to complain about the newest discourse. These complaints threaten to bleed into tears, on occasion.
Mikhail has begged Ilia on more than one occasion to just get off of social media, to put his phone down or delete Twitter and just live in blissful ignorance of what people think about him.
Ilia doesn’t, and Mikhail will think that he wishes Ilia would, and they’ll reach an impasse and drop the conversation.
Mikhail isn’t online enough to hear what they say, but maybe they can’t see Ilia’s beauty, maybe they’re saying something about him physically. The idea fills him with anger, but he wouldn’t be surprised. They can’t see the beauty in Ilia’s skating, either. Plenty of them are intentionally mean-spirited and hateful, filled with anger just for anger's sake and jealousy that their favourite skater or that they themselves are not as talented as Ilia is.
It is a terrifying idea, something that fills him with utter dread. Of course, these people don’t realise that Ilia’s body is fine-tuned for his jumps. Of course, they don’t realise that Ilia is muscular and visibly so. All they can see are ways to hate and freeze-frames in the middle of programs, while breathing heavily.
The worst thing, perhaps, is that some of these people are so malicious that they’d hope for the comments to stick. Mikhail is certain that many of those people would be thrilled to see how they can get in his head, how they could hurt him if they caught him on a bad day. They’d be happy if they saw Ilia miserable and sad; it was, if anything, their goal.
If that group was big enough online, and Ilia was always online…Mikhail feared the idea that they could be successful.
It wouldn’t bode well at all, and Mikhail was certain that Ilia would understand this, as well. He can’t imagine that aesthetics (which were beyond perfect, in Mikhail’s eyes) would suddenly eclipse Ilia’s overwhelming desire to perform at his peak on the ice. Ilia lived for skating too much to put it behind much of anything at all.
So Mkhail holds onto that.
Because he has to.
Ilia wins the short programme.
He does it with his stress clearly flaring, as evident by the way he wrings his hands together, the way he keeps rolling his lip between his teeth, his general demeanour just radiating a lack of confidence that one could rarely find on Ilia when it came to skating.
It’s jarring, undoubtedly.
Ilia is typically assured in his scores and satisfied with his performances, even when they aren’t perfect. Typically, a score that was even second-place in the short programme would not have rattled him, because he would’ve trusted himself to make up the difference in the free programme.
Not to mention, this one had gone well.
There was no logical reason for him to look this anxious over the result in the way he was, as if something was already slipping through his fingers.
Mikhail is glad, at least, that Ilia performed well, because he tells himself that it will help. He hopes that it will boost Ilia’s confidence enough to pull him away from whatever headspace he’s been trapped in.
When he watches back the interviews that Ilia does after his skate, he does seem…better. He seems relatively satisfied with his performance and gives the indication that he is prepared for the free skate after changing his mindset slightly from the team event.
Mikhail hopes this is true, too.
They don’t talk much.
They’ve fixed the argument from before, at least. Mikhail apologises for pushing too far, and Ilia says sorry for snapping at him, for jumping to conclusions, and Mikhail pretends he isn’t still doing the same himself.
They don’t have time to be mad at each other, to be caught up in relationship conundrums when everything else is too important, with performances that would be crucial on the line.
Mikhail sees Ilia on his phone at the rink more than once, and each time he returns back to that thought that has caused them arguments in the past.
Why hasn’t someone taken it away from him?
Roman, Rafael, anyone.
He doesn’t know if he’d be happy if they had. That phone is his main connection to Ilia…but still, he was certain that whatever he was doing on it was not helping him at all.
Mikhail, a hypocrite, still has his own phone with him. He is not above accepting his own flaws.
The difference is that Mikhail knows how to put it down, that he isn’t obsessively checking social media and searching for the opinions of others.
His team could also trust him not to pick this moment, the Olympics, to start caring about what strangers have to think of him.
And they’re right.
Ultimately, nothing anyone says matters to him beyond the judges, his family, and his friends who actually know him. He barely even feels the need to check any social media to see what was going on, outside of occasionally scrolling on his meticulously non-figure skating curated TikTok and keeping up with people on Instagram when he remembers to update.
Mikhail could open up his socials to check to see if Ilia has been active on them. But he doesn’t.
(In the future, Mikhail will think about this with regret. He will think about how easy it would’ve been to open up the app for the first time in maybe two weeks.
He will imagine seeing Ilia’s reposts. Of calling him then, before everything goes downhill. He thinks that he would be a supportive force for Ilia, be there for him in the way that he clearly needed someone to be. Remind him that people love him, regardless of how well he skates, that there are people there if he’s struggling, whom he could talk to.
Tell him that he would always be there for comfort, instead of the repost button at 3 am on depressing TikToks and the haunting line—
I wish something bad would happen to me so I don’t have to do it to myself.
He will wish that he’d known, that he could’ve been that person.
He will wonder if anything would’ve been different if he had been.)
Instead, it’s the day of the free skate, and Mikhail thinks he might be sick with nerves too.
He’s fifth after the short programme, which means that he’s slotted to skate in the final group alongside Ilia, Yuma, Adam, Daniel and Junhwan.
All of which were skaters with a far more established fanbase, more well-known than he was. Names that would get people to turn on the television, even if they’d skipped the entire rest of it.
He’s spent so many days putting in the effort to ignore the expectations of others, but he can feel it beginning to crawl into his consciousness insidiously.
On the one hand, if people do not know of him, they cannot expect too much from him.
On the other hand, that meant skating packed in a line of people who casual fans would know…perhaps they’d expect something from him at the competition to prove he should be amongst them.
Mikhail, on any other day, would dismiss these concerns. He knows that he’s proved his spot just as much as any other skater has, and he belongs just as much as they do. But today it mixes with everything else: the scale of everything, the exhaustion of the season, the reminder that his country is watching, waiting, hoping for him to do well.
It threatens to tear at his composure.
So he keeps his focus narrow and removes all his distractions. He spends the day singularly concerned with his warmups off-ice and whatever Alexei wants him to do to get prepared.
He will be calm. Or at least, he will pretend to be.
He only checks his phone once, for a total of perhaps two minutes, and long enough to see Ilia’s text message to him,
hope you’re ready for a podium finish
you got it on lock
Mikhail smiles, texts back,
And you’ll be standing right beside me.
Then, he put it away. He was ready. Or so he hoped.
When they call him out for the on-ice warmup, Mikhail sees Ilia for the first time in months in his free skate costume. Of course, he’d seen it on television during the team event, but in person, it looks different.
Because Ilia’s meticulously tailored Satomi Ito costume is designed to move with him, not be baggy all over, bunched slightly at the waist and arms. It certainly shouldn’t be loose where it fit perfectly just two months ago.
Mikhail looks away.
He warms up alongside the rest of the skaters, finishes and leaves the ice so that Junhwan can do his free skate.
Mikhail doesn’t watch it, either.
He knows Junhwan, and he knows how Junhwan skates as well. He moves fluidly and effortlessly. No matter what, Junhwan will look pretty; he emphasises artistry in a way that Mikhail is still striving towards.
But he doesn’t need to see it today, because no matter how well Junhwan does, it won’t keep his nerves at bay.
Five minutes later, he stepped onto the ice himself, adorned in his costume for the free, shaking his hands as if they would shake the nerves away.
A brief glance to the side shows Stephen Gogolev still sitting in the leader’s chair.
Then, he faces the judges, takes a deep breath.
The music begins to play, and he lets it all fade away.
He ignores the crowd, the judges, the other skaters, leaves behind whatever else has been plaguing him.
It’s just him, the music and the ice, and it’s time to perform.
Perform he does.
There’s a mistake, a step out on the end of an otherwise great quad jump. But he doesn’t let it affect the rest of his performance, and at the end, it barely even registers to him, because he’s still standing.
It’s the end of the programme, and he has not fallen, and there’s nothing else outside of that one moment that he could think of that would be a problem.
This means he’s done it, exactly what he came to Milan to do. Two clean programmes.
He’s so relieved and so tired and beyond excited that he collapses, and the ice graces his skin for the first time since he’s landed in Milan, because he has not fallen.
He leaves the rink with a smile on his face that can mirror the ones displayed by his entire team. He has made them proud.
In the kiss and cry, he gets back a score that places him squarely in the leader's chair, his season best, his personal best. It is enough to do incredibly well, which puts him in contention for a bronze medal. No matter what, he has achieved the finish that he was aiming for.
He watches the remaining skaters from the leader's chair with bated breath. It’s a little hard to see because he does not have his glasses on, and no television screen to see the results come in. It’s just the crowd’s reactions and his own blurry vision of the other skaters.
He can see that things are not going particularly well.
He cringes as Adam’s free programme progresses with struggles, and he can’t really breathe as he realises almost all the skaters have gone, and he’s still sitting in the leader's chair.
Bronze.
Bronze was a medal. God, he could cry just thinking about it. But the competition isn’t over.
Yuma’s performance comes up, and it doesn’t go as well as it typically does. It’s shocking, not disastrous, but Yuma has no smile when he gets off the ice, which is uncharacteristic. He’s not happy with it. Mikhail watches the score come in, low enough that Kagiyama slots beneath him on the leaderboard, and now it’s even more surreal.
Because Mikhail is looking at silver for the Olympics. He hadn’t allowed himself to believe that this was an option, that he could get his hopes in this way. After a rough season outside of Worlds and his loss at Four Continents, he just wanted to do well for himself and his country.
Silver.
The podium will look the same as Worlds, then, Mikhail thinks as Ilia skates out.
He can’t see Ilia’s face from this far away.
(If he could’ve, he would’ve seen how quickly his expression shifts the second he gets into his opening pose.
He would’ve noticed something was off from the moment the music began, seen evidence of Ilia’s own words, “It was like my laugh flashed before my eyes.”)
Ilia’s first jump is perfect.
The second is a pop. A 1A that was undoubtedly supposed to be a Quad Axel.
Then the whole programme just unravels.
Completely.
If Mikhail is honest, it is a trainwreck, the kind that is hard to watch, so bad that you do want to look away.
Ilia can usually cleanly recover from a mistake, stack elements back up to make up for something that hasn’t gone well, do calculations behind his eyes and reign everything back in. At the Olympics, it just keeps slipping away, element after element that pop, uncharacteristic falls.
When Ilia finishes, the arena is borderline silent. Mikhail claps anyway.
Of course he does.
That’s Ilia.
That’s his boyfriend. Hell, he would’ve clapped if Ilia stepped onto the ice, did a 1A and fell on it and then got up and skated off without attempting anything else.
It’s still blurry, but he can see Ilia skating around on the ice, so defeated, head hanging as he shakes it, and when he skates off the ice, he’s still shaking his head as he’s pulling on his guards, being hugged by Rafael.
Ilia’s flushed cheeks are already damp with tears as he walks past Mikhail on his way to the kiss and cry, and Mikhail feels terrible.
But it will be okay, because it always is.
Ilia did not have a great skate at all, but his short programme was strong; he had a nice lead, he always pulls through.
Hell, his base value alone should be enough to keep him afloat.
There were mistakes, sure, but—
People are shaking him violently by his shoulders, yelling in his ears, and Mikhail looks up at the screen and sees his name still slotted at number one.
What the fuck?
He’s just won.
Won the fucking Olympics.
In his daze, he searches the board automatically for Ilia’s position, maybe second or third. FInds it all the way down in eighth place on the scoreboard, and Mikhail feels his mind moving sluggishly as he tries to think about the reality that he’s won the fucking Olympics and yet Ilia had not even come top five.
Then, Ilia is suddenly standing in front of him, deceptively smiling somehow. His eyes are devastatingly hollow and empty as he says, “You deserve it.”
Mikhail responds, spewing something back that’s rushed and probably incoherent as he shakes his head, “You should’ve—”
Ilia nods again, slowly. “You deserve it,” he insists, the only words that he can formulate.
When they hug, Ilia’s hand threads itself in his hair, and Mikhail’s not sure who the touch is supposed to be more grounding for.
Then he’s gone.
Mikhail is whisked away in a blur of movement. They are backstage, likely scrambling for the Kazakhstan national anthem. Someone is shoving a huge flag of his country into his hand, there are lights and cameras trained on him, and the entire stadium is cheering for him.
He’s being adorned with the weight of heavy gold, and spotlights hone down on him as the announcer shouts, ‘Olympic Champion Mikhail Shaidorov.’
It’s a movie, a dream, a manifestation of years and years of his life.
It’s everything he could’ve ever aspired for and beyond it, a thrill he doesn’t know if he can ever come down from.
He has interviews galore after he gets off the podium, gold still around his neck.
They ask him how he feels, did he think that he would medal, let alone be champion? He answers the same way every time.
They ask him about Ilia without fail.
It rubs something raw in his chest. He tries his best to be professional, but every time they bring it up, it reminds him that Ilia does not have a medal for the individual events, and hadn’t come close to one, that he went from first place after the short to a mere top ten finish.
His boyfriend should have been standing beside him, an accompanying medal around his neck, one of the positions taken by Yuma or Shun…yet, that wasn’t how the night had gone.
He comes up with a standard, professional answer for these questions, too. One that indicates his shock that Ilia had not done as well as he’d expected, but did not turn his loss into a spectacle.
He knows that Ilia will have to deal with enough of that without Mikhail adding to it. If anything, he’s sure that if he walked off, he’d find Ilia with 55 cameras and microphones in his face, running a press circuit consisting of questions not about how it felt to win, but what happened? How did he underperform so drastically?
Mikhail feels for him.
He manages to, in his brief moment alone, message Ilia.
I love you so much
I want you to remember
I’ll love you no matter the outcome
His parents call him after that. They stayed up late to watch him skate live and then even later to finally call him once he could get away from the cameras. They scream so loudly for him through the phone that he wonders if they could blow the speaker out.
The rest of the night is a blur of celebration.
Alexei takes him out for drinks afterwards, and a bunch of his friends come too, almost everyone from the Kazakh team, Luka and Nika. It’s fun, of course, and nobody lets him buy a single drink for himself, although there’s somehow one in his hand the whole night. His entire world is coated in a haze of alcohol and so many emotions he couldn’t even name them all, and when he stumbles back to his room at the Olympic Village, he can take off his gold medal and set it right on the table beside his bed.
He checks his phone again through swimming letters and an almost dead screen, and he can see that Ilia has seen his messages, but has not replied to any of them.
love please don’t be mad at me. i’m sorry.
He’s too drunk to send it in English, and there’s probably a spelling error or two in it that will make it hard for Ilia to translate if he needs to; he sends it anyway and falls asleep almost immediately after.
He dreams of gold and glitter, of blinding spotlights. He relives standing on the podium again, but when he glances to the side, he can see Ilia standing in the darkness of the stadium, crying.
He wakes up late, with a groan and an egregious hangover. As he grabs his phone off the bedside table, he grins when he sees the gold medal still sitting right beside it. He still can’t believe it’s real.
The smile slides off his face as he sees messages from Ilia.
why would i be mad at you?
just because i can’t manage to skate when it matters most?
i told you that you deserved it
and you do
misha you’ve always deserved it
you deserve the world
and someone just as good as you are
The texts are dated from close to four AM, hours before. Mikhail wonders if Ilia went to sleep incredibly late or woke up unreasonably early.
Ilia, you’re beyond enough for me.
The response is immediate, which means it’s actually more likely that Ilia didn’t sleep at all.
that’s not true
don’t try to pretend like it is.
i’m not a good boyfriend and i’ve been a dick the whole time we’ve been here
and now you’re an olympic champion
and im nothing
and it’s what i deserve
Mikhail presses his fingers into his eyes, like maybe the messages will vanish. Like maybe they are a hallucination, and Ilia isn’t seriously texting him that he’s not good enough for Mikhail, as if that had ever been true.
When he opens them, they are still there.
Ilia, you are an amazing boyfriend
You have not been terrible while we’ve been here, either
You’ve been under immense pressure
There is no one else better for me than you are.
He lets the messages sit and sees Ilia begin to type. Before he can finish, Mikhail sends another message.
I’m worried about you.
Ilia’s text bubble vanishes and then reappears, vanishes again a few times.
you should celebrate instead
or keep celebrating
i know you did last night
and you earned it
it’s not worth your attention how i feel
Mikhail hears the despondency in the tone and instinctively presses the call button on the phone. It only dials for a second before it stops, clearly declined.
i don’t want to talk
i’m bad company right now
i’d just kill your mood
i probably am already
i should go
i guess i love you
no i do, i love you so much
don’t know why i typed it like that
fuck
why do i bother
Mikhail tries to call again, but the call declines instantly.
Ilia doesn’t send any more texts to follow up.
Ilia, you never bother me
I want to talk to you because I care about you
And you’ve been there for me when I’ve been upset before
Please let me do the same for you
You are always worth my time and energy
I don’t want you to think badly of yourself even if yesterday didn’t turn out how you wanted it to.
No response.
Ilia doesn’t even see it.
Mikhail goes online just to check what people are saying, what he knows Ilia is seeing. It’s not worse than he expected, and not better either, which isn’t good because he expected it to be close to the worst.
That is also when he finally sees Ilia’s reposts on TikTok, shared by a fan account that is trying to tell people the importance of mental health and to combat harassment.
Mikhail sits there too, meticulously checking what they mean, and with each one, he just feels more dread. He hadn’t noticed. Had Roman or Rafael not? Had Ari not noticed? He was Ilia’s publicist and agent; it seemed like something that he should’ve been aware of since it related to Ilia’s socials.
He’s terrified because some of them seem almost like posts about self-harm or a desire to give up, and Ilia’s never communicated these ideas before, and this was before the free skate, before he shocked himself and the world and lost out on the chance that he’d been vying for for the past 4 years since he lost it for Beijing.
If Ilia was already expressing ideas like this but hadn’t even been vocal enough to tell Mikhail about it, and now was practically spiralling to him…
Mikhail blinks again, and in the split second of darkness, he remembers full plates and baggy costumes.
Fuck.
Honestly, every moment with no response from Ilia only heightens the fear that’s beginning to fully set in. He gives it an hour before he checks back again, and Ilia still hasn’t read his messages.
It doesn’t make sense because he knows that Ilia is awake.
So he is avoiding Mikhail.
Or his phone.
Or he’s—
Ilia is unreachable all day.
He tries to call again at nine pm and is met with no response, but the phone rings for the full time and goes to voicemail instead of the tell-tale sign of a declined call, which meant that Ilia was maybe not purposefully avoiding him.
He can’t help himself, though.
Please tell me you’re okay.
Ilia doesn’t answer this one either.
It’s just past eleven when Mikhail gives up on waiting. He resigns himself to bed, and half-distracted and half-numb, replies back to a friend from home who is reminding him that, Olympic champion or not, Mikhail still owes him 10,000 tenge.
His phone rings.
Ilia.
Mikhail nearly drops it in his haste to answer, picks it up frantically as he answers, “Ilia?”
“What did you mean by am I okay?” Ilia asks, voice too quiet.
It catches Mikhail off guard. “I—I don’t know?” he admits. What did he mean? “In general?” He says, almost phrased like a question.
Ilia snorts, devoid of humour. “‘Okay’ is a lot of things. Am I okay physically? I’m bruised, but yes. Am I okay mentally?”
There’s a long silence. Finally, a near whisper, “How could I be okay right now?”
“Ilyushka—” Mikhail begins, and he doesn’t get far.
“Everyone has been texting me nonstop.” Ilia cuts in. “They keep asking me the same thing. I tell them I’m sad, but I’ll get through it, because I know that’s what I’m supposed to say, and it’s probably right.”
A pause.
“But my life feels like it’s completely over.” Ilia laughs.
“Which is fucking ridiculous, I know! It’s not like I’m injured or something. It’d almost be better if I was injured, because at least I’d have an excuse for sucking so badly, and instead all I have is the fact that I blew it again.”
“You did not, Ilia—”
“I keep telling you to stop lying to me!” Ilia snaps, a quick pivot from the quiet of before. “Stop acting like I didn’t fuck up! I got fifteenth in the free! I finished eighth, and I was supposed to win!”
His voice is rising, uneven and stress is placed on the wrong parts of words. “You know, I haven’t even done this badly since the fucking Cup of Austria in 2021, and I wasn’t even a senior then! I thought I couldn’t do worse than Worlds 2022, and I got ninth there and still had a better score than I did yesterday! I sucked so fucking badly that it’s going to be the only thing I am remembered for, and everyone’s right when they say that I earned this! I let them run all this fucking press about me, and I was on the TV and hyped up into oblivion, like I somehow deserved it more than everyone else—”
Ilia barely stops to take a breath before he keeps going, dragging it in through his teeth with a sound that makes it appear painful.
“I’m mad!” He continues, “and I want something else to blame, but there isn’t anything to blame but myself! There are a million things I could say. What if I hadn’t done both parts of the team event? What if I hadn’t tried to do that stupid quad axel? What if I had fucking listened to you when you told me to get off social media for the five hundredth fucking time?”
It pitches high and cracks. “I don’t fucking know, maybe everything would be different, but all of those things are my fault. And I hate myself because I’m jealous and bitter, and I told you that I think you deserve it—and you do, I swear—but I see photos of the podium, and I wish I could hate you, because hating you would make it so much easier! But instead I’m so happy for you and so angry for myself that I can’t have it with you because I love you so much I wanted you to have the fucking world, but I wanted it to be with me, and now it won’t ever happen, and it’s my fault.”
Then Ilia is sobbing again, and it’s dreadfully loud over the speaker.
Mikhail knows, depressingly, that he is not qualified to handle all these emotions at once. He swallows the lump in his throat and tries his best nonetheless, because if Ilia needed something, he’d try his best.
Ilia called him, not his dad or his mom, or any of his friends. He trusted Mikhail with him in this state.
He was sure that Ilia would put the same effort into helping him, roles reversed.
“Ilyushka, why do you think you’re not allowed to be upset?”
There’s nothing on the other end, just another choked cry.
“Do you think I didn’t feel upset at all when I came fifth at the Grand Prix in 2024, and you won, and then sixth this year, and you won again? Or when you medalled at Worlds in 2023 and then won in 2024, and I came fourteenth twice? It’s normal to be upset and jealous, and it’s valid. I don’t blame you, of course, you wanted to win together, I’ve wanted to win together, and I’ve been defeated over and over again by not podiuming, and I’m still here!”
“It was one bad day, Ilia. It will not define you, and there will be so many more opportunities and ways to establish a legacy, no matter what happened yesterday.”
“You can’t put all the blame on yourself, or it will eat you alive, and it isn’t fair. You did the team event at the last minute because the U.S. begged you to, and you were selfless enough to skate an extra program to help out your team overall. You weren’t even happy with the amount of press you had to do, and you didn’t sign yourself up for it. The amount of pressure being put on you was so horrific that I felt bad, and that was not your fault.”
“Misha, please,” chokes out, probably another desperate plea for Mikhail to stop lying to him or a dismissal of his words.
So Mikhail keeps talking before Ilia can cut him off again. “Maybe the people around you failed you. They could’ve scheduled you for less, not gone to the press and insinuate that you would be doing the axel to make you feel like you had to, they could’ve not made you do both portions of the team event, or taken your phone away so that you couldn’t see social media, or not fed you to the wolves like you aren’t only twenty one.”
“Please, Ilyushka, give yourself a break.”
There’s another hitched gasp over the phone, the sound of sniffling and broken tears that fill Mikhail with unbelievable amounts of sadness.
“It doesn’t matter!” Ilia exclaims. “I’m never—”
There’s a loud thud and then nothing but silence, and Mikhail wrenches his head away from the receiver. “Ilia? Ilia?”
“Fuck,” Ilia’s voice cuts back in over the line, already bordering on hysterical. “Let’s be honest. This was my last chance.”
“What are you talking about?” Mikhail interjects, because that wasn’t true at all—
“I’m not going to come back from this,” Ilia bemoans. “How am I ever going to medal here, in 2030? They skipped me in 2022. I finally got to go, and I was supposed to prove to them that they were wrong and it was a mistake, and I fucked it up again just like at worlds. Why would they take me back here? They shouldn’t, I’ve proven that I can’t do it.”
“Ilia, that’s not—”
He’s hyperventilating over the phone, “I’m going to be what? 25? There’s no way I could win by then.”
“Adam is 25 right now, and he did well.” Mikhail tries to remind him, but he knows it won’t be enough. “They will take you again because this isn’t your last chance, there’s a high chance you will medal in 2030. You are capable, and you’ve always been, hell, you’ve been undefeated for two years!”
“I just—” Ilia sucks in a breath that sounds more like a wheeze, “I fucking—I don’t know—God, I don’t want to keep— what’s the point, who fucking cares—”
It’s broken and defeated, too anachronistic not to spark anything but alarm bells in Mikhail’s head as he asks quickly.
“Ilyushka, do you want me to come over? I’m worried—”
“You can’t!” Ilia wails. “Please don’t come. Everyone who sees me just looks at me with all this fucking pity, like I’m a fucking wreck, and a failure and broken, and I just don’t want to see it on you, too. I can barely even look at my dad, and I can’t even—”
The thought seems to scatter away, and Ilia sputters something that Mikhail can’t quite discern because the phone goes muffled for a second, and when it comes back, he can hear Ilia, still broken, “I’ll scare you if you see me like this—”
“Why would you scare me?” Mikhail asks, fear flaring deep within his chest. God, please don’t let Ilia do something drastic.
“Are you...” he trails off, then braces himself for the ire that might come from Ilia as he mentions them. “I’ve seen the TikToks you’ve shared. Are you thinking about…well, hurting yourself? I can keep you company instead. Please just talk to me.”
There’s a beat.
Then sobs that blend with laughter, “Oh God, now you think I’m gonna kill myself,” Ilia says through it, hysterical. “Am I really that fucking dramatic?”
“You’re not being dramatic, Ilyushka, love,” Mikhail tries to amend quickly. “ I wasn’t saying that you would, I just know that you’re upset and I want you to be safe—”
“I’m not going to kill myself!” Ilia denies adamantly. “Or slit my wrists or something. I don’t know. I’m just sad. That’s it. It’s normal. I’m fine. I don’t need you to worry about me, please, Misha, I’m okay, and I want you to be happy and celebrate and pose with your gold, and I’ll get over myself—”
“You don’t have to get over yourself, you can be upset—”
“No, no, no. Misha, I won’t do this to you. I’m just stressing you out, and I can hear it! I don’t know why I called you if I was just going to complain—
“You’re not doing anything to me,” Mikhail says, even more urgent because things are beginning to feel dire. “I love you so much, how could you ever be a burden to me?”
“Misha, I love yo—” There’s a noise in the background, and then, bleeding with anger, “god damnit, Andrew, can you fucking knock!?”
“I have to stay here too! Why can’t I come in—are you crying?”
“No, I’m fucking jerking off, and that’s why you can’t come in! Fucking hell, what does it look like!?”
Mikhail blinks at the phone, not able to say anything in case his voice will emanate through Ilia’s room and give something away.
The tone shift is blindingly disorienting, and this is not a side of Ilia he sees either. Not one that he knew existed. But he can tell exactly what it is, a coping mechanism. He’s spiralling out over the idea of Torgashev seeing him display too many raw emotions and is trying to overlay it with distracting anger.
It’s jarring on Ilia nonetheless, especially in his broken-down voice, pitchy and unregulated.
“I’ve already been out all day—”
“Jesus Christ!” Ilia shrieks, “Another person who gets to see me fucking crying, why don’t we livestream it too? The masses would love to see me ruin my fucking life!”
“Dude!” Torgashev exclaims, “Who pissed in your cereal? It’s midnight, and I need to sleep!”
“I had the worst day of my life yesterday! I’m already having a breakdown on the floor, and you’re wondering why I’m in a bad mood? Are you fucking serious?”
“Man, I know, but I still have to stay the night here!”
There’s a rustling sound, and then Ilia’s voice is a little bit closer and back in Russian, sharp but without the loudness behind it from a second ago. “Y’know what, I’ll call you back, Misha.”
“Are you on the phone with Shaid—”
The phone cuts off.
Mikhail stares down at his screen for a long moment. He lets the phone drop down beside him as he collapses backwards onto the bed with a loud sigh. His head lolls to the side, and his gaze drifts to the gold medal there.
He sighs.
At least Ilia isn’t alone anymore. Mikhail knows that he is upset, and as communicated, very uninterested in having company. At least Torgashev would be able to keep Ilia from doing something he’d very largely regret.
Now, if Ilia said he wasn’t going to hurt himself, Mikhail was inclined to believe him and trust that he wasn’t being lied to, but it was always good to be sure.
If anything, Torgashev could manage to piss Ilia off enough to pull him out of his depressive spiral, which would still be better than any alternative.
Ilia doesn’t call him back that night. But he does text.
andrew and i are fine now
hes already over it
but i yelled at him for no reason
i’ve really been unbearable
Mikhail frowns at that, because he really wouldn’t go that far. Ilia’s outburst was a little bit aggressive, but nothing ridiculous, and Torgashev clearly agreed, because he’s already over it.
The only person still caught up on it is Ilia. And that slots neatly into the pattern that Mikhail has already recognised in him.
Ilia fixates on everything. He will ruminate and regret, will say, “what’s done is done, and it can’t be changed,” and understand that it is true.
But he still can’t put it away or let it go entirely, not in the same way that one typically would when they say something of that nature. Instead, he will accept that the outcome is unchangeable, yet still think about all the ways he could’ve done differently and hyperfixate on them until he’s upset at himself all over again.
Usually, it is to a lesser degree, because things are typically minuscule enough to allow him to move on quickly.
Big things…those don’t leave. It was Beijing before, haunting him up until this moment. It will be this, now. He can imagine Ilia telling the press something similar, “The free skate was done, the results were not what I wanted, but I can’t change it.”
Mikhail knows that it will be an empty platitude to prove to the world that he is okay and unshaken. It will not translate over into his personal life.
Ilia doesn’t mention Beijing often, though Mikhail knows that he thought about it quite a lot. This will probably be worse. At least for Beijing, he was still young and with a budding career, instead of at a potential peak. He wasn’t nearly as famous. It wasn’t as high-profile. The announcers wouldn’t mention it as a part of his backstory; instead, they’d mention his silver medal at the U.S. Championships and not the disappointment of failing to go.
With this, there wasn’t much of a positive spin to put on it, and it would likely follow Ilia like a shadow at every competition for the next quad, a footnote of failure in a list of achievements that would stick out like a sore thumb to him and crawl under his skin like a parasite.
The sentiment was right: what’s done is done. It is easy for Mikhail to say, he knows, because the outcome worked out in his favour. No matter how devastated and torn apart he is for his love, it is quite literally the best result he could’ve ever gotten. What’s done is done is an easy thought when things are done well. Mikhail is familiar with the other end of the coin, when what’s done is not what you wanted, and it’s hard to move on, and it threatens to suffocate you until you are but a shell.
Mikhail also had a sports psychologist at that point, which he shilled out for with the dwindling level of money he and his family had, because he understood that, in his case, little good could come from that mindset than a rumination that would lead to further loss.
Ilia’s outburst at Torgashev wouldn’t be something he thought about in this same way, but it would be an individual action in a wider display that Mikhail knew Ilia would come to unfairly regret and turn into something more harmful than it was.
He’d think back on his time in Milan and his reaction after the free skate with repulsion, not because he’d done anything wrong or acted anything other than human, but because he’d shown it too strongly. Because everyone clearly could tell Ilia is upset and hurt, he’d likely grow to abhor it and even more so hate that he’d not been able to hide it better. Everyone saw him lose, splinter to pieces on the ice under pressure, and then they’d see him break behind the scenes, too, if word got around too much. He’d hate himself, not for the loss (although he would hate that as well), but more so that everyone could see if it’d done something to him.
There were many sides of Ilia Malinin, and Mikhail had been given the allowance to see most of them. There was the Quad God on the ice, the side that the world knew best. He was confident and secure, reaching heights never before seen, bending the sport as he pleased, as he introduced technical elements to be marvelled at.
There was an off-the-ice but still public side of Ilia that was bright and peppy, a little more awkward and clumsy but still appealing.
There was Ilia for his friends and family, who showed more variety in his emotions and a more unfiltered side of himself. This Ilia was real and authentic, even if it was still made for others to see with intention.
And then, there were other sides that Mikhail got to see as well, every so often. The ones that Ilia tried to keep hidden.
This was obviously one of them, the fragile and unravelling version that had remained thinly veiled under the surface.
If he hadn’t shown it to Mikhail before, nor his family, as it appeared, he would regret immensely that it was so prevalently displayed, even if no one could blame him for it, and no one who knew him personally would be inclined in the slightest to revel in his sadness.
It was a step too far and a step too earnest, and Mikhail was sure that it would be another thing added to Ilia’s list of things that he couldn’t quite let go.
Mikhail opened up his phone to a text from Luka, and he could see the messages above it, where Luka sent the photos they took while exploring Milan. The time they spent out will be another one of Mikhail’s fond memories from Milan and a designated spot in his Olympic photodump.
He then wonders what Ilia will include in his. It was hard for Mikhail to think of anything.
The team event would be something, and the gold medal he earned from it would certainly be included, but it’s not like Ilia had a great time even before the event started. He spoke to the press of the atmosphere of the Olympic village, he smiled and said the right things for the camera to make it seem like glitz and glamour, and maybe some of that had even been true.
But beyond that…?
What had Ilia actually enjoyed?”
Mikhail threw a hand up to tug through his own hair, utterly exasperated. The U.S. national broadcasting, USFS and Ari Zakarian were all going to hell for their roles in making this what was probably the most stressful month of Ilia’s life, with their horrifically packed schedule that managed to turn him into a product to be consumed rather than a whole person.
And maybe—if Mikhail was being honest with himself about it—some of his anger was selfish.
Because Ilia’s misery is causing him distress, threatening to taint his own experience. He should’ve been able to singularly revel in his own achievement and success, instead of having to split his consciousness between his overjoyment and working down Ilia from his loss.
At least if the scores had still wound up the same way, but Ilia could actually have had some other fun moments, he wouldn’t be as upset, and that was only another thing to add to the list of other alternative timelines.