This is how it starts:
His mother is French. An ice dancer, beautiful as they come; fluid on her feet, light on her toes. Her hair is like molten silver. She gives it to her only child. She expects a daughter (to be named Victoire), so convinced the child she carries will be female, a little dancer like herself.
But his mother never seems disappointed that she gets Victor instead.
Victor loves her, he loves her, he loves her until the day she dies.
He keeps her alive with his skating, mon petit lune, the starlight shadow of the woman who gave him life. He does it for his Russian father, for himself. He wins every medal, every competition, stuns with every exhibition. He is beautiful, he is fearless, he listens to no one and nothing can stop him.
He is his mother’s son, and like his mother, he is made of charm.
He smiles like the sunrise, spins like the ocean breeze, dances like a storm with his silver spray of hair billowing behind him like the fog off the sea. He is a thousand rainbow colors in the sun and pale as the stars, too distant and shining to touch.
But he aches for it. Oh, how he aches.
Victor’s father passes from lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking, ever the artiste his mother fell in love with. In truth, he died long ago from a broken heart.
In between his short program and his free skate at Worlds, Victor cuts his hair off in the hotel bathroom. When his blades cut into the ice the next evening, the audience cries for him.
Strong. Bold. Beautiful. He makes his money from sponsorships and prize winnings, sells the family home and buys himself a flat in St. Petersburg, makes himself a refuge for Makkachin’s sake if not his own. It’s clean. It’s empty. It’s nothing like what he grew up with, his mother’s hair combs strewn about, pictures on the walls, his father’s paints and pastels and books, so many books. He keeps the books, but precious little else.
It’s hard out there. He pulls away from Yakov as he sees his coach’s marriage crumbling and can’t imagine a world in which love does not last a lifetime. He sees Yuri Plisetsky come into Yakov’s tutelage, his mother and father split apart at the seams, so he lives in poverty with his grandfather. Yuri never knows that Victor sponsors him that first day, makes sure Yuri will always be able to skate the way he loves (and he loves such precious little else). It’s a silent agreement that no one tells him. Nikolai doesn’t mention it. Yakov would never dare.
Victor wins and he wins and he wins and he wins, but every day feels like losing.
And he keeps going and going and going until—
—a boy breaks open in front of him on the ice. It’s the most honest suffering Victor has ever seen. Victor wants to talk to him, wants to comfort him, wants to say I know, I know—
But he turns his back to Victor as he flees, and Victor is left alone again.
Yuuri crashes into him two nights later, steals his breath and his drink and his life and makes him smile, holds Victor’s hopes and heart in his hands and digs in until they both bleed.
He’s stubborn, he’s a mess, he’s painful, he’s so unbelievably beautiful.
Like his mother, Victor falls for an artist—a man who makes music with his body on the dance floor, on the ice.
And this is how it starts.
