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“I think I want to leave,” Zhenya said, into the stillness of the dark locker room. It was before practice, and they were the only ones here, and with a wordless nod of mutual understanding, they had shut the lights and hunkered down in a corner together, knees knocking comfortably and shoulder against shoulder.
Wakaba remembers nodding, not quite understanding the severity of the statement, stumbling out her agreement. Zhenya had sighed, and her head had fallen heavily onto Wakaba’s shoulder and it was a moment of softness, a moment of weakness, for both of them. It was a moment of quiet that felt like the eye of a storm.
For Waka, it was a moment to prove herself, and the first one. For Evgenia, it was her home turf, and in many ways, that made it harder.
Waka didn’t watch her skate, she never does. On the ice, Zhenya is someone else, like a mannequin, a doll with misassembled arms and legs, all odd and foreign and lacking the life Waka knows is in there. It’s when she’s off the ice, laughing with her mouth stretched open awkwardly, trying to fit odd-angled words in, that she’s again Waka’s friend.
And then she was gone, with a suddenness that was jarring, because Zhenya was a fixture in Wakaba’s life, the girl she’d see at every big competition, the girl to beat, the girl she—
“stress fracture,” Zhenya said, hollow, “injured,” she whispered, and “I want to win the Olympics so badly,” and “how could this happen,” and “I would give anything,” and “it hurts so much, I would skate but it hurts so much,” and Waka sat silent in front of her phone and nodded. She tried to be a good friend but she was helpless. Zhenya cried.
Wakaba fights on her own. She wouldn’t lie and say she fights for both of them. There’s a selfishness in competition, a need to be the best and out-do everyone else, that Zhenya understands. She would never hold it against Waka, but she did have reassuring words, after the Grand Prix Final. After a devastating last place finish when Waka needed to prove herself most.
“Persevere,” her message read, “you’ve come further than ever before, just keep pushing forward. I know you have more to give, just trust your perseverance.”
It was a rough translation, because Zhenya tried, but her Japanese never makes much sense. Waka translates it back to Russian, than back to English, and it makes even less sense. In the end, she accepted her own interpretation as truth. It was easier than probing for a deeper truth and making Zhenya feel self-conscious about her words. They were kind, they helped. Waka wouldn’t want to throw that kind of gift back into her face.
(The flowers were a surprise. Waka hopes fervently that the cameras won’t pick up on her blush.)
“I think I want to leave here,” Zhenya said, months before, a quiet murmur into the warm hollow of Waka’s throat, and now Waka understands. She understands defeat and she understands loss, and she understands, though limited and lesser, what injuries cost. She would like to leave, everything, everyone, bury herself in a hole in the ground and come out when the world has frozen over.
Instead, she took a break. She placed her skates in her closet, and asked her friends not to talk about it, and she went for runs every morning instead. On the tenth day, her oldest sister called. Her words were an echo, an uncomfortably expectant echo: “So will you give up or will you persevere?”
In a moment of sentimentality Waka would never admit to when asked outright, she pressed a few of the petals, wrapped into a tissue and pressed between the pages of an old copy of some CLAMP anime Zhenya had given her. She has read it, of course she did, Waka isn't one to squader gifts and besides, it’s a story of girls saving each other. In every story Zhenya loves, it’s girls saving each other.
(She sends one text, during the Olympics. Just the one, a heartfelt wish good luck, and a photo of her flowers, a little crushed, but preserved.)
“I want to leave,” Zhenya said, and she’s carrying silver like a brand, and she's withdrawing from worlds, and Waka’s heart breaks, because she had come for redemption but Zhenya won’t even get that. She got elevated ankles in thick wrappings and another uncertain amount of time off the ice, and Waka wasn’t going to lie and say she was going to skate for her.
She skates for herself, first and foremost, but she has a duty, she has a responsibility, because it was her who lost the third spot, and it was her who got punished for it, and yes. She must retrieve it, but she also has to show she deserved it.
She crumbled.
And she persevered. Somewhere inside, there is a strength, a steely core that refuses to bend, and her music plays, and there are Mai’s tears and Kaori’s “I’m sorry,” and Satton’s bird boned arms holding her firmly and Marin’s frozen smile in the corner of the room, sidelined for once by everyone else's emotions, and Zhenya’s eyes in a dark room as she presses words against Waka's skin, and it has always been about girls saving each other but it also has to be girls saving themselves, and she skated for all of them.
But she succeeded for herself.
“I knew you could do it,” Zhenya said, weeks later, sitting awkwardly on Waka’s oldest sister’s couch. Waka shrugged, shook her head, searching for the right words in her head, and settling on: “It was luck. Bad luck for everyone else.”
“And good work from you,” Zhenya insists, and Waka allows it. She's made mistakes, but she kept going. She did good.
“Now we match,” Waka said, and Zhenya’s smile dimmed for a moment before it brightened again, as if she just realized what Waka knew all along: everything carries its own weight.If Zhenya’s silver feels like a loss, Waka’s feels like an unlikely gain. Both are wrong, attached to deeply to their emotional response. Instead, they are accomplishments, and they are symbols of "almost there," and "not enough" and "strive for more."
“Hey,” Zhenya says, in the taxi to the rink, “do you want to put them on?”
She fishes both medals out of the front of her skating suitcase, and holds them out, and yes, it aches, a little, but Waka knows Kaori and Satton did their best. They skated as well as they could, and they didn’t make it to the podium, so Waka would never have held this in her hands.
“Yes,” she smiled, and Zhenya arranged the medals around her neck with careful hands. She pulled her phone out, and Waka smiled for her, and Zhenya smackd a kiss against her cheek and Waka hoped, against hope, that her blush wouldn't show in the photos too much.
(She saves the photo, and prints it. It’s a good memento of everything Waka will achieve.)
“I want to leave her,” Zhenya said, a week later, in the quiet of a hotel room, and “I am thinking about Brian Orser,” and “Do you think that would be okay,” and “I know you’ve trained there,” and “if you don’t want me to, I won’t even ask,” and Waka isn’t a selfless person.
But she cannot make these choices. She wants to leave, too. But she doesn’t want to leave like Zhenya wants to leave, didn’t need to admit it in the darkness of a locker room, in the darkness of a hotel room, like the whispered confession is a crime.
“Maybe we can both go,” Zhenya said, “maybe we could train together,” and “It would be fun.” But there was something rushed and hopeless in her eyes and her skating is jumbled, rushing, seeking and needy and open, and Waka wants her to jump again. She’s not a selfless girl, and she isn’t giving anything up.
“Of course,” she answers, and takes Zhenya’s hand. They are skating in the same ice show, but only a few times. There is a lot of demand for an Olympic silver medalist, and less demand for the world silver medalist of an Olympic year. Waka has made peace with that. Zhenya squeezed her fingers with too much force, realised, let go, and reached out again.
“You should try,” Waka says, “you should do what you need. Be selfish.”
Zhenya nods, uncertain. Waka gives her a smile, like a secret, and a promise.
“You’ll leave. And I’ll persevere.”