Work Text:
“It’s like a light that you see going over. What do you call it... A shooting star, when it falls out of the sky, you know?”
Yuzuru nods at Shae-lynn. He doesn’t know.
Stars don’t reach the ground; they die a bright, brief death in the sky and live forever in the heart of a beholder. They don’t fall. They blast across space and make the art of going gently into the night not lonely but beautiful.
Yuzuru wouldn’t know what a shooting star is like; all he knows is how to fall.
Falling on jumps, falling short of expectations, falling in love with the cold air and the colour of gold. A loss of control so total it makes his head spin. His entire life is a series of leaps and subsequent free falls. His travels all across Japan after the quake took his home rink. His move to Toronto. Medals and risks and world records and injuries. Each high and low pushes the memory of a steady ground further away, until all he can recall is the feeling of wind rushing by, the thrill and terror of not knowing whether wings or gravity will get him first. In a way, he supposes he understands where the comparison came from; he does know how to make his jumps quite the sight.
The difference is that while stars go out gracefully, his crashes into the earth have been nothing but gruesome.
Sochi. Shanghai. Osaka. Places where he was hollowed out in the middle of the stark white ice—a bloody specimen flayed open for audience and judges to gape at. And now Boston, too. From the moment when he drew second in skating order and felt bile bubbling in his throat, Yuzuru knew. This time, this fall would ruin him. After months of injections and changing the way he walked, corrosive dread churning his innards raw, that draw result killed what little confidence he was nursing with surgical precision. The universe’s last laugh. Not since the day he had woken up from an abdominal surgery to find out that Tatsuki had retired that he thought the gods were truly cruel. When he took center ice for his free skate, he had only let himself hope that his fall would be painless and swift.
Almost three months later, Yuzuru still isn’t sure if the free fall had ended yet.
He’s stopped falling on jumps, that’s one thing, but only because he starts popping them instead. His body remembers too well—the nightmares, the ache that left him bed bound, the helplessness that clogged his throat like asthma when he watched little Shoma landed quad flip at Team Challenge Cup at the time he could barely walk unassisted. A shooting star goes out pretty and clean. Not in a teary mess that Tracy had to gather up in her arms because he hasn’t managed to land one single loop all week.
Let it out, Yuzu. She stroked his hair as he wept into her shoulder. You’d kept it inside for so long. Cry it out and let us in.
And so he tries, as best as he can. A star doesn’t fall but a star doesn’t heal either. Yuzuru explains to Brian why he needed quad loop not tomorrow but now, when Javi’s revised World Champion plaque just arrived all shiny and new. He trusts Jeff with his short program and David with Tarasova-san’s music. He approaches Tracy—quietly, the only way he knows how—about the fear in his marrow and she glides with him until her blades drown out the sounds in his head of reporters referring to him in the past tense. He hands Shae-lynn songs of a child’s Olympics and talks to her about clear rivers and green breezes.
Shae-lynn glides to a pause as Asian Dream Song swells, looking up past the rink’s ceiling and towards the night sky of her imagination. Yuzuru mimics her movement. He doesn’t know this shooting star she speaks of. Instead he pictures a leaf in the wind, a day guilelessly sunny and the sky a depthless blue, before mapping out the transitions he has going into the quad salchow combo.
Shooting stars are brilliant and beautiful and gone in a blink of an eye. Rather than burning away, Yuzuru wishes to stay and grow. He jumps on the music cue. Maybe, just maybe, this time his blades will catch his fall—a running edge that arcs not like a trail of light but a flowing stream.