Chapter Text
On Earth, January was used to being tall. He had been taller than most people around him since he was 17, and as he continued to grow to his full height, he came to understand the expectations that went with being a tall man: stronger, more virile, more someone you didn’t want to mess with. Being a ballet dancer, it helped. Instructors praised his long lines, directors liked the way he looked lifting shorter partners, and people who terrified him by flirting took “no” for an answer.
Grisha, his best friend at ballet school, was on the short side for classical ballet but made up for it with his athleticism. Standing still he vibrated like a tightly coiled spring; unleashed, he moved through the air like a whip, and somehow you couldn’t look away when he was on stage. January was different, not shy, but quiet, he never grabbed anyone’s attention until they saw him dance.
Grisha had taken him under his wing in their first year. Back then they were closer to the same height, but Grisha had broader shoulders, more muscular arms and legs. While January faded into the background off stage, people were drawn to Grisha. January happily tagged along in his shadow, but sometimes he watched people fall into Grisha’s orbit and wondered whether that kind of charisma could be learned, or if it was something you had to come by naturally. Looking back much later, he could see how much he learned about putting on an actor’s mask from trying to be Grisha, standing at the barre looking at himself in the mirror trying to call up the intensity in Grisha’s eyes and that effortless way he moved through the world.
When January hit a growth spurt in his second year at ballet school, he was suddenly all arms and legs. Next to Grisha, who always gave off the vibe that he knew exactly what he was doing, January felt like a floppy scarecrow. “I looked like a frog today - you know like a frog jumping and all its limbs just go out” he lamented, throwing his arms out to the sides and almost hitting Grisha in the face with his ice cream cone. They were standing outside the ice cream shop on Tverskaya on a rare day off, fluffy snow flakes drifting down around them. One of the things he loved about Moscow was ice cream in any weather.
“Hey, I know you’re jealous, but we can’t all be short kings,” Grisha laughed, then said more gently “You’re just going through an awkward phase, Yanush.[1] It will all come together for you - you were made for this. Besides, don’t complain when you can eat all the ice cream you want and you’ll just grow two inches taller overnight.” Grisha took a bite of his much smaller cone and savored it.
“Are you coming home with me again this Easter? There will be tons of food and you can eat it all so no one pesters me.” January remembered his visit last year all in warm tones - the beeswax candles, the church full of incense, and the taste of the kulich from the Easter basket the priest had blessed just before dawn. Sitting with Grisha’s extended family crowded around a long table in their apartment in a tiny industrial city in the middle of Siberia, enjoying the holiday. His father worked at a wood processing plant, and his mother at a bottling facility - they were the kind of regular working class people his father valued more than “p——r dancers.” But unlike his father they glowed with pride when they passed around videos of Grisha’s solo in the school production of the Nutcracker. January wondered what it was like to not have complicated feelings about your family.
“Wait, isn’t it still Lent? Why are you eating ice cream?” “Vegan gelato” Grisha smiled. “I still think that’s cheating…you’d better give it to me.” “No! Mine!” And Grisha held the cone out of his reach and spun away from him, ducking beneath his arm to head back to the metro.
Grisha had been right - endless drills, years of staying late after the other students had left, practicing while they followed Grisha out to a club or on a group date to the mall…It had all paid off the day he surprised everyone but his teachers and Grisha by winning a top spot in the spring showcase - the one all the scouts from the larger ballet companies came to. At the end of the celebration, in a quiet moment in a corner backstage Grisha hugged him, and January leaned down to press his cheek to the puff of curls on top of Grisha’s head. “I’ll miss you,” he said quietly. Grisha was leaving the next day to start in the corps of a small company in Beijing. “Will you?” Grisha pulled back to search his face, then reached up to kiss him. Not really knowing what to do, he let Grisha take the lead, not objecting to the kiss, nodding as he asked him to come back to his room, smiling nervously as he followed Grisha there. He enjoyed that it was Grisha, his closest friend in the world, and he felt safe and cared for and turned on. But he still froze in panic as they cuddled afterwards and Grisha whispered “I love you Yanush.” January pretended he was asleep already, and they never talked about that night again.
They kept in touch for a while, texting, sending pictures, trading gossip about mutual acquaintances. As January’s career soared, Grisha’s faded, and he moved back to Russia to teach dance. Grisha seemed happy to be settled, but as his world got smaller, they had less to say to each other. Occasional texts became an annual exchange of birthday and Easter greetings. January felt the loss of the friendship more than he wanted to admit. He made new friends: they had a group chat and a favorite pub, and everything. Good, but never the same as being in Grisha’s orbit, a pale moon tucked against a planet and held there by its gravity: Safe. Cared for. Really, really, seen.
Many years later January learned from a ballet school friend that Grisha had been killed in a car accident. He had already been dead for months, and January hadn’t known. That night he sat in his apartment and cried, wondering whether he would still be alone if he had just tried harder to love Grisha back.
After the showcase, January had left for London, and the next year a visiting prima donna put the corps in a stir, all the taller dancers vying to impress her at rehearsals, then daydreaming backstage about the director chosing one of them to partner her in a pas de deux. She was, in retrospect, not a nice person, but she radiated command of the stage, and he felt a strange sensation in his stomach every time she snapped at someone for some failure or other. January never wanted to be the one she noticed for falling below expectations, so he practiced even harder, willing himself to look taller, more confident, more like Grisha, more like a leading man.
At a certain point, even he had to admit he had fallen in love with her, and of course she remained blissfully unaware of his existence. At an aftershow party, he screwed up the courage to introduce himself and then gushed about how inspiring it had been to dance on the same stage as her. She smiled courteously and excused herself to go chat with one of the soloists. He saw her roll her eyes and whisper something to the other dancer that made them both laugh. In the end, he doubted she even remembered his name, which most people found so hard to forget.
Annie came over and wrapped her arm around his waist for a side hug. “You’re just too much man for her Jan. C’mon - let’s get some drink in you and get you laid.” January let himself be led away and paired up with someone, feeling guilty kissing them as his thoughts drifted to his crush. And then she was gone, off to another short term residency in Dubai, leaving a pining January who sat alone in his apartment and wondered why he could fall in love with someone who would never love him back, and at the same time feel nothing but panic when someone looked at him like they might actually want a January in their life.
__________
On Mars, January had gotten used to being short. Once you learned to dodge people’s gesticulating hands, it was nice, in a way, to not always have people turning to you like you should know what to do, or how to make the first move, just because you were tall. Yes, he would stand up for his beliefs, and argue endlessly with Gale now that he felt completely safe doing that. But he still got a secret thrill whenever they made a gesture that showed everyone he was theirs to look after, like they way their eyes always found his effortlessly when they circulated separately at an event, or when they tucked him against their side to navigate a crowded room.
From his first meeting with Fenghua, he had largely deferred to the stylists and media consultants who crafted Shongshu’s public image. He doubted he would ever really understand the complexities of Tharsese fashion intrigue and was content just to enjoy the fabulous ride. Then gradually he realized that as Consul Consort he wore a “Grisha” mask so often, over days and evenings of public appearances and house meetings, that it was almost second nature. Passing a mirror at a Jade Hill reception one evening he caught a glimpse of someone - shorter and more powerfully built than the figures surrounding them but exuding a charisma that made it hard to look away. In the moment before he realized he was seeing himself he had a sudden sharp pang of remembering Grisha.
Perhaps the change had happened this way, from the outside in, until the Consort costume had become indistinguishable from January. But January suspected that the reverse was true; the change had occurred from the inside out, as he began to believe that this thing he and Gale had was real, that he was their January. Becoming Gale’s January had happened slowly that he had time to adjust to the idea that someone who could have anyone would choose him.
After an embarrassingly slow start, now flirting with them created a warm glow in his chest instead of making him feel like his insides had all crowded up into his throat, suffocating him. When he explained this to Gale, they had promptly launched a full scale flirting campaign that lasted more than a month, surprising him with a whisper in his ear or a knuckle trailing down next to the spine of his cage almost, almost too far for public decency. He retaliated with provocative brushes of his fingertips against the most sensitive spot on their neck, under the guise of adjusting their collar or slipping a stray strand of hair back into place, pointedly focusing his eyes on their neck with unabashed lust, and angling his face so that only they could see it. A few times, after a day of public appearances, they returned home and after heading to their room to change never came out for dinner. The next morning they were both ravenous at breakfast, ignoring Mx.Ren’s barbs about their “honeymoon phase.” January felt like being in love was a Mandarin text he thought he could read, until Gale handed him an English translation and he realized he’d gotten the gist of it right, but missed most of the key words that gave it meaning.
Now he looked at his reflection in the bedroom mirror and recognized a different January. Not the actor’s mask he put on to perform, or his everyday strategically self-effacing persona, but someone who could absorb a world of attention and reflect it back, amplified. With a twinge of sadness he thought of Grisha, and then realized he had unconsciously woven him into this evening. He posed again, shifting to the side to catch the effect in the mirror, admiring how well Fenghua had brought his vision to life. He’d gone to them a month ago with an idea and a reference photo - a shot down through the frozen surface of Lake Baikal, back when it still used to freeze over in the winter. Layers of fabric created the illusion of looking through a sheet of ice into endless depths, shading from icy green to blue black, with arrows of frost lancing through it at different levels. In the virtual layer swirls of snow caught on tiny ridges, piling up before snaking away. The cut and colors enhanced the Earthstrong balance of his body, forged by stronger gravity but honed through years of training. He knew he looked fantastic. And tonight he was fine with owning that.
Gale strode in, looking down at their tablet. “A-Yue, are you…”
They glanced up and their gaze snagged on his in the mirror. January smiled softly and slowly pivoted on one foot to face them, feeling for once like he was Tharsese tall.
Gale’s eyes widened, taking him in. “You look…” they breathed.
He cocked an eyebrow at them. “I look…?”
“You look…stunning.”
“Do I?” he smiled. Their eyes danced over him again, coming back to meet his.
“More than that. Like a magnet, pulling everyone towards you. Like it doesn’t matter how tall you are.”
”Doesn’t matter how tall…Wait, did you just call me a short king?” January asked, smiling wider as he walked closer to them. He saw Gale process the words and unpack them in context, the corners of their mouth quirking up when they were confident they understood the reference.The whole process took seconds, and January watched it unfold across their face with a familiar burst of happiness in his chest.
“Hmm. I think I did.” Gale closed the last distance between them and bent down to whisper, their breath tickling tickling the shell of his ear. “So, if you’re a king, does that mean I get to be YOUR consort tonight?”
”Oh, I think it does” January answered with a gleam in his eye.
Footnotes
1When January first arrived at ballet school, it took him a while to get used to being called many different nicknames, most of which drew on the first or second syllable of his name translated into Russian (Yanvar’). In the first few months, he was called everything from Varya to Yaya to Yasha, but it was Grisha who began calling him Yanusha and by the end of his first year, that name had stuck, only some of the older teachers still calling him Yashka. Often, Grisha dropped the “a” for a hyper-casual and affectionate form of the diminutive
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