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Mikhail runs the gamut of emotions on February 13th: shock, joy, confusion and pure elation. It’s so bright it almost hurts for him to feel so much all at once, crashing over him in waves without warning.
Something below it sits too, more rotten, because if there’s one person that Mikhail does not envy on February 13th, it is Ilia Malinin.
They known each other for years now, since juniors, since awkward handshakes, stilted Russian and shared locker rooms with the understanding that comes with dedicating yourself to an unforgiving sport. Mikhail would certainly call them friends, would argue they had been for the majority of the time they’d known each other. Even still, there had been plenty of times that Mikhail envied him. How could he not?
There were so many times that he saw Ilia win and felt a sharp stinging in his chest. Others, he’d been nothing but happy, and sometimes, there was nothing for either of the time celebrate at all.
But tonight?
Tonight, Mikhail feels sick for him.
He watches the entirety of Ilia’s free skate from the leader's chair with a pit of dread in his stomach. The lingering warmth from his own clean programme still buzzed under his skin, thrill that he hadn’t been moved out of the leader chair even to the last skater. It should feel like success.
Instead, he felt a knot in his stomach that only deepened as Ilia’s programme unfolded.
It started with the popped jump that Mikhail is sure was supposed to be a quad axel. It didn’t matter, honestly. Ilia’s free programme was so advanced that he could win without it. Then it spirals, and Mikhail watches Ilia pop jumps that he’d never popped before. He falls on a double salchow that he’d probably been landing since they were too young to even be competing in juniors.
It’s like seeing a skinwalker in the body of Ilia, because this can’t be him.
Honestly, it doesn’t register at first. He’s still thinking about how far ahead Ilia could be in the free programme if he does well. Then he realises that Ilia has not done well at all.
And he knows exactly what has happened.
Pressure.
And honestly, it wasn’t that Mikhail had expected this at all.
He hadn’t, but he had been worried for Ilia, because he saw Ilia after the short programme. The way his jaw was locked, waiting with bated breath and eyes trained on the scoreboard while they waited for Yuma’s scores. Ilia himself might not have noticed how obvious his stress was, and maybe the public couldn’t tell either—but Mikhail had noticed. Ilia was never this worried about the point difference, even when he’d had a rough programme, and his short programme had not been rough at all.
Mikhail knew that Ilia had the weight of what was almost the entire U.S. Winter Olympic campaign riding on his back, that he was a gold medal favourite, and he’d been documented almost the entire time he’d been in Milan. He had commercials and brand deals and publicity, and even if Ilia was pretending like he wasn’t utterly overwhelmed, Mikhail couldn’t have imagined how he wouldn’t have been.
Perhaps, Mikhail worried that Ilia would cave, falter just enough to lose gold to Yuma. But this…this was not at all in the cards, and Mikhail just knew that the cause of the outcome was simple. The media and the commentators put too much onto him, and it was the sheer pressure.
He could see Ilia finish the programme, throw up his hands, and promptly burst into tears.
It’s not subtle, like Ilia tries to be. The cameras catch everything, his face crumpling as he covers it with his hands, his shoulder shaking, forcing himself to skate off and bend down to cover his blades with hands that don’t look steady.
He passes close enough to Mikhail as he heads to the kiss and cry that he can see Ilia’s splotched cheeks and glossy eyes, going to await scores that certainly weren’t going to be what anyone expected.
Eighth place.
For a moment, nothing makes sense. Ilia’s name plummets from where it still rested in first, and Mikhail’s first thought is, well, that can’t be right. It must be a mistake, and they’ll correct it, put Ilia into third.
Then, he looks at the leaderboard for a second longer, and he sees his own name at the top of it
Everything explodes. The noise of the area surges back all at once, loud cheering, shouting, the roar of a crowd and an announcer in English saying his name because he’s won the fucking Olympics.
His team is grabbing him, pulling him into their embrace and cheering, shaking him and everything is a blur.
He is an Olympic figure skating gold medalist.
And somehow, suddenly, Ilia is standing in front of him—hugging him, hand in his hair, voice hoarse as he tells him that he deserved it.
Mikhail barely processes it, he says something that Ilia probably doesn’t understand, and time warps, slow motion and double speed. His flag is draped over his shoulders, and everyone is cheering around him; it’s ringing in his ears, and suddenly he’s standing on the podium, and it’s his national anthem they are playing. He’s being adorned with a gold medal, and nothing feels real at all.
When he comes off the podium and his blades are covered, there are cameras and interviews, some more explosive excitement from his team. The medal is light, but it feels heavy around his neck, and he can’t stop touching it, because it feels as if he looks away for too long, it might disappear, and reality might set in.
Eventually, he manages to slip away from the limelight and all the people for a few moments, just long enough to change out of his skating costume if he can, so he can become more comfortable. He needs a breather, backstage, where the noise will grow fainter, and the lights will be less blinding.
Instead, everything feels very real, all at once, because Mikhail can see him.
Ilia, standing off to the side, still in his skating costume as well, stuck in a standstill as the rest of the world rushes past him, out of his control just like the results and the skate he’d done.
Mikhail doesn’t mean to listen. He doesn’t even realise he’s stopped walking until the voices register, not quiet at all. They probably think that they’re alone, because they were, until Mikhail showed up to eavesdrop.
“I don’t want to do it!”
Ilia’s voice is sharp, fraying at the edge, too close to yelling and breaking already.
Mikhail can see the side of Ilia’s face, still bright red, and there are still tears coming down. His blonde hair sticks up in every direction, like he’d run his hands through it a thousand times, tugging until it sticks out as if electric currents had run through it.
“You have to, Ilia, I know you don’t want to, I get it—” It’s his dad, Mikhail knows, he can pin the voice down from the amount of times he’s heard it.
“What else am I supposed to tell them?” Ilia snaps, angry and defeated. “I blew it! How many more ways can I say it?”
“They’re just doing their job,” his father says, trying to placate. “I wish I could make them stop, son.”
“I don’t care what they’re doing!” Ilia’s voice cracks. “I don’t want to talk to them anymore, Dad, please, don’t make me, I can’t—”
It turns strangled and choked by the end, dissolving into sobbing again.
Mikhail’s chest tightens as he watches Ilia fold in on himself, clinging on like a scared child when Roman pulls him in for a hug. It puts knots in his stomach, looking at Ilia and finding the absence of a composed, perfect athlete.
“Папа, please,” Ilia begs again, quiet and broken and too personal (Mikhail was an asshole for eavesdropping, that wasn’t for him to hear, none of this was—)
Ilia is still crying, even as no words are spoken for a little bit longer. Then finally, his father replies.
Ilia, it will be okay, eventually. Once we get through the press, we can go back, you can take a shower and rest. I know what it’s like; it’s hard, but you have to dry your tears and calm down—”
It’s like the words flip a switch, and Ilia is recoiling sharply, anger and vitriol flaring. His expression twists into something volatile.
“You don’t know what it’s like!” He spits, voice trembling with sheer anger. “Because you never won shit, and when you went to the Olympics, nobody gave a fuck about you!”
And Mikhail feels a bit aghast hearing Ilia swear, it was so utterly rare and for him to do it to his dad like this…
“Ilia!”
“If you fucking loved me,” Ilia continues, tumbling out faster and even louder, “you’d go out there and tell them to go ask Mikhail what it’s like to win the medal that was supposed to be mine and make them get those fucking cameras out of my face!”
By the end, he’s almost hysterical, borderline shrieking, and his Russian is so fast it’s slurred, Americanised and mixed with random English as he loses control of his tongue and language.
And Mikhail supposes that he should be offended that Ilia insinuated that the only reason he deserved to win was because he himself had not done well, especially after telling him that he deserved it mere minutes ago, but honestly it seemed pretty low on the list of concerns (and it was admittedly a little hard to care when the gold was still sitting around his neck.).
“Stop it, Ilia!” His father’s tone hardens, far less sympathetic than before. “You can’t start screaming, or you’ll make everything worse! Because I love you, I’m telling you that you cannot break these legal brand contracts you have. You can cry more later. Right now, you need to wipe your tears and power through it!”
There’s a beat.
“I’ll talk to the reporters,” he adds. “You get maybe five minutes before I’m coming in here to drag you out myself.”
And Mikhail hears the sound of footsteps echoing as Roman leaves, heavy as they fade down the corridor and back into the hum of the arena.
The silence that follows is immediate and suffocating, but it doesn’t last for long at all.
Ilia moves, slipping out of Mikhail’s line of sight, and then there’s the violent slam of metal—it’s loud enough to make Mikhail flinch where he stands. The noise echoes harshly, reverberating throughout the dead air and bouncing down the many rows of metal. It doesn’t sound like someone just harshly closing something. It sounds like someone trying to break it, like Ilia had slammed it closed with all the reckless force he put behind his quad axel.
“‘Ilia, tell us about what happened,’” Mikhail can hear Ilia mock whinily in English, an exaggerated caricature of a reporter, down to the botched mispronunciation of his first name. “‘Oh, tell us, how are you feeling?’”
“I fucked it! It was terrible! Gold medal and—” Ilia’s tone starts shifting again, breathy and tight, like coming out of a suffocating throat. “First and straight to eighth—what have I done? I’m a failure, God, what—”
There’s a loud clatter against the floor, and Mikhail can’t see what it is, but the following sound is just of Ilia laughing.
It’s wrong. Completely wrong, scraping against the quiet like broken glass. It’s jagged and too loud, maniacal and anything but amused as it bleeds right back into crying.
Another bang, duller, followed by the muted drag of something against metal.
“What am I going to do?” Ilia bemoans, words tumbling over each other, barely coherent. “Why now? Why— How could I let this happen? I can’t—I can’t go out there, I can’t do it—” petering out into nothing but sharp, ragged gasps.
“I wish I could just disappear! Why me?”
It’s at this last sentence, so utterly defeated and far too private, that something in Mikhail jolts sharply back into place, and he remembers that he has control of his own limbs.
And he has to make a decision.
Does he walk away and rejoin the celebration? Leave and return to the blinding lights, the noise of the joy waiting for him, rejoice in the gold medal still hanging heavy against his chest?
Does he stay here, hidden just out of sight, listening to something he was never meant to hear?
Or does he step forward?
It would be so easy to leave again. Everything is waiting for him out there. Everything that he has worked for. He has coaches to talk to and family to call, interviews, and afterparties he could go to that would stretch into the early morning.
But, right in the ears that could be hearing that, is instead the ragged cries of someone he’s known for years—someone who hugged him minutes ago, and told him that he deserved this, even after having the worst night of his entire life.
And all Mikhail is doing is listening to it, from a few feet away, just out of sight. Just like he had just a little bit ago, watching it happen on the ice like a slow-motion car crash, he just couldn’t draw his eyes away from.
It’s only mere seconds before his mind chooses for him, and he enters from the corridor.
Ilia somehow looks even worse for wear when Mikhail is fully able to see him.
Half the contents of his bag are scattered on the floor—guards, athletic tape, a metal water bottle, crumpled fabric, and beside it is Ilia, curled up on the ground, knees tightly pulled to his chest, and his arms wrapped around them like he could physically hold himself together.
Ilia looks up at him, and both of their eyes must be wide, just staring.
“Mikhail?” Ilia confirms, voice high and nasal.
“Uh—”
“Fuck!” Ilia laughs hysterically, throwing his head back hard enough to crack against the metal locker behind him. Mikhail winces instantly at the sound, but Ilia doesn’t even react, as if it doesn’t register at all.
“How much worse can this get?” Ilia asks nobody.
Then, his expression shifts to something more scared, asking, “How much did you hear?”
Mikhail hesitates for a fraction of a second, wonders if it would be better to soften his words and lie, or to just be honest.
“Most of it, probably.”
“Oh God, I don’t—Mikh—Misha—I don’t hate you, I swear. I don’t—”
“I don’t think you hate me.” Mikhail quickly assuages, stepping closer, words coming out faster than he can properly think them through. “I just came because I was worried about you. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
The second he says it, he regrets it, because it’s so obviously untrue.
Ilia is very clearly not okay, and he hasn’t been since he stepped off the ice. He probably hadn’t been before that, either.
“I’m fine, obviously!” Ilia replies brightly.
It’s too jolly and forced to be true. It’s not sarcastic. It’s not convincing either, but it certainly sounds like he’s trying to make it true just by saying it out loud, even as he’s still curled on the floor, eyes wet and unfocused.
“It’s okay to not be fine,” Mikhail says, instead, closing the distance between them.
“No, I need to get up, I have interviews—” Ilia replies automatically.
But he doesn’t move.
His chest is still rising and falling so quickly and shallowly that each breath barely catches before the next one interrupts it. There’s a tremor running through Ilia’s hands, still wrapped around his shins, that he doesn’t even seem to notice.
For a fleeting moment, Mikhail can’t help but think that Ilia’s more likely to pass out right here than make it to them at all.
“Yeah, but just because you have interviews doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to be upset.”
“It’s my own fault!” Ilia replies quickly, words still hitching. “I let—” he wheezes, trying to drag in air. “Let it…go. I can’t—don’t deserve to be upset.”
“You aren’t a failure, Ilia. It was just one bad day—”
“At the fucking Olympics!” Ilia snaps, before his breath gives out again, and he sort of gags.
Mikhail cringes. Ilia looks lost, eyes clenching closed as he continued to go impossibly paler.
“You can’t be perfect every day,” Mikhail continues, even though he hates how hollow it sounds, loathes how much it feels like something he pulled from a premeditated script of empty platitudes. “What matters is everything else you’ve done. You’re an amazing skater.”
He says it to console, but he means it.
He’s always meant it.
Ilia shakes his own head anyway, like he was nothing at all.
“I think you’re having a panic attack,” Mikhail says, a little helplessly, in lieu of any other empty words.
They’re empty anyway, because Ilia doesn’t react to the words at all. Either he doesn’t understand them, or they just don’t register through everything else happening in his head, but Mikhail doesn’t know the words in English to translate either.
And he comes to the crushing realisation, fueled with unease, that he has absolutely no idea what he’s doing.
Where is Ilia’s team?
Ilia’s head tips back, lolling for a second like it’s too heavy for him to hold up, and his breathing is just getting worse, and there’s going to be even more of a problem if Ilia goes unconscious, and doing nothing is the worst possible option.
So, Mikhail forgoes more words to kneel in front of Ilia. He reaches for Ilia’s hand, cold, clammy and still shaking. Mikhail presses it against his chest anyway. Then, he places his other hand against Ilia’s sternum, aiming for grounding, letting him feel Mikhail’s heartbeat, something closer to normal and tangible.
“What are you doing?” Ilia gasps, not pulling away, barely peeling open his swollen eyes.
“Just, uh, try to breathe?” Mikhail offers. He actively makes an effort to slow his own breathing despite his racing heart.
For a second, Ilia looks like he might argue, or defend himself, claim he didn’t need help. But it only stays for a second before his expression collapses, too tired and overwhelmed to try, and he lets himself follow.
And eventually, he’s moved away from hyperventilating, and Mikhail drops his hand.
Ilia swallows hard. “Thanks, Misha,” he says, voice quieter and raw from crying. “I’m sorry, I’m holding everyone up. I need to go do those interviews…”
He runs a hand over his face, already pushing himself to stand up as if nothing had ever happened.
“Honestly, I don’t know what I said or what you heard. It probably wasn’t nice.” A weak, humourless huff, again. “But I’m sorry. You earned it, really. You skated…phenomenal.”
“You don’t have to worry about it, Ilia. I understand. I don’t think whatever you said in the middle of a breakdown is necessarily the best display of your personality. I’ve known you for years, remember?”
Ilia nods slowly.
“Right. I guess that’s true.” He grabs a handful of paper towels and presses them awkwardly against his tacky skin. “I appreciate it. Dang, I look high.”
He tries to fix his hair next, dragging his fingers through it more intentionally, mangling it into something that is just barely passable. Mikhail can still see it, the tightness in Ilia’s jaw, the fauxness of the smile he’s trying to dredge up, the shaking hands, the barely concealed undercurrents of distress threatening to explode into another breakdown that Ilia is just barely tamping down.
Ilia heads to the door that Roman left from before, despite this.
“Thanks again, just...can you not tell everyone about this?”
“Ilia, why would I ever do that?” Mikhail asks, utterly incredulous.
“I don’t know.” Ilia shrugs. “It’d make another great story for the papers, ‘Quad God has a mental break, loses his mind and the gold at the Olympics.’”
He laughs again, and then sees that Mikhail isn’t laughing, more so just increasingly more and more alarmed (maybe Ilia really needed mental help?) and stops abruptly.
“For what it’s worth,” Ilia adds, almost as an afterthought, or something to quell Mikhail’s concerns, “I’m not like…suicidal.”
That is not consoling at all.
“That’s…a very low bar,” Mikhail says, words coming out before he can filter them. “You should like…talk to your sports psychologist about the rest of this?”
Ilia blinks at him, as if trying to remember the words in Russian again (and Ilia spoke Russian with Rafael and his dad, he should certainly know the words, right—) and then he smiles sadly, and Mikhail knows with a sinking feeling that whatever comes out next won’t be a satisfying answer.
“Yeah. I guess. If I get one soon.”
“Jesus Christ.” Mikhail exhales. Who on earth failed to—
“Only a few more 3 a.m. repost sprees in a depressive spiral, and maybe someone will notice, right?” Ilia smiles, but it doesn’t reach his still watery eyes, and the tone sounds sad and hopeful and wistful all at once.
“Or a friend?” Mikhail offers as a second option. “Or me, I’m here too. Just don’t…don’t bottle it up, you know? It won’t get better that way.”
“Thanks, Misha. That means a lot. For real.” Another pause. “Congrats on the medal, you really, really deserve it.”
Then Ilia rolls his shoulders back, takes one deep breath, closes his eyes and lets his face shift back into something composed and practised, something he’s done a thousand times before beginning a programme.
He turns around, opens the door, and just like that, he’s gone.
The noise from the arena bleeds back in for a second, a little quieter now but still deafening after the raw atmosphere, and then it fades out again as the door swings shut once more.
Mikhail stares at the empty space where Ilia had been just a second before, turns around and lets out an exhale of his own.
Right.
Changing into regular clothes.