Chapter Text
This had to be a mistake.
It had to.
Well, it didn’t have to. It could have been a joke, or a prank. Yuuri’s eyes instinctively flicked over to his roommate, Phichit, who was currently deep in conversation with their mutual coach by the rink wall, having run through his free program in a manner that was exciting (if you asked Phichit) or slapdash (if you asked Celestino). Yuuri tended towards Celestino’s side of that particular question this time around, but you couldn’t have gotten that out of him with wild horses, a signed picture of Viktor Nikiforov, or homemade katsudon, because Phichit was probably his only friend here in Detroit, and he wasn’t going to let him down.
Also, to be completely honest, he hadn’t been looking that carefully, so maybe Phichit was right. Maybe the doubled triple flip in the first half and the insertion of a gratuitous replacement triple in the second half had been an intentional homage to the something or other of the motivations of the music.
But probably not.
Usually, it would have bothered Yuuri that he hadn’t been fully paying attention to his friend’s skate. And it did bother him, right now, in fact. It was just that being mildly annoyed at himself for not fully supporting the most supportive person in his life (non-Hasetsu edition) took a very distant second place right now to freaking out about the email that had just popped up on his phone. He’d just meant to swipe the notification away—he was a stickler for a clean home screen in a way that Phichit would very pointedly remind him he was not about, say, the common spaces of their apartment—but his finger had slipped and the notification had opened up his email app, and then the words had flowed into his eyes almost without his voluntary participation in the matter.
Katsuki Yuuri
unfortunate situation
pleased to announce
Fukuoka, Japan.
FUKUOKA, JAPAN
FUKUOKA, JAPAN.
He’d gotten stuck on that particular phrase for a whole minute, looping in his head. Not stuck enough not to notice Phichit’s doubled flip, of course—being a top figure skater meant being able to have whole in-depth visualizations of routines in your head while also keeping your eyes on your feet, or in this case someone else’s, and calculating scoring differentials on the fly—but enough to stop him from doing anything else.
Fukuoka wasn’t home, of course. It wasn’t Hasetsu, or the Ice Castle where he’d done his youth skating, or his mom and dad’s onsen where the best katsudon in the world was served to the guests who chose to rest their weary bones.
But it was one hour away by train.
And while he’d done his youth skating in Hasetsu, he’d spent two years based in Fukuoka, with its larger skating rink and better infrastructure, before making the leap over to Detroit and Celestino in search of medals that hadn’t quite come as quickly as everyone back at home seemed to think they would.
Fukuoka was also, and this was the thing that Yuuri had to approach from the side in order to even contemplate contemplating, let alone process or address, the site of this year’s Grand Prix Final for the International Skating Union. The very Grand Prix Final that Yuuri had almost-but-not-quite qualified for, landing as the second alternate with a silver medal at Skate America and a fourth place finish at Skate Canada. He’d spent a month gnashing his teeth over how close he’d come to getting an excuse to go home—he hadn’t been home in years, his mantra being ‘not until I win something’—and show everyone that he hadn’t wasted his time away. Except that he had wasted it, because when all he’d needed was a podium finish at Skate Canada he’d come down hard on the ice on each of his quads in free and slipped from second to fourth. He wouldn’t get a chance to come back to Japan and compete, because he wasn’t good enough.
Only, if the email in his inbox was not a cruel prank by the nicest roommate he’d ever imagined having—and the fact that Phichit was still talking to Celestino and not crowding up into Yuuri’s space for a reaction was the only evidence better than his friend’s overall non-toxic personality that it wasn’t—or some kind of terrible error—he was still holding out judgment on that one—he would.
He had refused to get his hopes up when one of the senior skaters had withdrawn, citing a leg injury and the desire to pamper it in the hopes of making it through the Olympics. That had brough the first alternate in, but still left Yuuri on the outside looking in, and the twist of hope in his gut had been too painful to even let himself feel any more of it.
Only now…
Now it seemed that a second skater had withdrawn, not from an injury—he would have heard about an injury, Phichit or Celestino or someone with an ear to the ground in the skating world would have sniffed it out before it was announced—but because his wife was pregnant, with complications, and they were going to induce the baby on the first day of the competition.
Which meant that he, Katsuki Yuuri, had an email in his inbox telling him that he had exactly four days to get to Fukuoka and compete in the most significant competition of his life.
Well, technically it was asking him if he would be willing to accept his position as second alternate, but much like when Celestino asked “do you think you can try the quad salchow again,” there was only one answer to that question.
He got up on legs that were wobblier than his salchow landing itself and made his way around the rink just as Phichit and Celestino wrapped up their colloquy, the former skating to center ice again and the latter turning to Yuuri with a question in his eyes and a cocked eyebrow.
“Coach…” he started, and then everything went black.