Chapter Text
When Yuuri wakes up, a sweet-faced twelve-year-old, he bursts into tears and his mother calls him in sick to school.
He spends a day in bed, crying and pinching himself until he can really believe that he’s really doing all this over again. Then he starts laughing because he’s really doing all this over again. It feels like it should be easier but when he tallies up, the losses are almost too much to bear.
When Yuuri finally looks at the calendar, he has to go hunt down his birth certificate, baffling his mother once again. When he finally verifies the date and year with his entire family, he starts laughing all over again, hugging Vicchan to his chest.
All he can think is, “Yura will be furious.”
Yuuri spends the weekend reacclimatizing to his body. He is still soft with baby fat but he spends a lot of time jogging with Vicchan and dancing with Minako the same as always though there is a newfound maturity and poise to his dance that even he can feel. Minako-sensei definitely notices and asks him if he’d like to make a go at being a real danseur with a competitive gleam in her eyes, but Yuuri stubbornly sticks to ice-skating. He knows his limits but he also knows how far he can push it so he eases up on the jumps (triples for now, quads later) and focuses on his step sequences and spins to polish them up to what he became renowned for. The Viktor Shrine gets cleaned up. Yuuri keeps everything but he restrains himself to one large poster next to his door, everything else is packed away.
Competition-wise, Yuuri knows the Japanese Junior Figure Skating Championships are coming and he plans to meet Minami Kenjiro there. Yuuri goes into competition knowing that he’s even better than the last time but reminds himself that with a new competition group, there may be a dark horse. As it turns out, he’s the dark horse competitor. He skates to Lohengrim in his short program as a nod to his inspiration to Minami.
He also wears a dress. The costume had a split skirt last time, but you don’t live with Victor and not pick up a few tricks. So he tosses the pretense and wears black tights and a shimmery, lilac, long sleeve dress, which Minako enthusiastically approved of, and when he takes off his borrowed long trench to get on the ice, he hears the crowd begin to riot. He skates his improved Lohengrim and leaves the ice to a standing ovation and a smug sense that he has broken twitter.
Minami goes right after him and Yuuri makes sure to watch him especially.
The crowd is, at first, a bit disappointed when he gets on the ice in a more conventional male costume with a white collar top and black pants for the free skate but he moves to the music the way he did with Phichit in Detroit. When they were reveling in acing jumps (A quad! I did it! My first quad!) and showing off steps (I can’t do that! I never took ballet! You can do it!). Yuuri cries a bit as he fills the ice with his friendship with Phichit that never happened here, but he keeps it as joyful and fun as his memories because they are precious and real.
On the podium, he accepts gold and meets Minami who had just accepted silver. Minami at fifteen is even more enthusiastic than Minami at seventeen. The poor bronze medalist, Ryuichi Kihara, is completely bowled over and shouted on top of.
“You were so amazing! You’re younger than me but you really inspired me! I was so moved by your free skate and your short program was so dynamic! It was really cool! You can call me Kenjiro, okay!”
Something of the old man devil in him pricks Yuuri. He knows exactly how chubby cheeked and wide eyed he is, so he looks up through his lashes at Minami, blushing, “Aaah, Kenjiro-senpai?”
Minami becomes even more red and starts to fidget, “Ah, actually, I think you’ve been competing longer so really, you’re the senpai, Katsuki-senpai.”
“You can call me Yuuri.” A beat. “Kenjiro-onii-san.”
Kenjiro-onii-san nearly passes out right then and there as Yuuri smilingly invites Ryuichi-san to also call him Yuuri.
The goal is the Junior Grand Prix in Sochi which will be in two years, when he is fourteen. Any earlier and Victor will forever see him as a child on par with Yurio, though the tantrums probably didn’t help. It has to be age fourteen because he has to get to Sochi. He doesn’t have the money or a coach to take him internationally but the Junior Prix competitors are chosen by national federations, not seeded, so he just needs to do well nationally. Luckily, he has Minako and years of choreography behind him. Unluckily, he cannot skate some of his best pieces yet. (No Eros at twelve. Not even at fifteen, seriously, what was Yurio thinking?) He only takes that as a challenge to look up fun pieces and texts Kenjiro a lot, who is really upbeat and playful.
Yuuri tries really hard not to make Kenjiro a replacement-Phichit. He gets to know about Kenjiro’s family and even makes a weekend visit for a sleepover that sends Kenjiro over the moon in joy. The Minami parents are very approving of Yuuri’s polite and retiring nature in contrast to his risqué short program costume. The fact that he shows up in pants and a plain jacket probably helps as well because Kenjiro confessed over skype that he had been considering wearing a dress on ice as well. His older brother, Mori, is kind but very busy with his studies and mostly appreciates that Kenjiro’s exuberant affections are being diverted elsewhere.
Kenjiro is, in turn, invited to Yu-topia and the Katsukis think that they’re adorable with the way Kenjiro says “Yuuri-senpai” and Yuuri replies “Kenjiro-onii-san”. Kenjiro enthusiastically helps out around the inn and they spend their free time at the Ice Castle and hot springs afterwards. It’s the kind of weekend he never had in his first childhood and he feels so happy to be with Kenjiro that he thinks he can probably try to contact Phichit soon.
Maybe.
But before that, the Japanese figure skating federation shows up at his doorstep.
They want him to go to the Junior Grand Prix. They are really excited. Yuuri is a strong Japanese competitor and, though he is very young, they feel that he can really make an impact on the international stage with his performance. They are devastated when Yuuri rejects them. Though it had been a reach, they had hoped that by sending representatives personally, they could persuade him to go internationally. He cites his growing body and his schooling as reasons to delay his international debut and makes a deal with them. He will work for two years to polish up his skating and accelerate his schooling and then he will enter for the qualifiers for the Sochi Grand Prix. Both parties leave the negotiations satisfied. Everything is going so well that Yuuri is now waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It happens.
Phichit isn’t skating anymore.