Shattering Glass

Chapter 7

Yuri stood in the doorway of the nursery, looking inside at the half-painted interior. The walls were a soft, muted pink with an accent wall bearing a shade of grey so warm and light it made the room apparently glow.

The nursery's construction had been underway for a few days following a slightly uncomfortable conversation about design preferences to which Yuri had been entirely indifferent and that resulted in Otabek essentially picking the colors and anxiously hovering while Yuri confirmed.

So far, Yuri had been barred from helping with the room's construction; as the paint fumes would be harmful to him and he was unable to lift heavy objects, there really wasn't much he'd be able to do. Nevertheless, he had been reminded twice to stay away-- once, vaguely awkwardly but gently, from Otabek, and again, firmly and almost reprimanding, by Victor, who had come over to help.

Currently, the latter two were taking a break while the first coat of paint dried, taking the time to scrub the pink and grey from their hands and have lunch, cooling off from painting.

While the house was climate-controlled, the raging inferno that was the heatwave had yet to let up and, for the first time, Saint Petersburg was able to sympathize with the Southern hemisphere, wondering how they ever got anything done in the heat.

At the telltale sounds of Otabek and Victor returning upstairs, Yuri moved away from the doorway of the nursery, retreating into the office. He'd been working on choreographing a routine for his Beginner Pointe class, hoping to familiarize them with more difficult types of turns while up en pointe, and needed to adjust a few counts for it to be dance-ready.

Though he'd been hesitant to introduce the turns at first, knowing that for this type of lesson demonstrations were essential and that he was in no position to give them, since Ekaterina was a helper and had expressed eagerness to demonstrate when he'd asked her, he'd decided that he'd give it a shot. His students had been asking about the turns anyway, and if they were that excited, he figured, he may as well harness the energy and use it for something productive.

Yuri sat down at the desk as, across the hall, Otabek and Victor returned to their work, deeming it time for a second coat of paint.

Otabek dipped his paintbrush into the pot of pink sitting at his elbow, finishing the edging where pink met the grey of the accent wall before he started with the roller. Victor, on the other side of the wall, had taken the opposite tack and had chosen to use the rollers first, recoating the grey wall slightly haphazardly, using far too much paint on certain sections and going back to the paint tray with every other stroke.

Otabek fought a surge of annoyance as he looked on; there was a reason he had assigned Victor a third of his own task: the man could not paint. Several years ago, when Victor had tried to paint Luci's nursery, he'd done such a bad job (drips everywhere, the siding smeared, the walls splotchy enough to resemble leopard print) that Yuuri had eventually banned him from the task and had called Yuri and Otabek over to fix it. The paint war they had gotten into had taken hours to clean up, but eventually, all of the purple had been gotten out of Yuri's hair and the paint job had ended up pristine.

Fighting a sigh at the leopard print-esque job Victor was doing now, Otabek returned to his own work, fully resigned to the fact that he'd be repainting the wall once Victor had left. In truth, he fully wished that Victor wasn't helping at all, but apparently the man had so little faith in him that he didn't trust him to paint walls correctly. There had been no dissuading him, and, after a few aborted tries that had resulted in straight-up growling from Victor, Otabek had given up and 'accepted' (as if he'd ever had a choice in the matter) his help.

Finished with his job of the edging and Victor finally smoothing out his rough second coat, Otabek grabbed his paintbrush to wash it before moving on to use the roller.