Chapter Text
It’s nearly four in the morning when Yuuri finally calls, the soft chime of the phone pulling Victor out of sleep fast enough that he picks up before it can ring a second time.
“Yuuri,” he says.
“Victor.” The voice on the other end is so familiar, so dear. “Did I wake you up?”
“Of course you did,” says Victor. “I told you to.”
“Yeah, but…”
Yuuri sounds worried. This in itself isn’t unusual, but considering the circumstances?
“You made it,” Victor says, because there’s no point in pretending this isn’t what Yuuri wants to talk about. “That’s all that matters.”
“On a technicality,” Yuuri shoots back. Victor sits up, rolling the sleep from his shoulders, blinking himself further awake by the dim light of the moon outside. Yuuri’s clearly been gearing up for this conversation all evening, and Victor needs to be right there with him in spirit. It’s the least he can do, given that he can’t be there in person. Yuuri goes on: “Michele placed third. I didn’t even make the podium, and it’s me advancing to the Grand Prix Final. I know it’s fair, and I know it’s just the way the numbers came together, but it doesn’t feel—it feels—I feel like I cheated.”
“You didn’t cheat,” Victor says.
“I know!” Yuuri practically shouts. Then he sighs. “I’m sorry. I just… I know it’s stupid. But that’s how it feels, though. And it’s my fault. I didn’t skate well.”
“You skated beautifully,” Victor says, clutching his phone harder. “Could you have done better? Yes, and I won’t waste your time telling you how, because that will keep until you’re back here and we can start training again. Could you have kept yourself from getting lost inside your own head? Maybe, and make no mistake, we’ll talk about that too. But, Yuuri, could anyone else have given a voice to that program the way you did? Anyone at all?”
Silence.
“Yuuri, that was not a rhetorical question. Can anyone else, except you, skate your free program with the meaning that you bring to it?”
Yuuri’s voice is small: “…no?”
“I can’t hear you,” Victor sing-songs into the phone.
“No. Nobody can.”
“Once more for the folks in the last row?”
“No!” Yuuri declares, and he almost sounds like he means it. “Nobody can skate it but me. Nobody.”
“There we are,” says Victor, grinning into the dark room. “You’re advancing to the Final because you deserve to. As soon as we hang up, I want you to look into the mirror and say that to yourself. Understand?”
“All right—Wait, are you hanging up now?”
Victor’s breath hitches at the raw need in Yuuri’s voice. “No, no. Of course not. I can talk for as long as you want.”
“Okay,” Yuuri says. “Okay. I just. Sorry, I feel bad waking you up. I wish we could have talked earlier.”
Victor wishes that, too. He spent all evening wishing it, starting the moment Yuuri buried his face in Yakov’s shoulder after his free skate was finished, his need for comfort broadcast worldwide to anyone with a television and an interest in skating.
Victor texted, of course, with a request for Yuuri to call; it was Yuuri who texted back with Press everywhere. Interviews about GPF. Too many things happening. Talk later?
Victor’s reply: Call me as soon as you get back to your hotel room. I don’t care how late it is. CALL.
“Me too,” he replies now.
“Victor, I…”
Silence. Victor digs the fingernails of his free hand into his thigh. He knows that tone. He knows the face that goes with it, too. Yuuri is on the verge of tears, and Victor feels anew just how far away Moscow is from Hasetsu.
“What is it?” Victor asks softly.
“I… I didn’t…”
“Yuuri?” Gently, gently.
Yuuri draws in a shaky breath. “I don’t… I don’t think I realized how much I’d gotten used to you… being here. At night. With me.”
Victor’s nails dig in harder, almost to the point of pain. Of course. Every hotel they’ve stayed in, it’s been the two of them, together. He’s gotten used to it, too. He flips the light on and asks Yuuri, “Can you switch to video? I want to show you something.”
“Um. Hold on.”
It takes a minute, but then there it is: Yuuri’s face, filling the screen of Victor’s phone. His hair looks freshly washed: wet and unruly. The glittery remnants of his makeup still cling to the skin near his eyes, because glitter, as they both know, can survive the most thorough of showers. His eyelids are drooping slightly behind his glasses. He is tired and worn, and he is the most beautiful thing Victor has ever seen.
He smiles and waves. “Hi.”
“My lovely Yuuri,” Victor says, and kisses the air. Which makes Yuuri blush.
Sometimes, Victor is certain he could forsake food altogether and live only on the sight of Yuuri blushing.
“What did you want to show me?” Yuuri asks. “You aren’t naked again, are you?”
Victor isn’t naked, but he smiles into the camera as though he is. He tilts his head just so: sultry, secretive, seductive. It’s an angle he can pull off in his sleep. It’s an angle he can pull off even five minutes after sleep. Then he pulls the phone away from his face and tilts it right, then left, giving Yuuri as much of a view as possible.
When Yuuri realizes, he actually claps a hand over his mouth, not quite stifling the burst of laughter that escapes him. It’s a few seconds before he lets his fingers slip down again so he can speak.
“That’s my room,” he says, nearly breathless.
“It is,” says Victor.
“You were sleeping in my room.”
Victor gives the camera his best smile. “It smells like you.”
Yuuri’s jaw goes slack. One hand creeps up to scratch at the back of his neck. His face is bright, bright red. “Oh,” he says. “Oh.”
“What I’m saying,” Victor continues, bringing the camera closer to his face again, “is that I miss you, too.”
Yuuri nods, slowly, more to himself than for Victor’s benefit. He licks his lips. Starts to say something, then stops himself. “Um,” he says, and rubs his free hand over his forehead. “Um. You can say no, but. But. Will you stay on the phone with me while I, you know, get ready? For bed?”
“Yuuri. Of course I will.”
Yuuri smiles. It looks more relieved than happy. “You don’t mind?”
Mind? There’s nothing in the world that Victor wants more. Except possibly to be there in person. To watch as Yuuri putters around the hotel room, brushing his teeth and washing his face and making sure his glasses are somewhere safe for the night. Stripping down to his underwear and sliding between the sheets.
These days, when they share a hotel room, Victor slides right in after him. Yuuri will curl into his side, or Victor will turn him over and cradle him, Victor’s front to Yuuri’s back. Or they’ll face each other, stealing kisses and whispering in the dark and touching each other’s faces, necks, shoulders. Chests, sometimes, but no further, not yet. Not because Victor doesn’t want it. He does. He wants to touch all of Yuuri, and he wants Yuuri to touch all of him. He wants them to crawl into each other’s bodies, folding into one another until they both forget how to exist apart.
He’s wanted that for such a long time.
But, more than any of this, he wants Yuuri to be comfortable. To feel safe. So he hasn’t pushed. He’s made his interest crystal clear, but he hasn’t pushed.
“No,” Victor says. “I don’t mind at all.”
Yuuri smiles—a smile that falters almost immediately. “Actually. Sorry, but can I leave you here for a second? I have to go to the bathroom.”
Victor’s laughter bursts out of him like a rainbow. “Abandoning me already?” he teases. “I’m hurt, Yuuri. I’ll never recover.”
“I’ll be right back!” Yuuri replies, and sets the phone down. Victor can’t tell where, but he has a perfect view of the hotel room’s ceiling. The ceiling that gets to share a hotel room with Yuuri.
What Victor wouldn’t give to trade places with that ceiling right now.
“Fuck you, ceiling,” he says softly, and waits for Yuuri to return.
-
Yuuri gets ready for bed slowly, chatting with Victor all the while. Propping the phone behind the faucet as he washes his face. Propping it up on the desk as he strips off most of his clothes. Propping it up on the floor, somehow, as he does his evening stretches.
Victor has to remind him to brush his teeth.
Yuuri gives him a pointed look, but complies—which gives Victor a return trip to behind-the-faucet, and a close-up view of Yuuri spitting toothpaste out of his mouth. It’s white and frothy and Victor comes this close to saying, “You should try swallowing sometime.”
But he doesn’t.
He is very proud of himself.
“Happy?” Yuuri asks, when he’s finished.
“Very,” Victor replies. “Now go to bed. You’ve had a long day.”
So Yuuri does. He turns out all the lights except for the one on the bedside table, and he slips between the sheets, and… he hesitates. “We should probably hang up, right?”
No. They should not hang up.
“Do you want to hang up?” Victor asks.
It’s too dark to tell for sure, but it looks like Yuuri’s blushing again. “Not… really…”
“Then no.”
Yuuri smiles, takes off his glasses, and puts his head down on the pillow. Uses one hand to bunch it up under his neck for support, while the other hand holds his phone. Victor does the same, curling Yuuri’s pillow under his head. They are both lying on their sides. They could almost, Victor thinks, reach out and touch each other.
“Victor?” says Yuuri.
“Yuuri,” says Victor.
Yuuri smiles. “If you were here with me, right now… um. Um. What would you do?”
“I’d kiss you,” Victor replies, without even bothering to think about it. “And I’d keep on kissing you until you begged me to stop.”
The smile unfurls, slowly, into a grin. “What if I didn’t beg you to stop?”
“Well, then, I’d just have to keep going, wouldn’t I?”
Yuuri laughs. “I guess so. Yeah. That sounds nice.”
“Mm,” says Victor.
“Then what?”
“Mm?”
“What about after?” Yuuri asks. “Would you… would we… how, um.” He’s blushing furiously now; there’s no mistaking it. When he speaks again, his voice is almost a whisper. “How would you hold me, if you were here tonight?”
Heat curls in Victor’s stomach, and he lets out a long breath, longer than it should be, just to keep himself from trying to jump through his phone screen and into Yuuri’s bed. He can’t lose himself to instinct. Not yet. If Yuuri’s going where Victor thinks he’s going—and is he? is he really?—then Victor needs to keep his head on straight. He needs to be mindful.
“I think,” Victor replies, “that I’d like to see your face. We could share a pillow.”
“Where would your hands be?” Yuuri asks.
Victor’s breath stutters in his lungs. There are so many ways that this conversation could go, and each possibility is better than the last.
“My hands. Well, I think one arm would be folded under my head, like this”—Victor adjusts his arm, and the pillow along with it, making sure the camera angle is wide enough to capture it—“and the other would be around you. I’d rub your back. You carry so much tension there, and I’d like to try to loosen it up for you.”
“That sounds nice,” Yuuri says, turning his face into the pillow, almost shyly. But one eye is still visible, still fixed on his phone, and he adds, “What next?”
“Next,” Victor says, still impressively calm, if he does say so himself, “I think I’d move my hand to your ribs. So I could feel you breathing.”
Yuuri smiles. “I like it when you do that.”
That’s when Victor notices that Yuuri’s phone isn’t moving anymore. The image is steady—Yuuri’s probably propped it up somewhere again—and the frame is just wide enough for Victor to see the top of Yuuri’s torso, including his arm, the one not pillowing his head. It’s visible almost to the elbow, and it’s bent in such a way that Victor knows exactly where his hand is.
Victor swallows and continues, just to see: “I think I’d touch your chest next. Right over your heart, so I can feel it beating.”
Sure enough, Yuuri’s hand comes up and presses itself against his chest. Right over his heart, just as Victor said. He smiles into the camera, a mischievous look playing across his face. “Like this?” he asks, and oh, how Victor loves it, loves it, when Yuuri is bold.
“Just like that,” Victor replies breathlessly.
“Where else?” Yuuri insists. “Where else would you touch me?”
So Yuuri wants Victor to say it first, does he? Victor grins.
“Your face, perhaps. Your neck. You have such a lovely neck, Yuuri…”
“And then?” Impatience edges Yuuri’s voice.
Victor frowns, as if he’s deep in thought. “You know, I seem to have run out of ideas.”
“Victor—!”
“Perhaps you could suggest something?” He raises one eyebrow. “Perhaps you already have something in mind?”
Yuuri is blinking fast—but he recovers quickly. Visibly steeling himself, he says, “I… might.”
“Oh?”
“What if,” Yuuri says. “Um. What if I put my hand over yours and, and showed you? Showed you where to go?”
“Good,” Victor breathes. The heat in his stomach is radiating downwards, and he resists the urge to palm himself through his clothes. “And where is that?”
“Down,” Yuuri says—and slides his hand down his chest. Right out of the frame. “Down my chest, down my stomach. I’m, um, I’m still wearing my briefs, but your hand sneaks in underneath them and… and…”
“And I touch you,” Victor says simply.
Yuuri nods into his pillow. The visible half of his face is fiery red.
“Gently, at first,” Victor says. “I’d touch you gently. One finger, maybe two, to feel the length of you, and to see how you respond to me. We’ve not done this before, so I would take my time. I’d make sure you weren’t letting me do anything that made you uncomfortable. All right?”
Yuuri looks at him with an open, guileless expression that makes Victor’s heart ache. He knows, they both know, that they aren’t just talking about tonight.
“All right,” Yuuri says quietly.
“I’d explore you, and I’d tease you, and I’d wrap my hand around you—still gently, though—”
“Doesn’t have to be gentle,” Yuuri murmurs.
Victor blinks. “No?”
Yuuri turns his whole face to the camera once again, almost glaring. “I’m not fragile.”
“I know you aren’t. My love. I know.” Victor hopes that his voice conveys just how much he means it; Yuuri is one of the strongest people he’s ever met. “Tell me, then. How do you like it?”
“I… I don’t know?” Emotion after emotion flickers across Yuuri’s face, too quickly for Victor to catch them all. “Because it’s different when it’s someone else, right? Someone else… doing that? It’s only ever been me.”
Of course. Yes. Victor has long suspected as much, and he’s actually sort of relieved to hear it confirmed. Now he knows, just a little more clearly, what he’s working with.
“That’s fine, then. That’s something we can figure out together.” Victor grins. “Which sounds like a lot of fun, if you ask me.”
Yuuri gives him a shy smile that holds more relief than anything else. “Yeah,” he says.
So, then, no specifics tonight. Victor won’t go into detail, as it would only bring Yuuri out of the moment again. But he does want to finish this. This adventurous side of Yuuri has been rearing its head more and more often—exponentially so, since Victor kissed him on the ice in Beijing—and Victor wants to encourage it as much as he can.
“Am I still there with you?” Victor asks. At Yuuri’s confused look, he clarifies: “Am I still in bed with you? Is my hand still around you?”
Blush, blush, blush. But then, finally: “Yes.”
“Can I stroke you?” Victor asks.
Movement, right there, in Yuuri’s shoulder. A slow, rhythmic movement that can only mean one thing. And when Yuuri finally whispers, “Yes,” his voice is shallow and breathy.
“Beautiful,” Victor says. It’s true, too. The camera is close enough that he can see when Yuuri’s eyelashes flutter closed, then open again. He can see a sheen of sweat start to form on Yuuri’s temples. He watches the rhythm of that shoulder, absolutely fascinated. “Just beautiful, Yuuri.”
“I wish—Victor—I wish you were here—I—”
“So do I.” And then Victor has an idea. “Yuuri, can I see? If you moved the phone, just a little bit…”
Yuuri’s shoulder goes still. He worries at his lower lip with his teeth. After a moment, “I think… not tonight? If that’s okay? Sorry, it’s just…”
“It’s fine.” Victor isn’t even disappointed. It was just an idea—and anyway, this way he gets to watch Yuuri’s face. “Will you still come for me, though?”
Yuuri’s body clenches at the question. His shoulder begins to move again, and his eyes are still fixed on Victor.
“Pretend I’m there with you,” Victor says. “Pretend it’s my hand, or pretend it’s your own hand and you’re just showing me what you like. Pretend I’m kissing you—”
A moan, low and obscene, escapes Yuuri’s lips, and the sound slides straight down Victor’s spine, pooling at the base.
“Or just pretend I’m watching over you.” Victor sees Yuuri’s face begins to contort, the nuances of his pleasure etched in the line of his mouth, the color in his cheeks, the sheen at his hairline. “I’m watching over you, and you know that there’s nothing in the world I want more than to see you come for me.”
“Oh, you have no idea,” Yuuri says, a laugh underscoring the words. Victor doesn’t know what that means, but he definitely likes the sound of it. Yuuri is starting to lose himself to pleasure, and Victor’s whole body is taut with anticipation.
“My Yuuri,” he murmurs. “My love. My beautiful love.”
Yuuri doesn’t even seem to hear him anymore, but Victor keeps going anyway, speaking in English and Russian both, keeping Yuuri company with the sound of his voice.
Then, all at once, Yuuri’s face goes slack. He lets out a breathy moan from somewhere deep in his throat, and Victor watches in awe as the muscles of his shoulder and biceps convulse. Something washes over him, making him squeeze his eyes shut and crinkle his nose, and who knew that Victor had a thing for men who shut their eyes and crinkled their noses when they came?
Victor certainly didn’t. Not before now. But there it is.
Yuuri goes boneless before long, his body practically melting into the mattress. It’s a little while before he opens his eyes again.
When he does, Victor says, “Hello.”
Yuuri laughs; it’s a giddy, wild sound, and it lands squarely in Victor’s chest. Finally, he replies, “Hi.”
“Do you feel any better?”
The redness is starting to fade from Yuuri’s face, but his orgasm has left his eyes gleaming. “Mm. Yes. I still wish you were here, though.”
“Me too,” he says, heart heavy.
He knows Yuuri isn’t accusing him of anything. He was, after all, the one to insist Victor go be with Makkachin—and after that, he was the one texting, at least once an hour, to ask for updates. When Victor reported that Makkachin was going to be fine, Yuuri sent a string of celebratory emoji: five flamenco dancers, six thumbs-ups, a pair of rainbows, hearts in every color, and, inexplicably, an avocado.
“You know,” Yuuri says, “I tried to change my flight. I wanted to fly out tonight so I could see you sooner. There wasn’t anything available, though.”
The suggestion, the mere idea, of seeing Yuuri sooner squeezes Victor’s heart into a fist. He breathes through it. He makes himself smile. “Well, then we wouldn’t be having this very illuminating video chat, would we?”
“Guess not,” Yuuri replies. His eyelids are starting to droop, and his voice is blurry when he adds, “But we could’ve done it all in person instead.”
“We still could,” Victor says, cool as anything. He hopes.
“I’d like that.”
“Yuuri,” Victor says, remembering. “What did you mean before? When you said I had no idea?”
But Yuuri’s eyes are closed now, his face gone slack with sleep. He murmurs something in Japanese, and his breathing begins to even out, and Victor wishes that he could be there to clean Yuuri up, to cover him and tuck him in, to kiss that spot on his forehead that’s still a little bit shiny with sweat.
He wonders if Yuuri remembered to plug his phone in. Likely not.
And so, as tempted as he is to watch Yuuri sleep until the battery dies, he gives it only a few more minutes, then ends the call. Rolls onto his back. Stares at the ceiling and misses Yuuri like another person might miss an arm, or a lung.
He presses one hand into his chest and the other into his belly, trying to… he doesn’t know, really. Trying to contain what he feels? Squeeze it into something nameable, or manageable? He can, usually. Tonight, though, he feels himself suspended inside the distance between Moscow and Hasetsu, inside the not-quite-real hours between night and morning; time stretches infinitely outward, and this thing inside his chest is trying to do the same thing. To expand beyond the limits of his skin, to explode like a supernova, to swallow everything in its path.
It’s terrifying, feeling this much all at once. In a good way, though. He thinks.
Somewhere at the periphery of his consciousness, Victor knows that he’s still half hard. Watching Yuuri bring himself off, even without all the visuals available to him, was more than enough to send all the blood in Victor’s body straight to his cock. And if this were any other night, and if he were in any other room, he’d have the problem taken care of in five minutes. Probably less.
But tonight, surrounded by Yuuri’s smell and Yuuri’s possessions and twenty-three years of Yuuri’s memories, he can’t bring himself to do it. Maybe it’s because missing Yuuri sits so much heavier inside him than the simple, stupid need to get off. Maybe it’s because he wants to call Yuuri back and say, “Me next,” even though he knows he can’t.
Maybe he knows that his own hand will just make him feel lonelier.
So Victor flips over on the mattress and buries his face in Yuuri’s pillow. His erection begins to fade eventually, and sleep descends on him once again—and he promises himself, just before he drifts off, that the next time he comes, it will be for Yuuri.