1When you finish a routine, there's always a pinch of paused time between when the music cuts and the crowd claps.
It's a sort of warp in time: when you can't quite feel the sweat on your face yet, or the pounding of your heart in your chest, or the strain of your lungs. In fact, all those little nuances get forgotten.
In that moment, there's nothing to feel as you're stretching your whole being into your final pose – the last breath of your performance, the last moment to captivate your audience.
It's natural. A period at the end of a sentence – easy, no strategic thought behind it.
He always liked that small, quiet moment in time best.
You see, it's in that moment of stilled time that the coil in his stomach melts away and his shoulders finally, finally loosen. He's allowed to breathe now; his thoughts clear out the one-track horror show that had been playing just beyond his temples since the moment he stepped foot into the skating arena.
It's in that small moment that his anxiety relinquishes its hot grip over him. And it's the most beautiful sensation.
It always amazes him how good this moment feels.
From the moment he steps into the skating arena, up until the moment he stops short with the music, he's absolutely sick to his stomach. His brain wont let him relax – it's a rollercoaster of a sticky situation as he tries anything and everything to block it out. His hands sweat, he's constantly on edge, and his mind is a tunnel vision of him screwing up his jumps, his routine, making a fool of himself, coming in last…Over and over until he has to force himself to breathe. And then there's the constant tightening and fighting to hide all of it. Trying to look neutral and un-phased. It's painful.
But then there's this moment. After he's hurdled through the whole performance (the one thing he'd been fixating on to near sickness) suddenly he doesn't have to think anymore. It's over. It's done. He can breathe.
It's the only instantaneous thing he's found that completely scrubs away the constant screaming nerves in his head.
Unfortunately, however, like all small moments in time it doesn't last too long.
The crowd claps and the ringing in his ears begins to deafen him as he regains his bearings. He looks around a moment, dazed, and slowly lowers himself out of the ending pose.
His stomach re-coils at the thought of going through the kiss and cry. Of hearing out loud the numerically scored critiques of how he's done. Numbers can be shackles sometimes. Especially when he's never really satisfied with his scores, no matter the day or the competition.
But then…
Oh yeah. That's right.
This is new.
His heart speeds up, but not in the thrumming, near-panicked way.
No. This is different. This is good, too.
He catches him between all the other faces simply by the sharp gray of his hair. He can't pick up the expression on his face, but his heart picks up anyway, and his stomach feels like it's floating.
This is so, very good.
The ice is bumpy, the divots from past jumps and footwork nicking on his blades as he glides his way off. The announcer rumbles something through the speakers, but it swims past him. Wisps overs his shoulders and rolls down his back, the vibrations of it doing nothing to disturb what he's fixating on.
His ears still ring, but he can make out the general words of praise spoken by his coach as he approaches.
"Yuuri!" and "Amazing!" and "Overall best, I think!"
He knows - despite how genuine the words are now – that later on he'll be in for a less sugary play-by-play of his performance. Victor is still his coach, after all.
Before he could fret about that, however, he's enveloped. One thing that always surprises him is how tight Victor's hugs are. And how much Yuuri genuinely enjoys them. Before Victor, he'd never been much of a hugger.
(Well…he still wasn't. On principal, he wasn't much of a touchy person, but Victor was the one beautiful exception.)
Yuuri doesn't hesitate to return the embrace, throwing his arms around his coach's neck as his toe picks jam up against the elevated barrier at the entrance of the rink. Victor's warm - he always had a knack for radiating heat like an oven - and he smells of sharp cologne, and Yuuri can hear his heart thrumming fast against his ear. He always liked when his heartbeat matched the speed of his own, seeming to run like the wind, as if it were about to burst. It grounded him, made him feel like for once everything wasn't just in his head. That everyone else was just as sparked with nerves.
"You skated beautifully," Victor whispers into his ear, battling against the ringing, and Yuuri can't help but tear up. Close his eyes. Breathe.
It's then that he realizes that he really likes this moment, too.