Chapter Text
September 3, 2025
Nezha’s return home began under less than ideal circumstances, the dull ache of jet lag settling behind his eyes after a night of fractured sleep, the kind that never quite allowed his body to understand which country it belonged to. By the time he arrived at the training center the following morning, reporters were already stationed along the entrance, their cameras angled with quiet anticipation, microphones poised as though they had been waiting not for him specifically, but for whatever statement might be extracted and reshaped into something louder.
They had intercepted him at the airport the night before as well, just as he had expected, and he had given them precisely what he always gave: measured gratitude for his placement on the international circuit, cautious optimism about the coming Olympic season, and a careful refusal to speculate on competitors or outcomes. Years of media training had taught him that ambiguity was safer than enthusiasm, that the less he offered, the less there was to be dismantled and reassembled into headlines. He might have escaped entirely unbothered, had one reporter not called out a question that briefly disrupted the careful rhythm of his detachment.
It was not the question itself that unsettled him, but the name embedded within it.
A name he had not heard addressed to him directly in years.
Security had intervened before he could respond, guiding him efficiently through the terminal and into the waiting car, yet the echo of it lingered with uncomfortable persistence, a reminder that certain histories were not as dormant as he had convinced himself they were.
The training center greeted him with its familiar sterility—the faint metallic scent of cold air and resurfaced ice, the low hum of refrigeration systems beneath polished floors. Coach Xue was already waiting near the corridor that led to the rink, falling into step beside him without preamble and launching immediately into a recitation of adjustments that would need to be made before the next international assignment. The free skate layout would require minor restructuring, particularly the toe sequence, as the technical panel at Worlds had been uncharacteristically strict regarding under-rotations; the federation had also scheduled additional media appearances in light of his recent placement, and there would be choreography revisions to address before the Grand Prix Final.
The steady stream of logistical corrections pressed against his already throbbing temples, and although his throat felt dry from travel and insufficient rest, he inclined his head at appropriate intervals, offering quiet acknowledgments to staff and younger skaters who moved aside respectfully as he passed. He had changed at home, arriving already ready and composed, a habit Xue openly disapproved of but one Nezha found preferable to the noise and humidity of the locker rooms, where proximity and chatter left little room for the solitude he required before stepping onto the ice.
As they approached the rink doors, the sound reached him before the cold did—the unmistakable cut of blades against fresh ice, sharp and deliberate, accompanied by the faint hiss of shaved frost scattering across the surface. It was a sound so embedded in his daily life that it often dissolved into the background of thought, yet this morning it drew his attention with unusual clarity, prompting a subtle narrowing of his gaze as he paused just short of the threshold.
There was nothing inherently remarkable about it; skaters trained at all hours, and early sessions were rarely quiet. And yet something in the rhythm—controlled, powerful, followed by the decisive thud of a landing executed without hesitation, felt distinctly familiar.
For a brief moment, he remained where he was, hand resting against the cold metal of the door, aware that stepping inside would mean more than simply resuming practice after an international assignment.
Then he pushed the door open and allowed the cold air to meet him fully.
The temperature shift struck him immediately, sharp enough that he scrunched his nose on instinct, a habit he had never quite managed to outgrow, as the sounds of the rink swelled around him—the steady carving of blades across ice, the muted scrape of stops, the distant echo of a coach calling instructions he could not quite make out. Xue made no move to step forward, and so Nezha remained where he was, drawing in a slow breath as his coach continued speaking beside him, hands moving in clipped gestures to emphasize a point about layout revisions or edge quality or some other technical correction that seemed suddenly far less urgent.
The motion stopped mid-sentence.
Nezha did not look at the ice immediately, but he felt the shift beside him, the subtle stilling of Xue’s presence, and when he finally followed his coach’s line of sight he saw something he had rarely witnessed in all the years they had worked together: unguarded surprise, written plainly across a face that prided itself on calculation.
Only then did Nezha allow his own gaze to settle fully on the rink.
She had not noticed him.
She completed the landing just as he looked up, a clean, decisive finish with no visible check of the upper body, before flowing directly into her exit edge, the transition seamless in a way that made it clear the jump had not been a risk but an expectation. The difference was immediate and disorienting. The last time he had seen her skate, her power had been undeniable but edged with volatility, every element charged with visible effort; now her movements were measured, deliberate, almost unsettlingly composed.
Her hair was tied back in a ponytail that had grown longer than he remembered, strands loosening and clinging briefly to her cheek before being brushed away by the momentum of her next pass. She set up again, the faint scratch of her blade deepening along the curve of the ice, and launched into another jump with the kind of confidence that suggested repetition rather than ambition. The landing was solid enough that the boards gave a soft tremor, and a voice from the rink side offered clipped praise, which she acknowledged only with the slightest incline of her head before pushing onward, already resetting for the next element.
She wore black—plain training fabric, unadorned and functional—yet against the white of the rink she appeared almost stark, the contrast sharpening the precision of her movements.
“Oh, this is going to be interesting,” Xue murmured under his breath, the words low but edged with unmistakable satisfaction.
The comment seemed to fracture the stillness that had settled between observation and interruption, and as though summoned by it, her momentum faltered. She rose from her setup edge and drew herself into a controlled stop, blades carving a deliberate crescent into the ice as the fine spray settled around her ankles. For a heartbeat she remained angled away from them, gaze fixed somewhere distant, as if weighing whether to acknowledge the shift in atmosphere at all.
Then she turned.
The movement was unhurried, almost precise in its restraint, and before Nezha could decide whether stepping back would look conspicuous or cowardly, her eyes found him and did not waver.
He was too far away to distinguish every detail of her expression, yet he saw the narrowing first—the faint tightening at the corners of her eyes that transformed recognition into something edged and deliberate. A breath left her, audible even across the rink, dry and clipped, the sound suspended somewhere between disbelief and a humorless laugh.
For the past two years, Nezha had made a quiet discipline of not thinking about her. He avoided interviews that mentioned her name, scrolled past headlines that paired the words Speer and figure skating, and trained himself not to pause when commentators referenced her rising placements on the international circuit. The effort had grown increasingly futile as she began appearing in more articles, her programs dissected, her technical scores analyzed, her potential debated in increasingly speculative tones. It was impossible, after all, to remain ignorant of an athlete from his own federation—particularly one the media seemed intent on framing as either Nikara’s next medal hope or its most imminent loss.
One night, unable to sleep in a hotel room halfway across the world, he had broken that self-imposed restraint and searched her name deliberately. The results had been extensive—competition footage, interviews, commentary threads, and a growing collection of opinion pieces questioning her national allegiance. Because she had been born to a Nikara father and a Speerly mother, she held dual citizenship and therefore the legal freedom to compete for either country. According to several reports, she had spent the better part of the last year training in Speer, a detail that had ignited widespread discussion about a potential federation transfer.
He had locked his phone moments later, as though he had trespassed into something private, something he had forfeited the right to examine.
She had told him once,he remembered it with uncomfortable clarity, standing beside the rink boards after practice, brushing her hair behind her ear with forced casualness, that she sometimes missed Speer more than she allowed herself to admit. He had already known the basics: that she was born there, that she moved to Nikan young because it offered better training facilities, stronger programs, broader futures. The media repeated that narrative often enough. What she had confided, however, was less strategic and more vulnerable, that she felt tethered to the island in ways she could not fully articulate, even as she built her career in a country she had never entirely claimed as her own.
At the time, he had dismissed the idea that she might ever choose Speer competitively; the decision had seemed impractical, almost self-sabotaging. But the results spoke differently now. Whatever infrastructure Speer had developed in recent years, it had elevated her. The skater carving across the ice before him bore little resemblance to the volatile, raw force he remembered. The refinement was undeniable.
It was not as though he had failed to consider the possibility of encountering her here. He had known, abstractly, that their training schedules might overlap, that the rink was shared territory, that avoidance was not a permanent solution. Yet he had treated the prospect as distant, improbable: something that belonged to rumor rather than immediacy.
Now, as she pushed off from her stop and glided toward the boards with decisive strokes, gesturing sharply toward her coach as she spoke, he felt the quiet inadequacy of that assumption settle uncomfortably in his chest.
He should have prepared for this.
“Compose yourself, Yin,” Xue said evenly beside him, the reprimand quiet but unmistakably pointed.
Nezha had not realized he had been staring.
On the rink, whatever exchange had passed between her and her coach ended without visible resolution. She gave a short nod—more acknowledgment than agreement—before pushing away again, her expression smoothed back into something impassive. If she had any reaction to their presence, she did not offer it a second time. The indifference was deliberate.
The sharp cut of her blades echoed across the rink as she gathered speed, and despite himself, the sound made him tense—a reflex more instinctive than rational. He forced his gaze away from her silhouette carving across the ice and turned back to Xue instead, schooling his features into something neutral.
“I am composed,” he replied, though the dryness in his throat suggested the effort required to maintain that composure.
Xue regarded him for a moment longer than necessary, measuring the steadiness of his expression before shifting his attention back to the ice.
“I was not informed she would be training in this slot,” he said at last, voice returning to its usual even cadence. “However, now that she is here, the situation becomes useful.”
He did not look at Nezha as he spoke. His gaze followed Rin’s movement across the rink instead, tracking the arc of her entry edge as she gathered speed for another pass. From a distance she appeared unaffected, her lines clean, her posture steady, but when Nezha allowed himself to look again, he noticed the faint rigidity in her shoulders, the slight excess force in her push-offs. She was aware of them. Of him.
“You have heard the speculation,” Xue continued. “About her transfer.”
Nezha inclined his head once. He swallowed, though the dryness in his throat had not eased.
“Yes.”
Xue exhaled quietly, not quite a sigh. “I have never been particularly fond of her temperament,” he admitted, the words controlled rather than emotional. “She is difficult. Reactive. Not easily directed.” A pause, brief but deliberate. “But she is talented. And she has improved.”
On the ice, Rin launched upward again: clean takeoff, tight rotation, decisive landing. No visible check.
Xue’s eyes narrowed fractionally. “Speer has invested in her,” he said. “That much is obvious.”
The implication settled between them with quiet weight.
Before Nezha could reconsider, the words left him. “They would be foolish not to.”
Xue’s response was a low hum, almost thoughtful, though there was no mistaking the calculation beneath it. His gaze drifted once more to the ice, following Rin as she drove into a sequence of turns, the edges deep and controlled, before returning to Nezha with a look that was far too deliberate to be casual.
“Yes,” he agreed lightly. “And we would be equally foolish to allow her to leave. Particularly this close to the Olympic cycle.”
The phrase did not need elaboration. Eighteen months was both distant and immediate in skating terms: enough time to build momentum, not enough to recover from miscalculation.
“She strengthens Speer the moment she transfers,” Xue continued, voice measured. “Not only technically, but symbolically. They will market her as reclamation. As return. As proof that their program no longer depends on exporting talent.”
Rin landed again— equally clean, centered, without the frantic correction he remembered from years past.
Xue’s attention did not waver. “And Nikan,” he added quietly, “does not benefit from narratives of loss.”
“She hasn’t made any decisions,” Nezha replied evenly, because it was the only response that did not betray too much. “Speculation isn’t the same as intent.”
“No,” Xue agreed, though there was little concession in it. “But we do not have the luxury of waiting for intent to declare itself.”
Before Nezha could form a response, Xue turned fully toward him, the movement deliberate, measured, leaving no room for misinterpretation.
“You will speak to her.”
The words settled heavily, more directive than suggestion.
Nezha felt something tighten low in his stomach at the implication, not quite fear, not quite anger—something less dignified, something dangerously close to reluctance. He was not afraid of her. That would have been simpler. Yet the thought of approaching her deliberately, of standing close enough to speak without the shield of distance, sent an unwelcome heat up his spine. He swallowed down the instinctive refusal that rose to his throat, aware of how childish it would sound if given voice.
He wetted his lips, suddenly conscious of their dryness. “She does not like me,” he said evenly, though the statement carried more weight than he intended. “I doubt she would listen.”
Xue regarded him with a patience that felt almost rehearsed.
“She liked you once,” he corrected quietly. “You skated together. You trusted one another. That kind of foundation does not disappear entirely.”
Nezha nearly let out a sound at that, something between disbelief and bitterness, but restrained it before it could surface. The idea that history alone might soften her stance felt dangerously optimistic. If anything, their history was the reason she would not listen at all.
“She will not respond to pressure from the federation,” Xue continued, his tone sharpening slightly. “But she may respond to you. You understand what this means—for her, for us. You represent stability. Continuity. If she is uncertain, you are in a position to remind her what she is walking away from.”
Nezha looked away then, lifting his gaze toward the high ceiling of the rink where the industrial lights cast a pale glow over the ice. The architecture offered no answers, only the distant hum of refrigeration units and the echo of blades cutting in steady repetition below.
He wondered, not for the first time, whether Xue genuinely believed this was a matter of persuasion rather than consequence.
“She does not see this place the way we do,” he said at last, his voice quieter now, stripped of its earlier neutrality. “It has never been home to her.”
Xue’s mouth curved faintly, not quite a smile, not quite impatience.
“Home,” he repeated, as if testing the weight of the word and finding it negligible. “Sentiment is a luxury afforded to those without expectation.”
He gave a small, dismissive shrug. “Medals are not awarded for attachment.”
Xue reached out then, patting Nezha once between the shoulder blades—an almost companionable gesture that felt more like a reminder of hierarchy than encouragement.
“Come,” he said, already turning away. “You will use the secondary rink today. There is no value in immediate friction.”
Nezha remained where he stood for a fraction longer, his gaze drifting back to the ice despite himself. Rin had resumed her run-through, driving into her step sequence with sharpened precision, the rhythm of her movements unbroken.
“Tomorrow,” Xue added without looking back, his tone shifting from conversational to final, “you will speak to her.”
There was no space in the statement for negotiation.
“Whether you are inclined to or not.”
January 17, 2022
When he had first met Rin at seventeen, they had disliked each other almost immediately: a reaction that surprised no one, considering the stark contrast in their upbringings, skating styles, and general temperaments.
And yet that contrast was precisely what their coaches found promising. They were assigned the same ice sessions under the firm belief that each possessed what the other lacked. Nezha’s technique was clean, controlled, almost effortless in its elegance—everything Rin’s skating, at the time, was not. She, in turn, skated as though she were perpetually proving something, every jump driven by urgency, every program edged with a raw intensity that Nezha himself had never quite embodied.
Their friction was not subtle.
Once, after she fell attempting a jump she had stubbornly retried for the better part of an hour, Nezha had clicked his tongue in quiet irritation. She had turned on him immediately, words sharp and unrestrained, accusing him of arrogance. He had laughed, openly, unhelpfully, which only deepened the divide.
It was perhaps inevitable, then, that their coaches interpreted that tension not as incompatibility, but as potential.
The announcement came on a cold Tuesday morning. Nezha remembered the chill of the rink more vividly than the words themselves as he glided across the ice toward the boards, where Xue stood waiting alongside Rin and her coach. Xue gestured him over with a subtle motion of his hand, his expression unreadable.
Nezha slowed to a controlled stop in front of them, unaware that whatever was about to be said would bind him to Rin in ways neither of them had anticipated.
Rin was already there when he reached the boards, arms crossed over her chest, one blade tapping lightly against the ice in a rhythm that suggested impatience rather than nervousness. She did not look at him as he approached, though the slight tightening of her jaw told him she was aware of his presence.
Her coach offered him a brief nod. Xue did not bother with preliminaries.
“You will begin pairs training next week,” he said evenly, as though announcing a minor adjustment to their schedule rather than a structural shift in their careers. “We have evaluated your compatibility. The federation believes the potential is worth exploring.”
For a moment, Nezha assumed he had misheard.
Rin was the first to react.
“No,” she said flatly.
The word cut cleanly across the rink.
Her coach placed a hand on her shoulder, not gently, not harshly, simply to anchor her in place. “You will at least attempt it,” he corrected.
Nezha felt the faintest flicker of something dangerously close to amusement at the predictability of her defiance, though he did not allow it to surface. Pairs. The word settled uneasily in his thoughts, rearranging years of solitary discipline into something shared and uncertain—something he had never intended for himself.
“You complement one another,” Xue continued, his gaze moving between them with clinical detachment. “Runin is compact. You are not. The physical alignment is favorable.”
His eyes rested briefly on Nezha.
“You have the steadiness and extension required for lifts. Your carriage is consistent. Your timing is precise. And she can jump, can’t she?”
Rin scoffed, tapping the heel of her blade sharply against the ice. “I do not need to be thrown around to land a triple.”
Xue did not so much as glance at her.
“What you two do need,” he said slowly, allowing the pause to stretch just enough to command their attention, “are medals.”
Nezha had not liked the arrangement any more than Rin clearly did, but he had learned early in his life to distinguish between arguments that altered outcomes and those that merely exposed defiance. This was not a situation open to negotiation. Orders, when delivered in that tone, were meant to be absorbed, not debated.
And while the thought of rearranging his training around hers, of constructing a program that would demand proximity and trust in equal measure, unsettled him more than he cared to admit, the alternative unsettled him further still. Disappointing himself was tolerable. Disappointing the federation—and, by extension, his family—was not.
Rin did not conceal her displeasure on the way to the changing rooms. She muttered something sharp under her breath about arrogance and entitlement, words designed less to wound than to provoke. Nezha did not rise to it.
“If your future matters to you,” he said instead, evenly, “be here tomorrow.”
It had been a calculated remark, cold enough to irritate, measured enough to avoid escalation.
She had shown up.
Not without reluctance, of course. Likely after considerable persuasion from her own coach. When she stepped onto the ice the following afternoon, her eyes narrowed the moment they found him, and she kept a careful distance as they began with simple stroking patterns, tracing parallel lines across the rink like opposing currents forced into the same channel.
“Trengsin, loosen up,” Xue called across the ice, his voice carrying easily over the hum of the rink. “He is not about to tackle you.”
A beat.
“Or murder you.”
Rin’s coach shot Xue a sharp look from the boards, the kind that suggested this was neither helpful nor appreciated. On the ice, Rin stiffened visibly, her edge biting deeper into the surface for a fraction of a second before she corrected it. For a moment, it looked as though she might abandon the drill altogether and skate straight to the boards to confront him.
Instead, she exhaled sharply through her nose and muttered something under her breath, too quiet for Nezha to catch. A mantra, perhaps. Or more likely, a restrained insult.
The tension in her shoulders eased by degrees. Not gone, but controlled.
Nezha kept his gaze forward, resisting the impulse to comment. If he acknowledged the exchange, it would only sharpen her defensiveness further.
“Your edges are too shallow,” he said evenly as they completed another lap. “If we are expected to stay in hold, you cannot hesitate.”
Her head snapped toward him.
“I am not fucking hesitating.”
“You are,” he replied, unbothered. “You’re just doing it early.”
The look she gave him then could have cut through steel. Her eyes narrowed, sharp with irritation, before she tore her gaze away again, jaw tightening as she bit down lightly on her lower lip in concentration.
He said nothing further.
On the next pass, her edge deepened—noticeably, deliberately—carving a stronger arc into the ice. The difference was subtle but undeniable.
September 3, 2025
Nezha had been distracted for the remainder of the day after encountering Rin again, and he was acutely aware of it, no matter how carefully he attempted to conceal it beneath routine and discipline. There was little use in pretending otherwise when Xue had corrected him with unusual sharpness, noting every fraction of instability in his landings, every rotation that lacked its usual precision, every exit edge that wavered just enough to betray divided focus. The comments had not been unjustified, which only made them more irritating.
He stayed long after the others had finished.
He told himself it was refinement rather than avoidance, that an additional hour on the ice was an investment rather than a penance, yet the quiet emptiness of the rink suggested otherwise. Skating demanded total occupation of the body—calculation of entry edges, compression through the knee, alignment through the air—and in that demand there was relief, because there was no room left for memory.
Xue had already left by the time Nezha attempted another jump, the building reduced to a cavernous stillness broken only by the steady hum of refrigeration and the hollow echo of blades cutting into ice. He launched upward, rotation clean and controlled, landing firmly into his edge without the faint instability that had plagued him earlier. The satisfaction was muted, dulled by the sharp pulse that flared behind his temples as exhaustion began to assert itself.
When he glanced at the clock mounted above the boards and registered the time—half past ten—he finally conceded that further repetition would yield diminishing returns. He skated off with measured strokes, unlacing his boots methodically, wiping down the blades with habitual precision before sliding them into their guards and securing them inside his bag. The ache in his shoulders deepened as he straightened, running a hand through his hair and allowing himself a brief moment of stillness against the bench.
He had skated to quiet his thoughts, yet they pressed forward now that motion had ceased: the memory of her across the rink, the narrowing of her eyes, the assignment that awaited him the following day. He pushed away from the bench before those reflections could take root and stepped into the hallway leading toward the locker rooms and main exit, the unfamiliar solidity of the floor beneath his shoes momentarily disorienting after hours on ice.
The corridor was darker than it should have been.
He slowed instinctively, noting the absence of the overhead motion lights that normally activated with the slightest movement, and though the rinks were generally accessible at all hours for elite training, the stillness felt heavier than usual. Choosing practicality over suspicion, he retrieved his phone from his bag and switched on the flashlight, the narrow beam illuminating the path ahead as he proceeded toward the exit.
He had nearly reached the door when the sound of footsteps echoed from behind him, quick and uneven against the polished floor, followed by a voice that carried through the dim corridor.
“Hey—can you open that door? I’ve been trying to get it to work, but it won’t, and it’s too dark to see what I’m doing—”
He turned, lifting the phone instinctively toward the source of the sound, and the bright beam caught her directly.
The reaction was immediate.
“Gods, get that fucking light out of my face,” she snapped, squinting and raising a hand to shield her eyes from the glare.
He lowered the phone at once, the hallway returning to its muted half-light, now lit only by the faint spill of streetlamps filtering through the tall windows at the end of the corridor.
For a moment neither of them spoke.
Recognition settled slowly across her features, tension following closely behind it, and she took a deliberate step backward as though distance might restore some control over the situation.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”