Chapter Text
Everyone else in the hall, non-student athletes, Yuri supposed, moved in the next day. Phichit watched them curiously from the window. Yuri went for a run, a long one. It was as good as, say, doing sprints on the roundabout in front of the motel with Mark. He knew that. Hockey required quick bursts of strength and power. Shifts on the ice were short, even if the game was long. It wasn’t slow and steady endurance he needed, but the endurance to continuously be strong across short bursts.
He knew all of this, knew it because he’d spent the last sixteen years or so having it drilled into his head, and he didn’t care. He and Cooper and Mark had always taken one long run together every week or two. They did it under the guise of training and called it a “recovery” run, but it wasn’t recovery for their bodies they needed so much as recovery for their minds. They all thought best when they were moving, and they all thought best when they were together. Recovery runs had always been the time and space they needed to think through the roadblocks they could feel ahead of them. It was like gently working out the knots in a tangled piece of string; it took time and effort, but eventually they got everything sorted out together.
It was the together that was really getting to Yuri as he stepped off of the side streets surrounding campus and plunged into the woods that surrounded the college town on virtually all sides, like a barrier keeping the outside world, and the shenanigans of the students in. In all, lately, Yuri was feeling as isolated from everything and everyone around him as Melrose and Avon was from the outside world. He didn’t have a “together” here, no matter what anyone here tried to tell him. Together couldn’t just be dictated to you. It had to be earned.
Yakov had at least started to acknowledge that in his pre-practice pep-talk. They still needed to prove themselves to each other, learn to depend on each other. The problem was the dependence required trust, and Yuri had only ever fully trusted two people on the ice, and he’d grown up playing with them his entire life.
And now they were gone. So the question stood: what was he going to do?
With a start, Yuri realized the origin of this line of thinking. It stopped him short on the path. Soft sunlight, filtering down through the canopy arching high above him, washed over him, highlighted little patches of violets at the edges of the brush. Comforting silence settled down around him.
Mark had been the captain of their team for the past few years. He was the center, their idea man, the one who could always pull the team together when it mattered most. It was a decision that had made sense. But when it had been made, their coach had pulled Yuri and Cooper aside and directed the two of them to be Mark’s “impulse control.” Alternate captains, the people who provided the necessary support and subtle leadership on a team that the captain couldn’t always give. It seemed that even here, thousands of miles from everything he thought he knew, and endlessly removed from the plans Yuri had laid for himself this time last year, being that impulse control, shaping things from the background, was a habit he couldn’t shake.
Another player might have looked at this and despaired. Yuri, completely uprooted and unsure of his footing, the rest of the team, green freshman who still needed to figure out the ropes, and a miniscule set of upperclassmen to show them all the way.
But Yuri had always had a gift for looking at all the players lined up one the ice and seeing how the patterns would form, where the openings would be, and what the weak spots were. It’s part of what had made the offensive line he and Mark had led so good, no matter who was playing on their left wing.
This team needed leadership, and a persistent dedication to growing together that would breed trust and loyalty. It might be overstepping his bounds, to call out Victor and tell him what this team needed--likely when Victor himself already knew all of this, but hockey was an impossible sport to play alone. One strong player couldn’t save a team if he couldn’t inspire everyone else to follow him to greatness.
He had thought, last spring when he’d been trying to figure out what to do next, that if he did ever play hockey again, then from here out he would go it alone, that he would try and be alright without his best friends behind him, without forming the bonds that made defeat so, so much worse.
Yakov had told him otherwise, or the approximation of it. He didn’t think he was good enough to play with his friends anymore? Fine. Yakov had never been in the market of trying to convince Yuri to do otherwise, not when Mark and Cooper wouldn’t be playing for Avon. But hockey wasn’t an individual sport, and it never had been. The goalie was only as good as the defence, the defence only as good as the center and his string, The forward string could only be as good as the center, and the center would be nothing without his wings. It was a little mantra. An old one, another thing that Yuri had been hearing all his life that he’d been surprised to hear Yakov recite to him.
“This team doesn’t want you, Yuri,” Yakov had told him last spring, once he had caught Yuri off-guard. “It needs you.”
It was a lot to put on a freshman, Yuri had known that even before he’d agreed to play for Yakov. But he had the leadership, the knack for the game, even if nobody had ever expected it from him. He didn’t know if he could play without Mark and Cooper. He didn’t know if this team really had anything left to give. He knew their stats, and the overwhelming amount of freshman made him as nervous as anyone, but it felt like a challenge, to rise above it all.
And there had always been a part of Yuri that loved ripping apart a challenge on the ice with his skates, his stick, and his string.
He started running again. The world went on around him. And Yuri started planning ways that he could help bring them all together.