What Love Is (M)

[eccentric_hat]

Fandom: Yuri!!! on Ice
Title: What Love Is
Pairing/Character Focus: Katsuki Yuuri/Victor Nikiforov
Author: elstaplador
What makes this a gem:

Everything started in September. The Grand Prix series took care of autumn. Nationals followed the Grand Prix Final and Europeans followed nationals and Worlds followed Europeans, as reliable as Christmas and Epiphany, Lent and Easter. The wheel of the year was endlessly reassuring, a lifebelt to cling to when the fog was drowning him; a compass when it lifted, allowing him to orient himself by the red or the purple. Or the gold.

I think of this as the fic where Victor is Russian Orthodox, because I found it when I was wondering if there were any of those and did a text search for "orthodox" on the AO3. But it's much more than that, too. It's a story about Victor living in time--skating time, seasonal time, liturgical time--and learning something about love each time the wheel goes around. The story has a really nifty structure, organized by the months of the year, and a thoughtful perspective on Victor, who we see here taking comfort in ritual and repetition at the same time as he learns how to let his life be transformed by love.