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“Sequins,” muttered Yoshio Fuji to himself, doing what the rest of the team somehow had not yet done (excluding only Keiichi Genma, who for tactical reasons did not divulge anything he learned in his reconnaissance about the Rabid Prince): searching Shirakawa Rou’s name on the internet.
The goal was spite. The reason was no reason, and the plan was simple. Find pictures of Rou wearing sequins. Laugh.
Easy. Fuji had an idea of what male figure skaters wore. There were tights and they sparkled. These things were funny. There had to be a picture that was funny enough to print out and pin surreptitiously onto a corkboard at school. Then everyone would see it and laugh at Rou, and Fuji’s devious goal of sheer schadenfreude would be accomplished with ends as spiteful and facile as the means.
Facile the search proved. He found pictures, he debated which tropical fresh mess he wanted to print out, but with the pictures came videos, and the videos were…
Well, he had seen figure skaters performing before. And he had seen the way Rou moved when he played hockey (whenever he wasn’t attempting something far beyond his skill level), always quick, slick, and suddenly he would burst off the ice like a grasshopper burst out of weeds or a carp leapt out of clear water and break above their heads in a way Fuji could only call eerie. Startling. Rou’s fervor stopped other players in their tracks, as they watched a fellow player turn for a moment into some kind of animal, with animal grace. That drama had its own advantage: intimidation.
Maybe that was the reason inside the ‘no reason’ that Fuji wanted him mocked.
And maybe it was because he did know Rou and had seen him perform some of these moves before that the videos felt so uncanny. He knew that was Rou on his screen. When the camera came close to his face Fuji cringed. But when it filmed him from above, like a watching hawk, as he spun and slid, the further away he traveled the more Fuji felt like he was watching a stranger.
He watched Rou’s legs. He could see it; he could catch the moments that could do something astonishing in a hockey game, confound his rivals, slip Rou past defenses and to the goal. He could sometimes catch moves he had seen Rou pull with his own eyes… and ones he couldn’t believe that he hadn’t seen Rou pull yet.
Then he clicked on the video with the girl.
—
The thing was that they had just been mocking Rou for being a forever virgin the day before.
Objectively, this had to be true. Rou seemingly had no clue that a woman was different than a man. He claimed to have a twin sister, so maybe that was his problem. He was too used to women as friends. When girls approached Rou, he… said hello. He waited for them to speak. He helped them out if they asked for it. He complimented their outfits or their hairstyles. That was it. Rou saw girls all the time, but he had never seen a girl.
He wasn’t much bothered by the razzing from his team, either. He told them that kind of speech wasn’t beautiful and that was it. They all laughed it off and went home secure that Shirakawa Rou would never touch a girl in his life, a knowledge that made many of them feel better about their relative girllessness.
“Hey,” said Fuji, dragging several of his teammates over to a classroom computer and commandeering it without permission for his purposes, “look at this.” Then he opened the browser, took it to Google, and typed in ‘Shirakawa Rou 2009 pair skate winning performance video’.
—
She was gorgeous. Light, sleek, perfectly poised on long, lithe legs. She had to be older than Rou; her face, perfectly painted with sharp red stage makeup, was set in a confident, mature smile. Her silky hair was wrapped around itself in a bun on the back of her head and thin, athletic form was pinned in a slip of white and red fabric.
If she went to their school, she would be the most beautiful and popular girl in school. She soared over the ice on her sliver-thin skates like a swan over still silver water. And Skirakawa Rou was lifting her in the air over his shoulder with one arm between her legs.
He braced her over his head with his hands on her thighs. She rolled her torso over his chest as he slid her to the ground, and down below his knees, dropping, nearly lying, soaring over the ground and slipping back up again like a sheet of paper caught by the wind. Rou grabbed her hand and pulled her around in circles. She caught his eyes and smiled.
Five or six members of the Oino-Kami hockey team, many of them years older than Rou, stood watching in silent devastation.
What was happening on the screen was clean. Rou had his eyes closed for some of it. When he looked at the girl he looked at their face; they communicated only calculated planning to each other with their glances. When he touched her, his hands found their place and stayed there, like a bird lit on a branch and stayed. Every movement turned in perfect circles, as smooth, as impersonal as a waterfall arcing off of a cliff. Rou had his hands all over her and you could tell he had never looked at her once.
“Yeah,” said Fuji, perfectly content now that several others were suffering the pain he had felt himself the night before, “he has touched a girl more than the rest of you combined.”
As if summoned, blissfully unaware that he had been mentioned or indeed that anything at all was happening outside of the sparkling world of his mind, Shirakawa Rou appeared in the doorway to the classroom.
“What are you all doing here?” he demanded immediately. “Half of you don’t go to this class.”
Second-year Kai Kengo, who absolutely did not go to this class, stared at him like he was watching a disgraced son return home after losing everything in a single drunken night of obviously rigged gambling. He silently grabbed the back of Keiichi’s shirt before he could even start.
“We’re just getting a look at your girlfriend,” said Fuji in monotone.
“I don’t have a girlfriend,” Rou responded, immediately, factually, but walking a closer step into the room got a better look at what the rest of them could see on the teacher’s screen. “Oh, Ienaga! She’s amazing,” he enthused, gripping a fist in front of his chest.
“This is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen,” said Kengo.
“She’s an incredible athlete. It was a shame I didn’t get to skate with her more,” Rou said, complimentary, respectful, completely chaste. “She taught me a lot in the brief time we were pair skating. I didn’t know her at all before, we were matched by her coach for the competition. She helped me break out, even, because she was more established.” Rou watched himself skate with her; and he was watching himself, his eyes tracing his own skates, the trails they made, whatever flaws he saw in his own performance.
“You barely knew her?” asked Keiichi in a wheeze.
Rou straightened up and crossed his arms, because he might not know what all of them were so upset about or even what was going on, but he was ready to square up with Keiichi in any situation. “It’s not uncommon,” he said. “Some people excel in pair skating but some never do it at all. It’s a completely different category from single figure skating. I pair skated with my sister all the time but we never competed together. Ienaga’s coach scouted me for her after she had a falling-out with her last partner and wouldn’t skate with him. She was an incredible—watch this jump,” he demanded, and every incredibly insecure and 100% virginal member of the hockey team turned to watch despondently as Rou gathered the girl in his arms, slid both his hands down her waist to lift her above his head, and then tossed her into the air. The camera focused on her spinning through the air, twice, thrice, but if one looked at the corner of the screen, they saw the blank, wide eyes of Rou not even fucking watching. Then she landed, and he grabbed her hand to whisk her around the ring.
“An arranged match,” said Kengo weakly.
“She was so strong,” complimented Rou sincerely.
That was, typically, the clue for Keiichi to lose his fucking mind at Rou, but he was standing in still, disgusted disappointment. When Kengo took a deep steadying breath in, the rest of the men turned to him, expecting a defusal of the situation.
“That’s it,” Kengo said, calmly, nigh serenely. “I’m going to get this little punk.”
Chaos erupted immediately. Almost everyone earned a suspension, which was going to come with additional hell when the coach learned about it. Fuji, who didn’t fight anyone, almost got away with it before they realized he had been using a teacher’s equipment without permission.
Rou, who was not in trouble for being attacked and who could have just gone back to class to relish in his victory, went home instead to meticulously paint over his fresh black eye with a box of makeup he kept under the sink (right next to his sister’s single bottle of mascara). Then he changed, since he was already late for school and might as well, into a shirt glittering with sequins.
He did win that fight, whatever it was about, and in his mind, it was more beautiful to emerge from the chaos in style.