Chapter Text
yuuri felt out of place in his old childhood bedroom.
it would have been easier had it been dusty, neglected in some way during his absence of five years. but his family had kept it meticulously clean, as they did the rest of the onsen, while also keeping it meticulously untouched.
it looked the exact same way he’d left it behind when he went off to university.
it made yuuri, now five years older, a diploma, few medals and many disappointments richer, feel like he was in a museum exhibit. not allowed to touch anything, prohibited from sitting on the furniture for fear of disrupting the carefully maintained history.
that faraway history when yuuri was a promising young skater leaving home in order to pursue an international career.
all these aspirations, the hopes his family had set in him, the hopes he’d set in himself, preserved, unchanged, for him to find again.
what a joke it had turned out to be.
yuuri hated all of it. he wanted it gone.
that younger, more naive version of himself, that version that had harboured all those dreams, he wanted to get rid of every trace of it. he wanted to eradicate it along with the rest of himself.
it was surprisingly easy, once he‘d made the decision.
the first things to go were his victor nikiforov posters and all his other paraphernalia. they were all in top condition—thankfully young, naive yuuri had taken good care of his prized possessions—and had, over the years, accumulated quite the collector‘s worth. they were all out of print, some even limited edition and hard to get even when they were new.
yuuri knew just the right places on the internet to get rid of items like these, and for a nice profit, too.
the suddenly bare walls of his room, the empty spaces, pale outlines on the wood where his picture frames and collector‘s figurines had sat felt oddly satisfying. satisfying in the way that it does peeling the scab off a wound in one piece, a little too early maybe, the skin underneath still raw and thin and prone to start bleeding again at the slightest movement, but it was just too tempting to pick at the scab and that moment when you finally pull off the last corner of it fills you with a rush of satisfaction.
that‘s how it felt, and yuuri craved that satisfaction. so he went and searched his skin for another scab.
none of the others could compare however—none of his other possessions seemed to have the same symbolic weight, the same significance when he packed them up to be shipped to their new owners. his books, his old video games and handheld consoles. some of his old clothes that were still in good condition, his CDs, the odd useless decoration strewn about the room, figurines and clutter from old anime and games he used to love.
none of it gave him that same rush of twisted pleasure that it had the first time, so he kept going back to dig deeper into his closet.
that’s where he found his old skates.
they were all set carefully in their old boxes, protected from damp and dust. they were all worn through, of course, he always used to—and still did—wear out his skates for as long as he possibly could, hoping to put off the moment when buying new ones became inevitable.
still, it was surprisingly easy to find people to sell them to. he supposed they were still high-quality skates, and even though they were worn into the specific shape of his own feet, and the lining inside covered in faded old bloodstains, they could be invaluable to an aspiring young skater from a low income family, desperate for anything that would let them keep skating.
yuuri tried to sell to those rather than the inevitable weirdos messaging him about the specific conditions of the skates and their smell and how old he’d been when he’d worn them. but if there weren’t any other takers, he’d sell to those, too. money was money, after all, and he found it gave him another, different kind of pleasure to think of his once so precious skates being debased like that, stripped of their original purpose and their naïveté, to be reduced to a mere fetish.
it felt like some kind of poetic justice.
his old costumes from juniors went the same way, sold off and shipped out throughout the country for young skaters and school theatre troupes and eager creeps alike.
yes, thought yuuri, as his closet slowly but steadily emptied, make it all disappear. erase your dark past.
left behind were only folded up cardboard boxes and empty clothes hangers.
the vacuum they created in yuuri’s room made him feel so sated. so justified.
and yet, it was not enough.
he‘d already sold off or given away most of the possessions he’d accumulated in detroit before he left the US, bringing back only one suitcase’s worth of belongings back to hasetsu. but once he ran out of his old childhood things, he started to sell those, too.
most of his clothes and shoes, his newer games, his recent costumes.
the emptier his room became, the calmer he felt. looking around the bare surfaces brought a unique kind of pleasure that he soon became addicted to. he needed more of it.
he kept selling more, donating or giving away what nobody wanted to pay any money for, throwing out the truly worthless things, until there was nothing left to give.
the last things to go when his room had been cleared out were his laptop, his headphones, his cellphone.
he shut them off without hesitation, cleared all his data from them. it wasn't like he‘d been still using them anyway.
he was left in a bare room, only the deserted furniture left behind, the bed stripped of sheets, even the old stickers peeled off the bed frame.
yuuri sat on the floor, back leaning against the bed, knees pulled close to his chest, taking in the emptiness around him. he felt... serene.
right in front of him, leaning against the foot of his desk, there was his last possession remaining, the last thing he owned other than the very clothes on his back.
his last pair of skates.
he didn't encounter anyone when he left the onsen, skates in hand.
there was one final thing left for him to do.
it felt right, standing on the ice again.
that was a relief; it hadn't felt right standing on the ice since sochi.
it did now: now that all he had left in this world were his skates, this was where he belonged again. there was nowhere else for him to be.
he remembered the peaceful feeling, that serenity that had come over him in his empty room, and he started to skate.
he skated with a lightness he‘d never felt before, even when he ran his routines late at night on the rink all alone.
he skated it not for yuuko's benefit, though she was watching.
he skated it not for victor, though it was his routine.
he skated it only for himself and for the ice; a last goodbye between them.
he left it all out on the ice, everything he still possessed.
he didn't stick around for long after the triplets and takeshi appeared.
there was nothing left in him to deal with them.
there was nothing left in him to feel bad about it, either.
he‘d gotten what he came for.
he left ice castle with a wave and a non-committal see you later.
he slept on his bare bed, shivering, and the next morning he crept out of the onsen while his parents and mari were dealing with the morning rush of customers.
it took some (very polite) arguing with the clerk behind the desk, but finally yuuri was allowed to terminate his bank account. his meagre savings left after his failed attempt at a figure skating career, along with his profits from selling his possessions, were handed over to him by the clerk in a wad of cash.
it wasn't much, not as much as he’d hoped to be able to procure, but it was the best that he could do.
he wrapped it carefully in a piece of paper, contemplating for a long while the right words to write on it. he put it down neatly on his bare desk.
then he went downstairs, sat down with his family for lunch. offered reassuring platitudes to his mother‘s questions about his well being, returned deadpan comments for mari‘s teasing remarks.
it was easy.
when minako appeared shortly after they finished lunch and demanded answers from yuuri about some video that had been uploaded to the internet, yuuri didn't even flinch.
it didn't concern him anymore.
he spent the remaining afternoon on his knees before the family shrine. he breathed in the faint smell of incense. vicchan‘s picture, his tags had not accumulated any dust—and they never would.
yuuri knew that his mother was too fastidious in her duties to let that happen.
he silently entrusted the care of the shrine to her.
during dinner, he listened silently to his family‘s conversation, discussions of chores coming up around the house, local gossip, the most recent football games.
nothing was asked of yuuri—it wasn't unusual, even after all this time, for him to follow a conversation quietly, content to listen. his family knew, if he had something to say, he would speak up.
when everyone went in search of their own activities after dinner—mari heading outside for a cigarette, his mother looking after the remaining guests out in the main room, his father taking care of the clean-up in the kitchen—yuuri bid them all good night with a smile.
his bed, stripped bare, didn’t feel quite so cold that night.
the next morning came, and yuuri put on his last remaining set of athletic clothing, left right where he had put it down the night before.
he made the bed and set his skates in their hard guards on the neatly folded comforter.
he made sure the bundle of cash was still sitting prominently at the centre of his desk.
leaning against the door frame, he took in his neatly cleaned out room once more.
during most of the process, he had left the closet doors and drawers wide open at all times. seeing the emptiness left behind them had filled him with a strange warmth every time.
it had given the room an unfinished appearance, the slightly messy air of someone moving in or moving out.
now, all the doors and drawers were neatly shut, all surfaces empty and clean. this wasn't a room lived in. it wasn’t even a room about to be lived in, or recently lived in.
it was completely lifeless.
it was perfect.
yuuri pulled the door shut behind him.
it took him a while to reach the big bridge on foot. it was further out than he usually went on his errands or runs through hasetsu.
he didn’t have a watch or a phone any more, so he wasn't sure how long it took him in the end, but when he reached the cable-stayed bridge, the largest one crossing the river, the sun was fully risen.
a brilliant spring day.
school had long since started, and what little rush-hour traffic hasetsu got had long since dissipated.
it was quiet.
yuuri had barely seen another soul on his walk, and there was no one on the bridge now.
he wandered along the edge of it, looking down into the sparkling waters of the river. he wondered if he should stay close to the shore, where there were rough rocks and boulders extending into the water, or if he should go further toward the middle, where the river was at its deepest.
he wandered the whole length of the bridge once, then turned back toward the middle.
despite the brilliant spring sunlight, there was a cutting breeze blowing in from the bay, ruffling his hair. when he stopped his steps, the rush of the wind blowing in his ears and rustling his clothes and the faraway cries of the gulls were the only sounds he heard.
he thought of the quiet emptiness of his room. how simple it had felt, sitting curled up against his bed frame.
he thought of that rush of righteousness he had felt, selling his old skates and costumes.
erase yourself, he thought. unmake yourself. disappear.
he didn’t feel scared.
he didn’t feel much of anything, except for the wind tearing on his jacket, when he swung himself over the railing.
his feet found the narrow ledge on the other side.
he swayed.
he didn’t hear the noise of a dog barking, torn away in bits and pieces by the wind.
he didn’t think. he didn’t hesitate. he didn’t doubt.
his fingers let go of the railing.
there was a grip, hard as iron, around his wrist.