Viktor is five and they have a dream. Their dream is the shkk, shkk of steel on uneven ice and the bite of cold on their red-tinged nose. Their hand is nestled safely in their mother’s, fingers cold from the chill of Russian winter, but their smile is bright and toothy. Their knees wobble on the rough surface of the lake, but they trust their mother to hold them up. Snowflakes catch in their blond hair and dance on their eyelashes like stars.
“Mama, look! I’m flying!” they cry. And they are, gliding through the air in a way that’s impossible on land.
“Yes, my little star,” she laughs with a face Viktor can’t remember.
Viktor has a dream, to keep skating forever and to hold onto the feeling of flying on ice.
They wake up at sixteen and just “skating” is no longer enough. They have ashen hair down to their waist, that moves like the frozen water they dance on. They’ve given up everything for the dream they’ve been living, that singular desire to keep skating, to fly.
That’s not enough anymore, they need to be great because they can’t keep skating if they’re not great and there’s no point in skating if they’re not great. Skating is their life, but it’s no longer the joy it once was. Skating is the pain in their knees and the scarred over scabs on their feet as much as it is the wind in their hair and their greatest pride.
The laces of their skates are golden thread spinning from their fingers and they could spin for a hundred days and a hundred nights and it would never be enough. Yakov is their father selling them away. Viktor loves him (needs him) more than they’ve loved anyone in a long time but they need to earn it. When they stop being great is when Yakov stops needing them. And they need to be needed.
Yakov watches them at the rink side with steely eyes like he sees through all of Viktor’s masks. They’re amid what many will come to see as their rise to greatness, but they don’t know that yet.
“What do you want from this, Vitya?” Yakov asks.
Viktor spins gold from their fingers and then from their skates when they take to the ice. Then they spin and spin and spin. The golden thread spools around them until they’re impossibly tangled, a fly caught in a spider’s web.
“I want to be great.”
And Yakov smiles because greatness is what he does.
Twenty-two and they weave a gold medallion around their neck. It’s heavy, and solid, and real when they bring it to their lips and taste greatness. They’re told they’re beautiful, a genius, an artist, ethereal, inhuman and it’s all true. Viktor has to make it true. It’s an impossible image to live up to but they don their masks and do it anyways because that’s the price of greatness, of the medal heavy on their neck.
Viktor is a dream, born from the collective consciousness of the skaters they defeat. They must be, because no human could be perfect. (Viktor isn’t perfect but they would sooner eat their medal than let that be known).
“What are your plans for next season?” they’re asked, now that they’ve achieved what they sought after for so many years.
Viktor pauses, thinking long and deep. They don a mask, flash a smile and say, “I want to keep surprising people!” not knowing that wish is a dream that can never be fulfilled.
Viktor is a dream and they can never wake up.
At twenty-six he hangs from the podium with a noose of four gold medals. He sleeps but he doesn’t dream. He sleeps a lot these days.
When he’s not sleeping, he skates. He skates, and he skates, and he skates, because this is the dream he had all those years ago, and this is what he’s left with long after it’s died. He jumps for his coach, spins for the judges, but never skates for himself. After all these years, he wouldn’t know where to begin.
“This year, I want to skate to ‘love,’” Viktor says. “My theme is loneliness,” he doesn’t. Because in the end, aren’t they the same thing?
Yakov lets Viktor do as he wishes, because Viktor’s artistry is his own. It’s the one thing he never needed to be taught (Yakov isn’t sure if he could) and it is part of what makes him great. Viktor’s skates spin golden thread and weave together a story that becomes a gold medal, another noose to hang him by.
Viktor is twenty-six and his reality is this; no one has ever needed him. Not like he needs them.
Yakov only needs him so long as he keeps winning, when that stops so does their bond. Already, Yakov is training a boy to take his place. A thin wisp of a person, all long limbs, and brash words. But they had greatness in their skin and dreams in their blood. Viktor hears the whispered promises, that if Yuri works hard and stays focused they can be better than Viktor. It’s a knife in his back.
He has one friend and that’s Christophe, a relationship that consists entirely of Viktor stealing Chris’s dreams. Viktor wonders if they ever would have spoken, had he not been Chris’s rival. He wonders if that friendship will crumble beneath him if Chris ever fulfills his dream. The moment Chris wins is the moment Viktor stops pushing him forward. Then what use is Viktor to him?
Viktor stands under the spotlight in Sochi and pleads. He begs someone to need him, to stay close and never leave. He extends an arm to the world and begs, on hands and knees, to let him dream once again.
He glides on wings he’s never seen. Stay close to me, he pleads. He spins in endless circles, invisible thread wrapping around his neck and squeezing tight. I’m so afraid, he admits to the world. He launches himself into the air and soars. Give me a dream worth living for.
In his sleep, he sees a frozen lake, stretching farther than the eye can see. He steps on the ice with bare feet; he doesn’t need skates, not here. He glides forward, the snowy bank and frozen trees fading from view until all he sees is ice.
The woman whose face he can’t remember waits for him, dress billowing in the wind. Fog and snow obscures her face, even when Viktor is close enough to take her hand. He holds on desperately.
“Mama,” he whimpers. “I want to be loved.”
Below the fog, her lips curl into a smile.
Viktor wakes up in tears and they freeze on his cheeks.
He meets Yuuri that night, and everything changes.
Dancing with Yuuri, Viktor falls as easily as he flies. He spins in Yuuri’s arms, the golden thread tangled around his neck coming loose. Yuuri is a dream, but unlike Viktor, they’re real.
“Is this real?” Viktor whispers into Yuuri’s neck, needing the answer more than he’s ever needed anything.
Yuuri laughs, champagne on their breath and stars in their eyes. They dip Viktor low and their smile is the sun. “If this is a dream, I never want to wake up.”
The golden noose on his neck snaps.
Viktor dreams, and he dreams, and he dreams.
Viktor is twenty-eight, and his reality is this; every morning he wakes up in Yuuri’s arms, and every morning he kisses the sleep from their eyes. His dog curls at the end of the bed, heavy and warm on their feet. Yuuri wakes to the St. Petersburg sun and Viktor’s warmth beside them. They cook breakfast, shuffling through the kitchen as Viktor hangs on their shoulder. The food is burnt black at the edges where Viktor distracts Yuuri from the stove, but it tastes like heaven anyway. They walk to the rink hand in hand, gulls cawing overhead to herald the morning and Viktor kisses the cold from Yuuri’s red-tinged nose. They slip on their skates and share a story that never ends.
i have no idea what i am or who i am or what in feeling or how im typing this or where i am in space and time or what im doing and god. this gets frustrating and existentially exhausting after a while. adderall my beloathed. i just wanna be a person. a consistent and single fucking person
you ever feel like your very state of existence is giving you deja vu. you can tell you’ve felt this before but it’s such a fundamentally different way of thinking and processing the world and seeing and existing. maybe it’s how you felt when you were 5? 10? 12? 15?
and every time you try to analyze it you feel nauseous because everything is different and everything is wrong and dream-like. yet you’re still fully aware and present but if you were to just hold your eyes shut a lil too long and then open them again everything around you would be different
it’s simultaneously like you’re at recess on the playground in the middle of september of 2006 and at your dad’s and everything is volatile and scary in 2009 and like you’re on the bus in 7th grade writing stories and creating worlds and excited to post the next chapter of your fic
and the current moment might as well not exist because you’ve been flung back into your childhood for no damned reason at all
and you try to reach for your personality and it’s there. but it’s not fucking you
