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"Are you sure this is how it’s supposed to go?”
"Yes, Little Genma. I'm the professional here, remember?"
“Whatever. Let’s get it over with.”
Their voices ricocheted, two lone projectiles zigzagging down the Ouji Paper Skating Center. Its seats blessedly devoid of witnesses to what Keiichi felt was going to be the most humiliating experience of his life. And it was only the trial round.
One of Shirakawa’s hands was a searing presence on Keiichi’s waist. The other gripped his hand like it would fall off if he didn’t. They were close, too close for any of Keiichi’s dignity to be allowed to bloom. And one sequenced slash after the other, they created their own private breeze as they glided down the ice.
With not an ounce of effort, Shirakawa’s deceptively strong arms took hold of Keiichi’s ribcage like it was the bokko they trained with and lifted him above his head. Trembling with embarrassment, Keiichi outstretched his arms like the choreography required, as though he were inviting the brisk air for a hug. Ridiculous.
He couldn’t bear to keep his eyes open as he did it. The crushing, full-body cringe was debilitating. This was not what he was built for. As he landed on the ice again, Shirakawa was there. Firmly by his side, holding his waist like a trophy. It was going to be a very long, very torturous three minutes to get through.
As he went through the motions, Keiichi cursed the entire Oinokami High School Hockey Team for sentencing him to this fate. Not his own hubris, never that; it was they who had done this.
It had been Captain Kouro, actually, who kickstarted the whole thing on that doomed afternoon. Shirakawa displaying his sparkly little skating moves on the ice had whet the captain’s curiosity. So he asked Shirakawa every single question under the sun about figure skating: about the training, the competitions, the whole spectacle aspect… Then, Kengo-kun joined the conversation; praised Shirakawa for giving the team an edge. He even patted him on the back the same way he would Keiichi at times, whenever he was especially proud. Didn’t take long for the whole team to join in the figure skating hysteria.
Shirakawa had probably felt like a damn superstar, hadn’t he?
Even Kouichi was hyping him up, surrounding him with praise and questions of his own. As if Kouichi’s soft spot for Shirakawa hadn’t hurt Keiichi enough.
And of course Keiichi, being Keiichi, wasn’t able to hold his tongue on the entire ordeal. “What’s the big deal, Captain Kouro? It’s just dumb little twirls on the ice. Nothing special about it.”
The entire team stared daggers into him. Particularly Shirakawa. Yeah, yeah, someone had to be the buzzkill.
“Keiichi, that's enough,” Kouichi’s deep timber rumbled and echoed through the locker room. “Apologize to the captain.”
Did it really count as insubordination if the captain was talking crazy in the first place?
“Oh, don’t worry about it, Kouichi-kun,” Captain Kouro replied, humble as ever. “I can think of a way to settle the score.”
Keiichi didn’t like that glimmer in his eye. “And what’s that, Captain?”
“Let’s bet on it,” he replied. “If Rou-kun here,” he clasped both hands on Shirakawa’s shoulders for emphasis, “manages to score a goal next game using one of his flashy figure skating moves, then…”
“Then what? Spit it out,” Keiichi grumbled.
“Watch it,” Kouichi warned, but the captain waved it off with a smile.
“You, Keiichi-kun, will have to perform a figure skating routine for us all.”
Almost the entire team was turned into a chorus of instigating ‘oohs’. Just like that, they had betrayed him and rallied behind Shirakawa. The very team he idolized! Keiichi was suddenly too hot, too exposed.
“Shut up!” he yelled, his voice turned shrill. “Why should I do that crap?”
“Didn't you say they were just dumb little twirls?" Kouichi asked, glowering.
“That's 'cause they are!”
“Is that what you think?” Shirakawa asked. “Well, then. I’ll be sitting front row for your performance of Swan Lake.”
Kengo-kun, the traitor, clapped Shirakawa on the back with every little burst of laughter that escaped him. “Good one, Shirakawa!” Keiichi’s rage simmered beneath his skin, urging him to let it out.
“And what if the figure skater loses, huh?!” he asked, hoping to turn the tides. “He has to have a penalty, too!”
“If our dear Rou-kun loses,” Kouro leaned into Shirakawa's ear, “we kick him out of the team.”
The jovial atmosphere surrounding Shirakawa dissipated completely. The instantaneous “huh?!” that left the figure skater’s mouth rang melodically in Keiichi’s ears. “Hey, you’re kidding, right?”
“No, I'm dead serious,” the captain replied, cheeriness undiminished. “So you better put it all into that game. We really wanna see Keiichi-kun do a twirl.”
Stakes defined, the day of the game barreled on. In less than three minutes, Shirakawa had won the bet. Of course he had. All it took was one axel and in went the puck. Keiichi truly, if briefly, considered quitting the team right then. Instead, he just channeled the rage into a couple hip-checks, hell, even a few penalties. Just fuck it all, right?
The game ended with their victory and when he crossed Shirakawa after, he couldn’t contain the death glare that spilled out. “Count your days, figure bastard,” he threatened. Shirakawa gave him the evilest little smile and clapped his shoulder. “Tough luck, Little Genma. Have fun training, though!”
The next day, Keiichi tried bargaining with Captain Kouro. "Come on, I get it now," he'd pleaded, "Figure skating isn't dumb. Can you just let me off the hook?"
"No can do, Keiichi-kun," the captain replied, bizarrely cheery as always. "You either get yourself a pair of figure skates, or we won't let you live it down. Either way, you lose."
So, that was off the question. He had to honor his end of the bargain, now.
Humiliation was one hell of a motivator. Or it would have been, if the promised prize wasn’t even more humiliation. So he did as much digging as he could into figure skating, and attempted to practice during downtime. Get it over with as soon as possible.
It was a catastrophe. His first attempt at a jump resulted in a face-first fall onto the ice, only narrowly avoiding a fractured nose. Didn’t take long after for him to trudge on down to Shirakawa’s home with his tail between his legs, proposition in mind.
Shirakawa’s schadenfreude threatened to make Keiichi break out in hives. Shit-eating grin affixed to his face, he gloated. “Oh, so you want me to help you, now?”
“Shut the hell up and come with me.”
“And what's in it for me?” Shirakawa never did strike Keiichi as much of an altruist.
With a heavy heart, Keiichi swore to help him with hockey in return. Surprisingly, that was all it took for Shirakawa to accept the truce.
They took up training at the frozen pond at first.
Keiichi had been convinced his skating was good, better than most in the team, even. But it took one training session with Shirakawa to understand just how rudimentary his technique was. In hockey, technique wasn’t judged on preciseness or beauty; it was judged in terms of adaptability and speed.
Figure skating was precision. Hockey was entropy. And it was easier to tangle things than it was to untangle them.
“It’s all about edge control,” the figure-bastard explained. “And yours sucks.”
“And how do I fix that?” Keiichi asked, already exasperated.
“Well, you kind of have to tweak your technique quite a bit. There’s some drill exercises you can do for it, but since your foundation is so—“
“So what?”
“Well, shitty,” Shirakawa said, the word far too heavy for his manicured tongue. "It makes the whole thing near impossible."
Keiichi bodychecked him immediately for the troubles.
They began scheduling little training sessions on the weekends. They'd do figure skating first, then switch to hockey. Soon, they moved to the Ouji Paper Skating Center, where Shirakawa’s grandfather managed to sneak them in during his shifts. Slowly, Keiichi refined his technique; as Shirakawa said, it was difficult to work with the foundation he had been given.
But despite the improvements, Keiichi still couldn’t land jumps as smoothly as Shirakawa could, nor could he maneuver his body the way he was supposed to. The skates played a part, of course; hockey skates weren’t nearly as stable as figure skates, but it was mostly down to the huge gap in their technique. As Keiichi continued to fail, his patience grew thinner and thinner. To the surprise of them both, so did Shirakawa’s.
“You’re not making much progress,” Shirakawa huffed after the first month.
“Yeah, no shit,” Keiichi said. “Easy for you to say. Took you like six months to even handle a puck.”
“Shut up,” Shirakawa replied. “I have a proposition for you.”
“Spit it out.”
“Since you’re so bad,” Shirakawa said, “Let’s just do an ice dance.”
Keiichi blinked. “Isn’t that the same thing I’m supposed to be doing?”
“No, idiot. Figure skating has many disciplines. One of them is ice dance, which is traditionally done in pairs of one man and one woman. What I’m trying to say is… I’ll dance with you, do the heavy lifting, and take on half of your embarrassment.” Shirakawa avoided looking him in the eye as he divulged this, and for good reason. A gentle rosiness took over Shirakawa's cheeks. Keiichi felt his brain melt with every new word that came out of his mouth.
“You’re not serious,” Keiichi said. “I mean… Why would you do that? Are you dumb? They’ll laugh at us forever.”
“I can take the heat. Just trying to make it easier on you,” Shirakawa said, and for some reason Keiichi didn’t doubt him. But he couldn’t allow the moment to linger. “And on me, so I don’t have to waste my youth training a lost cause.”
Keiichi grit his teeth. Figure-skating bastard, always having to be a little smart-ass, always getting on Keiichi’s nerves. But Keiichi saw his point. The faster they figured out the dance thing, the faster he’d honor the bet and be freed from this torture.
“Fine. Let’s have it your way.”
And so, the current predicament played out, with Shirakawa not keeping his hands to himself and Keiichi trying his hardest to extinguish his palpitations.
Shirakawa had truly surprised him over the past few weeks they'd been training. Not only was his teaching effective, but his proficiency as an athlete was indisputable. Where Keiichi's strength was evident in the thick casing of his legs and the sheer potency with which he barreled down the ice, Shirakawa was strong in the way a cat is lithe. An understated, slender frame whose muscles have been honed in on themselves, not protruding but still holding tremendous force. To put it lightly, Shirakawa could sucker-punch him and do some real damage if he wanted to. It made him reconsider many things about the figure skater.
And that wasn't all that had changed in his perception of him. Shirakawa's touch was scalding not only because it was embarrassing, but because it meant something. It was intimate in a way they were never supposed to be; it was the kind of gesture only reserved for your significant other. Sure, that was the entire point of the dance; to imitate a couple's waltz on the ice. It wasn't supposed to be performed between two men, but especially not between men who were supposed to hate each other. Now, Keiichi was unsure that any hatred remained anymore.
Things could change with proximity. The realization truly scared him. He feared he wouldn't be able to treat Shirakawa normally anymore; but it took one snarky remark from the figure skater to bring things back to normal. It was a constant cycle of disruption and reconstruction in the fabric of their interactions, and it was driving him dizzier than the choreography did.
It didn't help that Shirakawa took hold of him with care that no one had ever afforded Keiichi. He guided him down the turns, hand interlaced with his own in a vice grip that almost seemed tender. How could Keiichi avoid being flustered under such conditions?
The choreography they'd chosen had a dramatic final sequence. Keiichi would be lifted into the air again, guided into an axel, and land in Shirakawa's arms; the prelude to the final move, in which both twisted on the ice until Keiichi dipped in Shirakawa's arms, faces centimeters away from each other.
Completely engineered to embarrass Keiichi. Unbelievable.
The first time they performed it, Keiichi had to shut his eyes. How was he to react to such extreme closeness to Shirakawa's face, to his eyes, to his mouth? For his part, Shirakawa simply burst into laughter, a gentle sound that rumbled through Keiichi's entire body. It was all a big joke to him, clearly; it was entertaining to see Keiichi like this, a far cry from the big bad icy wolf that had sharpened his fangs the first few times they'd met. A beast on the ice turned mellow by his touch.
It was ridiculous that despite the danger and complexity of an axel jump, it was that final dip that gave Keiichi a fear of death. It took several tries for him to get the hang of it, and several more for his heart to settle down. When he felt confident enough, and as Shirakawa stared into his eyes in that final moment, Keiichi couldn't help but lean in a little more than he needed to.
Shirakawa was perceptive enough to notice. “Don’t get carried away, now, Little Genma.” Were they not already so close, Keiichi would have barreled bodily into him. In fact, the moment Shirakawa let him go, Keiichi did just that. Gathered enough distance and momentum to embark on a collision course with Shirakawa.
It was successful. Shirakawa lay flattened atop the ice, with Keiichi peering triumphantly at him. “That’s what you get for being such a pain in my ass,” Keiichi said. “You put me up to this." There was a dumb smile plastered on Shirakawa's face.
“You’re so dramatic. You say that like I ruined your life," Shirakawa said with not an ounce of regret.
“Yeah, you did,” Keiichi said, enmeshed in the depth of Shirakawa’s gaze.
“Guess I did,” Shirakawa replied, air suddenly shifted. “Just means you’ll never forget me.”
Keiichi had two paths laid out in front of him. One, he could clumsily get up and shake off the embarrassment; or two, he could be brave and kiss the arrogance off Shirakawa's face.
He chose the latter.
It was angry, sure; and definitely very terrible. And after, when he looked back down at Shirakawa, the look on his face made him want to punch it off.
“Knew it,” Shirakawa gloated. “You know what they say about boys who pull on little girls’ pigtails?”
“Shut the hell up.” His face was a furnace.
“Was that your first kiss?”
It was. “I don’t have to answer that.”
“It so was. That sucked.” Insufferable, irritating Shirakawa. Keiichi lifted a fist in warning, and Shirakawa laughed it off. “Alright, alright, help me get up.”
They clambered off the floor and got right back to practice.
When they performed their little number in front of the hockey club, Coach Nihei included, Keiichi didn’t feel ashamed.
There was something different about that last time. Keiichi felt the time fly by as they performed maneuver after maneuver. The music flowed freely through him, and for the first time he truly understood the appeal of figure skating. Why people did it. There was liberty in it, despite the fixed sequence of the movements. In hockey, his senses were on high alert all the time. Dancing was the complete opposite; he felt that his body had become one with the wind. And, of course, he had the grounding presence of Shirakawa beside him. Guiding him, taking him with him moment by moment. They complemented each other like gravel and snow.
At last, the final dip came. This close up, he could count Shirakawa’s lashes; he was able to see just how flushed Shirakawa was. He was able to hear Shirakawa's heart beating out of his chest, too.
Yes, the team was crying of laughter, clapping and hollering as if they were watching a comedy special.
But Keiichi only cared about the hand holding his own, a hand that had managed to clutch even his heart.