top 5 times Yuri talked Yuuri up to someone else
1) Anonymously all over the internet.2) “I want a lohengrin costume!” he grouches to himself all the way to the rink. Once there he hands a couple carefully-clipped magazine pages to Yakov. “These are fine,” Yuri says. Yakov does not recognize them, which Yuri finds insulting. Maybe that’s why he begins to praise that skater’s fluid movements. His stamina. His musicality. Yakov starts tuning out around the time Yuri starts praising the other skater’s nose. Yakov gets enough of this shit from Georgi. He doesn’t need another Georgi. (He can’t even think about another Viktor at this point. Poor guy.)3) “No,” Yuri tells the columnist from Vogue magazine. He’s wearing a suit jacket with no shirt underneath it, and his hair has been thrown over one side and braided through with wildflowers. It’s a bit light for his tastes, but doing press is rarely about his tastes. This is about his image, Lilia told him before the shoot. At least for this next season, Viktor amended, taking a thousand and one pictures of Yuri with his phone while cooing nonsense. Do what you won’t regret later, Otabek wrote from Almaty.
Well, Yuri’s a two-time GPF gold medalist, fresh off his second victory, and he’s not going to regret this ever.
“No,” he repeats, “Viktor has been a motivating force in my life, but he’s not the skater I look up to the most.”
“Oh?” The columnist asks. “And who would that be, then?”
“The most important skater to me is Yuuri Katsuki.” The columnist flips to an empty page in her notebook. Yuri stops her with a hand before she can interrupt him with a follow-up question. “He is the most talented, beautiful skater on the international scene today,” he says. “And have you seen his thighs?”4) Yuri is 10 and Viktor Nikiforov has just won everything there is to win. (he’s going to do it 4 more times, but he doesn’t know that yet. right now it’s still fresh, and fun, and he can’t get enough of it.) Viktor Nikiforov is 22 and somehow he gets stuck alone at the training rink with a little kid whose mother has forgotten to pick him up at the end of the day. He doesn’t know the kid very well, but that’s never stopped him from having a conversation before.
The kid refuses to talk to him.
Viktor doesn’t have to wait, but he waits, and together they sit in the lobby as the sky outside grows dark, and Viktor chats about his day, and skating, and his dog, and the food he’s eaten and the places he’s been, and the kid refuses to talk to him.
And then Viktor says something about the NHK trophy and it’s like a switch is flipped.
Fifty minutes later the kid’s grandfather arrives in a beat up old Riva. The kid, little Yura, is still nattering away about his hero, also named Yuuri, and Viktor knows it would be normal to be exasperated. He is 22 and he’s won everything there is to win, and he doesn’t know this kid very well. But instead he is helplessly charmed at the kid’s spirit. He takes the pair out to dinner and he makes a note in his mind to see how little Yura is on the ice. If there’s any help Viktor can give him.
(He remembers little Yura the next time he sees him, but he forgets the reason why.)5) “He’s the best skater in the junior division,” Yuri says, dragging his hand across the glossy magazine spread. It’s after dinner and he’s sleepy, but it’s a bit too early to go to bed. He asked his grandfather to read to him, but instead they’re looking at pictures in Yuri’s skating magazines no one but his grandpa will buy for him. Yuri’s grandpa’s lap is warm. “I want to be just like him.”
