Work Text:
The lights flicker on for the first time over bare concrete.
It's warm. The refrigeration is yet to be activated; pipes and vents and wide tubes all dormant and silent as they will never be again after today. One thick plastic gate stands half-open, abandoned that way after the final checks on the smooth level surface beyond it.
Life pours in where two skaters stand hand-in-hand in the open doorway at the balcony's far end.
"We did it," says Xiao Xingchen, almost disbelieving, and beside him Song Lan smiles ever so slightly.
"We did it," he echoes, quiet and certain and to no-one but himself as Xiao Xingchen runs ahead down into the heart of the rink and traces astonished hands along the smooth new surface of the barrier.
The first touch of a skater.
The first touch of love.
*
"Good morning," says Baoshan Sanren as she stands alone on fresh white ice with face upturned to empty clear air. "You and I are going to share the futures of the brightest talent in our world. We should know one another."
It's the first music the rink has ever known. The first song to pour through new-made speakers out into the crystal vastness of the air – and Baoshan Sanren skates the last program she ever performed before retiring from competition.
It's the only time she ever addresses the rink directly.
(Save for just once more, sixteen years later.)
*
Baoshan Sanren brings Wei Ying home, and the ice lights up from within in welcome.
He doesn't recognise it, at first. Doesn't know what to do with it, sixteen and wild and so far estranged from love he barely knows it yet.
He learns.
*
Wen Qing arrives with burned-in habits that are hard to break.
One of these is hiding when she cries.
She gets a job at the rink to support herself, gets a pass-card with a crisply printed photograph that will fade and scratch as the years pass until it's worn almost back to smooth ice-white again, learns shift patterns and quiet hours and all the most out-of-sight places to tuck herself away.
Her tears are the first the boot store sees. Her hands pull the first splinters from a just-beginning-to-wear wooden shelf edge, on a bad morning when something has to break and she's just beginning to learn it shouldn't be her.
Wen Qing learns the secrets of the rink, as she learns to trust herself again.
*
The rink learns the sound of laughter. The rink learns the interwoven patterns of its skaters' moods, gains scribbled graffiti in the slowly wearing wood of the staff shelves in the boot store, learns the scent of a half-open bag of McDonald's takeaway flying through the air to be caught without fail every single time.
Wei Ying climbs over the counter into places he's not supposed to be. Wen Qing says things into the speaker system that were never printed on any scripted announcement instruction sheet.
The Lans arrive.
The rink learns – so many things.
Lan Qiren places a volume-limiting screw into the main slider of the sound system after seven separate extended discussions with Baoshan Sanren about it.
(Wei Ying has carried a screwdriver in his bag for longer than the rink has known him.)
Sizhui and Jingyi are the first children of the rink. Tiny axels and undignified half-disciplined shrieking and star-bright sparkling laughter – and glimpses of Wei Ying's own childhood too, as he plays with them and laughs with them and chases them around the ice to make them jump faster.
And Lan Zhan.
Wei Ying thinks Lan Zhan's ears turn pink-tipped from the cold. Wei Ying is wrong.
Eighteen-year-old Lan Zhan locks himself in the bathroom on twelve separate occasions before he gets enough of a handle on his thoughts to make it back to his apartment first.
Nineteen-year-old Lan Zhan whispers Wei Ying to empty ice at the end of the final run-through of his free skate before nationals.
By twenty, Lan Zhan drives Wei Ying back after practice every Wednesday and cooks dinner for him in his own apartment and still, still it's another four years until the rink sees Wei Ying for the first time in six weeks at midnight.
*
Once, the rink taught its skaters to love.
This time, vulnerable and recovering and torn open by it, Wei Ying returns the lesson.
Hushed and still and overflowing, the rink listens.
*
Jiang Meixiu learns to walk with baby-soft fingers gripping the worn-smooth blade-scored wood of the boot store shelves. It's been years since they've been fresh enough to splinter.
She takes her first unassisted steps across the same damp black-rubber floor that held up her mother as she learned to recognise herself again.
*
Two days after Wei Xinyi learns to crawl, she learns what cold fresh ice feels like beneath her bare hands – and everyone else learns to keep the gates closed.
*
Nie Huaisang talks to the rink. Nie Huaisang runs one soothing hand along the barrier, murmurs we trust each other, hmm, let me land this jump today, hacks into the CCTV system from his phone and always acts surprised at what he finds.
Nie Huaisang, practising at midnight three nights before the world championships, sprawls panting on the ice after landing all his jumps five times in a row and whispers into emptiness hey, listen, I never told you what I did this time two years ago.
Do you want to know?
*
Lan Sizhui stands inside the boot store in a fresh new dark-blue fleece and says how can I help you? with a polite smile and an innocent blink.
Jin Ling climbs over the counter in outrage to write in the patch booking folder himself without permission, and Lan Jingyi collects the most enormous handful of ice shavings he can manage for the express purpose of ruining Sizhui's new uniform and making a huge mess for him to clear up, and A-Qing steals Sizhui's pass and makes an illicit copy of the magnetic signature while he's distracted posting pieces of ice down the back of an outraged Jingyi's Summer Skating Challenge t-shirt after the unsuccessful sabotage attempt.
The illicit copy of Sizhui's pass enjoys an extended lifetime of three weeks before the new weekend shift manager discovers it.
"Can you believe this?" he says to the flat air of the past-closing-time locked office while finishing the day's paperwork. The blank white card sits beside him on the desk; he taps it twice with one fingernail. "These kids can't even make a convincing fake, who's in charge of their education these days?"
The office is silent save for the faintly buzzing whine of three computers on standby. The pass has fulfilled its purpose already.
In the central aisle of the boot store, two sets of initials are scratched in wood beside countless others, and two fledgling young adults have shared a nervous first kiss in the very heart of the place that entwined their lives together.
*
"Okay," says Wei Ying to himself as he enters the evening-empty office with an armful of paperwork. "Okay. This is not my job and I am too busy for this to be my job."
He drops the paperwork on the stretch of clear desk space between the front counter and the manager's computer and sits down on the spare wheeled chair with the halfway-broken backrest and all-the-way-broken height adjustment lever. Half of the paperwork immediately slides to the floor.
"Re-allocate Baoshan Sanren's group lessons," he murmurs to himself as he gathers it back up, like a reminder of a to-do list he should probably have written down. "Figure out which evening we can add to the timetable for a third block of sessions. Figure out which coaches can do the third block. Make sure they can all do the same day. Give Wen Qing a list of who needs covering for upcoming events –"
He breaks off, gives in and tears a scrap of paper from the top of Wen Qing's neatly piled workload, and starts writing.
*
Wen Qing usually makes Mo Xuanyu do the laminating for the rink display boards. He has a natural gift with office equipment.
This one, she's doing herself.
Wei Ying's picture is from this year's world championships. He's smiling, bright and alive on the podium like he was born to stand there.
Seven words are printed in neat black ink below the image.
Wei Ying: Head Coach
Immortal Peak Arena
*
"Well," says Baoshan Sanren to the empty clear air of twilight. She's alone; wet-shining ice at the end of the day, half the lights already off as she stands quietly in the very centre of it.
Her skates are falling apart by now. There's a hole worn right through the left toe; cool air whispers across her foot.
"You've outlasted me," she says with a smile. "I'm glad."
In the wide pipes above her head, the chilled air sighs just a little louder in the silence.
"You don't need me any more. You know what to do with them."
There's a sound, somewhere, of something metallic settling softly into place for the evening. Water drips from the resurfacer, shut away quiet in the garage beside the ice.
"Thank you," says Baoshan Sanren simply.
When she leaves, the straight-line tracings of her departing strokes glisten undisturbed on shadowed ice until the morning.