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-1, home
She’s going to regret this, she knows it. She knows it when she walks into the studio and sees Gojo stretching, arms flexing above his head as he rocks back on his heels. She lets the door thud shut behind her, and only then does Gojo turn to look, as if he hadn’t seen her in the mirrors anyway.
“You actually showed up,” Gojo grins.
“Yeah,” Utahime dumps her back on the linoleum, next to the door. Of course she did, what other options does she have? Linger, hoping that Getou’s knee injury miraculously heals in time for the season? Retrain for singles, with no ultra-C, against the teenagers with quads that keep crawling out of the woodwork? Yeah, that’s a great idea.
The off-season has been quiet in general. Utahime’s still been skating on the early morning sessions, a little aimless, just to keep the routine, done some low-level ice dance competitions. She hates the skirt length. Thinks it makes her body look even more boxy than it already does.
“Y’know-” Gojo leers, “I’ve never seen you in such little clothing, Utahime.”
She looks down at herself. A respectable vest top and double layered shorts. What is he talking about? “You’re an asshole,” she grits her teeth, “do you even want a partner?”
At that, Gojo’s face does something complicated. He’s been as unlucky as her. Partner injured at the peak of their careers. All of the sports analysts had been saying that he and Shoko had a chance of beating Choso and Yuki at worlds, if they peaked at the right time. If they skated clean. And then Shoko stopped turning up to patch ice in the off-season, for long enough that Utahime texted her and said hey, haven’t seen you in a while, what’s up?
What was up was a torn achilles to go with Getou’s ACL injury. Apparently she didn’t even do it skating, which was– good, Utahime supposed. They were both on the ice when Getou did his knee, and Gojo wouldn’t stop fussing until they let him drive him to the hospital, until they let him stay overnight. Utahime doesn’t like Gojo a lot, but she would hate for him to have to deal with that twice. With both of his best friends in the span of eight months.
She’d watched Gojo in the rink alone through a new lens, after that. He always looked so different as a skater without Shoko by his side. Less mellowed, maybe, more prone to being the natural show off that he is by nature. Long arms, long legs, objectively gorgeous lines as he skates. Face concentrated, because boys don’t have to smile like girls do. There’d been a lot of chatter about him switching to singles, training quads properly. Because he does them for fun, like a psychopath.
Instead he’s here, washed out by the studio lights, cheeks flushed. “Yeah. I wouldn’t have–” the apprehensiveness melts off his expression as he seems to remember Utahime is, in fact, in the same boat as him, “you need me.”
Utahime hates that he’s right. She hates that she’s in this position, after being asked by Yaga and storming out the rink, only for Getou to meet her on her way out, leg brace and all, and tell her well maybe you should consider it. As if Getou isn’t the most biassed person on planet earth, when it comes to Gojo.
But then Shoko had come to morning patch, still favouring her right leg, waving at the barriers. Said I know you don’t like him, but he’s a good partner. On the ice, I mean.
So now she’s here, a chemistry test , or whatever. She doesn’t really understand how she’s been convinced, but– oh well.
“Don’t just stand there,” Gojo grins. “You need to warm up, right?”
Utahime does. But she equally doesn’t really like being observed for this bit. For the inbetweens. The ugly stuff that even other skaters don’t understand, sometimes. She trusts Getou, for all his flaws, to not look, to come to her when she’s ready. Gojo is looking at her with wide eyes and a hapless smile as she nods, slowly.
“Come on, show me,”
“Show you?”
“Well. We need a routine, right? You should show me yours.”
“Has Getou not told you?” Utahime snaps, a touch too bitter. She winces as she says it. Gojo wrinkles his nose.
“No? Why would he?”
And that’s true. Utahime just– they’re in each other’s pockets. She feels like Gojo already knows everything about her, and is just waiting to reveal it, waiting to pounce. She looks at him, thinks is he even that smart, and then of course he is, he has a Master’s, and then why am I thinking about this this much.
Her old sports psychologist called her neurotic, but that was in juniors when her parents still paid her bills and she can’t afford one now. “Right,” she replies, to Gojo, “um. It’s just normal stuff,”
Gojo rolls his eyes. “I’ll show you what I used to do with Shoko,”
Utahime isn’t paying the most attention when she gets swept off her feet into– what, she can’t tell. She feels herself squeal, which is pathetic, she’s older than Gojo for fuck’s sake, as he laughs beneath her, chest vibrating.
“Stop!” Utahime balls her hands up into fists and pounds on Gojo’s shoulders. “Put me down!”
Gojo just laughs again. “What’s the magic word?”
Like she’s twelve, being told off for having her elbows on the table at dinner with a coach, or being told to smile nicely on the podium. “I am not-”
Gojo throws her up in the air so her hips are level with his chin, his big hands caging her in at the backs of her knees. Her hands come to rest on the top of his head, trying to steady herself. “You are,” he says, grinning with those perfect white teeth that seem to charm everyone– the reporters, the judges, Shoko, Getou– well, she’s not falling for it.
“Fuck off,” she grins back. She knows how to play to the panel as much as anyone. Feeling more than seeing, she finds herself up on Gojo’s shoulder, staring at herself in the mirror. Huh. They do look good together. “You used to do this, to warm up with Shoko?”
Gojo shrugs her off, grabs her by the waist to lower her to the floor. It’s gentle and uncaring all at once, no real care put into it, but– she’s not thinking about it. “When she came in with a stick up her ass, yeah,”
Utahime hits him, square in the sternum, and he takes a step back with an oof, throwing his hands up, “sorry, sorry, but you can’t deny it.”
Utahime bristles. “I definitely can. You’re the one who’s– who’s–” she doesn’t know what to say.
“Trying to learn about you? Your routines?” Gojo taps a hand over his chest. “I’m a bleeding heart, here, Utahime, I’m trying to be a good partner-”
“Just–” grabbing his wrist, she pulls him to the middle of the room. “Listen, then.”
Gojo holds a hand up in mock salute, grin still present on his face. “Of course, I’m always listening,”
Which is objectively untrue– Yaga has to repeat stuff to him a lot. He looks like he’s somewhere else when he’s skating, most of the time, his expression hardly concentrated at all, even when he’s practising the hard stuff like twizzles, or choctaws, or axels, which he constantly brags about being his best jump because he’s an asshole.
But he’s listening now, Utahime thinks, with the most clarity she’s ever thought that about a person before. He’s attentive, ears pricked, focused on her. Like she’s the most important thing in the room, and not about to be overshadowed in a pair by one of the best skaters the sport has ever seen. It’s infuriating.
“I usually start with– skipping–” she stutters under his attention, goes to her bag, and picks out her rope, from underneath her tissue box, a red-and-white dog thing that Getou got for her when they got silver at junior worlds. Behind Gojo and Shoko, obviously. “But I only have the one rope.”
“I can just jump,” Gojo shrugs.
“Didn’t you already warm up?” Shoko frowns. She hadn’t expected him to participate in this bit. Gojo nods anyway.
“Yeah, but standing and watching would be stupid, wouldn’t it?”
—
So, it turns out they work well together.
Annoyingly well together.
It’s easy to trust Gojo when he doesn’t really give her a choice. In the studio, he just says we should work on twists now, and they do. And Utahime’s not bad at all: she can do a triple, and Gojo is stronger than Getou is.
The throws and the twists were never going to be an issue. Neither is the skating, where she has to work harder because Gojo is slightly taller and faster than Getou was, but once she relaxes into it, it’s nicer. Freer. She’s not admitting that in a million years, though.
“You look good,” Yaga says, “I’ve not seen anyone sync like that in a while.”
Gojo grins, shuffling on his skates on the spot, stretching his shoulders down behind his back. He’s always moving. “Raw talent,”
Utahime rolls her eyes, “your edge on your choctaw is shallow, and you have a flutz,”
“I don’t compete lutz,” Gojo grins, “and neither do you, because Suguru’s is worse than m-”
“Alright, that’s enough,” Yaga presses his fingers to the gap between his eyebrows, exasperated. It feels good to have someone on her side. “Gojo.”
“She started it-”
“Gojo,”
Utahime can’t help it: she snickers, and it bubbles up out of her, into the cold air in front of them. One of the kids skating past turns around as she does, head swivelling as he works on his crossrolls.
“You too.” Yaga gripes, “you should know better than to goad him,”
Gojo elbows her in her side, and Utahime shoves him back, and Yaga just sends them out on their drills again, like nothing’s happened at all. Like they’re a perfect fit.
“Bend your knees,” she hisses at him, tapping two fingers to where they’re linked, wrist-to-wrist. Gojo grins back, exaggerating it and promptly falling over.
Utahime really does laugh then, at Grand Prix gold medallist Satoru Gojo sitting on the ice scowling up at her as she struggles to breathe.
—
He doesn’t get it. It’s been four weeks and they’re training almost every day, blocking out the short program, refining all the details, and he still doesn’t get it.
Utahime had been nervous all day. Costume fittings in the morning. She’d come out flushed and a little irritable, even when Gojo drove them both to the rink as a distraction. He’d delayed getting his skates on, made his excuses and gone to talk at Nanami on reception.
Sometimes she just needs to be alone.
When he comes back in, Utahime is skating around the corner, stretching, stepping into an ina bauer. It’s gorgeous: the arch of her back is perfect, the bend of her knee, the soft open expression on her face. Why has he never seen her do one before? It was never in any of her programs.
He stands and wolf-whistles, “we should put that in.”
Utahime turns back to him and scowls, “no. There’s no place for it,”
“We can find one,” Gojo says, because they can. It would be a shame, to leave it out. “Ready to work on lifts?”
“You just wanna find a way to turn me into a pretzel,” Utahime scoffs, “get your skates on.”
—
1, Nebelhorn Trophy
Utahime stews the entire plane ride about the snubs for the Grand Prix series. Sure, as a new couple, they should have expected it, but it still stings, being sent off to– God, France and Finland.
They’d known they probably wouldn’t get the NHK assignment, not with Yuki and Choso competing, and in a way, its a reprieve: a much easier route to the final, if they skate clean, with less competition, but–
First, Challenger Series. First: Germany. All the flights to Europe this season are going to cost her so much money, she thinks, and Gojo got first class on the way over, like an asshole, and she just wants to sleep.
Gojo’s humming as they traipse the corridors of the hotel they’re staying in, obnoxious. It takes everything in her for Utahime not to slam the door to her room in his face when she finally gets an escape, falling face first onto the bed. Ice time tomorrow. Practice. Short on Friday. Long on Sunday.
She groans. All her muscles are aching from being sat on the plane for thirteen hours. There’s bruises all the way up her hip and thigh that ache. She flexes her ankles, rolls her cheek into the side of the pillow. It's cold: the way she likes it. It's quiet in here, the way she likes it.
She's been re-evaluating what she likes recently. She's been enjoying turning up at the rink at the crack of dawn. She's been enjoying training. Enjoying the feeling of actually being able to perform the skills she knows she's capable of-- triple twist, loop, lutz, axel. She's been enjoying Gojo's-
Well. Not his company. The man is still annoying. Still grating on her ears, with his whining that barely even means anything, the laugh when Getou comes to watch their training and says something smart to him. The fighting with Yaga about the difficulty of their step sequence, which Utahime thinks is more than difficult enough, and that Gojo thinks they could challenge themselves more on.
They'd agreed to compromise. Perform it once, see if they can up the difficulty of the elements if they're clean.
Muscle memory is a powerful thing. In the season where she and Getou managed a silver at Four Continents, Utahime had been able to close her eyes and imagine the short program in perfect high definition. Along with it, she’d been able to breathe in and out and feel every movement, every beat of the music. But that had been at the end of the season, and they’re nowhere near that yet.
Triple loop throw, get deep in the knee, like Gojo shouted from his place on the ice the last training session they had before they left. It had pissed her off, because of course she was getting low in the knee, she's been competing in pairs since she was 14, for God's sake-- but it had helped, at the same time.
The edge coming out of a throw is one of the most volatile things in all of skating, Utahime thinks. The power is not your own, not predictable. Every now and again, Getou used to throw her much higher than she was used to by mistake, and she had to work to correct the momentum in the air, hold it all together in the taut muscles of her body. It's a skill she's proud of. Taking something and making it yours.
Gojo's more consistent, but he does throw naturally higher, which had been a learning curve. He spins faster, too, so naturally, Utahime had to learn to keep up. She's still not sure if her butterfly to the entrance of the side-by-side is high enough, but–
The ina bauer. In the step sequence. She's most nervous about that part. They don't get it wrong in run-throughs, often, but it's always on a knife-edge, just shy of going wrong. Doing that move alone is easy. It's one of her favourites. Just stretch, hold, and let momentum take care of the rest.
With Gojo next to her, it's hard. It doesn't help her balance: more the opposite - puts her off.
The ice rink isn't cold, in Germany. Not like it is back home. Utahime doesn't know how they make them warmer, because the ice still has to be the same temperature, but-- it's not worth thinking about. There are warm rinks and cold rinks. She prefers cold, Gojo and Getou prefer warm. She knows they have that in common.
"Run-through?" Gojo asks, panting lightly as he ducks down against the barrier, hands where Yaga can see them, at least. He's so dramatic. They've hardly done the lifts, and they've thrown the loop and the flip. Not even done the Salchow, yet, or the step sequence.
But Gojo likes to go into things cold: doesn't like running them too much. Utahime's the same, before a competition. No point in psyching yourself out when there's no time to correct it. Her body knows what to do, mostly.
Yaga shrugs. "You ready, Utahime? He's annoying to warm up with."
Gojo wrinkles his nose as he stands back up, "come on, you don't need to be on her side all the time-"
"Yes he does," Utahime snipes back, but she's smiling. It's easy to, after all. "Just-"
She shrugs off her team Japan jacket, rolls her shoulders a few times as the cold air hits the thin fabric of her top. Long-sleeved, the way she likes it, backless, like her dress is, so she can acclimatise to the way the cold will hit her on competition day without having to do a full dress rehearsal. She tucks it over the barrier, next to her tissue box, tapping its head twice for luck. When she looks up, Gojo is gaping.
"What?" She hisses. She knows- she knows she's not Shoko, okay? Not cute with the small shoulders and the naturally skinny arms, built like a ballet dancer without even having to try. "Stop,"
Gojo snaps back online. "I've never seen that top before."
"I save it for competing," Utahime hisses, "stop ogling me and let's get on with it, I'm cold," she skates away, making him catch up. It's what he deserves.
It doesn't take him long, with his freakily long stride and speed. "Utahime," he drawls, "I wasn't ogling. You think I'd ogle you? I’m a good partner, good partners don’t-"
"You're a degenerate, is what you are," Utahime snaps back, "pose,"
Gojo mutters under his breath, but he does. The music kicks in, and then they're in motion.
He's easy to deal with when they're in motion. Shoko and Getou were right about one thing: Gojo is a brilliant partner. It's been easy to fall into the trust they need to perform. She knows, when she gets flung into the air, that his hands will find her waist, lower her down. She knows that when they spin together, his hand linked in hers, pressed to the bone of her hip, in between her shoulder blades in the sit variation. He’s there. Never misses a step. Never out of place.
It’s sort of infuriating, how good he is. Naturally. Like he’s never had to work for it a day in his life. And maybe he hasn’t.
When they’re on the ice, he’s a different person. Focussed. Determined. Skilled. She half-thinks about it as they go for their opening throw: triple loop– landed. Gojo grins at her as she lifts her arms to the roof, showing off a little now. It’s a performance, at its core.
Maybe that’s why Gojo’s a natural at it.
—
Shoko surprises her by turning up in Germany the day of their long program. The short was clean, so they’re sitting in first by a margin of over ten points. Utahime hasn’t had a result like that in a long time. It feels– it feels wrong, almost.
She jumps into Shoko’s arms, who responds with an oof, and laughs, “I’ve not been gone that long,”
“Feels like forever when he’s my company,”
Shoko pushes her back and grins. She’s got a lollipop stick between her teeth, with not much lollipop left to chew on. “Don’t be mean to him.”
Gojo, sensing he’s being talked about, leans down to drape himself over them. “Yeah, Utahime. Don’t be mean to me,”
“He paid for the tickets, anyway,” Shoko grins, the traitor, and Gojo finally gives them some breathing room, leaning all the way back.
“You said you wouldn’t tell her,” he groans, “Shoko. It was supposed to be our secret,”
“She would’ve figured it out,” Shoko deadpans, “come on Gojo, you’re not this stupid.”
Gojo rolls his eyes, stepping back to stretch his back out. Utahime thinks she hears something click as he rolls his spine upwards. His T-shirt rides up just a little, exposing the sliver of skin there between his waistband and his stomach. She tears her eyes up, and Gojo isn’t looking at her, anyway, focussed on Yaga heading over.
“Ready?”
Gojo nods, and grins, “yeah,”
Utahime just nods. As they go to follow Yaga, Shoko grabs at Utahime’s wrist, squeezing her pulse point. “Good luck,”
—
The crowd isn’t loud, not like it was at the GP stages or the final the last time that Utahime competed, but it doesn’t matter. All she can hear is the rush of the blood in her ears anyway.
It wasn’t clean: they made a mistake on the timing into the side-by-side spin, and Utahime popped the second double axel into a single. That’s all expected, though: known errors. What isn’t, is–
“You dropped your hands in the twist,” Utahime gasps, still bent over Gojo’s thigh, looking up at his smug face in their finishing position. Gojo doesn’t reply, just hauls her up with him as he stands, and so Utahime says it again. “You didn’t– you dropped your hands in the twist!”
Gojo just smiles, easy. “You were supposed to be focussed on spinning, not where my hands are,”
“Peripheral vision exists,” Utahime scowls, “you promised me you wouldn’t,”
They’re at the barriers now, and Yaga hands over their guards. Gojo has these bright baby blue guards, and Utahime is so sure they’re custom because she’s never seen any other skater with the same shade. She tugs at the edge of her dress, and gets her own guards – red and white – put into her hands. She stands as Yaga hugs her and Gojo puts his guards on. He’s so particular about it. She prefers to put hers on at the kiss and cry.
“I still caught you, didn’t I?” Gojo laughs, “what’s the big deal?”
And he had caught her. Just as smoothly as all the other times, when he kept his hands above him during the movement.
“It’s not like we needed the points,”
“You messed up the axel, it’s extra execution-”
“Stop. Later.” Yaga cuts in, “go,”
Their overall score is just shy of 180, and it gets them the gold, so Utahime doesn’t really stay that mad at him for too long.
—
Utahime looks dead on her feet. She’s blinking, bleary, like a tired college student and not an elite athlete who just won an international competition. Gojo looks at her, then her passport, held loosely between her fingers, then at his own.
He didn’t realise she was flying economy. He thought she made enough to– he doesn’t know. He’d texted Suguru in a panic from the plane when he realised on the outbound flight, and Suguru had just replied yeah we only ever fly business to worlds.
She really needs to sleep. He tugs at her wrist, says, “come on, let’s sit down until they call us.”
If he switches their passes whilst she snoozes and tells her the airline gave her a free upgrade, that’s his business. He curls his legs up in economy. He can’t sleep on flights anyway.
—
2, Grand Prix de France
When they collect their passes, Utahime starts thinking about the very real possibility that they could break the two-hundred point barrier this season.
Gojo and Shoko used to average about a 210, when they skated clean. Getou and Utahime’s highest score was at Worlds, just before his injury, a 199. That one had been exciting at the time: just one more point. Just a bit more progress. Then it all got dashed, thrown aside, careers bloody and dying by the side of the road.
180 is not a bad starting point. They made considerable errors, and those alone probably lost them fifteen points. The axel, the spin– the spiral. All fixable. And then there’s the components. In Germany, their synchronisation hadn’t been as good as it could be. Gojo still doesn’t bend his knees properly in the one-foot section of the step sequence, the twizzles lack a little rhythm, and–
It’s still worthy of 180. Flawed. There’s parts where they can change elements to increase their scores, too. Changing the triple flip-triple loop-double axel sequence to a lutz, changing their throws to a lutz and a loop instead of a flip and a salchow. Gojo’s been going on about it recently, because Utahime’s outside edge is strong, and they’ll get good execution scores for it, especially if they keep the same entries and exits, which are classified as difficult. But Utahime had warded him off until Finland, because she still falls on the lutz throw and pops the loop in the side-by-side jump combination a little too much when they run it. She’s not confident, yet.
That doesn’t mean Gojo’s not being annoying about it, though.
“Can we run the higher difficulty in practice?” He’s saying, twirling his pass around his hands instead of putting it around his neck like a normal person.
Utahime wrinkles her nose and goes to reply, but Yaga’s hand comes down on her shoulder. “Yes, I was going to suggest it. It would be good to run it away from home,”
Gojo grins, all his teeth on show. Utahime groans. “It’s not ready. What if we mess it up with everybody watching?”
“We messed up the easy program,” Gojo shrugs, “I think it’s not, like, engaging enough, and that’s why we keep messing up. We’re both too good for it.”
Utahime wants to point out that she messes up lutz, too, and her double axel still isn’t high enough because she’s so used to matching Getou, who jumps lower, and that this is the highest difficulty set of programs she’s done in her life. So really, it’s just him that’s too good for it.
Gojo must see her scowling, because he loops an arm around her shoulders and pulls her into him, “come on, baby. What do I have to do to convince you?”
And fuck it– his body is warm and his arm is strong, and she touches him all the time, so– “you’ll do anything?”
Gojo nods, leering. Utahime scoffs. “Leave me alone until tomorrow morning,”
—
In the press conference after the short, a reporter, predictably, asks them about the increased difficulty version of their program, and why they’re not running it in the actual competition, given it looks good. Utahime resists the urge to snap back at them that it feels horrible, but Gojo just laughs beside her, leaning forwards to the microphone.
“We’re still getting to know each other. Our limits. Utahime is talented, and we’re working on the consistency of the elements before we debut them in competition.”
“When will you debut them?” The reporter grins: shark to blood, and Utahime stutters, tries to grab the mic off Gojo, but it’s too late.
“At the Grand Prix Final,”
—
Not only is it cementing something that Utahime hadn’t agreed too, but it’s jinxing them. She worries her lip between her teeth as she does her solo laps in their warmup minutes for the long program, skating over to Gojo on autopilot, who immediately taps the inside of her wrists as they come into hold.
“Relax, baby,”
“Calling me that isn’t going to make me relax,” she hisses back, rolling through the crossovers. They can talk and work, it’s not a problem. Maybe it’ll help her relax if she shouts at him. She can’t, not here, but it’s a nice idea. Later, maybe, if they lose. God, there’s so many ways they can lose. Or not qualify for the final at all. Even with relatively easy placements, they’re not guaranteed a spot.
Gojo shrugs, in the meantime. “We should replace the flip with lutz.”
“No,”
“The throw,”
“No.”
They run through their warmups. They come off. They keep warm. They get back on. They run through their routine. They come to centre ice.
“I’m not trying to sabotage you, you know,” Gojo says, “I think we can win worlds. But we have to believe it. And I’ll make sure you land that throw,”
Utahime looks at him. It’s rare to see him looking so earnest. It looks almost foreign on him: sincerity. There are freckles on the bridge of his nose, fading as the winter sets in. “Okay,”
They take their starting position. Gojo’s chin is on her shoulder, just for a moment, whilst he adjusts his feet for slightly longer than necessary. She can feel his breath on her skin. “You have this, baby,”
Utahime’s eye twitches. She doesn’t know what’s worse, Gojo working with her out of pity, or him genuinely believing that she’s good. Each way there’s an expectation that she doesn’t want, either way, she’s being watched. It’s anticipation, pure and simple, all eyes on him and even more eyes on her.
She either proves them wrong or she proves them right, and she’s–
They start. The muscle memory is starting to kick in, now, and it’s starting to feel easy. Everything last year had felt easy, finally coming to her, finally slotting into place. Looking up, slowly pushing forward to challenge Gojo and Shoko, maybe Choso and Yuki.
Except it hadn’t panned out. This isn’t easy. It’s the hardest thing she’s ever done, and she hates it, and–
She takes a deep breath and leans through the outside edge on the throw. Lutz, not flip.
What makes a lutz so hard is the counter-rotation. Gojo’s arms are strong on her waist, helping her up, but she still has to lift her own body into the air, stomach pulled tight, arms in, rotate-
Toepick to the ice. Gojo’s smile. The crowd cheering.
They win that one, too.
—
The baby thing. Well– he didn’t mean it. It was meant to be an attempt to piss her off. It’s so fun to piss her off.
And then she’d blushed, high on her cheeks, and landed the throw, and breathed heavy, looking up at him at the end of the program, and–
He thinks it, again, watching her smile as they call the scores. She’s got crooked bottom teeth, and he thinks she probably wouldn’t appreciate it being pointed out, but he likes them. Wants to know where else she’s crooked, injured, strong, all at once.
She’s his partner. He has to make it count.
But he can make it fun, too.
—
3, Finlandia Trophy
“What?” Utahime’s voice sounds small to her own ears. The receptionist winces.
“It’s been double booked. The other person has already arrived,”
“I don’t mind a downgrade,” Utahime finds herself saying, “I just need somewhere,”
“We’re fully booked,” the receptionist stutters. Utahime knows its not her fault but she wants to shake her and tell her to get a new job, because all you have to do is one fucking thing-
“It’s okay,” Gojo says, behind her. “My room’s okay, isn’t it?”
Utahime almost grabs him by the arm and twists him like she does when he annoys her in training. But they’re right in the middle of the hotel lobby, and she can’t just tell him off like it’s 6am patch with no one watching but Yaga.
The receptionist nods, “yes. Your room is fine,”
Gojo shrugs, “a double?”
“The bed is a king,”
“Oh, that’s fine, then, refund the room, you can sleep with me,” Gojo says, casually, like what he’s offering isn’t completely insane. Utahime needs her space. And her own bed. And she’d kind of like a bath.
“Gojo-” she hisses, grabbing at his sleeves, pulling him back, but when he doesn’t need to be moved, no one can really make him budge. Gojo just turns to her, easy.
“Baby, it’ll be fine, you don’t even have to touch me if you don’t want to-” and Utahime’s heard enough, snatching the keycards off the desk and marching off with them down the hotel hall.
—
She doesn’t lock Gojo out, but it’s a close thing. After she scolds him for making the receptionist think they were a couple (he’s not bothered, the bastard) she locks the door to the bathroom and strips all the way down, submerging herself into boiling water.
Utahime hates ice baths. They spend enough time in the cold, for fuck’s sake. Utahime is covered in bruises from being thrown down on the ice, or falling, or being grabbed too hard. So when the water blisters, steam filling the room, she can relax into it, even though it makes her feel faint, cheek pressed against cool porcelain as she watches the door.
It doesn’t move.
Gojo’s quiet out there, or maybe he’s left altogether, she thinks. He’s like that. He’ll drive her up the wall all through airport security, and then once they’re in their seats – next to each other, because Yaga’s been booking all their travel – he’ll just lean against the window, listening to their program music over and over, rewatching videos, studying with his fingers tapping.
On the way over to Finland, he had just tucked in, knees to his chest, watching program after program, most of Yuki and Choso at NHK. Sometime when Utahime had woken up from being half asleep, he’d been watching his and Shoko’s program from last year. Utahime had felt sick when she saw.
She feels kind of sick now.
There’s anomalies in sport. She knows. But usually the girls are younger than the guys, and she knows people have been talking. She’ll probably have to retire before Gojo. A couple of years feels like an uncrossable chasm, sometimes. Like the distance between her and Shoko, not knowing how to reach out when she got injured. Like the distance between her and Getou now, keeping him at arm’s length because she’s skating with his best friend and he’s on the sidelines.
She’s not very good at guilt. But neither is Gojo, so she guesses they have that in common.
—
The only thing they don’t add to the long program is the lutz on the side-by-side jump combination, and that’s weirdly enough because of Gojo, not Utahime. Her lutz is a lot stronger than his is. So they stick with the flip.
Gojo whines all through practice about the lifts being too easy, too, but it’s too late to change those for this time round. They score two new personal bests, break the two-hundred point barrier, and leave Finland with another set of gold medals and a Grand Prix Final qualification.
Gojo scoops her up in the kiss and cry when their score is announced, in his big arms that are still sort of shaking from the adrenaline. Third time competing together, and she’s noticing how those things affect him, the emotion of it all.
He whispers low in her ear, “we’re gonna win the finals, baby,” and Utahime firmly ignores the shiver that drops down her spine. She can deal with that later.
—
Utahime is looking up at him and panting, back arched over his knee, skin warm, cheeks flushed. Her braids are coming loose around her forehead. Lips parted. Gojo, not for the first time, if he’s being honest with himself, thinks about leaning down and–
She rolls off, onto the ice, onto her elbows and knees. Gojo collapses backwards, too, because a double run-through of the long is brutal and because looking at her stomach and her thighs shaking is not doing good things to his brain.
“Gotta get fitter, baby,” he breathes out. Utahime scoffs and presses her forehead to the ice.
“Say that again so that I can hit you when I don’t feel like I’m gonna throw up.”
“Yes, yeah, will do,” Gojo huffs, scrambling to his feet.
—
4, ISU Grand Prix Final, France
“The big news-” the reporter says, hand twitching around the mic, “is that with Choso and Tsukumo out, you come here as the firm favourites for gold. How’s that feeling? You’re still a new pair but your programs are solid, and you broke the two hundred point barrier last time out. Are you confident?”
Gojo laughs, still leaning back in his chair. Utahime kicks him under the table, and leans forward. She doesn’t think about if she’s lying or not. “Yeah. We are.”
—
It’s the first time they’ve run both programs at full difficulty in a competition. Gojo managed to convince her to do a new lift, too, and for the first time since they got paired up against her will, Utahime finds it. The muscle memory. The ease.
When she stares up at Gojo in their finishing position, she has to gulp in air. She does it again as Gojo picks her up and spins her around, right there on the ice. “Clean! You were incredible, Utahime,”
It shocks through her. The way he says her name.
—
“You–” Utahime narrows her eyes. “Why me? You hate me.”
“As a partner?” Gojo says, knowing full well that’s what she means. She’s definitely drunk, tapping on the stem of her glass.
“Yes. Yeah.”
“I never hated you. I think you’re a good skater.”
Her mouth parts in a little o and Gojo– he has to know she knows. “I do like you, baby. I thought you hated me.”
“I do.” She replies, certain, with big saucery eyes even though they just hit 215 and won a Grand Prix Final. “I do hate you,”
Gojo grins. “Nah, you don’t.”
—
5, Four Continents
They get the call-up late. Which means another shared hotel room, since everything is near enough sold out in Seoul when they do. Utahime drops her bag just inside the door and allows herself to look.
“Do you want the bath again?” Gojo hums, dropping down on the bed. He’s not really looking at her, big hand loose around his phone. His hair is getting pretty long now, enough to reach out and run her fingers through it. There’s no adrenaline now, though, no excuse. So she doesn’t.
When she doesn’t reply, he looks up through his lashes, “Utahime?”
His eyes are so blue. “I– again?”
“The bath.” Gojo shrugs. “You’re tense, like Finland,”
“Yuki and Choso are here,” Utahime blurts out, and Gojo drops his phone like it’s burnt him. The switch is immediate.
“Yeah. They are.” Gojo says, slow. He blinks a couple times, opening his mouth, closing it, then frowning, “why does that matter?”
“We’ve not competed against them before,” Utahime says. It’s the truth: they haven’t. Whilst Gojo and Utahime went to France and Finland, Yuki and Choso got assigned to NHK and China. Then they’d had a minor injury and missed the final. The gold is less sweet when the top couple of the season is absent.
Yuki and Choso have been a pair for a long time. They’re sort of perfect for each other: she’s five years younger than he is, just the right height. They regularly score in the high 210s and the low 220s, and they hold the world record for the long program and the overall score in pairs. No one knows if they’re an actual couple or not.
Outside of figure skating, media likes to latch onto the idea of pairings being romantic with each other. In the real world, that just doesn’t work. You can’t have strong feelings about each other. You can’t argue. There has to be mental strength. No rollercoasters.
And yet those two– Utahime is sure they’re just so good that dealing with all of that doesn’t matter. They could have it all if they wanted.
Gojo leans back, and looks at her. Looks through her. She doesn’t know. “We both have. I’ve beaten them.”
“That was with Shoko,” Utahime stresses, “this is different,”
Because it is: Shoko and Gojo had skated together for over a decade. They grew up together. Shoko and Gojo were so in sync, on the ice and off. Shoko’s kind and sweet and nice and they never argued at centre ice because Gojo wouldn’t stop pestering him about a difficult lift.
“You’re better than Shoko.” Gojo says, like it’s simple, with a completely straight face. Utahime lets out a laugh, because that has to be a joke. Sure, she’s doing more difficult skills than she was with Getou, but their scores–
He’s not laughing back. He’s serious. “What? You’re– you can’t just say that to me,”
“It’s not like she doesn’t know,” Gojo says, hooking his ankle over his knee, “I love Suguru, you know I do, but he was wasting you. Shoko can’t do a lutz-loop combi. Or an axel in sequence. Or a lutz throw. The only thing she has over you is the lifts and that’s ‘cause she trusts me.”
“I trust you,” Utahime scoffs, to Gojo’s raised eyebrow, “I do . You throw me five feet in the air and I land just fine, you bug me to do harder stuff and I do it, of course I trust you.”
“You’re tense,” Gojo says, slowly, “being in the room with me. I don’t– I’m not bothered. I know what you’re like, I knew before– it’s okay, I can be patient.”
For the first time, Utahime looks. Gojo’s relaxed, but if she looks closely at the line of his shoulders– “ you’re tense,”
Scoffing, Gojo tenses up more. “I’m not.”
“Do you trust me ?”
Gojo looks at her. It’s unnerving, blue eyes steady. “Yes.”
She takes a step forward. Then another, and another, until she’s at the foot of the bed, standing over him. He looks up at her, and she reaches up to place her hands on his shoulders. Immediately, gratifyingly, he flushes. “What’re you-”
Utahime doesn’t say anything, and presses her fingers into the hard muscle there. Gojo immediately dips his head, and the tension drops away from under her palms. “God,” he says, quiet, bordering on a groan, “that hurts,”
Utahime stalls, “sorry-”
“Don’t stop,” Gojo tacks on, tapping at the small of her back with his hand, pulling her closer. “Hurts good.”
His head ends up pressed to her sternum as she softens the muscle there. His breathing slows. She whispers, “okay?”
Gojo just nods.
—
Yuki is wearing red. Utahime has to tear her eyes away from her in the warm-up for the short: her blonde hair, the effortlessness of it all.
Gojo is holding her hands before long, easy and light. “Don’t worry about her, baby. You’re better.”
It’s said with the same confidence that he said she was better than Shoko. She can’t let it absorb past the surface level, though, not when they’re running the lutz throw and the axels and crossovers.
They’re skating first in this group, which means they don’t get off the ice. Starting position. Gojo rolling his shoulders back, grinning. “Don’t fuck it up, yeah?”
Utahime’s eye twitches. “I won’t if you don’t,”
The music starts.
—
Gojo isn’t tense in the kiss and cry after the long. He’s relaxed, which– she’s not.
They’ve just skated clean. At Four Continents. She’s had one podium here before and it was three years ago, and now they’re contenders for a gold. She clasps her hands together in front of her as she breathes in, out, holds.
Gojo reaches across as the announcement starts to sound over the tannoy.
“The score, please.”
He squeezes.
“Satoru Gojo and Iori Utahime, in the free program, have earned one hundred and forty seven-”
The crowd devolves into cheering all the way to the rafters. She feels herself smile, relax, and get hoisted into Gojo’s arms as he laughs, “we did it, we did it baby,”
“Not yet-” she reminds him, “not yet, Yuki and Choso still have to skate-”
“Nah, we’ve done it,” Gojo says, and his gaze drops for a moment, and Utahime thinks oh shit–
And he delivers a smacking kiss right to her forehead, showy and stupid, and the crowd cheers again.
—
“Hey,”
Yuki looks content, for someone who just lost a gold at four continents by two points. Gojo is more than fuzzy enough round the edges to talk to her. “Hey,”
“You’re really good together,” she says, tapping at the back of his elbow as they both watch her dancing with Haibara in the middle of the floor. “I thought it was an exaggeration, but. No. Why did you not pair up in juniors,”
Gojo thinks back to Utahime’s parents not even letting them entertain it. Suguru got there first, and from then on it was a partnership to break up. “Wasn’t an option.”
“Are you glad you got the option now?”
Gojo turns to her and squints. “Yeah.”
Yuki snorts. “Are you two fucking?”
And yeah, that’s the end of that conversation.
—
+1, World Championships
They come into Worlds with the gold at four continents.
Utahime has to pinch herself to make sure she’s not dreaming. It’s not that she didn’t expect to be good with Gojo. He’s talented and experienced and barely feels the concept of pressure at all. But she hadn’t expected this. If someone told her– you’re going to score an overall of 219.5 with Satoru Gojo, she would’ve laughed in her face. And laughed harder if they said they’d beat Yuki and Choso.
But here she is, lying flat on her back looking at the ceiling and thinking about how she’s the current gold medallist, the one with everything to lose. She blinks. Then thinks about how their practice went: still clean, still feeling good.
There’s a knock at her door, and when she opens it, Gojo is stood there, plastic bags in hand. “I found a really good Japanese the last time I was here. It’s healthy, I swear,”
Except he doesn’t just drop it off, he muscles his way into her hotel room, gets his greasy fingers all over her remote, sprawls out across her bed. “We can eat together,”
Utahime doesn’t really have it in her to deny him. He’s smiling, open, the lines of his body soft and warm and inviting. They sit, shoulder to shoulder, watching some hotel channel with a documentary about wildlife. It’s in English, and Gojo’s is good, but Utahime;s is worse, so he keeps translating the important bits for her with his mouth full. Not that much of it is important, but-
She puts her bowl to the side after a while. Lies down. It’s so warm.
—
She doesn’t remember falling asleep, but she wakes up with Gojo’s arm slung over the top of her, his snoring face all she can see.
His hair is rumpled. She reaches out to fix it, and she exposes his forehead, his white lashes. It’s ridiculous.
She flicks his forehead and he snorts awake.
—
“You fell asleep first!”
“You were in my hotel room,” Utahime hisses, still finishing her eyeliner, trying to steady her hands, because she doesn’t have time to correct anything like she usually does. “You should have left!”
“I don’t sleepwalk,” Gojo bites back, “how was I supposed to get back if I fell asleep?”
“You weren’t supposed to fall asleep,” she finishes her eyeliner, and puts it back in her bag. Just lashes–
Gojo groans, flailing on the bed. He’s changed already, team Japan jacket open, showing off the sparkle on his costume. “Hurry up!”
Utahime throws a makeup brush at him.
—
The short program is a season’s best. It puts them one point ahead of Choso and Yuki by a single point, going into the free. It’s nothing. Nothing at all.
—
Utahime wakes up alone. She puts on her dress, admires it a last time, gets in the car to go to the rink. Gojo is there.
“Are you nervous?” He murmurs, as they gravitate towards each other in the warm-up room. He’s let her do the first bit by herself all season. She feels– she doesn’t know.
Looking up at him, she can’t find the right words. Of course she’s nervous, but they skate this same program clean nine times out of ten. They can do it. She trusts Gojo to do it.
Next season– will they get to do this again? Will Shoko come back, want her partner back? Utahime would go, willingly, even, but-
Gojo grabs her hands. “Don’t be nervous. You know we could do this in our sleep.”
“You could, maybe,” Utahime gripes, but there’s no snarl behind it. She can’t find anything to dig it out from.
“Do you. I’ve been thinking.” Gojo says, turning her round, hands on her waist, like they’re about to warm up their lifts. “You should be my partner next season.”
And then he lifts her, with no warning at all, and it’s a wonder that Utahime possesses the muscle memory to not fall after that bombshell. She squeaks in the air, but tenses her core, holds like she knows she can. In the mirror, she looks back at herself, held in Gojo’s strong arms.
He lets her down, and she smacks him. “Why would you say that mid lift!”
“Do you not want to-”
Utahime smacks him again, “of course I do, this is the closest I’ve gotten to a worlds medal in my life,”
Gojo has the gall to look wounded. “I thought you liked me,”
“I–” Utahime stutters. “Now isn’t the time .”
“For the record. This is the closest I’ve been to a gold,” he says. The corner of his mouth twitches. “So.”
“You’re using me,”
“Yeah.” His grin is lopsided. There’s a dimple on his left cheek. His lips look soft. She might be going insane.
“Twists.” She says, because there’s nothing else to say. “Twists, please,”
Gojo obliges immediately. When she looks down at him from above, it’s easier.
—
They skate last. Skating last is–
It’s a different vat of pressure. She understands, now, how Yuki and Choso feel all the time, how they felt at the Four Continents. Gojo grabs her hands, presses them together in his. She’s not looking when he presses his lips to them, chaste. Friendly, almost. Getou used to kiss her shoulder before every program, for luck.
This is different.
“We’re gonna do this again next season,” he says, eyes boring into her. “Yeah?”
Utahime nods.
The music starts.
Just them, together.
They still mess up. Utahime pops the axel, but only because she got distracted by Gojo singling out on the lutz. It’s a mess, but the spins are still good, the spiral makes her whole body ache. The music swells, and stops, and she’s breathing hard, looking up at him, and the thing is that she kind of wants to cry. Gojo collapses, breathing hard, onto the ice surface.
“Baby-” he immediately says, and Utahime is so– she–
“I messed up the axel!” She cries, “we’ve lost it, we probably lost the bronze, too-”
“It was already lost!” Gojo laughs, full bellied, “I fucked the lutz. Next season I’m not jumping it, we should stick to flip or loop-”
“Still, Gojo–” her eyes are wet– “we could have got the gold-”
Gojo grabs her. At her waist and her shoulder. It feels so different, now she’s not being flung into the air, or raised above his head. There’s a single, crisp moment of warning before she’s being tugged in, up on her knees as he kisses her.
It’s not good. It’s horrible, in fact, for the first couple of moments, because he’s desperate and their teeth clack together and he’s gripping at her like he doesn’t want to let her go.
In front of everyone, where they can all see. Her figure and her skating and her flaws, and he’s kissing her, slower, now, and his lips are soft, like she thought–
“Oh my God,” she gasps, pushing at his chest. “Are you insane?”
His hand drops to her hip, where the bruises are from falling on her throws and the jump sequence, and he presses in- “we still did it, baby.”
Utahime scrabbles to her feet, and pulls him up. They almost both fall, from his weight. “We lost a gold, you idiot,”
“We’ll get it next time.”
She believes it, even as she wipes away her own tears.
—
She’s still half-crying even in the kiss and cry. He reaches out, wipes them away. The World Championship can wait. He got what he wanted.
—