somewhere between there and now

♊

The ceiling of the Namihaya Dome feels impossibly high, like a cathedral designed for a religion that Hokuto isn’t sure he’s devout enough to practice. The air here is thinner, cutting into the lungs differently than the air at the rink in Shizuoka.

Today is supposedly the darkest day of the year, astronomically speaking. He looked up on the train ride here, staring at the gray blur of the countryside and wondering if the sun entering Capricorn is a sign of structure and discipline or just an omen of cold things getting colder.

And he’s trying, really trying, to keep his hands from shaking.

He isn’t supposed to be here.

Well, technically, he is. He won the Junior Nationals. But standing here restricted by the boards, watching the senior men glide past with that terrifying, frictionless quality they all seem to possess, Hokuto feels like a forgery. Someone is going to ask for his identification. Someone is going to realize there’s been a clerical error.

“Hokuto.”

His father’s voice cuts through the ambient echo of the arena. Yosuke is standing by the boards, arms crossed over his chest, wearing that navy puffer jacket that’s starting to lose its loft in the shoulders.

Hokuto skates over, checking his face automatically—the symmetry of his smile, the focus in his eyes, scanning for droop or confusion. The habit is a reflex now.

He looks fine. Tired, maybe, but fine.

“You’re rushing the setup,” Yosuke says. Not unkindly. Just a statement of physics. “The music is fast, but you don’t have to be.”

“I know,” Hokuto says, touching the neckline of his practice shirt. “It’s just… it’s big here.”

“Exact size as the ice sheets at home,” his father says, tapping the boards. “Go. From the opening.”

Hokuto nods, exhales slowly, and glides backward to center ice.

The opening notes of Sing, Sing, Sing are brassy and loud. It’s Louis Prima. It’s swing. It’s a song that demands a version of him that is extroverted and electric, a version that takes up space without apologizing for it, and most days he has to pull that persona on like a costume that doesn’t quite fit in the shoulders.

He strikes the opening pose. The drums in his head kick in.

He moves.

The first combination is a triple lutz-triple toe. He can do this in his sleep. He can do this in the dark. But today, the ice feels brittle under his blades. He goes into the lutz, taps, rotates—one, two, three—and the landing has a hollow, scratching sound that echoes too loudly in the empty seats. 

He holds the edge, fights the wobble in his knee, and forces the second jump.

He lands it, but it’s tight. Ugly. The kind of landing that judges circle in red, the kind that says nervous junior skater, the kind that wastes the forty-thousand yen they spent on the hotel room.

He ignores the spiral of guilt starting in his stomach and pushes into the step sequence. The trumpets are screaming now. He has to smile. He has to look like he’s enjoying this. His hands move through the choreography, but his mind is drifting, calculating angles, wondering if he looks like a child pretending to be an adult.

He wonders if…

No, focus on the edge. Deep knee bend.

He finishes the runthrough with his chest heaving, the final pose a little shaky. The silence that follows the music is heavy.

Hokuto skates back to the boards. His father doesn’t say anything for a long moment. He just looks at him, and Hokuto prepares for the correction, for the list of things he did wrong, for the validation of his fear that he’s not ready for Senior Nationals.

“You’re listening to the drums,” Yosuke says finally, his voice quiet. “Listen to the melody instead.”

“The melody is fast too,” Hokuto says breathlessly.

“The melody has room in it,” his father says. He reaches out to adjust the neckline of Hokuto’s shirt, a gesture so sudden and fatherly that Hokuto almost flinches. “Stop trying to prove you belong here, Hokuto. The ice will tell you if you do. Just let it talk.”

Hokuto looks down at his skates. The ice is scuffed and white, a record of every mistake and correction. “Okay,” he says.

The loudspeaker crackles, followed by the announcement that their session is over. The ice needs to be resurfaced.

It’s a relief, honestly. The specific pressure of trying to find the melody while worrying about his lutz edge was starting to feel like holding his breath underwater. 

He skates to the barrier, the sudden cease of motion making the world feel heavy again, and clips his guards onto his blades before stepping off.

His father is already by the bench, zipping his bag. He moves with that peculiar economy of motion he’s always had, no wasted energy, but Hokuto watches his hands anyway. He watches for tremors. He watches for fumbling.

Yosuke looks steady. He looks fine.

Hokuto pulls on his team jacket—the navy and white one with HAMAMATSU SKATING CLUB printed across the back—and grabs his water bottle. The condensation feels cold against his palm.

“Let’s clear out,” Yosuke says, slinging his bag over his shoulder. “Don’t want to be in the way of the machines.”

They head toward the exit, the rubber mats squeaking under their feet, but before they can reach the corridor, a woman in a bright teal down coat intercepts them.

“Yosuke-kun!”

She has a voice that carries, the kind of projection one develops from yelling instructions across a 60-meter sheet of ice for two decades. It’s Mayu Tsuruta. She competed around the same time as his father—Hokuto thinks she was at the Calgary Olympics too, though she didn’t place as high—and now coaches in Nagoya.

“Tsuruta-san,” his father says, and his smile is the polite, professional one. “Good to see you.”

“And little Hokuto,” he says, turning that high-beam attention onto him. “Not so little anymore. Senior Nationals! That’s wonderful.”

“Thank you,” Hokuto says, performing the bow that the situation requires. “I’ll do my best.”

“He’s looking thin,” she says to his father, as if Hokuto is a piece of furniture that can’t hear her. Then her voice drops, shifting into a register that sets all his alarms ringing. “And how are you doing? The… recovery? No headaches?”

Hokuto freezes. He doesn’t move, but inside, everything stops. He looks at his father’s temple, the vein there, the skin around his eyes.

“I’m fine, Tsuruta-san,” his father says, waving his hand dismissively. “Old news. That was two years ago.”

“Well, you have to be careful. Stress is the killer,” she says, shaking her head. “Did you hear about Taguchi? He’s back in the hospital. Gout, can you believe it? Or maybe it’s the liver. He never did know how to stop drinking after a loss.”

His father laughs dryly. “Tomo always lived hard.”

“He’s asking about you,” she adds, leaning in. “Says he wants to see the boy skate. Wants to see if the son has better knees than the father.”

They laugh together, a shared history of injuries and competitions Hokuto will never be part of, but the air around them feels suddenly too thick.

Stress is the killer.

Hokuto looks at his father’s face, searching for the stress she mentioned, wondering if the cost of bringing him here, the hotel, the entry fees, the pressure of his shaky lutz—if all of this is slowly building up pressure behind his eyes again.

He can’t stand there. He can’t listen to them discuss mortality like it’s just another element score.

“Um,” Hokuto says, interrupting the flow of their reminiscence. He presses a hand to his stomach, which isn’t entirely a lie. “Excuse me. I think… I need to use the washroom.”

“Go ahead,” Yosuke says, barely looking at him. “Meet me by the entrance in ten minutes.”

“Okay,” he says.

He turns and walks away, keeping his pace measured until he turns the corner. Then he speeds up. He passes the restrooms without looking. He doesn’t need a mirror; he doesn’t want to see his own anxious face.

He heads for the back exit, the one leading to the loading dock area. He needs air that hasn’t been recycled through a ventilation system, air that doesn’t smell like Zamboni exhaust and anxiety.

He pushes the heavy metal bar of the door and steps out into the gray afternoon.

The loading dock area is a monochromatic study in grays—concrete floor, metal doors, a sky the color of a bruise healing badly. Hokuto leans back against the rough stucco of the exterior wall, the cold seeping through the layers of his club jacket, and lets the air out of his lungs in a long, shaky stream that fogs instantly in the December chill.

It’s quieter here. The hum of the ventilation system is just a low vibration in the ground, not a roar.

He closes his eyes for a second, trying to scrub the image of his father’s face from the back of his eyelids.

Stress is the killer.

He wonders if he can skate well enough to lower his blood pressure, or if the act of skating itself is the problem, the financial hemorrhage that precedes the physical one—

A sound cuts through the spiral.

It’s small. Electronic. A synthesized chime, followed by the distinct, frantic clicking of plastic buttons.

He opens his eyes and turns his head to the left, expecting a maintenance worker or maybe a lost sibling of some competitor.

He isn’t alone, which is startling enough, but the person standing ten feet away is—well, he’s a category of problem that Hokuto is absolutely not equipped to handle right now.

Kyomoto Taiga is leaning against the same wall as he is, though he makes the act of leaning look like a deliberate choreographic choice rather than a posture of exhaustion. He’s wearing a charcoal drawing of an outfit—oversized black hoodie, dark jeans, sneakers that look lived-in—and his head is bent over a Nintendo DS held in both hands.

Hokuto stops breathing. He actually stops.

It’s strange seeing him this close. On television where Hokuto watched him place fourth at Senior Nationals last year, he looks untouchable—a creature made of speed and sharp edges. Here, slouching in a hoodie with his hair falling into his eyes, he looks... softer. There’s a quietness to him that feels heavy, like a dense fabric. He’s the World Junior Champion from two years ago, the one everyone says is the future of Japanese men’s singles, and he is currently frowning at a dual screen with a level of concentration usually reserved for a quad toe.

Hokuto should move. He should say excuse me and walk back inside to look for his father.

But he is frozen, caught in the specific paralysis of witnessing something beautiful that doesn’t know it's being watched. Taiga’s fingers—long, slender, the kind of hands that look like they should be playing the piano—move rapidly over the controls.

Then, without lifting his head, he speaks.

“Is it the four o’clock session yet?”

His voice is lower than Hokuto expected. Melodic, but flat.

He looks up then.

The impact is immediate and physical, like missing a step on a staircase. His eyes are large—dark and doe-like, framed by the messy fringe of his bangs—and they are looking directly at Hokuto with a calm, unbothered expectation.

“Um,” Hokuto says.

His brain has short-circuited. He is trying to find the file folder labeled Standard Social Interaction and instead he is just processing the symmetry of Taiga’s face, the way his eyelashes catch the dull afternoon light, the terrifying fact that he is even better looking in high definition than he is on a screen.

“I…” he starts again, clutching the fabric of his pants. He feels the heat rising up his neck. “It’s… no. It’s not.”

Taiga blinks once. He waits.

“It’s 3:30,” Hokuto stammers, the words tumbling out in a disorganized pile. “The-the ice. They’re still resurfacing. It usually takes 20 minutes, so… um. Not four. Yet.”

He wants to dissolve into the concrete. He sounds like he’s never successfully operated a clock before.

Taiga looks at him for another second—a long, agonizing second where Hokuto is convinced he is cataloging his flushed face, his nervous fidgeting, the way he is clearly overwhelmed by his presence—

And then he just nods. 

“Okay,” he says quietly. He looks back down at his game, the spell broken as easily as it was cast, his attention returning to the screen with total, absolute efficiency. The clicking starts up again.

Hokuto stands there, heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird, wondering if he’s supposed to leave or stay, and realizing with a sinking feeling that he desperately, dangerously, wants to stay.

He should say something. The social contract usually demands it, but the silence feels surprisingly architectural, like a room Taiga has built and Hokuto has just stumbled into.

He finds himself running the calculations, trying to find a conversational entry point that doesn’t sound like he's hyperventilating. He knows Taiga celebrated his birthday earlier this month—

December 3rd, which makes him a Sagittarius. Fire sign. Expansion, philosophy, the archer aiming for something distant.

But standing here, he doesn’t feel like fire. He feels more like a stone in a river, water rushing past him without moving him at all. Maybe he has a heavy earth placement in his chart? A Capricorn moon, maybe? Or Virgo rising?

“Hello, I know your birth date from a Wikipedia page and I’m wondering if your emotional reserve is due to Saturn’s influence on your Ascendant.”

No. Absolutely not. He can’t say that. He can’t say anything.

The clicking of the console buttons is the only sound in the world. It’s rhythmic, slightly frantic, which suggests that he’s losing, or winning, or just fighting something Hokuto can’t see.

Hokuto shivers, the cold seeping through his jacket, and instinctively shoves his hands into his pockets. His fingers brush against the disposable pocket warmer. It’s still warm, a small, localized comfort in a world that feels increasingly hostile to his circulation. He clutches it, letting the heat bleed into his palm, and pulls out his phone just to have somewhere to look that isn’t Taiga's profile.

The screen lights up. One new message from Mayuyu.

Moon is void of course today, the text reads, followed by a series of sparkle emojis that feel aggressively cheerful given the context. Don’t start anything new. Stick to routine. If you feel weird, it’s just the cosmos taking a nap.

Hokuto stares at the screen. Don’t start anything new. Well, that feels like a direct indictment of his entire presence at Senior Nationals.

Then the phone buzzes again—a sharp, short vibration that makes him jump.

Dad: I’m by the vending machines. Where are you?

The text is simple, punctuation perfect. Typical Yosuke Matsumura. But Hokuto reads the subtext immediately: I am waiting. The clock is running. We are wasting time.

The guilt, which had been hovering at a polite distance, comes rushing back in. He’s standing here freezing while his father waits, likely checking his watch, likely worrying about his focus.

He shoves the phone back into his pocket. He has to go. He has to go right now.

Hokuto turns toward the door, his movement sudden and jerky, but the motion catches in his peripheral vision.

Taiga has stopped clicking. He’s lowered the game console. He isn’t looking at Hokuto; he’s looking at his own hands. They’re red—the knuckles pale, the skin looking tight and uncomfortable in the way skin gets when the temperature drops below five degrees. He sets the console on the ledge of the wall, balancing it precariously, and rubs his hands together. It’s a slow, stiff movement. The friction makes a dry, rasping sound.

Skaters know that sound. They know what it means when hands get too cold to feel the blade during a catch-foot spin, or when you can’t make a fist properly.

Hokuto doesn’t think. If he thought about it, he wouldn’t do it.

He pulls the warmer from his pocket, and he takes a step toward him.

“Here,” Hokuto says. His voice sounds too loud, or maybe just too sudden.

Taiga looks up, his eyes widening slightly, that terrifyingly calm gaze fixing on him again.

Hokuto thrusts the packet toward him. “It’s… um. For your hands. It’s unused. Mostly.”

Taiga doesn’t move for a second. He just looks at the packet in Hokuto’s hand, then at his face, processing the offer with that same unreadable expression he had when Hokuto told him the time.

Then, slowly, he reaches out. His fingers brush against Hokuto’s palm—his skin is shocking, like ice against Hokuto’s own feverish warmth—and he takes it. “Thanks,” he says, soft and low.

“Right. Yeah. Good luck,” Hokuto says, the words tumbling out in a panicked rush.

He turns and walks away fast, almost running, his face burning with a heat that has nothing to do with the pocket warmer he just gave away.

Don’t start anything new, Mayuyu said.

Hokuto thinks he just ignored the moon.

♐

The banquet hall is warm. The ventilation system is insufficient for the number of people in the room, or maybe the Japan Skating Federation officers generate their own heat.

Taiga is sitting at Table 3. The tablecloth is white. The water glass is sweating. The man at the podium is Vice President Something-or-other, and he is talking about the Spirit of Japan.

He has been talking about the Spirit of Japan for twelve minutes. Taiga has been counting.

He shifts his weight in the chair. His lower back is tight. He should have stretched longer after the exhibition gala, but they rushed the skaters to the buses.

He wants to be upstairs. His Nintendo 3DS is in his bag. He’s currently stuck in the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time. He missed a small key in the central pillar, but he knows exactly where it is. It’s a solvable problem. It requires logic and a precise sequence of actions.

Meanwhile, this banquet is not a solvable problem. It’s an endurance event.

Next to him, Yugo kicks his shin under the table.

Taiga doesn’t jump. He turns his head slowly. 

Yugo is smiling the smile he uses for press photos—wide, bright, completely synthetic. He tilts his head almost imperceptibly to the left. “Look at Juri,” he murmurs, barely moving his lips.

Taiga looks. Juri is sitting on his other side. He’s staring directly at the Vice President with an expression of intense, unwavering focus. His eyes are wide, and he has not blinked in forty seconds.

“He’s asleep,” Taiga says.

“He’s impressive,” Yugo whispers. “That’s a coma with eyes open. It’s a talent.”

“He’s conserving energy.”

“He’s drooling internally.”

Juri blinks then, like a lizard in the sun, and returns to the coma.

Taiga exhales through his nose, not quite a laugh. He looks away just as the Vice President talks about the “winds of Nice.”

He’s going to Nice. The World Championships. It’s a fact that has been true for 24 hours, since the selection announcement. He doesn’t feel anxious about it yet. Coach Sawa will have a plan.

His gaze drifts past Juri, past the untouched bread rolls on Table 4, to the far side of the ballroom.

Table 9. Junior men and the lower-ranked seniors.

Matsumura Hokuto is sitting there.

He finished ninth. Taiga saw his free skate from the monitor in the warm-up area. He popped the lutz. His knees are soft, though. He lands quietly.

He’s not sleeping but listening to the Vice President. He leans forward slightly, his hands folded on the table, absorbing the speech as if it contains actual information. He is wearing a dark suit that fits him. He looks serious.

Taiga watches him. He’s good at watching. It’s how he learned to spin. You watch, you break it down into mechanics, you replicate.

Matsumura Hokuto. Hamamatsu. Seventeen. Taiga learned his age on Wikipedia three days ago. He also learned his height and his coach’s (apparently father’s) name. This was unnecessary data acquisition, but he did it anyway.

Hokuto shifts in his chair, running a hand through his hair. It’s black, slightly long. He looks nervous even when he is sitting still.

Taiga thinks about the loading dock.

The cold. He had been standing there too long, waiting for his practice session, hiding from the noise of the rink. His hands had stopped working properly. He was losing the boss battle because his thumbs were numb.

Then the door opened.

Hokuto had looked terrified. That was the primary assessment. He looked at Taiga like he was a judge or a ghost.

He stammered about the time.

Then he gave Taiga the pocket warmer.

It’s unused, he had said. Mostly.

Taiga looks at his hands now, resting on the white tablecloth.

He’s attracted to him.

Hokuto is cute. He has eyes that look perpetually startled, and a mouth that does something complicated when he tries to be polite. At the loading dock, he had blushed. The red had started at his collar and moved up. Taiga had wanted to touch it.

He didn’t. Obviously. But he kept the pocket warmer. It’s currently in the pocket of his club jacket, hanging in the wardrobe of his room. It’s cold now, a piece of trash. A rational person would have thrown it away.

Taiga hasn’t thrown it away.

He watches him across the room. Hokuto laughs at something the skater next to him says—Lewis, the pairs skater. Hokuto covers his mouth when he laughs. It’s a shy gesture.

“Taiga.” Yugo’s low voice.

Taiga turns back. Yugo is looking at him, not smiling his press smile anymore. He’s looking at Taiga with the specific, attentive look he gets when he thinks Taiga is missing something social.

“What are you looking at?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

“You were staring at the junior table.”

“I was zoning out.”

“You were zoning out very specifically.” Yugo picks up his water glass. “You know you can talk to people, right? You’re allowed to say hello.”

“I have said hello. I said hello to everyone at the mandatory greeting line.”

“You nodded at them. It’s different.”

“Efficient.”

Yugo sighs. He shakes his head, but he drops it, like he always does.

Taiga looks back at Table 9 one more time. Hokuto is looking down at his lap now, probably checking his phone.

Taiga does not need this distraction. He has Worlds in March. He needs to fix the entry into his quad. He needs to work on stamina for the second half of the free skate.

Matsumura Hokuto is a variable he can’t control.

But he remembers the heat of the packet in his hand. He remembers that Hokuto noticed he was cold when he hadn’t said anything.

The Vice President finally stops talking about the winds. There is a ripple of polite applause. Juri wakes up immediately and claps, his timing miraculous.

Taiga claps and stands up.

“You going?” Yugo asks.

“Upstairs,” Taiga says. “Zelda.”

“Socialize, Taiga. Even for just five minutes.”

“No.” He checks the time on the wall clock. 8:00 pm. The speeches are finished. The mingling phase has begun. This is the dangerous part.

He stands up. His chair scrapes against the floor. He adjusts his jacket.

The path to the double doors is clear. He has calculated the trajectory: past the dessert station, around the pillar, exit. If he moves at a steady pace, he can be in the elevator in 45 seconds.

He takes two steps.

“Kyomoto-kun.”

The voice is melodic. It carries a specific frequency that cuts through the ambient noise of the room. It is not a request but a summons.

Taiga stops. He does not sigh. He turns.

Takashima Reiko is standing three feet away, holding a glass of champagne. She is smiling. She is the President of the Japan Skating Federation.

“President Takashima,” Taiga says, bowing.

“Kyomoto-kun,” she says, stepping into his personal space. The distance is now less than two feet. “Leaving so soon? The night is young.”

“Exhaustion,” he says. “Recovery is important.”

“Of course. You’re so disciplined.” She reaches out, her hand landing on his upper arm.

He registers the contact. Her fingers are warm, pressing into the fabric of his suit jacket. He wants to step back, but he suppresses it. President Takashima is friends with the President of ANA, who pays for his flights, the costume designers, the ice time at Meiji Jingu. If he steps back, the funding becomes unstable. If he stays still, the funding remains secure.

So he stays still.

“You were excellent,” she says, squeezing his arm slightly. “The axel… beautiful. A little tight on the landing, perhaps. But the height.”

“Thank you.”

"Kazuya-kun..." She pauses. She looks toward the other side of the room where Kamenashi is talking to the press. Her expression is fond, but it keeps the quality of someone assessing inventory. "He’s wonderful. An artist. But his knees... he’s getting older, no? The body has limits."

Taiga doesn’t answer. Kamenashi Kazuya is 25 and is not old by figure skating standards. He’s the reason half the people in this room became skaters.

“The future,” Takashima says, turning her gaze back to him, “is not just artistry. It’s physics. Four revolutions. You know this.”

“The scoring system requires it,” Taiga says.

“Exactly.” Her fingers move slightly on his sleeve, smoothing a wrinkle that isn’t there. The sensation is like a spider checking a web. “Japan needs a jumper. Someone who can compete with the Russians.” She leans in, and Taiga can smell her heavy floral perfume. “Have you considered Toronto?”

Taiga blinks. “Toronto.”

“The Cricket Club,” she says. “Brian Orser is building something there. Very technical. Very… modern.”

Taiga knows the club. He knows who trains there.

Daniel González, the Spanish skater. Taiga has watched his videos this season, when he switched from Nikolai Morozov to Orser. He has slowed them down to analyze his entry edges. He has a quad salchow that is technically superior to anything currently being jumped in Japan. It’s efficient, consistent.

If Taiga went there, he would see that jump every day. He would learn the mechanics of it.

He would also have to leave Koenji. He would have to live in English, eat food that’s not Japanese. He would have to leave the arcade, his mother, the specific quality of the ice at Meiji Jingu.

It’s a massive variable change.

“It’s a prestigious club,” he says.

“It’s made one Olympic champion and will continue to make more,” she corrects. “We could arrange it. The Federation has resources, and ANA is very interested in your development. They want to see you on the podium in Sochi. Not just participating.”

He looks at her hand on his arm. It’s still there. “It’s a generous suggestion,” she says. “I’d have to discuss it first with my mother and Sawa-sensei.”

“Of course, of course.” She pats his arm twice, then finally, finally drops her hand. The absence of the weight is an immediate relief. “Talk to them. But don’t take too long. Slots fill up. Brian is popular.” She smiles again, one that expects compliance. “Think about the gold, Kyomoto-kun.”

She turns away before he can answer. Her radar has locked onto someone else. Taiga looks. It’s that junior skater from Sendai. He looks terrified.

Taiga exhales. Quietly. Through his nose. He rubs his arm where she touched it. The sensation lingers. He feels like he needs to wash the jacket. Or maybe burn it. 

That would be excessive. He’ll wash it twice.

“She got you.”

Yugo is standing there. He’s holding a plate with two macarons on it. He looks sympathetic.

“She touched my arm,” Taiga says.

“Ah.” Yugo nods. “The clamp. It’s her signature move. Did she tell you that you’re the hope of the nation?”

“She told me I had a tight triple axel and I need to work on my quads.”

“Close enough.”

Juri appears from behind Yugo. He has a glass of orange juice in one hand and a napkin in the other. He looks concerned. “She talks very close to your face,” he says. “I was watching. I thought she was gonna bite you.”

“She might have,” Taiga says. “If my results were better.”

Juri nods solemnly. “She smells like a department store.”

“She does.”

Yugo takes a bite of a macaron. He chews, swallows. He looks at Taiga, reading his face. He’s very good at it, it’s annoying. “What did she want?” he asks. “Besides your soul.”

“She suggested Toronto.”

Yugo stops chewing. “Canada Toronto?”

“There’s no other Toronto.”

“Orser?”

“Orser.”

Yugo makes a low whistle. “That’s big time. González is there.”

“I know.”

“You’d go?”

Taiga looks at the exit. “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s cold.”

“It’s Canada,” Juri says helpfully. “Of course it’s cold.”

“I don’t like the cold,” Taiga says.

“You’d get used to it,” Yugo says. He’s not joking now, looking at Taiga with serious eyes. “If it gets you the quad, Taiga… you’d go to the moon.”

Taiga doesn’t answer him. He’s accurate, and that’s the problem.

He feels the phantom weight of the pocket warmer in his jacket back in the room, the weight of Takashima’s ambition on his arm.

“Kyomoto-senshu!”

The voice is high, cutting through the ambient noise of the banquet hall with the specific frequency of a junior skater.

Taiga turns.

It’s Katsuta Rina from junior ladies. She landed a triple lutz in the short program that the judges graded generously. She’s wearing a dress that is very pink. Behind her is a cluster of three other girls in their banquet dresses, vibrating with the kind of energy that usually precedes a competition or an autograph session.

Rina is holding a phone, her hands shaking slightly. “Can we… can I take a picture?” she asks. She looks at her shoes, then at his face, then at her shoes again.

“Okay.” Taiga nods, adjusting his stance. Weight on both feet. Hands out of pockets.

She squeaks, a noise of pure relief. She steps next to him. “Thank you so much!” she says. “Your axel was… I watched it three times on the monitor.”

“Thank you.”

She holds the phone up. She’s short, so he has to lean down slightly to fit in the frame. He activates the press smile—corners of the mouth up, eyes engaged but not too engaged.

“Wait!”

The shout comes from one of the girls behind her. The one with a ponytail. She is waving at someone over Taiga’s shoulder.

“Get him too!” the ponytail girl says, pushing forward. “Rina-chan, you said you liked his skating too. Get the sandwich shot!”

“Matsumura-senshu!”

Taiga stops, his spine stiffening. He doesn’t turn around immediately. He counts one beat. Two.

Matsumura Hokuto is being physically steered toward them by the ponytail girl. He looks like a person who would prefer to be currently liquid. He’s holding a glass of something that looks like ginger ale, and he is trying very hard not to spill it while being manhandled.

He sees Taiga, and his eyes widen. “Um…”

“Stand there,” the ponytail girl commands, pointing to Rina’s other side.

Hokuto looks at Rina, then at Taiga. He looks at the exit, then steps into position. He’s on Rina’s left. Taiga is on her right.

“Sorry,” he says softly. “For the intrusion.”

“It’s fine,” Taiga says.

Up close, the fabric of Hokuto’s suit looks slightly too large in the shoulders, or maybe he’s making himself small inside it. He smells like hotel soap and something faint, like vanilla. Not the expensive, aggressive perfume of President Takashima. Just clean.

“Okay, smile!” the ponytail girl says. She has commandeered the phone.

Rina is now the color of a tomato. She’s clearly not breathing.

Taiga leans in. Hokuto leans in.

For a second, the geometry of the pose forces proximity. Taiga is aware of his shoulder. It’s not touching his own—Rina’s in the middle—but the space is shared. Hokuto is standing very still. Taiga can see his hand gripping the stem of his glass. His knuckles are white.

Flash.

“One more!”

Flash.

“Okay! Cute!”

They separate immediately. Hokuto takes a half-step back, exhaling a breath he must have been holding since he was dragged over.

“Thank you,” Rina whispers. She looks like she might faint. “Thank you both.”

“Good luck in Junior Worlds,” Taiga says.

“Yeah,” Hokuto says, his voice a low murmur. “Your lutz… it was very high.”

Rina stares at him, her eyes getting huge. “You saw it?”

“I was in the stands,” Hokuto says, rubbing the back of his neck. “The entry edge was nice.”

She beams.

“Matsumura-kun, right?”

Yugo steps into the circle. He has finished his macarons. He occupies the space next to Taiga naturally, closing the gap that the junior girls left when they retreated to giggle over the phone.

Hokuto looks at Yugo and straightens up. The hierarchy reflex, since Yugo is a senior. “Yes. Matsumura Hokuto.” He bows.

“Saw your free,” Yugo says easily. “You have nice knees. Soft landings.”

“Thank you.” Hokuto looks at his shoes. “The jumps were… inconsistent.”

“Everyone’s inconsistent. Mostly the men,” Yugo says. He gestures with his empty plate. “I’m Kochi Yugo. This acts-like-a-statue person is Kyomoto Taiga.”

“We met,” Hokuto says. He glances at Taiga, then away, very fast. “Briefly.”

“Did you?” Yugo looks at Taiga. “When?”

“Loading dock,” Taiga says. “Before practice.”

“Ah.” Yugo nods. “You train in Shizuoka?”

“Hamamatsu,” Hokuto corrects gently. “With the club there.”

Taiga watches him while they talk. Hokuto is doing the thing with his hands again—clasping them in front of him, thumbs rubbing over the knuckles. It’s a self-soothing gesture. He’s taller than Rina, obviously, but he stands like he is trying to take up less vertical space.

Taiga looks at his profile. The line of his jaw is soft but distinct. His eyelashes are long. This is an objective observation. He’s cataloging features.

Hokuto laughs at something Yugo says—quietly, covering his mouth with his hand again.

Cute.

Taiga doesn’t say anything. He stands there, shifting his weight to his left hip, and lets Yugo carry the conversation. It’s safer. If he speaks, he might say something stupid. Or worse, he might say something honest.

A chime sounds over the PA system.

“Attention, please.” The voice is the Vice President again. “Due to venue regulations, all attendees under the age of 21 must vacate the banquet hall by 9:00 PM. We thank you for your participation.”

The room shifts. The juniors and the younger seniors—them—start moving toward the doors. The older officials and skaters stay for the alcohol.

“Curfew,” Yugo says. “The pumpkin carriage awaits.”

“Legally mandated bedtime,” Taiga says. Finally, he can get back to Zelda.

“Well,” Yugo says to Hokuto. “See you when I see you?”

“Yes,” Hokuto says. “Excuse me.” He bows again then turns to go back to his table to get his bag.

They move toward the exit. Juri appears from the crowd, wiping crumbs from his mouth.

“I ate three cakes,” Juri announces. “They were dry.”

“Why did you eat three?” Yugo asks.

“Because they were free. And I can’t resist anything with strawberries.”

They reach the double doors. The air in the corridor is cooler. It’s a relief. The smell of the President’s perfume fades.

Taiga stops. Just for a second.

“What?” Yugo asks.

Taiga doesn't answer. He looks back into the hall.

Rina and her friends are near Table 9. They have cornered Hokuto again on his way out. He has his bag over his shoulder. The ponytail girl is saying something animated.

Hokuto is listening. He isn’t looking at the floor anymore but at Rina.

He smiles.

It’s not the polite smile he gave Yugo, nor the terrified grimace from the photo. It’s genuine. His teeth show. He looks younger, like a person who is capable of joy.

The image hits Taiga in the chest. Like landing a jump on a deep outside edge—that sudden, sharp clarity of balance.

He holds the door open for one second longer than necessary. He records the image. The tilt of his head. The light on his face.

“Taiga?”

He lets the door swing shut. The image is gone.

“Sorry,” Taiga says. “Let’s go.”

He turns toward the elevators. His hand brushes the pocket of his jacket. The warmer is not there—it’s in his room—but the memory of the heat is triggered anyway.

He walks. He doesn’t look back again.

♐

The stream from Minsk is pixelated. The connection buffers every 40 seconds, freezing the skaters in mid-air before skipping forward to the landing. It’s annoying, but it’s also the only way to watch.

Taiga’s history book is open on the desk. He has read the same paragraph three times, but it hasn’t been processed. He needs to study for next week’s final exams, but he pushes the book aside.

On the screen, the scoreboard updates. Juri is currently in first place.

He skated forty minutes ago. Taiga saw how the triple axel was tilted in the air; he opened up too early on the checkout. No combination, but he saved the landing with a deep knee bend that looked intentional but was actually panic mechanics.

The rest was clean. The judges gave him the component scores probably because he has a nice smile and his spins are centered.

He texted Taiga immediately after he got off the ice: I’m gonna die.

Taiga didn’t reply. Juri is currently leading the World Junior Championships, so he’s not going to die. He’s going to lose to the final group, but he won’t die.

The camera cuts to the kiss and cry. Liam Firus from Canada is sitting there. He looks disappointed for falling on the triple axel.

The score comes up. 126.96 for the free skate. Total score puts him above Juri.

Juri is now second, but still within the Top 10.

Before Firus, it was Nishihata Daigo. Daigo is fourteen and was tenth at Senior Nationals. Juri hates him, saying that Daigo has too much energy and talks during the cool-down period. Daigo popped his loop and fell on a transition, and now he’s currently third.

Juri will be pleased about that. He won’t say it because he’s nice, but he’ll be pleased.

Taiga checks the time. 9:12 PM. The ice resurfacing is finishing in Minsk. The final group is next.

There’s a knock on the door. He doesn’t turn around.

“Taiga?”

“It’s open,” he says.

His mother comes in, carrying a tray. Sliced rabbits made of apples and a cup of hojicha. She places it on the desk next to the history book. She glances at the book, then the laptop. “Studying hard?”

“Multitasking.”

“How’s Juri-kun?” She leans against the desk, looking at the screen. The feed is currently showing a Zamboni driving into the tunnel.

“Second,” Taiga says. “For now.”

“That’s wonderful.”

“He two-footed the axel and missed the combo.”

“Still not bad considering that’s his only mistake.” She smiles, smoothing his hair back from his forehead. “Who’s left?”

“The final group.”

She looks at the start list on the side of the screen. Her finger traces the names. Yan Han. Joshua Farris. Chris White. “Ah,” she says. “And the boy from Hamamatsu. Matsumura-kun.”

Taiga stops tapping his finger against the desk. “Yeah.”

“He was lovely at Nationals,” she says. “Do you remember? His knees are very soft. He lands like a cat. And he was so polite in the interviews.”

Taiga remembers Nationals, but he remembers the loading dock, the gray concrete and the cold that made his knuckles ache. He remembers Matsumura Hokuto standing there, looking like he wanted to be anywhere else, his face pale except for the flush rising from his collar.

“He’s consistent with components,” Taiga says. “His jumps are the variable.”

“He has a nice quality,” Hiromi says. “Artistic. Like you, but… different. Less intense. Softer.”

She keeps using that word. Soft. It’s not the word that Taiga would use.

“He skates fourth,” he says instead.

“Well. Eat your apples.” She taps the desk. “Don’t stay up too late. You have early practice. Sawa-sensei wants to run the free skate.”

“I know.”

“Goodnight, Taiga.”

“Night, Mom.”

She leaves. The door clicks shut.

Taiga picks up an apple rabbit, eating the ears first. On the screen, the announcer speaks in Russian, then English. “Gentlemen, your six-minute warm-up begins.”

The skaters emerge from the boards. Farris in the blue costume. Yan in loud geometric print.

Then, red.

Matsumura Hokuto is on the ice in his Firebird costume.

The costume is a lot. It is a deep, burning ombre—black at the pants, fading into charcoal, then bursting into crimson and gold at the chest. There are feathers, or fabric cut to look like feathers, wrapping around his ribs. One sleeve is sheer black. The other is solid red. The neckline is low, cut in a jagged V.

It’s dramatic and theatrical. It’s the kind of costume that demands you to look at it.

Hokuto skates to center ice, does a quick turn, and strokes backward.

The stream buffers. The image freezes. Hokuto is caught in a crossover. His head is turned, looking over his shoulder. The pixelation blurs his features, but the silhouette is distinct. The red sleeve cuts a line against the white ice.

The stream resumes.

He transitions into a layback spin. His flexibility is good. His back arches. The red fabric stretches.

Taiga leans forward, putting the apple core on the tray.

He looks different than he did at the banquet. At the banquet, he was trying to disappear inside his suit. He was making himself smaller.

On the ice, in the red, he’s not small.

The announcer lists his season’s best. It’s lower than Taiga’s. Technically, he’s not a threat. His base value is lower, and he doesn’t have a quad in the planned content.

Taiga knows this. He checked the protocols.

So there’s no reason for his pulse to be doing this.

The warm-up continues. Hokuto pops a lutz. He lands a double axel with that knee bend that his mother likes. It’s deep. He holds the running edge for a long time, drifting across the ice without checking out.

It’s beautiful.

Taiga exhales through his nose.

The stream freezes again during the six-minute warm-up. When it reconnects, the ice is empty.

Yan Han is first.

He’s fast, covering the ice with terrifying efficiency that Taiga respects even through the pixelated feed. His opening quad toe loop is massive. The stream buffers on the landing of his triple axel, but the takeoff was textbook.

He makes a mistake late in the program. The three-jump combination. He rushes the timing on the final double toe, steps out.

It doesn’t matter. Taiga does the math in his head as Han hits his final pose. The base value on the quad and the axel is sufficient to buffer the error.

The score comes up. Season’s best. He moves into first place.

Taiga sips the hojicha. It’s gone cold, but he drinks it anyway.

Two more skaters pass. He watches them, but he doesn’t file the details. They’re noise. He’s waiting for the red costume.

The camera cuts to the boards.

Hokuto is standing there.

He looks different than he did on the ice during warm-up. The red geometric pattern on his chest seems too loud for the person wearing it. He’s pale, the kind that comes from oxygen deprivation. His hands are gripping the top of the boards.

He’s vibrating. Taiga can see it even on this low-resolution screen.

Next to him is his father. Matsumura Yosuke. Taiga knows the face from old VHS tapes that Coach Miyauchi used to make him watch.

Look at the knee bend, Coach Miyauchi would say. Look at the discipline.

Yosuke says something. Hokuto shakes his head. He looks like he might be sick.

This is difficult to watch. You can’t skate if you are fighting your own autonomic nervous system.

Taiga taps his index finger against the desk. Breathe, he thinks, which is not something he says to screens.

Yosuke reaches out, taking Hokuto by the shoulders. He pulls Hokuto’s attention away from the ice, away from the judges, and centers it. He speaks low.

Taiga can’t hear the words over the static of the stream and the crowd noise in Minsk, but he sees the effect. Hokuto flinches, then settles. He nods.

Yosuke lets go. He slaps the confounding red fabric on Hokuto’s back—a sharp, percussive sound to wake the muscles.

Hokuto pushes off the boards and skates to center ice.

The transition is so immediate that it’s startling. The moment his blades establish their own rhythm away from the wall, the pale, vibrating boy disappears. The posture corrects itself. The shoulders drop. The chin lifts. He’s not shaking, nor looking for an exit.

He stops at center ice. He raises his arms. The starting pose. He looks entirely unclaimed by the world around him. He’s just there, waiting for the music.

Taiga stops tapping his finger.

The arena goes quiet. The stream stops buffering.

The music starts.

Stravinsky’s Firebird is a warhorse. Every junior man with a dramatic streak and a red shirt eventually skates to this. It usually results in a lot of flailing arms and frantic crossovers to catch up with the brass section.

Hokuto pushes off, and the first stroke is deep. He finds the rhythm immediately. It isn’t frantic. It’s heavy, in a way that shouldn’t work for someone built like that, but gravity seems to apply differently to him. He sinks into the ice instead of skimming over it.

His first element is a triple axel-double toe loop. The entry is complex. Steps, turn, takeoff. He holds the edge.

He goes up. The rotation is tight.

He comes down, and his right knee gives way. A soft, hydraulic compression. He checks out the landing on a deep outside edge that curves halfway across the rink. No scratch. No skid. Just silence and flow.

“Nice,” Taiga says quietly. He picks up an apple rabbit, holding it by the ears.

Hokuto moves into the second triple axel. It’s solo this time. He launches it. The air position is good—legs crossed tight, arms in.

He lands it. Same knee. Same quiet exit.

The stream buffers for a split second, turning his spin into a smear of red pixels, but when it clears, he’s in a flying sit position. His free leg is high, his back arched. He’s hitting the musical accents with his hands.

It’s irritatingly competent.

Coach Miyauchi always said jumping is physics, but skating is geometry. You simply have to trace the correct shapes on the floor. Most people trace scribbles.

Hokuto is tracing calligraphy. He exits the spin and goes into the straight-line step sequence. This is usually where programs die. Skaters get tired. They stop performing and start counting steps.

But Hokuto accelerates. He throws his upper body back, arms wide, throat exposed to the ceiling. It’s dramatic. It’s The Firebird, so it’s allowed to be dramatic, but he commits to the movement with a sincerity that borders on dangerous. If he catches a toe pick now, he’ll break something.

He doesn’t care. He leans into a rocker turn so deep that his boot must be scraping the ice.

The edge quality is offensive. It’s smooth, deep, and generates speed from nothing. He isn’t pushing. He’s just shifting his weight, and the skate responds like an extension of his nervous system.

Taiga puts the apple slice down. His hand is gripping the edge of the desk.

Hokuto passes the halfway mark. The music shifts.

Change-foot camel spin. He centers it immediately. He changes edges on the blade, and Taiga can see the shift even on the low-resolution video.

Now the combination—triple lutz-double toe. It’s in the second half, so he gets bonus points.

Hokuto sets up. The entry is long. He looks tired. Taiga can see the lag in his shoulders.

Don’t rush it, Taiga thinks.

He taps for the lutz. He goes up.

The axis is wrong. He’s leaning too far forward. The rotation is there, but the landing is blind.

He hits the ice on the lutz, fights to hold the edge, and forces the triple toe loop immediately.

He doesn’t have the height. He lands the toe loop, but the rotation isn’t fully checked. His free foot comes down.

Two-footed.

Taiga clicks his tongue. Sloppy. He threw a point, maybe two, there.

Most juniors would panic. They would scramble. They would rush the next element to make up for the mistake.

Hokuto pushes back into the choreography. He recovers the flow within two strokes. He transitions into the triple salchow like the mistake never happened. It’s a mental reset that takes seasoned seniors years to learn, and he just did it in three seconds.

Triple flip-double toe. Clean.

Triple lutz. Clean.

Double axel. Clean.

The music builds to the finale. The famous crescendo. The brass instruments are screaming.

He spins. Combination spin. Change foot. Sit. Camel. Upright.

He speeds up as the music gets louder. He’s blurring on the screen again, like a red tornado.

He stops into his final pose. Arms out. Chest heaving.

The crowd in Minsk is screaming.

Hokuto drops his arms. He’s gasping for air. His hair is a mess, stuck to his forehead with sweat. He looks exhausted, like he left his lungs on the ice.

Then, he smiles. A small one where his canines are visible. He looks surprised, as if he just woke up and found himself in Belarus wearing a bird costume.

Taiga’s chest does something strange. He frowns and presses two fingers against his sternum. The heartbeat is irregular. Maybe the hojicha.

On the screen, Yosuke is at the boards, clapping. He doesn’t look like a coach measuring angles. He looks like a father.

Hokuto bows and skates to the exit. He stumbles a little on the toe pick, catches himself, and laughs.

He’s ridiculous. He just two-footed a combination that could cost him the World Junior title, and he’s laughing at a toe pick.

Taiga leans back in his chair. The tension in his shoulders releases all at once, leaving him tired. “Well,” he says to the empty room.

The replay starts, and the commentators continue talking.

“A few technical gremlins in that combination,” the voice says. “But look at the quality of that skating skill. The knees. The edges. That is a mature performance.”

Yes. Taiga knows.

“With a bit more polish on the jump landings,” the commentator continues, “we could be looking at a serious rival for the rising Taiga Kyomoto when this young man moves up to seniors next season.”

Taiga’s hand freezes over the mouse. He looks at the screen. Hokuto is sitting in the kiss and cry, holding a water bottle with both hands. He looks harmless. Soft.

Rival.

Taiga is currently the third best in Japan. He’s making his debut at Worlds in three weeks. His triple axel is bigger, and he has a quad.

Matsumura Hokuto had decent jumps and a nice knee bend.

But the commentator isn’t wrong. The component scores will be high. If he fixes the axis on the lutz…

Taiga narrows his eyes.

The score comes up.

Total Segment Score: 147.23

Total Score: 221.97

Personal Best

Hokuto covers his mouth with his hands. Yosuke pats him on the back. It’s a solid score. It puts him in second place, behind Yan Han. He’s up for a medal.

There are four skaters left. Chris White. Joshua Farris. They are consistent and will likely push Hokuto off silver medal contention.

But 221 is not a junior score. That is a score that survives in the senior circuit.

Hokuto waves to the camera. He looks happy.

Chris White is next. His ponytail whips around his head like a kinetic weapon during his spins.

His flexibility is biologically improbable. When he does the split jump, his legs exceed 180 degrees. It’s flashy, and the crowd in Minsk loses its mind. It’s not checking off the quad box, but the GOE will be massive. He skates clean, or close enough to it.

The score comes up. It puts him in third.

Joshua Farris falls on the second triple axel. It’s a bad fall, the kind that rattles your teeth just watching it. He drops below the podium.

It’s done.

Yan Han wins gold. Matsumura Hokuto, silver. Chris White, bronze.

Taiga stares at the list. Juri finished ninth. He’ll inevitably send a text with a crying emoji later for costing Japan one less spot for Junior Worlds next year—then maybe blame it on Daigo, who sits in tenth.

The stream cuts back to the ice. They’re setting up the podium.

Taiga should close the laptop. He has morning practice. Coach Sawa wants to drill the step sequence at 6 AM, and she has sharp hearing for fatigue. If he’ll slow, she’ll make him run it until his edges stop screaming.

He doesn’t close the laptop.

The skaters glide out for the ceremony. Hokuto stands on the silver podium tier. He looks taller than Chris and Han. He looks awake.

When they announce his name, he steps up and waves. The official places the medal around his neck.

The stream buffers, freezing Hokuto in a frame where his head is bowed. When it resumes, he’s lifting the medal. He holds the silver disc in his palm, staring at it.

He doesn’t bite it or grin at the cameras with his teeth showing. He just looks at the metal like he’s trying to read a very small inscription written on the rim. His expression is complicated, like the look of someone realizing that the object has weight.

He runs his thumb over the surface of the medal, then lets it drop against his chest. He looks up.

For a second, he looks directly into the camera. The pixelation smears his eyes into dark blurs, but the expression gets through. It’s soft.

There’s that word again. He looks unguarded. Grateful.

Taiga’s chest does that thing again. A sharp, distinct contraction behind his sternum that has nothing to do with blood flow.

It’s annoying.

He shoves his chair back, the rubber wheels catching on the floor mat. “It’s late,” he says out loud, his voice sounding flat in the quiet room. “Go to sleep.”

It’s definitely sleep deprivation. He’s been staring at a glowing screen for three hours, and the blue light is messing with his cortisol levels. That’s the only logical explanation for why his pulse is currently sitting at 90 beats per minute while he’s sedentary.

He reaches for the mouse to close the window.

His hand hovers.

Instead of closing the browser, he minimizes it. He clicks on the folder on his desktop labeled DATA. Subfolder: Protocols. Subfolder: 2011-2012 Season.

He opens the PDF for the Senior Grand Prix Final. His protocol from Quebec.

He scrolls down to the Free Skate score.

Total Segment Score: 166.49.

He opens the Junior Worlds results in a separate window.

Matsumura Hokuto. Total Segment Score: 147.23.

He puts the windows side by side.

He’s almost 20 points ahead. Technically, Hokuto is not a threat. His components are high for a junior—suspiciously high—but he lacks the base value. He doesn’t have the quad toe and the experience.

Taiga looks at the numbers. The math is safe. The hierarchy remains vertical. He’s at the top; Hokuto is somewhere else.

He looks back at the minimized stream. Hokuto is skating a victory lap, holding a Japanese flag. The flag is tangled around his arm. He’s laughing, trying to free his hand.

Taiga saves the Junior Worlds protocol into a new folder. He names the folder Watchlist.

He closes the laptop. He can beat Matsumura Hokuto.

But he’ll keep the file. Just in case.

♊

The living room at 11:00 at night has a particular quality of light that Hokuto has never been able to paint accurately—the blue-white wash of the television against the dark walls, the way it makes everything look slightly underwater. The volume is low because his mother went to bed two hours ago, and Shintaro fell asleep somewhere around the second group.

He’s in Tomoya’s old room now. Yosuke carried him there—just scooped him up with one arm under his knees, the other behind his back. Shintaro didn’t even stir, just made a small sound and turned his face into Yosuke’s shoulder.

Hokuto watched them disappear down the hallway and thought about how his father used to carry him like that, years ago, after late-night competitions when he’d fall asleep in the car. The memory has a warm, golden quality to it, and he held it for a moment before letting it go.

His father hasn’t come back yet. Hokuto can hear him in the kitchen preparing tea. On the screen, the six-minute warm-up is underway.

Six skaters circling the ice at Nice, and Hokuto is watching from his living room floor in Hamamatsu with a blanket pulled over his knees and the remnants of the onigiri his father made earlier sitting on a plate beside him, and it feels impossible, the distance. Not just the geographical distance, not just the fact that this is happening right now, at this moment, in a building he’s never seen in a country he’s never been to, while he sits here in sweatpants on a Saturday night.

The competitive distance, too. The gulf between where he is and where they are.

He won the Youth Olympics in January. He stood on the top of the podium in Innsbruck, and his father cried in the stands, and he thought, for one luminous, impossible moment, I’m real. I belong here.

And then earlier this month, at Junior Worlds in Minsk, he took the silver. It should have felt like a triumph, but instead, it felt like a question he couldn’t quite answer. Close, but close to what?

And now his season is over. Three weeks of catching up with schoolwork, sleeping in past six for the first time in months, letting his body remember what it feels like to not be in pain. His muscles have softened just slightly, the way they do during rest periods, and he’s been painting more.

Next season, he goes senior.

On the television, the camera pans across the warm-up group, and the Japanese commentators are doing what Japanese commentators do—speaking in that particular register of controlled enthusiasm, narrating each skater’s warm-up jumps with the precision of surgeons describing an operation.

Adam Rippon attempts a triple axel and two-foots the landing. Kevin Reynolds launches something with so many rotations that Hokuto loses count. The camera cuts briefly to Denis Ten, then to Jeremy Abbott, who looks focused and slightly haunted in the way Abbott always looks, like he’s having a conversation with himself that isn’t going well—

And then the camera finds Taiga.

Hokuto stops breathing. He actually stops breathing, and he hates that he does this, that this is apparently just a thing his autonomic nervous system does now whenever he sees him, as if his body has decided independently that oxygen is optional in his presence.

He’s wearing that Romeo costume—dark, fitted, with a subtle embellishment across the chest that catches the arena lights in small bursts. His hair is pushed back from his face. He’s gliding through the warm-up with that quality he has, the way he moves as if the ice isn’t a surface he’s skating on but a medium he’s moving through, like water.

He does a triple axel. The height is—god, the height. He hangs in the air for what feels like a full breath longer than physics should allow, and the landing is deep and silent, the kind of landing that makes the ice look soft.

“Kyomoto-senshu’s triple axel continues to be one of the finest in the world,” the commentator says.

Yes. Obviously. You could set a clock by that axel. You could calibrate instruments with it.

“He’s improved the entry.”

Hokuto didn’t hear Yosuke come back. He’s standing in the doorway holding two mugs, and he’s watching the screen with that particular expression he gets when he’s analyzing technique—eyes slightly narrowed, head tilted, the same face he makes when he’s watching Hokuto's footage back.

“The—the entry?” Hokuto manages, pulling his attention away from the screen with an effort that he hopes looks casual.

“Into the axel.” Yosuke sits down on the couch, setting both mugs on the table. He pushes one toward Hokuto. “Last time I saw it, at Nationals, he was entering from a back crossover. Now he’s using a spread eagle. More difficult, but better flow.”

Hokuto takes the mug, the warmth seeping into his palms. “I noticed that,” he says, which is a lie—he was too busy having a cardiovascular event to notice the entry edge—but it sounds right, and his father nods.

“Watch his shoulders when he lands,” Yosuke says. “Perfectly square. That’s hours and hours of work.”

Hokuto watches. Taiga does another pass—triple lutz-triple toe —and yes, he can see it now, the absolute stillness of his upper body on the landing, the way everything above the waist stays quiet while everything below absorbs the impact. It’s control, discipline. It’s beautiful in the way a well-built bridge is beautiful— functional elegance, nothing wasted.

Mercury is in Aries now. He checked this morning, out of habit. Mayu confirmed it in their group chat with a string of fire emojis and the message: bold communication, impulsive action, say the thing you’ve been afraid to say!

Which feels cosmically ironic given that the thing he’s afraid to say is the thing he’s most afraid to say, the thing he has never said to anyone, the thing that lives in the locked room at the center of his chest where he keeps the knowledge that he is—

The warm-up ends. The skaters file off the ice. The camera lingers on Taiga as he steps through the gate, and for a split second—so brief that Hokuto might have imagined it—he looks directly into the lens.

His eyes are calm. Dark and steady and completely unreadable, the way they were on the loading dock when he looked up from his game and asked about the time, the way they were at the banquet when Hokuto stood next to him for the photograph and forgot how his lungs worked.

He wonders if Taiga still has the pocket warmer. Or maybe he threw it away.

He wonders why he’s wondering about this at 11:00 at night while his father sits three feet away analyzing jump entries, why the memory of those cold fingers brushing his palm has taken up permanent residence in a part of his brain that should be dedicated to more important things, like his senior debut choreography or the quad he’s supposed to debut next season—

“You’ll be in that group next year,” his father says quietly.

Hokuto looks at him. Yosuke is watching the screen, but his expression has shifted — softer now, less analytical. He's holding his mug with both hands the way he does when he's thinking about something that isn’t skating.

“Maybe,” he says.

“Not maybe.” Yosuke looks at him, his eyes warm in the television light. “You’re ready, Hokuto.”

The words land somewhere deep, in the place where Hokuto keeps the things his father says that he wants to believe but is afraid to examine too closely. Because if he holds them up to the light they might turn out to be hollow, or conditional, or meant for a version of him that he’s not sure he can sustain.

“Let’s see,” he says instead.

On the screen, the first skater takes the ice. Adam Rippon, in a blue costume, strikes his opening pose.

But Hokuto isn’t watching Rippon. He’s thinking about Taiga in the hallway behind the boards, pulling on his blade guards, his fingers—Are they warm enough?—and he’s running the calculations he always runs, the ones that aren’t about scoring or technique or competitive placement but about something else entirely, something he doesn’t have a category for, something that lives in the space between admiration and the word he won’t use—

His father settles back into the couch. The tea steams between them. The broadcast continues.

Hokuto pulls the blanket tighter around his knees and waits for Taiga’s turn to skate.

The quad salchow has been Rippon’s ghost all season. He loads into it with that hopeful energy he carries, all long limbs and optimism, and for a moment in the air it looks like maybe this time, maybe—

But no. The landing crumbles. He goes down hard, one hand on the ice, his momentum carrying him sideways. The Japanese commentators make a sympathetic sound, almost in unison.

His father says nothing, just tilts his head slightly, the way he does when a fall confirms something he already expected but wished wouldn’t happen.

Rippon recovers and finishes the program. Scores first because in total scores because his short program score saved him.

Kevin Reynolds is next, and here the trouble is different. The triple axel, which should be his bread and butter, comes out under-rotated and tight, the landing forced rather than received.

His father leans forward. “He’s muscling it. Too much upper body.”

Hokuto nods. He thinks about his own triple axel, the inconsistency that’s been haunting his training all season, and he files this observation away.

Reynolds finishes with a score that puts him in first temporarily.

And then Denis Ten takes the ice, and the evening shifts.

Ten surprises everyone. He skates like someone who has decided, in the last 20 minutes, that tonight is his night. The jumps are clean, one after another, with an ease that makes the difficulty invisible. He bobbles a combination, but it’s the only visible error. The rest is so assured that the mistake feels like a comma in an otherwise flawless sentence rather than a crack.

He finishes first.

His father makes an approving sound.

Jeremy Abbott follows, and Abbott is the one who always makes Hokuto feel something complicated. His artistry is extraordinary, his movement quality is among the best in the world, and his jumps betray him with a regularity that seems cosmically unfair.

Tonight is no exception. A popped triple axel becomes a single. A planned combination dissolves. The music, which is gorgeous and which Abbott inhabits with his whole body, deserves a program that isn’t falling apart around it. Watching him try to hold the performance together while the technical elements crumble is like watching someone paint a masterpiece on a canvas that keeps tearing.

He finishes second behind Ten, which the commentators note with the carefully neutral tone of people who know the free skate will decide everything.

And then—

“Next to skate, representing Japan—Taiga Kyomoto!”

His father straightens.

Hokuto realizes that he’s been holding his mug for the last 15 minutes without drinking from it and the tea has gone lukewarm. He sets it down. His hands are not entirely steady, which is ridiculous, because he’s not the one skating, there’s no reason for his pulse to be doing what it’s doing—

Taiga takes his opening position at center ice. The Romeo costume catches the light. He’s utterly still, and for a moment, before the music starts, there’s just him and the ice and the silence, and something in Hokuto’s chest pulls tight like a string being tuned.

The music begins.

And he is—god. He’s better than Nationals. Whatever adjustments he and his choreographer have made in the months since Hokuto last saw him compete, they’ve deepened something. The opening choreographic sequence flows into the first element with a seamlessness that makes the transition invisible, as if the jumps aren’t interruptions in the program but natural extensions of the movement—

The quad toe loop. He loads into it from a spread eagle—the entry Yosuke noticed during warm-up—and the takeoff is clean and decisive, and the rotation is tight and centered, and the landing—

The landing is silk.

“Beautiful,” his father says, almost under his breath.

The triple axel follows, and again, that impossible height, that hang time that makes Hokuto’s stomach drop even through a screen. He lands it on one foot, deep edge, the free leg extended behind him like punctuation.

The transition out flows directly into skating, no pause, no reset, just continuous motion, and Hokuto realizes his hands are tracing something in the air—the arc of the jump, the line of the landing—and he folds them into his lap before his father notices.

Triple flip. Clean. Triple lutz-double toe. The combination is tight and quick, the second jump punched out with a confidence that borders on casual, as if he’s merely mentioning it in passing rather than executing something that requires extraordinary precision.

And then the circular step sequence begins, and—

Something changes.

It’s subtle, but Hokuto sees it immediately. The steps are technically identical to what he’s seen at Nationals, but the way he's moving through them is different. There’s an urgency that wasn’t there before, a reaching quality, as if the choreography is asking a question that doesn’t have an answer.

His arms extend toward something. His body follows. The music swells, and Taiga is skating as if he’s trying to touch something he can’t quite reach.

It’s Romeo. It’s longing. It’s—

Hokuto wonders what Kyomoto Taiga knows about unrequited love.

He doesn’t know anything about Taiga’s personal life. He doesn’t know if he’s dated, if the emotion in the choreography comes from experience or from Yoshikawa Sawa’s artistic direction or from some private well of feeling that he opens only on the ice.

But watching him move through this sequence, Hokuto thinks—no, he feels—that Taiga understands something about wanting. About the distance between reaching and arriving. About the particular cruelty of being close enough to see something clearly and not close enough to—

He falls.

The gasp comes from Nice—Hokuto can hear it through the broadcast, that collective intake of breath from an arena full of people—and it comes from him, too, his hand flying to his mouth before he registers that he’s moved.

It’s the step sequence, not a jump. A deep edge catches wrong, his blade skids, and he goes down on one hip with a gracelessness that is shocking precisely because everything until this moment has been so precise. The commentators exclaim. His father leans forward, his mug forgotten on the table.

“Oh,” Hokuto says, which is not adequate, but it’s all he has because his throat has closed around something that feels disproportionate to the situation—

But Taiga is already up. He’s up in a motion so swift it almost integrates into the choreography, as if the fall were a deliberate descent and the rise were the point all along.

His expression hasn’t visibly changed. The camera is close enough now that Hokuto can see his face, and there’s nothing there except the focused blankness of someone who has decided, in the space of a single breath, to continue as if the world didn’t just tilt.

The triple axel-triple toe combination comes next in the layout, and Hokuto thinks—he can’t, not after that—but he sets up for it, the backward crossovers building speed, and—

He nails it. The axel is enormous. The triple toe snaps out clean. The landing is deep and sure and absolutely unforgiving of whatever just happened, as if his body has decided to answer the fall with something unarguable.

Hokuto exhales. He didn’t know he was holding his breath again.

His father sits back. “Strong,” he says simply.

The rest of the program unfolds like something inevitable.

Triple salchow. Textbook landing.

Triple loop. Quality lift. Deep landing.

There’s a beat of stillness before the transition carries him into the next element, and Hokuto realizes he’s stopped trying to analyze what he’s seeing and has simply started watching, unable to look away because the thing happening in front of him is too large and too beautiful for any response other than presence.

The music swells. Strings—layered and rich and aching with something Hokuto can feel in the base of his spine, in the hollow space behind his sternum where he keeps the things he doesn't know how to name. Taiga opens his arms and skates.

Not performs. Not executes. Skates, in the purest sense of the word, the way skating exists before it gets broken into elements and levels and point values. He covers the ice with long, sweeping strokes that use the full surface, and there’s an abandon in it now, a freedom that wasn’t present earlier.

The fall shook something loose, maybe. Or maybe this is what was always underneath the precision, waiting for the final 90 seconds to emerge: Kyomoto Taiga skating as if no one is watching and everyone is watching and both things are true simultaneously.

Hokuto has chills. Actual, physical chills, the kind that start at the back of his neck and run down his arms, and his eyes are—god, his eyes are burning, which is—which is absurd, he is sitting on a living room floor watching a television broadcast of a man he’s spoken to once, a man to whom he gave a pocket warmer in a loading dock and with whom he stood for a photograph at a banquet, and he is tearing up about his choreographic sequence—

The combination spin begins. The final element. He enters with speed that seems reckless but isn’t, and then—

The Biellmann.

He reaches back and catches his blade. His body arcs into the position—one foot on the ice, the other pulled up behind and over his head in that impossible, beautiful line that only a handful of male skaters in the world can achieve—and the spin tightens until he’s a single vertical axis of motion, the music cresting around him, the arena in Nice holding its breath.

Hokuto is pressing his hand over his mouth because something is happening in his chest that he doesn’t have a word for, something that is simultaneously joy and grief and recognition and longing and the specific, devastating awareness that he is watching someone become the thing they were always supposed to be—

The music ends.

Taiga stops. Center ice. Breathing hard, his chest heaving, his arms still extended from the final position.

And then he pumps his fist—a single, sharp, uncharacteristic gesture of pure emotion that breaks through the composed exterior like light through a crack—

And Nice erupts.

The arena is on its feet. All of them. The sound comes through the broadcast with a roar that makes the television speakers distort slightly at the edges, and Hokuto can see flowers and stuffed animals raining onto the ice, and the commentators are talking over each other now, the professional restraint cracking—

“—an extraordinary performance from the 18-year-old Kyomoto-senshu, who in his senior World Championship debut—”

“—despite the fall in the step sequence, the technical content and the artistry of that program could put him in serious medal contention—”

“—Kyomoto Taiga, ladies and gentlemen, remember his name—”

Taiga skates toward the boards. The camera follows him, and Hokuto can see it now—the thing his face does when the performance mask comes off. His jaw is working. His eyes are bright, too bright, and there’s a tremor in his expression that Hokuto recognizes because he knows what it looks like when someone is trying very, very hard not to cry on international television.

He steps off the ice and his coach is there, and she is crying. She has her hands over her mouth and she is crying, and when Taiga reaches her she pulls him into a hug so fierce that for a moment they’re both hidden behind the barrier, just two people holding onto each other while the arena thunders around them.

Hokuto watches Taiga’s shoulders shake once. Just once. Then he straightens, pulls back, nods at something she says, and the composure reassembles itself piece by piece.

“The recovery after the fall was remarkable,” his father is saying, already in analysis mode. Hokuto realizes he's been talking for several seconds and he hasn’t heard a word. “The combination after, that takes nerve. Most skaters would have downgraded. He committed.”

“Yeah,” Hokuto says. His voice sounds strange, like it’s coming from somewhere else in the room.

At the kiss and cry. Taiga sits beside Coach Sawa, a towel draped around his shoulders, his breathing still elevated. He’s looking at the monitor where the scores will appear. His expression has the particular blankness of someone who has given everything they have and is now suspended in the space between effort and outcome, unable to influence what happens next.

The scores flash.

173.99.

Taiga’s eyes go wide.

Then Coach Sawa grabs his arm and shakes it, laughing and crying simultaneously, and Taiga covers his face with one hand—just for a second, just long enough for the camera to catch it—before lowering it and staring at the screen as if the numbers might rearrange themselves.

“Season’s best for Kyomoto-senshu!” the commentator nearly shouts. “173.99 for the free skate—that includes a one-point deduction for the fall—and a total score of 251.06, putting him in first place with seven skaters still to compete!”

First place. With seven to go. At 18 years old. In his senior World Championship debut.

Hokuto feels something land in his chest.

His father picks up his tea. Takes a sip. Sets it down.

“He could be your biggest rival next season,” Yosuke says. He’s looking at the screen where Taiga is still sitting in the kiss and cry, Coach Sawa’s hand on his back, his expression slowly, slowly softening into something that might, from a distance, be called wonder. His father turns to him. “You’ll need your quad toe and triple axel bulletproof by autumn, Hokuto. Whatever else we do this summer. That’s first.”

Hokuto nods. “I know.”

Rival. He knows his father means it as motivation, as the practical language of competitive sport.

But he’s still looking at the screen, at Taiga’s hand pressed against his face for that one unguarded second, and the word rival doesn't fit the shape of what he’s feeling, doesn’t come close to describing the thing that’s been building in his chest since a loading dock in Osaka, since a pocket warmer passed between cold hands, since—

“I know,” he says again, quieter this time.

His father nods and turns back to the broadcast. The next skater takes the ice.

Hokuto picks up his cold tea and drinks it anyway. He doesn’t look at his hands, and he doesn’t think about the word he won't use, and he waits—with everyone else in the world—to see where Taiga lands.

♊

The hotel in Osaka has a lobby that makes you feel that you haven’t been living your life correctly.

It’s the ceiling that does it—vaulted and cream-colored and hung with chandeliers that aren’t ostentatious so much as certain, the way beautiful things always are. The floor is marble. The flower arrangement at the center of the lobby is so architecturally ambitious that Hokuto spent a moment near the entrance just looking at it, tracing the deliberate asymmetry of the branches, the color decisions, thinking: someone made these choices with great intentionality, and then feeling embarrassed because he was standing with his skate bag in the middle of the lobby entrance thinking about ikebana while other guests navigated around him.

He adjusts his grip on the bag strap and crosses toward reception.

He’s a cast member at Stars on Ice Japan. The phrase still doesn’t sit naturally in his mind. He’s seen the posters. He’s watched the televised versions, sitting cross-legged on his bed, eating crackers, watching the cast perform their exhibition programs with a looseness that competitions don’t permit. He understood it as something that happened to other people.

But he got the silver in Minsk, and apparently that’s the currency it requires, so here he is. In a five-star hotel in Osaka.

Meanwhile, his father is in Shizuoka.

This is the part he keeps circling back to. Which is strange, because he’s traveled without his father before, to training camps, to school trips. He knows how to exist without his father nearby. He’s been doing it competently for years.

But he’s discovering that there’s a difference between traveling to compete and traveling to perform, and the distinction is larger than he anticipated. Competitions have structure. They have warm-ups and protocols and judges and the clean grammar of a scoring system that tells you exactly how well you’ve communicated. Ice shows are collaborative and social and dependent on a kind of ease that Hokuto has, he’s realizing, never had to manufacture without his father 20 feet away at the boards.

Coaches don’t follow the skaters to ice shows, Coach Eri had said, when she called to brief him on what to expect. She’d said it gently, the way she says most things to him. That’s not how it works. But you’ll be fine.

The woman at reception smiles at him. “Matsumura-san? We have you checked in. Your room key is ready.”

“Thank you,” he says.

“Ah, one thing.” She consults her screen. “We have you in a shared room. Kinoshita-san’s policy for touring cast members.”

He processes this. “I see.”

“Your roommate has already checked in. Room 714.”

“Of course.” He takes the key card. “Thank you.”

He’s halfway through the elevator when he hears his name.

“Matsumura-kun!”

He turns.

Kamenashi Kazuya is standing near the concierge desk with a canned coffee in one hand and a phone in the other. And he’s just standing there, in the hotel lobby, wearing a navy jacket and looking precisely like himself, which is to say looking precisely like the person Hokuto has watched on televised competition footage approximately 130 times.

The part of his brain that is 17 processes this stimulus and briefly short-circuits. “Kamenashi-san,” he manages.

Kamenashi grins. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I—” Hokuto exhales. “Sorry. I wasn’t expecting—”

“To run into a cast member at the cast hotel?”

“When you put it that way, it sounds—”

“Logical?”

“Yes.” Hokuto covers his mouth briefly, something close to a laugh catching behind his palm. “Sorry. I’m still … adjusting to the situation.”

Kamenashi tips his head toward the sitting area near the windows. “You have a minute before you go up?”

Hokuto does. In fact, he has an afternoon of nothing but unstructured time before tomorrow’s first rehearsal, which is a concept so foreign to his nervous system that he’s been slightly at a loss since arriving at Osaka

He follows Kamenashi to the chairs and sits down carefully, spine straight, and tries not to appear to be doing what he is doing, which is quietly revising everything about this situation in real time.

“Junior Worlds,” Kamenashi says, by way of opening.

“Silver,” Hokuto says. “Yan Han was very clean.”

“He was. I watched.” Kamenashi takes a sip of his coffee, regarding him with genuine interest. “Your step sequence in the free skate was… something else.”

“I two-footed the lutz combination.”

“I didn’t ask about the lutz combination.”

Hokuto looks down at his hands in his lap. His fingers are unconsciously tracing, following the arc of the step sequence in miniature against his thigh. He stills them. “Thank you,” he says, which comes out quieter than intended.

“Have you met everyone yet? Cast-wise?”

“You’re the first person I’ve encountered.”

Kamenashi laughs. “Good. Consider this your orientation.” He leans forward. There’s an ease in his own body that Hokuto has noticed before in skaters who’ve been in the sport long enough to stop performing anything off the ice. “You’ll be fine, Matsumura-kun. Everyone here remembers their first ice show. It’s less formal than you’re expecting. You just skate. Go on tours and eat with people.”

“I’m good at skating,” Hokuto says. “I’m less reliable with people.”

Kamenashi laughs again, more openly this time. “It’s different without your coaching staff, isn’t it? Out here.”

“A little,” Hokuto admits.

“You’ll find your feet.” He says it simply. Then, in a tone that shifts slightly, more offhand: “Kyomoto’s here, you know.”

Hokuto goes very still. “I didn’t know.”

“Bronze at senior Worlds. Of course, he’s invited.” Kamenashi glances at him sideways. “The press has already started, you know. The rivalry framing. The next generation.”

“I know.” Hokuto’s been aware of it since Minsk—the think pieces, the forum discussions, the commentators who have already begun constructing a narrative about two skaters who have met precisely once in a competitive context. He’s been trying not to read them but failing.

“Don’t let them decide who he is to you before you’ve figured it out yourself,” Kamenashi says. “That’s not… advice I got early enough.”

Hokuto looks at him. Kamenashi is looking at the window now, at the light coming through the glass, and there’s something in his profile that suggests he isn’t only talking about the press.

“I won’t,” Hokuto says. Whether that’s true, he’s not entirely sure. What he’s less sure about is whether Kyomoto Taiga can be categorized—by him, by anyone—in the flat, useful way that sporting rivalries require. 

Rival implies a symmetry, a mutual orientation. It doesn’t account for loading docks or pocket warmers or the particular experience of watching someone perform their longing at center ice while you sit on your living room floor unable to swallow.

“Good,” Kamenashi says. He stands, rolling his coffee cup between his palms. “Go drop your things. There’s dinner at seven later.” He grins again, that easy, generous grin. “Welcome to Stars on Ice, Matsumura-kun.”

Hokuto stands and bows, and Kamenashi waves off the formality with casual warmth, and then he’s gone toward the exit, phone out, already onto the next thing.

Room 714.

The elevator arrives within seconds, the doors open with a soft chime, and Hokuto steps inside and presses seven and the doors close. It takes forever in the sense that every second is slightly more loaded than seconds usually are, because Kamenashi said Kyomoto’s here in that offhand way, and Hokuto’s nervous system has been running a quiet, insistent calculation ever since.

He’s probably not in the same wing. The hotel has hundreds of rooms. The probability is low.

He watches the numbers climb.

Room 714 is at the end of the corridor, past a series of identical doors and a small alcove with an ice machine that hums to itself. 

Hokuto stands in front of it for a moment with his key card in his hand, listening.

Nothing.

He presses the card to the reader, the light turns green, and he pushes the door open.

Someone’s bag is already on the bed nearest the window. It’s a plain duffel, navy, with a small kendama resting on top of it.

Hokuto stands in the doorway holding his luggage, skate bag, and key card and something that is not quite a thought yet, more like the shape a thought is about to take—

The bathroom door opens.

Steam follows it out, and then Kyomoto Taiga steps into the room with a white towel wrapped low around his hips and nothing else.

Hokuto’s brain does something that he’s going to be deeply embarrassed about for the foreseeable future, which is—it stops.

Not figuratively. It simply stops producing coherent output.

Taiga is—there’s no sentence that ends well from here. He’s lean muscle and still-damp skin and complete, total unselfconsciousness, because he clearly has not registered that there’s another person in the room yet, and Hokuto is standing near the door, unable to generate a single useful signal to his own body.

His gaze drifts, involuntarily—down the line of Taiga’s collarbone, across the plane of his stomach, lower toward the edge of the towel—

Oh no.

He snaps his eyes to the window so fast he nearly strains something. 

Outside: Osaka. Ordinary mid-afternoon Osaka. Buildings, sky, the distant geometry of the city arranged indifferently beneath him. He fixes his gaze there with the total commitment of a man whose face is currently on fire and who is attempting, with limited success, to convince his body that what just happened was nothing, a glitch, a momentary atmospheric disturbance—

“Oh,” Taiga says, from somewhere behind him. He’s not startled. “You’re my roommate.”

“I’m sorry!” Hokuto squeaks, still addressing the window. “I should have—I should’ve knocked. Or announced—I’m sorry!”

There’s a pause.

“You don’t have to stand like that,” Taiga says.

Hokuto doesn’t move.

He hears Taiga cross the room with unhurried footsteps, and there’s the soft sound of fabric being gathered. Clothes, presumably. From the bag, probably.

Then the bathroom door opens again, and closes, and Hokuto is alone.

He remains facing the window for another four seconds.

Then he sets his bags down very gently on the unclaimed bed, sits beside it, and stares at his own hands and thinks: Mercury is in retrograde.

It’s not. He checked this morning. But it feels like it should be.

♐

Being up at seven in the morning should be a contract violation, but the show organizers don’t seem to care.

Taiga stands near the entrance, adjusting the cuffs of his gray sweatshirt. It’s loud in here. The specific, echoing clamor of twenty elite athletes consuming carbohydrates before a rehearsal is a sound frequency that should be illegal before noon.

He scans the room, ignoring the hostess who is smiling a bit too brightly, and catalogs the geography.

It’s exactly as Kamenashi said. “First two days, everyone sticks to their flag. It’s like high school, but with more medals and lots of English.”

To the left, the North Americans have colonized three tables. They are loud. Tessa Virtue is laughing at something, head thrown back, while Patrick Chan gestures with a piece of toast.

Further back, the Europeans. A tighter formation. Brian Joubert is drinking espresso with a look of existential fatigue that Taiga deeply respects.

And then there’s Scott Moir.

Taiga watches him for a moment. Moir is unrelated to the concept of boundaries. He is currently at the Russian table, then he’s clapping a French pairs skater on the back, then he’s at the buffet making a joke to the omelet chef. He’s a kinetic event.

Taiga briefly wonders what kind of caloric intake is required to sustain that level of extroversion at this hour. It looks exhausting.

He looks away. Not worth the energy.

Taiga moves toward the buffet. He keeps his head down, grabbing a plate. Rice. Miso soup. Grilled salmon. He turns, plate in hand, and locates the Japanese delegation.

They’ve staked out a table near the window, slightly removed from the chaotic energy of the centerpiece tables. Kamenashi is there, looking effortlessly cool even in a tracksuit, talking low to Ishihara Satomi. Satomi is nodding, perfect posture, eating fruit with precise, delicate movements.

And at the end of the table, sitting next to Airi, is his roommate.

Matsumura Hokuto.

Taiga pauses, just for a beat, behind a decorative pillar.

Hokuto is wearing a black hoodie that looks soft. His hair is unstyled, falling into his eyes, and he’s holding a mug with both hands like he’s trying to absorb its heat through osmosis. He looks harmless.

He looks like he’s functioning. Which is an improvement over yesterday.

Taiga takes a bite of a pickled plum from his plate—he hasn’t sat down yet, but he’s hungry—and chews slowly, the sourness waking up his jaw.

He hadn’t thought much of yesterday at the time. He’d showered, dried off, wrapped a towel around his waist because he hadn’t brought his clothes into the bathroom, and walked out. It was a standard sequence of events.

But Hokuto had reacted like he’d walked in on a murder.

Taiga replays the image in his head. The way Hokuto had frozen in the doorway, luggage handle gripped so tight his knuckles went white. The way his eyes had widened—dark, panicked, tracing the line of Taiga’s collarbone before snapping toward the window with a velocity that probably risked whiplash.

He had apologized to the window.

Taiga swallows the plum. A small, dry feeling curls in his chest. It’s amusement.

It was ridiculous and dramatic, an excessive reaction to a very ordinary situation.

And it was… interesting.

Hokuto had looked so sincerely distressed, so completely dismantled by the sight of another person’s skin, that Taiga had to wonder how he survived the locker rooms of any competition. Maybe he just closes his eyes and navigates by echolocation.

Looking at him now, listening to Airi talk while staring into his coffee, Hokuto seems to have reassembled himself. But the defensiveness is still there. He sits with his shoulders drawn in slightly, protecting his center of gravity.

Taiga keeps walking. He navigates through the maze of tables, stepping around Scott Moir—who is now explaining something loudly to a photographer—and approaches the window.

Airi sees him first. “Taiga!” She waves, a bright, energetic motion that threatens to knock over her orange juice. “Over here! We saved you a seat.” She points to the empty chair directly across from her. And directly next to Hokuto.

“Morning,” Taiga says. His voice is raspy; he hasn’t used it yet today. He clears his throat softly.

Kamenashi looks up and nods. “Kyomoto. Sleep well?”

“Fine,” Taiga says. He sets his tray down. “The humidity here is better for my sinuses than Tokyo.”

“It’s the Osaka air,” Kamenashi says, grinning. “Filled with takoyaki steam.”

Taiga pulls out his chair. And then he looks at Hokuto.

Hokuto hasn’t moved. He’s staring at his mug as if the ceramic pattern contains a complex mathematical proof he needs to solve immediately. His posture has gone rigid. The relaxed slouch he had ten seconds ago is gone, replaced by a straight spine and tension radiating from his neck.

“Matsumura,” Taiga says.

Hokuto’s head jerks up.

There it is.

The flush starts at the collar of his black hoodie and climbs up his neck, hitting his cheeks in seconds. It’s fascinating, a physiological betrayal happening in real-time. His eyes dart to Taiga’s face, then to Taiga’s sweatshirt, then—and Taiga notices this—briefly down to Taiga’s hands, before snapping back to eye level.

“Kyomoto-kun,” Hokuto says, his voice cracking on the first syllable. He winces, clears his throat, and tries again. “Good morning.”

He sounds like he’s testifying in court.

Taiga sits down. He adjusts his plate and picks up his chopsticks. “You don’t have to be formal,” bhe says, breaking the grilled salmon. He doesn’t look at Hokuto; he looks at the fish. “We’re sharing a room. It’s too late for kun.”

Next to him, Hokuto makes a noise that sounds like a strangled hiccup.

Airi blinks, looking between them. “Sharing a room? Oh, right! Is it nice? My room with Satomi-san faces the parking lot, which is tragic, but the pillows are okay.”

“It has a window,” Taiga says, glancing sideways. Hokuto is staring straight ahead, rigid, gripping his mug like it’s the only thing tethering him to the earth. The red on his ears is vivid. “Matsumura likes the view.”

Hokuto chokes on his coffee. He puts the mug down firmly, coughing into his fist, his face now actively burning. “I—it’s a nice view,” he manages, his voice strangled. “The city. It’s… geometric.”

“Geometric,” Taiga repeats flatly.

“Yes.”

“Right.”

Taiga puts a piece of salmon in his mouth, feeling the amusement curling in his ribs again. It’s annoying, really. He shouldn’t care. Matsumura has been branded as his rival. He’s an obstacle to the Olympic team, someone who scores high on components and has a knee bend that makes judges weep.

But right now, he’s a disaster. A quiet, flustered, high-functioning disaster who can’t handle eye contact because he saw Taiga’s bare chest one time.

Taiga chews slowly.

He decides, with a detachment he doesn’t fully feel, that he’s going to make this difficult for him.

♊

The shower pressure in the fitness center’s shower room is extraordinary.

This is the thought that Hokuto’s allowing himself right now—just this, just the water temperature and the steam filling the shower room, the clean eucalyptus smell of the hotel soap, the specific relief of standing under hot water after a week that has done things to his nervous system that he’s not sure are reversible.

The Osaka stop is finished. The performance went well. His step sequence landed the way it was supposed to, the audience was warm, and for approximately four minutes at center ice, Hokuto was able to forget that Kyomoto Taiga exists.

Four minutes was the longest he had managed all week.

Hokuto exhales slowly, tipping his head back, letting the water run down the back of his neck. Through the glass door, he can see the entrance to the hotel sauna. He’ll go in after. Sit in the heat and let his muscles unknot and try to achieve something resembling a coherent inner state.

The problem is that every time he gets close to a coherent inner state, he remembers something, and then the coherence collapses entirely.

The first morning at breakfast. That had started it—or continued it, since technically the towel incident started it, but Hokuto’s still not thinking about the towel incident directly because his face starts doing things when he does.

Breakfast, then. “The city. It’s geometric.” He had said that. Out loud. To Kyomoto Taiga, who had looked at him with those flat, unreadable dark eyes and said “geometric” back to him like he was cataloging evidence.

And then it had just… continued. From there.

Because Hokuto had made the mistake, somewhere in those first two days, of underestimating how deliberate Taiga was capable of being.

Hokuto puts his face directly under the shower head and stands there for a moment, water running into his eyes.

It wasn’t dramatic. That’s the thing that made it so effective. Taiga never did anything that would have looked, from the outside, like anything other than ordinary.

During the rehearsal for the group number, they had been running the formation change in the second act, twenty skaters moving through a crossing pattern that required everyone to navigate everyone else in tight succession, and somehow, every single crossing, Taiga found him. A shoulder. A forearm. The back of his hand brushing Hokuto’s wrist when the timing compressed and they passed too close.

And Taiga would just keep moving, expression unchanged, as if it hadn’t happened, as if Hokuto wasn’t standing there in the middle of the ice with his entire nervous system staging a protest.

Taiga had to have known. He had to.

And then the ice cream run.

Hokuto closes his eyes.

Suzuki Airi had organized it. She knew which store had the best soft serve within a four-block radius had recruited four American cast members through a combination of enthusiasm and aggressive use of the translation app on her phone, and somehow Taiga had been there too, which, in retrospect, Hokuto should have recognized as an omen.

Taiga had gotten a matcha soft serve and eaten it slowly.

Hokuto turns the shower handle to cold, briefly and violently, and stands there.

The specific memory of what Kyomoto Taiga did with that edge of that waffle cone is something that Hokuto is actively trying to classify as a random event without meaning or cosmic significance, and he’s failing.

Taiga’s tongue. The deliberate, unhurried way he—

The slight downward cast of his eyes as he—

The fact that he’d looked up directly at Hokuto immediately afterward, as if checking something—

Cold water. Cold water is good. Cold water is clarifying.

Hokuto turns it back to warm.

The thing is: tomorrow they go to Tokyo. The tour continues for another week, where Hokuto will presumably share a hotel room with Taiga again, and he has to find some way to function in a body that has apparently decided to process this specific person as a Category Five atmospheric event.

Hokuto reaches for the shampoo.

Mercury is in retrograde is still not true. He checked again this morning, but he looked up the current Venus transit, and it’s—

Actually he’d rather not finish that thought. The Venus transit is not helping his case.

Hokuto turns off the shower. Stands in the steam for a moment, breathing.

The sauna light glows orange through the glass.

He’ll sit in there until his thoughts slow down. Until the week deposits itself somewhere quieter. Until he can think about Tokyo with something other than the particular dread of a person who is running out of geometric views to stare at.

He wraps himself in the hotel towel, tucks the edge, and pushes open the door.

The sauna is empty.

Hokuto leans back against the wall. Closes his eyes. The heat is immediate and total. It presses into his shoulders, his neck, the tight cluster of tension that’s been living between his shoulder blades since last Monday.

He exhales slowly. The sound of his own breathing, and under that, the soft hiss of steam.

This is manageable. This is a known quantity. Heat and silence and the absence of anyone else.

The cast members had gone out around nine, Kamenashi organizing it, extending the invitation to everyone but anyone below 21.

Taiga, when Hokuto had looked—involuntarily, it was entirely involuntary—had already retreated into their room with his Nintendo DS.

Hokuto hears the shower room door open. The sound of it, and then footsteps, and then water. He doesn’t pay it attention. Maybe one of the cast members or another hotel guest.

He tips his head back against the wooden wall and tries to let his mind go quiet.

It goes to Taiga.

Specifically—and he registers this happening, registers it with a kind of distant horror—to Taiga on the hotel bed last night, lying on his stomach, Nintendo DS held loosely in both hands, headphones in, the backs of his legs visible below the hem of the towel he’d been changing out of when Hokuto came back from the ice.

He hadn’t fully changed. He’d just sat down and opened the game while he was still halfway between one state and another, the towel rucked up around his hips, and his legs were just—

Pale. The particular pale of someone who spends most of their life indoors or under artificial light. Taiga’s thighs had that quality—almost luminous in the lamp light, that kind of pale that doesn’t see much sun, with the lean muscle of a skater’t leg visible in the line of the back of the knee.

Hokuto had looked. He had looked for—

It was a moment, it was a brief moment, he had been very tired and his guard was down and it was—

He’s becoming hard.

Oh no.

Hokuto sits up slightly, like distance from the wooden wall will help, which it doesn’t. He presses the heel of his hand to his sternum. Breathes. Thinks about his step sequence. Thinks about—

The sauna door opens.

The rush of cooler air. The sound of bare feet on the wooden step.

Hokuto opens his eyes.

Taiga, wrapped in the white hotel towel, steps into the sauna.

For a moment, Hokuto doesn’t process what he’s seeing. His brain presents the information—Taiga, towel, sauna—and then just refuses to do anything with it. “Oh,” he manages to say.

Taiga looks at him. The steam has already softened the air between them. His hair is damp, and he has his glasses off, and without them his eyes are — different. Larger somehow. Softer. The doe quality Hokuto has been carefully not looking directly at all week.

“Didn’t think anyone would be in here,” Taiga says. He doesn’t leave.

“I was just—” Hokuto starts, and then doesn’t finish, because he was just what, exactly. There’s no sentence that ends well. “Recovering.”

“Mm.” Taiga steps down onto the lower bench and looks at the space.

There is significant space. The sauna fits maybe eight people. Hokuto is in the far corner and there is, by any reasonable metric, an entire bench worth of distance between them.

Taiga sits next to him.

Not beside him in the general vicinity. Next to him. Close enough that the outside of Taiga’s bare thigh presses against the outside of Hokuto’s bare thigh, and Hokuto feels it in his teeth.

“Good week,” Taiga says, leaning back against the wall.

Hokuto is vibrating. Internally. He thinks externally, he’s probably still. “Yes,” he manages. “The audiences were… responsive.” The heat of the sauna, and the heat of Taiga beside him, are becoming difficult to distinguish.

“Your step sequence was clean,” Taiga says. His foot shifts. His ankle hooks lightly against Hokuto’s.

Hokuto looks at the wall across from them. “I’ve been working on the—the entry. The edge before the first turn.” Taiga’s foot slides slowly along the side of Hokuto’s. “It was too shallow. It needed more—more depth.”

Taiga turns his head slightly. He looks like he’s smiling, but not quite. “More depth,” he repeats.

“In the—the edge.” Hokuto’s voice has dropped. He didn’t mean for that to happen. “You need the right angle or it doesn’t… go in properly.”

There’s a pause.

“Right angle,” Taiga says. His foot has stilled against Hokuto’s, but the pressure is constant.

“I just mean—”

“I know what you mean,” Taiga says quietly. He’s not looking at the wall anymore.

Hokuto makes the mistake of looking back.

Taiga’s eyes, close and without the glasses, and the steam, and the specific quality of attention he’s directing at Hokuto—the heat in the room has become something else entirely. Hokuto’s situation under the hotel towel is becoming visible to anyone paying attention.

Taiga is paying attention. His gaze drops. Returns. The almost-smile completes itself. “Do you wanna take care of that?” he asks.

The question is completely calm. Like it’s a practical observation.

Hokuto opens his mouth. Closes it. Several things happen simultaneously in his chest—

Panic, and I have never done anything like this, and I don’t know what I’m doing, and the clear recognition that this is the kind of thing people regret, the kind of thing that complicates supposed rivalries and ice shows and the rest of the season, that there is almost no version of saying yes that doesn’t cost him something—

“Yeah. Okay.”

♐

The transition from the sauna to the locker room is efficient. Taiga doesn’t rush—rushing implies panic, and he’s not panicking—but he moves with the specific economy of an athlete during a quick turnaround. 

He dries off. He pulls on his joggers and his sweatshirt. He engages the filing system in his head, clearing the decks, categorizing the last ten minutes as preamble and the next ten as execution.

Hokuto, by contrast, is operating with zero economy. 

Taiga watches from the periphery of his vision as Hokuto fumbles with his waistband. He’s managed to get his sweatpants on, but the problem under the fabric hasn’t resolved itself. If anything, the friction of the fabric has made it worse.

Hokuto yanks his hoodie down, tugging the hem as far as it will go, clutching his toiletry bag in front of his groin like a shield.

“Ready,” Taiga states.

Hokuto makes a noise that is barely a syllable, nods rapidly, and keeps the bag clutched tight to his midsection.

They exit the fitness center. The hallway air is cooler, startling against damp skin. Taiga walks at his usual pace. He can hear Hokuto’s footsteps slightly behind him, faster, catching up, then lagging, then catching up again.

Taiga presses the call button for the elevator.

He’s not calm. He appears calm, but under the surface, the engine is revving high. It’s the specific frequency of adrenaline he usually only feels at the six-minute warm-up. The blood is thrumming in his ears. It’s the feeling of standing on the back edge of a blade before a jump, knowing the rotation is locked in.

Hokuto stands beside him, staring aggressively at the floor indicators. He is radiating heat, shifting his weight from foot to foot. The bulge in his shorts is visible even with the bag.

Taiga looks at the reflection in the polished brass doors. He sees himself: composed, hair damp, glasses back on. He sees Hokuto: flushed, erratic, beautiful in his distress.

The elevator arrives with a chime that sounds too loud.

They step in. They’re alone.

Hokuto jams his thumb against the button for the seventh floor. He retreats to the far corner, creating maximum distance.

Taiga says nothing. He doesn’t need to. The silence in the small metal box is thick, heavy with the things they just agreed to without speaking.

He watches the numbers climb. Every floor is a ratchet tightening the spring. He feels the pull of it in his own stomach. He wants to touch. He wants to break the stillness.

But he waits. He holds the moment until it’s ripe.

Ding. Seventh floor.

The walk to Room 714 feels shorter than it did yesterday. Taiga leads. He fishes the key card from his pocket. His hands are steady.

Meanwhile, Hokuto is hovering behind him, practically vibrating.

Taiga slides the card. The light blinks green. The mechanism clunks unlocking.

He pushes the door open and steps into the darkness of the unlit entryway. Hokuto follows, the door clicking shut automatically behind him, sealing out the hallway light, the hotel staff, the world where they are rivals and teammates and polite young men.

In the dark, the air changes.

Taiga drops his bag. He doesn’t turn on the light. He turns on his heel, intercepting Hokuto before he can move three steps into the room.

Hokuto gasps as Taiga steps into his space.

There’s no negotiation this time. Taiga reaches out, grabs the front of Hokuto’s hoodie, and simply pushes.

Hokuto stumbles back, hitting the wall near the closet with a dull thud.

Taiga follows the momentum. He steps in, eliminating the gap, pressing his body flush against Hokuto’s—chest to chest, hip to hip, the hard ridge of Hokuto’s arousal grinding against his own.

Hokuto makes a wrecked, desperate sound, his hands coming up to flutter uselessly against Taiga’s shoulders.

Taiga tilts his head. He finds Hokuto’s mouth in the dark.

And then he kisses him.

Hokuto makes a sound against his mouth—a sharp, startled intake of air that gets trapped between them. It vibrates against Taiga’s lips. But he doesn’t pull away. After the initial freeze, Hokuto pushes back, pressing his mouth against Taiga’s.

It’s sloppy. The pressure is uneven. Hokuto is breathing through his nose too fast, his lips are tense, and there’s a lack of coordination in the tilt of his head. Their teeth click together once, lightly.

Hokuto doesn’t know how to do this. He’s guessing.

Taiga pulls back a fraction of an inch, just enough to catch the heat radiating off Hokuto’s face, then presses in again. The messiness isn't disappointing. It’s informative.

This is likely Hokuto’s first kiss.

He feels a sudden, sharp spike of satisfaction. He hadn’t intended to be the first. But now that he has the information, he finds he likes it. He likes that he’s the one setting the baseline.

It’s different from his own.

The Hague, two years ago. The muffled sounds of the Junior World Championship closing banquet in the distance. He and Airi had found a quiet corridor behind the kitchen service doors. It had been an experiment for both of them, conducted with the mutual, slightly awkward curiosity of teenagers trying to determine if a variable fit.

She had been soft. She smelled like vanilla and hairspray. The kiss had been tentative, but correct.

And he had felt nothing. He had registered the warmth, pressure, the proximity of another person, but the engine hadn’t turned over. The pull wasn’t there.

They had pulled apart, looked at each other, and Airi had laughed, a quiet, bright sound that dissolved the tension. “Just friends?” she had asked.

“Just friends,” he had repeated.

It was the data point that confirmed what he had already known about his own axis of rotation. He didn’t want girls.

He wants this. He wants the frantic, overheated trembling of the boy pinned against the wall.

Taiga waits. He stays close, lips brushing, giving Hokuto the necessary seconds to calibrate. He feels Hokuto’s hands clutch at the sweatshirt, fingers digging in, holding on as if the floor has tilted.

Hokuto softens. His breathing hitches, then evens out. He’s learning the rhythm.

Taiga deepens it. He parts his lips and slides his tongue into Hokuto’s mouth.

Hokuto gasps, a wet, wrecked sound, his body jerking against Taiga’s like he’s been shocked. He tastes like mint and the sweet tea from dinner. He’s responsive, eager, following the lead with a desperate kind of enthusiasm that Taiga finds incredibly inconvenient for his own self-control.

Gravity does the rest. Taiga leans his full weight forward.

Their hips adhere. The friction is immediate. The hard ridge of Hokuto’s erection grinds against Taiga’s through the layers of fabric.

Hokuto makes a noise—high, needy, entirely involuntary.

It travels straight down Taiga’s spine. He hardens painfully, the blood rushing south. The control he prides himself on—it all narrows down to the single, urgent point of contact between their bodies.

He presses harder. He isn’t thinking about the ice. He’s thinking that this room is very dark, and that Matsumura Hokuto is exceedingly loud, and that he wants to hear that sound again.

The kiss is messy. It’s unrefined and lacks the technical precision Taiga usually requires of himself, but the friction makes up for the error margin. Hokuto presses back against him with a desperation that is arguably pathetic.

Taiga likes it. He likes the way Hokuto’s breathing hitches against his own mouth. It’s a loss of composure that Taiga has caused.

He breaks the contact. Not because he wants to stop, but because the angle against the wall is inefficient. He keeps his hand gripped on the front of Hokuto’s hoodie and pulls.

Hokuto stumbles forward, his eyes wide and dark in the dim light of the entryway. He looks wrecked. His lips are swollen. He looks like someone who has lost the plot entirely.

Taiga notes this satisfaction and turns, walking them further into the room, not letting go of the hoodie. He steers Hokuto past the narrow corridor and into the main space, where the city light from the window cuts a pale rectangle across the floor.

He stops near the foot of the bed and releases Hokuto. “Take them off,” Taiga says.

Hokuto blinks, his chest heaving. He looks down at his own waist, then back at Taiga, his expression caught somewhere between panic and obedience. For a second, he hesitates.

Taiga just waits. He doesn’t repeat himself. He stands with his weight settled on one hip, watching.

Hokuto’s hands shake as he reaches for the waistband of his sweatpants. He fumbles with the drawstring, his fingers clumsy. He shoves them down, hopping a little on one foot to clear his ankles, movements distinctively ungraceful.

He kicks the sweatpants aside. He hooks his thumbs into the elastic of his boxer briefs and slides those down, too.

Taiga looks. He doesn’t pretend to be looking away. He shifts his gaze downward and assesses the situation.

It’s a significant situation.

Hokuto is pale in the half-light, his legs lean and defined, the muscle structure familiar from a thousand hours of watching skaters. He’s hard, twitching slightly, the head of his cock red and weeping a clear drop of fluid. It stands up against his stomach, a stark, vertical line.

The shape and the length are substantial. Taiga registers a tightness in his own throat that has nothing to do with speaking.

“Sit,” Taiga says, gesturing to the edge of the bed.

Hokuto obeys. He moves like he’s in a trance, backing up until his legs hit the mattress, then sinking down. He sits on the edge, his feet flat on the carpet, his knees parted. He grips the sheets with both hands, knuckles white. He looks terrified but also expectant.

Taiga steps closer. He watches Hokuto’s eyes track him.

Then Taiga drops. He sinks to his knees between Hokuto’s spread legs. The carpet is rough against his shins, but he doesn't care. He settles back on his heels, looking up.

From this angle, the perspective shifts. Hokuto looks larger, looming, but he’s the one trembling. Taiga is close enough to smell him now—sweat and heat and all.

Taiga has never done this. He has theoretical knowledge and knows the mechanics. But it’s not the same as actually doing it.

He doesn’t plan on screwing up.

He reaches out, placing his hands on Hokuto’s knees to steady himself. Hokuto flinches, a sharp intake of breath hissing through his teeth, but he doesn’t pull away. His thighs are tense, rock hard under Taiga’s palms.

Taiga leans forward. He doesn’t close his eyes. He wants to see the reaction.

He extends his tongue and licks, a long, deliberate stripe from the base to the tip.

Hokuto makes a sound that is barely human—a strangled, high-pitched whimper that cuts off abruptly. His hips jerk forward.

Taiga holds him in place. He tastes salt and skin. It isn’t unpleasant, but maybe something he’ll have to get used to.

He opens his mouth.

He doesn’t tease or hesitate. He treats it with the same discipline he applies to the ice. He relaxes his jaw, suppresses the instinct to tense up, and moves forward. He takes the head into his mouth, then slides down, taking more, swallowing the length of him.

It’s a tight fit. He feels the intrusion at the back of his throat, a dull pressure that threatens to trigger a gag reflex. He breathes through his nose, focusing on the sensation. Warmth. Hardness. The pulse of blood in the vein against his tongue.

Hokuto cries out. “Oh god,” he gasps, his voice cracking. “Kyomo—”

His hands leave the sheets. They tangle in Taiga’s hair, gripping tight, pulling and pushing at the same time. The confusion is legible in his touch. He doesn’t know what to do with himself.

Taiga keeps going.  He pushes down, forcing himself to take the last inch, his nose pressing into the coarse hair at the base. He holds it there for a second, encompassing him, claiming the space.

Hokuto’s hips snap forward, grinding into Taiga’s face. He’s sobbing, or laughing, or something in between.

Taiga hums against him, the vibration traveling through the contact point. He withdraws slowly, dragging his teeth lightly—very lightly—against the underside as he pulls back.

Hokuto shudders, his whole body bowing forward, collapsing over Taiga like a broken marionette.

Taiga looks up. His glasses are askew. His mouth is wet. He watches Hokuto staring down at him with an expression of total devastation.

It’s the best thing he has seen all week. He decides to do it again.

Taiga keeps his eyes open as he continues sucking Hokuto.  He watches Hokuto’s face fragment, the composition of a soon-to-be elite skater dissolving into something messy and incoherent.

Hokuto’s head falls back. His mouth hangs open. A line of saliva trails from the corner of his lip, unmanaged.

He’s loud. The sounds are wet, broken gasps that pitch up into whines when Taiga tightens his throat. It’s undisciplined but satisfying.

Hokuto’s hips snap upward with zero rhythm, chasing the sensation. His hands are tangled in Taiga’s hair, gripping too hard, pulling with a frantic, clawing strength.

It hurts. Taiga ignores the connection between the pain in his scalp and the heat in his groin. He notes it and keeps going.

He feels the shift in pressure before it happens. Hokuto’s thighs seize, muscle groups locking up hard enough to bruise. The trembling stops, replaced by a rigid, suspended tension.

“Don’t—” Hokuto chokes out, his voice cracking. “I can’t—”

Taiga doesn’t stop. He doesn't slow down. He deepens the intake, forcing Hokuto past the point of return.

Hokuto cries out—a sharp, high sound that has no place in a hotel room—and arches off the bed. The release hits the back of Taiga’s throat in warm, heavy pulses.

Taiga doesn’t pull away, suppressing the reflex to gag. He stays there, swallowing efficiently, draining him dry. It tastes bitter and startlingly human. He cleans up every drop, running his tongue flat against the underside of the shaft one last time before withdrawing.

Hokuto collapses back onto the sheets. He looks destroyed. His chest is heaving, his eyes are blown wide and unfocused, staring at the ceiling like he’s forgotten his own name. His face is flushed a splotchy, uneven red.

Taiga wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, observing the wreckage. It is a good look on him.

He moves before Hokuto can recalibrate. Taiga crawls up the bed, looming over him, blocking out the light from the window. He grabs Hokuto’s chin, forcing his head straight, and kisses him.

It’s not a gentle kiss. Taiga pushes his tongue into Hokuto’s mouth, sharing the taste. Hokuto’s taste.

Hokuto makes a muffled noise of protest, or maybe shock, but he opens up. He tastes himself on Taiga’s tongue. He shudders, his hands coming up to grip Taiga’s shoulders, but there’s no strength in them.

Taiga uses the leverage to shove him down flat, pressing him into the mattress until Hokuto is pinned. He breaks the kiss and pulls back, resting his weight on his forearms, boxing Hokuto in.

The friction is gone, but the problem remains. Taiga’s sweatpants are uncomfortably tight. The heavy, aching pressure against his own stomach hasn’t dissipated; if anything, watching Hokuto fall apart has made it worse.

Hokuto blinks, his eyelashes wet. He shifts his legs, trying to find a comfortable position, and his knee knocks against the fly of Taiga’s sweats.

He freezes. His eyes dart down, then back up to Taiga’s face. The realization registers.

Taiga watches him do the math. Hokuto looks at the bulge in the fabric, then at Taiga. He looks terrified. “Wanna suck it?” he asks.

Hokuto’s throat works. He tries to speak, but nothing comes out. He looks at Taiga’s mouth, then down at his lap again. He hesitates.

Taiga clicks his tongue. He sits back on his heels, putting distance between them. “Forget it.”

He reaches for his waistband, not waiting for permission. He shoves the sweatpants down, then the boxer briefs, peeling them off with quick, efficient movements. He kicks them free of his ankles and tosses them toward the foot of the bed.

He’s hard. Painfully so. He adjusts himself, letting the air hit his skin.

He looks at Hokuto.

Hokuto is looking at him. He’s staring at Taiga’s cock with a mix of fascination and apprehension that Taiga finds acceptable. He can see the gears turning in Hokuto’s head.

Taiga knows what he looks like. He knows he’s narrower than Hokuto, paler, but the erection is dense and heavy, standing up against his stomach. “Well?” he says.

Hokuto jerks his gaze up, his face burning darker. He looks like he’s about to apologize.

Taiga sighs. He reaches out and grabs Hokuto’s right hand.

Hokuto flinches, his fingers cold and damp with sweat. Taiga ignores the reaction and pulls the hand forward, wrapping Hokuto’s fingers around the base of his cock.

“Here,” Taiga orders.

He guides the motion. Hokuto’s grip is tentative, too loose, afraid to break something.

“Tighter,” Taiga says. He watches his own length disappear into Hokuto’s fist. “Don’t just hold it.”

He moves Hokuto’s hand up and down, setting the pace. It feels good. It feels like control. The friction of another person’s skin is better than his own, even if the technique is lacking.

“Use your thumb,” Taiga instructs, his voice dropping an octave, slipping into something rougher. “Over the top. Yeah. Like that.”

Hokuto breathes a shaky, wet breath and watches his own hand move, mesmerized. He obeys, tightening his grip. He swipes his thumb over the head, catching a bead of pre-cum and smearing it.

Taiga’s hips jerk forward involuntarily. He closes his eyes for a fraction of a second, the image of Hokuto—red-faced, obedient, touching him—burning behind his eyelids. It’s messy. It’s amateur.

It’s working.

Hokuto learns quickly. The initial clumsiness fades, replaced by a rhythm that is unsteady but enthusiastic. His palm is damp, warm, sliding over the skin with a friction that Taiga finds immediately effective. It lacks the clinical precision of Taiga’s own hand, but the difference is the point. It’s unpredictable, warm.

Taiga lets a sound escape—a ragged exhale, sharp and low in his throat.

Hokuto catches it. He makes a small, breathless noise in response and speeds up, his thumb swiping clumsily but accurately over the head. He’s watching his own hand work with a flushed, terrifying intensity.

“Yeah,” Taiga breathes. “Like that.”

The sensation filters through him, bypassing his usual filing system. It travels up his thighs, tightening the muscles in his lower back. His hips jerk forward on their own, chasing the contact, disrupting the rhythm that Hokuto is trying to set.

Taiga notes the loss of motor control. He finds he doesn’t care to correct it. The focus he maintains on the ice doesn’t apply here. Here, there’s only the heat of Hokuto’s hand and the overwhelming feedback from his own nerves.

He needs more contact. The hand isn’t enough. The distance between their faces is inefficient.

Taiga leans down. He captures Hokuto’s mouth again. This time he doesn’t bother with finesse. He kisses him hard, grinding their lips together, tasting the salt and the lingering metallic tang of him.

Hokuto makes a small, muffled noise against Taiga’s mouth—half whine, half gasp—and keeps moving his hand, faster now, the motion frantic.

The friction spikes. It pushes Taiga past the point of assessment.

The coil tightens. The pressure builds at the base of his spine, blurring out the room, the hotel. He breaks the kiss, gasping for air, but he doesn’t pull back to look at him. He doesn't want to be seen like this—unraveled, eyes blown wide, face open.

He drops his head. He buries his face in the curve of Hokuto’s neck and shoulder, hiding himself. He breathes in the smell of sweat and hotel soap and skin.

“Don’t stop,” he grits out against Hokuto’s collarbone.

Hokuto obeys, tightening his grip.

Taiga’s hips snap forward one last time. The release hits him—a white-hot fracture in his composure that he can’t categorize.

He groans, the sound vibrating against Hokuto’s skin, and shudders, pressing his forehead hard into Hokuto’s shoulder. He rides out the aftershocks, his breathing wrecked, his body agonizingly sensitive.

The room is quiet. The only sound is the ragged synchronization of their breathing and the hum of the hotel air conditioning kicking in, a low mechanical drone that underscores the silence.

Taiga rests his forehead against the damp curve of Hokuto’s shoulder. His heart rate is decelerating, but the rhythm remains uneven.

He counts the beats. One, two. Miss. Three.

He’s heavy, dead weight on top of another person, sticky with sweat that isn’t entirely his own. He should move. The logical next step is separation.

He doesn’t move. Not yet. He lifts his head slowly, the muscles in his neck protesting the angle.

Hokuto is looking at him. His head is turned on the pillow, dark hair plastered to his forehead. His face is a ruin of flush and heat, mouth slack, lips swollen from the pressure Taiga applied to them only minutes ago.

But it’s the eyes that stop Taiga. They are wide, dark, and unfocused, fixed on Taiga’s face with an expression that defies immediate categorization.

It looks, inconveniently, like wonder.

Hokuto is looking at him as if he has just witnessed a physics-defying jump, something impossible landed on a clean edge. There’s a softness in the gaze that is terrifying. It is open, completely undefended.

Something kicks in Taiga’s chest. A sharp, physical contraction behind the sternum. It feels like a missed step on a darker stairwell, a sudden drop in altitude. It’s a feeling that he doesn’t have a file for.

The movement is abrupt. Taiga pushes himself up, levering his weight off Hokuto with a haste that borders on ungraceful. He needs space. He needs the air between them to stop vibrating.

He sits on the edge of the mattress, his back to Hokuto. The cool air of the room hits his skin, evaporating the sweat, chilling him instantly. He welcomes the drop in temperature. It’s grounding, a physical problem he can solve.

Tissues.

He scans the immediate radius. The nightstand on the left.

He reaches over, his movements stiff. He grabs the box and pulls out a clump of white paper. It tears. He pulls more.

He turns slightly, keeping his eyes lowered, avoiding the face on the pillow. He thrusts the handful of tissues toward Hokuto’s chest.

“Here,” he says. His voice is rough, gravelly. He hates the sound of it.

Hokuto takes them. His fingers brush against the side of Taiga’s hand.

Taiga pulls back as if he’s been burned.

He takes a second handful for himself. He cleans up efficiently, wiping the evidence from his stomach, his thigh. He balls the used tissues up in his fist, compressing the mess into something manageable, something that can be thrown away.

He needs to leave this room. Not the hotel room—that would require explaining—but this specific radius. The bed. The proximity.

“Bathroom,” Taiga states.

He stands up. His legs feel light, unsteady, the muscle tension gone. He grabs his sweatpants and underwear from the floor but doesn’t put them on. He bundles them against his hip, holding them like a shield.

He walks to the bathroom door. He feels Hokuto’s eyes on his spine, a physical weight tracking his movement across the carpet. He doesn’t turn around, doesn’t look back to see if the wonder is still there. He can’t afford to see it again.

He steps onto the tile and closes the door.

The lock clicks. It’s a small sound, but it feels final.

Taiga drops his clothes on the vanity. He leans back against the wood of the door, the hard surface pressing into his shoulder blades. He slides down an inch, then stops. He stares at the opposite wall, at the chrome towel rack, at the neutral beige tile.

His hands are shaking. Index to pinky, a tremor he can’t suppress.

The image of Hokuto’s face on the pillow—the wreckage, the heat, the look of absolute, terrifying openness—keeps resurfacing. It sits in the center of his mind, demanding an assessment he can’t provide.

He brings a hand up to his face, pressing the heel of his palm against his eye, blocking out the light.

Insufficient, he thinks.

But the word feels insufficient. It feels incredibly, dangerously insufficient.

♐

The Tokyo hotel room has a different quality of light. The city outside the window is gray and damp with morning mist. Inside, the air is still and quiet except for the soft, wet sounds coming from between his legs.

Hokuto is there. On his knees. His mouth is warm and clumsy around Taiga.

He’s trying. Taiga will give him that. His hands are braced on Taiga’s thighs, his fingers digging in with a nervous pressure. His head bobs in an uneven rhythm—too fast, then too slow. He keeps pulling back to breathe, his lips slick and swollen, his eyes screwed shut in concentration.

Taiga watches the top of Hokuto’s head—the dark hair, now messy, the way it falls forward. Hokuto’s shoulders are tense. “Slower,” he says. His voice comes out rough, lower than he intended.

Hokuto stops. Pulls off. Looks up at him, his eyes wide and dark, his mouth red. There’s a line of saliva connecting his bottom lip to the head of Taiga’s cock. It breaks, drips onto Taiga’s stomach.

“Sorry,” Hokuto whispers. He sounds wrecked already.

“Don’t apologize.” Taiga reaches down but thinks better of it. “Use your tongue. Flat. Like this.” He demonstrates a slow, deliberate swipe in the air.

Hokuto watches, his pupils blown. Then he leans in again and tries. The sensation is different this time—softer, wetter. Better.

Taiga lets out a breath. His hands fist in the sheets beside his hips.

He can feel Hokuto figuring it out, adjusting the angle, the pressure. His inexperience is irritating, but it’s also compelling. He doesn’t know the shortcuts. He’s doing everything by trial and error, and the errors are… not unpleasant.

The thing is, Taiga should be bored. He should be assessing this like a flawed run-through, noting the technical deficiencies.

But he’s not. He’s watching the way Hokuto’s throat works when he tries to take him deeper. He’s listening to the choked-off sounds he makes when he gags slightly. He’s cataloging the flush that starts at Hokuto’s collarbones and climbs up his neck.

Yesterday, in Osaka, Hokuto looked at him with that expression. Like Taiga had given him something precious instead of just a blowjob in a hotel room. Like Taiga was something to be marveled at.

It should have been a warning. A clear sign to stop.

Instead, he’s here. Letting him do this.

Hokuto’s teeth graze him. Taiga hisses, his hips jerking forward involuntarily. “Teeth,” he says, sharper than he means to.

Hokuto flinches and pulls back, panting. “Sorry, I—”

“Just be aware of them.” Taiga keeps his hands where they are. “Try again.”

Hokuto does. This time, he’s more careful. His mouth is hotter. Softer. He takes Taiga deeper, his nose pressing into Taiga’s pubic bone. His hands tighten on Taiga’s thighs, holding him in place.

The tension in Taiga’s lower back coils tighter. He closes his eyes for a second. When he opens them, Hokuto is looking up at him through his lashes. His expression is earnest. Too earnest. Like this matters. Like Taiga matters.

Taiga looks away, out the window. The mist is starting to burn off. A sliver of pale sun cuts through the gray.

Hokuto’s rhythm falters. He’s getting tired. His jaw must be aching.

Taiga should tell him to stop. He should finish himself, get dressed, and wait for instructions from the organizers like a normal person.

Instead, he slides his hand into Hokuto’s hair. He grips the strands at the back of Hokuto’s head and holds him there.

Hokuto makes a muffled, surprised sound, but he doesn’t pull away. He lets Taiga guide him. Lets Taiga set the pace.

It’s better this way. More efficient. Taiga can feel the pressure building, the familiar tightening in his gut. Hokuto’s mouth is wet and willing. His throat relaxes around him.

Taiga is close. He can tell by the way his breathing has gone shallow, by the tremor in his thighs.

Hokuto must sense it too. He speeds up, his tongue working in frantic, uncoordinated circles. It’s messy, amateur.

It’s enough.

Taiga comes with a sharp exhale, his hips lifting off the bed. Hokuto takes it, swallowing convulsively, his throat working around him.

When Taiga is spent, Hokuto pulls off, gasping for air. He rests his forehead against Taiga’s thigh, his breathing ragged.

Taiga releases his grip on Hokuto’s hair. His hand falls to the mattress.

For a long moment, neither of them moves. The room is quiet except for their breathing. The sun is stronger now, painting a bright rectangle on the carpet.

Hokuto sits back on his heels. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. His lips are red and swollen, his eyes glassy. He looks at Taiga. That expression is starting to form again—the softness, the wonder.

Taiga cuts it off before it can fully land. “Not bad,” he says. His voice is flat. “For a first try.”

Hokuto’s looks down, a faint smile touching his mouth. “I have a good teacher.”

Taiga doesn’t let him stay on his knees. His hands are already moving, gripping Hokuto’s shoulders, hauling him up.

Hokuto comes easily, unbalanced, his knees sliding on the sheets until he’s straddling Taiga’s lap. He’s warm and solid. His skin is flushed, damp with sweat. He looks down at Taiga, his eyes wide and searching, like he’s waiting for permission.

Taiga doesn’t give it. He just pulls him in and kisses him.

Hokuto’s mouth is soft, open, tastes like Taiga. Taiga pushes his tongue deeper, seeking the taste, and Hokuto moans into his mouth. Hokuto’s hands come up to frame Taiga’s face, his touch tentative.

Taiga doesn’t like it. He grabs Hokuto’s wrists, pins them to his sides, and keeps kissing him until he stops trying to be gentle.

When Taiga breaks the kiss, they’re both breathing hard. Hokuto’s lips are wet and swollen. He’s hard against Taiga’s stomach, the friction of his movement having done that.

Taiga doesn’t ask. He just reaches between them. His hand wraps around Hokuto’s cock. Hokuto is hot, slick at the tip.

Hokuto jerks in his grip, a sharp inhale catching in his throat. His eyes flutter shut.

“Look at me,” Taiga says. It comes out rougher than he intended.

Hokuto opens his eyes. They’re dark, unfocused. He nods, just once.

Taiga starts slow. A firm, steady stroke from root to tip. His thumb smears the moisture around the head.

Hokuto shudders, his whole body tensing. His hips twitch forward, seeking more pressure.

Taiga gives it to him. He tightens his grip, picks up the pace. It’s not tender. It’s efficient. Clinical, almost. He’s studying Hokuto’s reactions, cataloging them. The way his breath hitches on the upstroke. The soft, bitten-off whimper when Taiga twists his wrist just so.

Then Hokuto makes a sound. A low, broken gasp that melts into a pretty, pleading sigh. It goes straight to Taiga’s gut.

Taiga’s rhythm stutters. Fuck.

He sets a new pace. Faster. Harder. His own breathing is coming quicker now, matching Hokuto’s.

Hokuto is babbling, half-words, Taiga’s name mixed with nonsense. His forehead drops to Taiga’s shoulder. His hot breath puffs against Taiga’s neck. His hips are moving in frantic, shallow thrusts, trying to match Taiga’s hand.

Taiga can feel him getting close. Hokuto’s muscles are coiling tight, trembling. His fingers dig into Taiga’s biceps, holding on like he’ll drown otherwise.

“Kyomoto,” Hokuto chokes out.

“Yeah,” Taiga manages. “Go on.”

Hokuto comes with a sharp cry, muffled against Taiga’s skin. His body convulses, back arching. Heat spills over Taiga’s fingers, stripes his stomach.

Taiga keeps moving, working him through it until Hokuto goes limp, boneless, all the tension draining out of him at once.

Hokuto collapses forward. His forehead rests in the crook of Taiga’s neck. His breathing is ragged, hot puffs against Taiga’s collarbone. He’s heavy. Warm. Sticky.

Taiga doesn’t push him off. His hand falls away from Hokuto and rests on the bed beside his hip. He stares at the ceiling. The morning light has strengthened, cutting across the room in a sharp, bright line.

Hokuto’s breathing slowly evens out. He doesn’t move. He’s just… there. On top of Taiga. His heartbeat thumps against Taiga’s chest, a slow, steady counter-rhythm to his own.

Taiga should say something. Make a joke. Push him away. Get up and clean off.

He doesn’t.

The silence stretches. The warmth of him starts to feel less like an inconvenience and more like… just warmth.

Hokuto’s fingers curl slightly against Taiga’s arm.

Taiga closes his eyes. Just for a second.

The quiet is punctured by two sharp, synchronized beeps.

Hokuto stirs against Taiga’s neck. The sound repeats—a text, then another. Taiga’s phone vibrates on the nightstand. Hokuto’s chimes from the floor, muffled under his discarded jeans.

Hokuto pushes himself up, the warmth leaving Taiga’s chest. He reaches for his phone, flipping it open before squinting at the screen.

Taiga doesn’t move. He watches the line of Hokuto’s back, the tension returning to his shoulders.

“Organizers,” Hokuto says, his voice rough. He clears his throat. “Cast lunch in Omotesando. Lobby in an hour.”

Taiga finally reaches for his own phone. The message is identical. A group text to the Japanese skaters. He drops it back on the sheets.

Hokuto shifts off the bed. The mattress dips, then rises. He stands, stretching, a flash of lean muscle and pale skin. He doesn’t look at Taiga. “I’m not going,” he says.

Taiga raises an eyebrow. “Tired?”

“No.” Hokuto bends to pick up his clothes. “I told them beforehand. I’m meeting a friend.” He shakes out his shirt. “She’s in Tokyo today. We made plans.”

She.

Taiga feels his own expression go still. He keeps it neutral. A friend. A she. Is he straight, then? Bi? Was this just an experiment for him, a curious detour before returning to the main road?

He doesn’t ask. The questions are stupid, juvenile. They taste like something he should have outgrown.

“Right,” Taiga says, his voice flat. “A friend.”

Hokuto finally glances at him, a quick, unreadable look. Then he bundles his clothes against his chest and heads for the bathroom. “I’ll just be a minute.”

The door clicks shut. The lock doesn’t turn.

Taiga is alone. The room feels larger, cooler. The imprint of Hokuto’s body is already fading from the sheets. He stares at the closed door. He can hear the faint rush of the shower starting.

She. Who is she? Another skater? A girl from school? Someone from Hamamatsu who took the train up?

The image forms despite him: Hokuto, with his soft eyes and softer mouth, sitting across a cafe table from some smiling girl. Holding her hand. Being the person he was before he walked into this room.

Experimentation. That’s all this was. A one-off. A story he’ll maybe tell this friend later, or maybe never. A secret to carry back to Shizuoka.

Taiga’s jaw tightens. He swings his legs off the bed. The sticky residue on his stomach is unpleasant. He should clean up and get dressed. He should not be sitting here thinking about Matsumura Hokuto’s hypothetical girlfriend.

His phone vibrates again on the rumpled sheets. He picks it up.

It’s his mother.

“JSF confirmation came through. Your visa paperwork being expedited. We’ll leave for Toronto April 30. First on-ice session with Orser scheduled for May 5.”

♊

The afternoon light in the cafe holds the particular, honeyed gold of early April—a light that seems to retain the ghost of cherry blossoms even though the trees outside the window have shed their pink and settled into solid green. It falls across their table in a wide, lazy stripe, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air above the remains of lunch: Hokuto’s empty plate with its delicate traces of salmon cream sauce, Mayu’s half-eaten quiche, the shared mille crepes reduced to a careful architecture of sponge and cream they had dissected with shared solemnity.

Mayu is describing the astrology club she joined at her university. Hokuto watches her face, the way her eyes brighten when she explains a nuanced point about progressed charts, and he thinks, not for the first time this afternoon, that she has grown into someone quietly pretty.

It’s so different from the practical ponytails and tight training headbands he remembers from their junior circuit days. Back then, she was all sharp angles and ferocious determination in club jerseys and competition dresses.

Now, in a simple cream-colored sweater and jeans, she looks like a university student. She looks like someone with a life that exists beyond the boundaries of any rink.

The observation makes him remember the origin of their friendship. They were fourteen and thirteen, orbiting each other at a junior competition in Nagano, both too knotted with nerves to touch the provided boxed lunches. She had approached him with a solemn, almost alarming intensity, a dog-eared astrology book tucked under her arm.

“I can read your chart,” she had said. “If you want.”

He’d said yes, mostly because he hadn’t known how to refuse that gravity.

They’d sat on a cold, echoey hallway bench, their skate guards clicking on the floor, and she’d drawn his natal chart on a paper napkin, her brow furrowed in absolute concentration.

“Your sun is in Cancer,” she’d said, pointing to a smudged planetary glyph. “But your moon is in Aquarius. That means your emotions are… complicated. They’re deep, but they need space to breathe.”

It was the first time anyone had given him a language for the constant, swirling contradiction inside his chest—the need to feel everything intensely and the simultaneous, paralyzing fear of being consumed by it. She taught him the symbols, the houses, the way the planets conversed in a silent, celestial dialogue. It was a system. A map for the internal chaos. He had clung to it.

“—so we’re planning a viewing party for the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction next month,” Mayu is saying now, her voice pulling him back to the present moment.

He nods, trying to shape his expression into one of engaged interest, but his mind feels like a split screen: her animated face here in the warm cafe, and the memory of a different, dimmer room this morning. The memory of skin and stifled sound and the heavy, terrifying weight of another person’s breath against his neck.

The conversation drifts until it inevitably touches the upcoming ice show. Mayu leans forward, her elbows on the wooden table, and says, “My friends and I are planning to watch the broadcast, you know. We’ll be cheering for you.”

Something warm and dangerously fragile expands behind his ribs. “Thank you,” he says, and because he knows she’s waiting for more, he adds, “It’s… it’s good. The group numbers are fun. Kamenashi-senpai has been really helpful, showing me the ropes.” He traces the ring of condensation on his glass with a fingertip, watching the water bead and run. “And there’s Suzuki Airi. She’s… um. Very energetic. A bit too extroverted for me, sometimes, but she’s nice.”

A pause follows, the kind specifically crafted to invite a name neither of them has yet spoken.

Mayu’s gaze is gentle but relentlessly perceptive.  “And Kyomoto Taiga?” she asks, her tone deliberately light, as if inquiring about a mutual acquaintance’s travel plans.

The name lands in the space between them like a stone dropped into a still pond. Hokuto feels the ripples hit him—a sensory echo of steam and shared, oppressive heat, of a touch that was neither helpful nor nice but something else entirely, something that has rewritten the basic cellular memory of his skin.

“He’s… there,” Hokuto says, the words utterly insufficient. He feels warmth creep up his neck. “A good skater. Very precise.”

He leaves out everything else: the way Taiga had looked at him in the sauna, a look that felt like being physically dissected. The unbearable weight of his hand on the small of Hokuto’s back. The silence in the hotel room that wasn’t empty at all, but thick with a thousand unsaid things for which Hokuto possesses no vocabulary.

Because what does it mean? That’s the question that has been circling the dark edges of his mind since Osaka, since the generic hotel room with its bland landscape print and the phantom taste of Taiga still lingering on his lips.

He grew up with a single, unchallenged equation: physical intimacy equalled romance. It was in every shoujo manga passed around his classrooms, in the whispered conversations in school hallways, in the occasional, soft smile his mother would direct at his father across the dinner table. That kind of closeness was the exclusive territory of love—of grand, spoken declarations and public hand-holding and the solemn ritual of introducing someone to your parents.

What happened with Taiga… it dismantled that equation. It was an algorithm he doesn’t know how to solve. Was it just a physical transaction? A tension-relieving bargain between two upcoming rivals?

The thought leaves him feeling hollowed out. But then he remembers the look on Taiga’s face afterward. As if he’d stumbled upon something unexpected in a familiar room. Could it be the beginning of something else? The fragile seed of a different story?

“You seem far away,” Mayu says softly, her voice slicing through the spiral of his thoughts.

He blinks, returning to the cafe, to her patient, waiting expression. “Sorry,” he murmurs. “Just… thinking about programs. Choreography.”

She doesn’t press. Instead, she reaches into her bag and pulls out a familiar deck of cards wrapped in black silk. “Do you want me to read for you?” she asks. “For your senior debut season. And… for other things.”

He nods, the motion feeling like a surrender to whatever currents the universe has decided to send his way. “Please.”

She clears their dessert plates with a careful, reverent efficiency, then spreads the square of black silk on the wooden tabletop. She shuffles with a practiced, fluid motion, the cards making a soft, whispering chorus.

“Think about your question,” she instructs, her voice dropping into that familiar, focused register he remembers from the cold hallway in Nagano.

His question isn’t about skating. It’s a tangled, thorny knot of what was that and what does it mean and what happens now. He holds the messy conglomerate of it in the front of his mind as she lays out ten cards in the Celtic Cross pattern.

Mayu studies the spread, her finger hovering over the central card—the Six of Swords, upright. “This is the heart of the matter,” she murmurs, more to herself than to him. “Transition. Moving from troubled waters to calmer ones. It’s about a journey, Hokuto. Leaving an old state of mind behind.”

Her finger moves to the card crossing it—The Lovers, reversed.

Hokuto’s breath catches, sticks in his throat.

“There’s a choice here,” she says, her brow furrowing just slightly. “Or a misalignment. A relationship—or a potential for one—that’s out of balance. There might be a lack of communication. Uncertainty about shared values or desires.”

She moves through the past, present, and future positions, speaking of foundations built on diligent practice and mastery (the Eight of Pentacles), current energy dominated by ambition and swift, possibly impulsive movement (the Knight of Wands), and a future outcome showing the Page of Cups—a messenger of emotional news, of creative inspiration, of a new feeling timidly dawning.

“This is interesting,” she says, tapping the position signifying ‘how others see you.’ The Queen of Swords looks back at them sternly. “They see you as independent. Analytical. Maybe a bit guarded with your heart.” Then she points to ‘hopes and fears’—the Two of Cups, the card of partnership, mutual attraction, and emotional connection. “You want this… union. This coming together. But you’re also deeply afraid of it.”

Finally, the outcome card: the Ace of Swords. A brilliant, single blade cutting through clouds. Clarity. A breakthrough. A mental triumph over confusion.

Mayu looks up at him, her eyes soft. “The cards are saying there’s something significant here, Hokuto. A situation that demands your attention. But all these swords… they’re about the intellect. Communication. The need to cut through illusion and obfuscation.” She gathers the cards with a gentle touch. “My advice? Don’t let things fester in the realm of uncertainty. Whatever this is… you need to talk about it. Silence will only let the misalignment grow.”

Her words sink into him. The celestial map she has drawn makes a terrible, beautiful sense. The Lovers reversed, hovering over his present. The Two of Cups as both his deepest desire and his sharpest fear. The Ace of Swords as a promise of understanding, if only he has the courage to seek it.

It feels like permission, framed in the only language he has ever fully trusted to interpret the chaos of life.

The tight, anxious knot in his chest begins to loosen, its rigid strands unfurling to be replaced by a nervous, fluttering, but undeniably determined resolve.

The ice will tell me, he thinks, the old mantra surfacing automatically.

But first, he realizes, the words have to.

♐

The bus rumbles through Tokyo’s Friday night traffic, a low vibration through the soles of his sneakers. Outside, neon smears past the windows in red and white streaks. Inside, the air smells like recycled air conditioning and the faint, sweet musk of too many skaters in one place after a show.

Airi drops into the seat beside him, her shoulder bumping his. She’s still buzzing with post-performance energy, her smile bright in the dim cabin light. “Good show, yeah?” she says, already scrolling through her phone.

“It was fine.”

“Fine,” she scoffs, not looking up. “It was great! You won the quad off.”

He shrugs. The quad off is just a thing the male skaters do for fun at the end of the ice show. His quad was clean, but that’s the baseline. Something he’ll have to improve in Toronto.

He leans his temple against the cool window glass. His reflection is a ghost over the passing city. In the seat across the aisle, Kamenashi is talking, his hands moving in that graceful, explanatory way he has. Next to him, Hokuto is listening, nodding at something. His profile is sharp against the window behind him. He hasn’t looked over here once since they boarded.

Airi elbows him. “Look at this.”

She shoves her phone in his face. It’s a tweet. A photo from tonight’s show, him in mid-jump, the ice a blur beneath his blades. The caption is: KYOMOTO-SAN SO COOL!!!

“My mentions are full of you,” she says, pulling the phone back. “And him.” She tilts her head meaningfully toward Hokuto’s row. “The junior phenom. The ‘future of Japanese skating.’” She does air quotes with her free hand, her smile turning sly. “My followers keep asking if you two have talked. If there’s, like, a rivalry vibe.”

“There’s a vibe,” he says, deadpan. “It’s the vibe of him being in my way next season.”

She laughs. “Okay, Mr. World Bronze. So protective.” She taps at her screen again. “We should give them what they want. A photo. You and the junior phenom. For the fans.”

He glances over. Hokuto is looking out his own window now, his expression unreadable. The line of his jaw is tight. “He’s busy.”

“He’s sitting. Come on.” Airi is already half-out of her seat, leaning over the aisle. “Matsumura-kun! Over here for a second?”

Hokuto’s head snaps around. His eyes flick from Airi to Taiga, then back. He says something to Kamenashi, who smiles and waves him off. Hokuto unbuckles his seatbelt and stands, a little unsteady as the bus takes a corner. He makes his way toward them and stops in the aisle beside their seats. He doesn’t look at Taiga. “Suzuki-san?”

“Photo op,” Airi announces, brandishing her phone. “The people demand it. Stand next to Taiga.”

Hokuto’s gaze finally lands on him. He looks away almost immediately, his fingers tightening around the seatback. “I… I don’t think…”

“It’ll take ten seconds,” Airi insists. She’s already holding her phone up, framing the shot. “Taiga, scoot over. Make room.”

He shifts toward the window. The space he leaves is narrow.

Hokuto hesitates for a beat too long, then slides into the seat beside him. His thigh presses against Taiga’s from knee to hip. He’s warm. He holds himself rigid, trying to minimize the contact.

It doesn’t work.

“Closer,” Airi commands. “You look like strangers sharing a bus seat, not skating’s next big rivalry.”

Hokuto exhales, a soft, frustrated sound. He leans in. His shoulder brushes Taiga’s. Taiga can smell the hotel shampoo in his hair, and underneath it, the familiar, clean scent of his skin.

“Smile!” Airi chirps.

He doesn’t. He keeps his expression neutral, the one he uses for sponsor photos. Beside him, Hokuto tries for one. It’s strained, tight at the corners. His eyes are fixed somewhere past Airi’s shoulder.

The phone camera flashes, once, twice.

“Perfect!” Airi says, already typing a caption. “The fans are gonna eat this up.”

Hokuto is already pulling away, putting space between them. “Are we done?”

“We’re done. Thanks, Matsumura-kun!”

He nods, his movements stiff. He doesn’t look at Taiga as he stands and retreats to his own row. He sits down, says something quiet to Kamenashi, and turns back to the window.

Taiga watches him for a moment. The set of his shoulders is all wrong. Tense, defensive. Like he’s been put on display.

Airi shows him the photo on her screen. There they are, shoulders touching, staring at the camera with matching blank expressions. The tension between them is almost visible. “See?” she says. “Rivalry vibe confirmed.”

“Whatever,” he mutters, turning back to his own window.

But he catches Hokuto’s reflection in the glass. He’s not looking out at Tokyo. He’s looking at the back of Taiga’s head. Just for a second. Then he catches himself, his gaze darting away, a faint flush creeping up the back of his neck.

He’s the last one off the bus. The night air is cool and smells like exhaust and damp concrete. Everyone clusters on the sidewalk, laughing too loudly, the post-show adrenaline still buzzing through them.

He shoves his hands into his pockets and starts toward the hotel doors.

Airi materializes at his elbow, her arm looping through his before he can shrug her off. “Convenience store,” she announces, already steering him away from the group. “I need chips. And chocolate. And maybe one of those weird yogurt drinks.”

“I don’t want anything.”

“You’re coming anyway. Moral support.” She tugs, and he lets himself be pulled. It’s easier than arguing.

The convenience store is blindingly bright, the fluorescent lights humming overhead. The air is warm and smells like fried food. Airi beelines for the snack aisle, already chattering about brand loyalty to her sponsors.

He drifts.

The aisles are narrow, packed with colorful packages. His gaze skims over batteries, travel-sized toiletries, magazines with familiar idols’ faces on the covers.

He turns a corner.

And stops.

The display is small and discreet. Boxes of condoms in primary colors. Tubes of lubricant stacked neatly beside them. His brain registers the section with a detached click, like cataloging a jump layout.

He’ll be gone in a matter of weeks. Months. A different continent.

A bucket list. He doesn’t make lists. But if he did…

Top of the list. The most urgent item.

Fully fucking Matsumura Hokuto.

Not the rushed, fumbling thing in the hotel room. Not his hand on him, his mouth on him. He means the real thing. Pinning him down. Being inside him. Seeing what that does to his face—the concentration, the surrender, the stupid, pretty sounds he’d make when he couldn’t hold them back anymore.

He’s watched enough videos, late at night with his screen dimmed, to understand the mechanics. The logistics. Where to put what. How to make it work.

It would be his first time, too.

He stares at a blue box. Extra thin. His fingers twitch at his side. The idea is suddenly, viscerally specific. The weight of him. The heat. The exact way his breathing would hitch. He can almost hear it.

“Find anything interesting?”

Airi’s voice is right behind him, bright with curiosity.

His entire body goes rigid. He doesn’t turn around. His eyes stay fixed on the display, but he’s not seeing it anymore. Shit.

“Taiga?” She steps up beside him, following his line of sight. A beat of silence. Then a slow, incredulous laugh. “Oh. Oh my god. Are you… shopping?”

“No.” The word comes out too sharp.

“You are! You’re standing in front of the condoms like you’re comparing nutritional information.” Her voice rises, carrying in the quiet store. “Wait, is this for your big move? Stocking up for Canada”

“Airi.” His jaw is tight. “Shut up.”

“I’m just saying! You gotta be prepared. Safety first.” She’s grinning, leaning in to peer at the boxes. “Though, with your schedule, I’m not sure when you’d even…”

Her voice trails off. He can feel her looking at him, the amusement shifting into something more calculating. She’s smart. Too smart for her own good.

A clerk by the register glances over. An older woman in the tea aisle pauses, her eyes darting toward them. His ears feel hot.

“Is there a problem?” the clerk asks.

“No problem!” Airi chirps, but she’s still looking at him. Her expression has softened into something dangerously close to pity. “My friend here is just… doing some last-minute research. For his trip.”

The older woman makes a quiet tch sound and turns away.

Humiliation burns in his throat. This is why you don’t think. This is why you don’t want things. It turns you into a spectacle. A joke in a convenience store aisle. “Let’s go.” He turns on his heel, shoving past her.

“Hey, wait! I didn’t get my chips!”

He doesn’t stop. He pushes through the glass doors, the bell jangling violently overhead. The cool night air hits him like a slap. He walks fast, toward the hotel, his shoulders hunched. He can still feel their eyes on his back. He can still see that blue box in his mind.

Stupid. Pathetic. A bucket list. As if any of it matters.

She catches up to him halfway down the block, her footsteps light and quick on the pavement. “Hey, wait up! I’m sorry, okay?”

He doesn’t stop, but he slows down enough that she falls into step beside him. The streetlights cast long, distorted shadows. “You’re not.”

“I am! I was just surprised. And a little tipsy from the post-show high.” She bumps her shoulder against his. “You know I’m the only one you told about Toronto, right? I’m on your team. No judgment on whatever... pre-departure bucket list you’ve got going on.”

He shoves his hands deeper into his pockets. She’s practically one of his best friends in the skating world. But the words stick in his throat—Hokuto, the hotel room, the specific, inconvenient want that hasn't gone away since.

“It’s not a bucket list,” he mutters.

“Then what is it?”

He keeps his eyes on the sidewalk ahead. “A fan. From tonight’s show. She was at the stage door. Pretty. We talked. She’s coming to the Sunday show too.” The lie comes out flat, rehearsed. “Might meet up after.”

There’s a beat of silence beside him. He can feel her looking at him, assessing.

Then Airi laughs. “Oh! That’s all? Why didn’t you just say so? God, Taiga, you made it sound like some deep, dark secret.” She loops her arm through his again, her grip firm. “Okay. So you need supplies. For your date. That’s actually really cute.”

Cute. But she bought it. No sideways glance at the possibility of men.

She stops walking, turns to face him, and before he can react, she pulls him into a hug. It’s brief, tight, and smells like her floral perfume and hairspray. “I’ll be your wing-woman,” she declares, pulling back. “We’ll go to a different convenience store. One without nosy grandmas. My treat.”

He just nods. “Fine,” he says.

She grins triumphantly and starts leading the way down a side street. “So, this fan. What’s her name? Is she a student? You got her number, right? Don’t tell me you;re just hoping she shows up Sunday.”

“She’ll show up,” he says, because it’s easier than inventing more details.

“You’re hopeless.” She shakes her head, but she’s smiling. “Okay, rule one: always have a backup plan. Rule two: be specific about the location. ‘After the show’ could mean anything. You need to name a bar. A cafe. Something.”

“I’ll figure it out.”

“You’ll figure it out,” she mimics, her voice teasing. “Famous last words. Good thing you hae me.”

They turn a corner. The glow of another convenience store sign lights up the street ahead. This one looks newer, bigger. Less likely to have an audience.

He feels a strange sense of calm. The lie is in place. The cover is solid. Airi is chattering beside him about brand preferences and the importance of communication.

And for once, the noise is a comfort. It fills the space where the truth would be.

♊

The ice show is finally over. The final curtain has fallen on Stars on Ice Japan, and now the cast dinner at the hotel restaurant is a decompression chamber.

At the center of the room, the senior male skaters are already loud. Scott Moir is holding court, his voice a booming baritone that cuts through the din. Hokuto watches them from his island of relative quiet, picking at the remains of his steak.

His eyes keep drifting, a compass needle swinging true north, to the table across the room.

Taiga is there, sitting with Suzuki Airi, Ishihara Satomi, and a few others from the senior Japanese contingent.

Airi is talking, her hands moving in animated arcs as she tells a story. She’s leaning toward Taiga, her long hair falling over one shoulder in a glossy wave. She looks beautiful.

And Taiga… Taiga is listening. He’s not looking at his phone or staring off into the middle distance the way he does when he’s bored. He’s looking at her, his head tilted slightly, a faint, unguarded smile touching his mouth.

Hokuto feels a familiar ache start behind his ribs, the same one he gets when he watches a perfect skating performance he knows he can’t replicate.

Airi says something else, her voice too far away to catch, but the shape of it must be funny. Because Taiga’s smile widens, and then he laughs.

It’s not the short, quiet exhale Hokuto’s heard from him before. It’s a real laugh—low, surprised, a sound that seems to startle even him. His shoulders relax. His head tips back just a fraction. For a second, the careful, composed mask he wears like a second skin slips, and Hokuto sees the boy underneath. The one who might be capable of ease. Of ordinary happiness.

The sight is a blade. It slips between his ribs with a practiced, silent precision.

Beside him, Tsuchiya Tao, the junior ice dancer, leans toward her partner and whispers. “They look good together, don’t they? Kyomoto-senpai and Suzuki-senpai. I saw the photo she posted from the bus. The fans are going crazy for it.”

Her partner, Katayose Ryota, nods. “They’re always paired in those ‘skating power couple’ articles. The media loves it. And they do look… compatible.”

Compatible. The word lands in the pit of Hokuto’s stomach like a stone.

He looks back at them. Airi is smiling up at Taiga now, her expression soft, knowing. She reaches over and taps his forearm lightly.

He doesn’t pull away. He just nods, that faint smile still playing on his lips.

The memory of Osaka, rises unbidden—the steam of the sauna clinging to his skin, the taste of him, the weight of his body, the terrifying intimacy of a silence that felt like its own language. He had memorized his tarot card reading. He had thought there was a choice to be made, a conversation to be had.

But what if he was wrong? What if the choice was already made, and he was never in the running?

Maybe he was an experiment. Maybe Kyomoto Taiga, the golden boy with the world bronze medal, looked at him and wondered if Hokuto was just an experiment to see if he swings the other way.

The humiliation climbs up his neck, flushing his cheeks. He looks down at his hands, at the faint calluses on his palms. Maybe he’s an object of study. A data point in someone else’s self-discovery.

Across the room, Airi throws her head back and laughs at something Ishihara Satomi says. Taiga watches her, and his smile is easy. Open. It’s the smile of someone who isn’t calculating, who isn’t hiding.

He looks happy.

And Hokuto is sitting here, holding a secret that suddenly feels less like a shared treasure and more like a burden he was tricked into carrying alone.

He pushes his chair back, the legs scraping against the floor with a sound that is swallowed by the din. No one looks over. He murmurs an excuse about needing air to no one in particular, and he walks toward the doors, his steps steady, his face carefully blank.

The hallway carpet swallows the sound of his footsteps. The banquet’s laughter still rings in his ears, but here it’s just the hum of the air conditioning.

The room is dark, lit only by the sodium glow of the city seeping around the edges of the curtains. He doesn’t turn on the main light. He just goes to his bag and kneels beside it on the carpet.

He doesn’t turn on the main light. He just goes to his bag and kneels beside it on the carpet.

Packing is a ritual he knows well. The careful folding of t-shirts, smoothing out wrinkles. His skating gloves go into the side pocket. He takes his toiletries from the bathroom, avoiding his reflection in the mirror, avoiding the sight of two toothbrushes in a glass.

By the time he’s done, his suitcase is a compact, orderly cube. He sits back on his heels and looks at it.

Tomorrow, the bullet train will carry him south, back to Shizuoka. Back to the familiar smell of their local rink. Back to his father’s voice, to the whiteboard in their kitchen. Coach Eri will come down from Tokyo with a stack of music suggestions. They’ll argue good-naturedly over step sequence levels. He’ll wait for the email from the federation with his Grand Prix assignments.

And at home, in the quiet of his room, he’ll pull out his paints. He’ll try to capture the particular blue-gray of the Pacific in winter. He’ll rearrange the furniture.

This is his life. It’s a good life. It has structure and meaning and beauty that he has chosen, piece by piece.

Kyomoto Taiga will be part of it, but only as a score to beat. A technical benchmark. Not a memory that tastes like steam and salt and confusion.

A rival. That’s the word. Clean. Simple. It has a border.

He hears the click of the lock. Then the door swings open, and a blade of hallway light cuts across the carpet.

Taiga steps inside, and the door sighs shut behind him. His tie is loosened, the top button of his button-down undone. He looks rumpled in a way that feels intimate, and Hokuto has to look away, down at his own hands folded in his lap.

“You left early,” Taiga says, his voice giving nothing away.

Hokuto gestures toward his suitcase. “I wanted to pack. My train’s at seven tomorrow.”

Taiga doesn’t move further into the room. He just stands there, a silhouette against the curtains, and the silence that follows is a physical presence.

Hokuto can’t stand it. The silence feels like an accusation. So he grasps for the most mundane question he can find. “What about you? Do you have… off-season plans? Or are you staying in Tokyo to train?”

Taiga shifts his weight. “Toronto,” he says, and the word lands between them like a stone dropped into still water. “I leave at the end of the month. I’ll be training there with Brian Orser.”

Toronto. An ocean and a continent away. Brian Orser, the coach of champions.

And something twists in his chest. He’d heard the rumors. But hearing him say it, in this dark hotel room… it makes it real.

Taiga’s leaving the country. He’s stepping onto a plane and flying into a future where Hokuto is, at best, a footnote.

All his earlier certainty crystallizes into a cold, hard fact. Of course he’s going. Champions move toward their destiny in straight lines. They don’t look back.

“Oh,” Hokuto says, and the word is a small, hollow thing. “Toronto. That’s… that’s really great, Kyomoto. Orser is… he’s the best.”

He sounds like every other person who will congratulate him. The twist in his chest tightens, becoming a knot of longing and loss so acute he has to press his palm flat against his sternum.

He doesn’t move from the edge of the bed. The word “Toronto” is still expanding in the air between them.

Then Taiga moves.

He doesn’t walk around the bed. He just leans in, and his hands come down on the mattress on either side of Hokuto’s hips, bracketing him. The bed dips slightly with his weight. Hokuto can feel the heat of him, smell the faint, clean scent of his skin. His face is inches away, his eyes shadowed, unreadable.

“I’m making the most of my remaining days in Tokyo,” Taiga says, and his voice is low.

Hokuto’s breath catches somewhere high in his throat. He’s not talking about sightseeing. Their lips are so close Hokuto can feel the faint disturbance of his breath. The air between them is charged. “What are your plans?” he whispers.

Taiga doesn’t answer with words. He closes the distance, and his mouth finds Hokuto’s.

It’s gentle at first—just a soft press, a testing of the silence. And for a second, Hokuto is frozen. Then something gives way inside him, a levee breaking, and he kisses him back.

The gentleness doesn’t last. It deepens with a sudden, hungry intensity. Taiga’s mouth opens, and the kiss turns wet, searching. There’s tongue—a hot, slick slide that makes Hokuto’s thoughts dissolve into static.

Hokuto’s hands come up, clutching at the front of his wrinkled shirt.

When Taiga finally breaks the kiss, they’re both breathing hard. Hokuto’s lips feel swollen. Taiga hovers there, his forehead nearly touching his, his eyes searching his face in the shadows.

Then he leans in again, his mouth brushing the shell of Hokuto’s ear, and his whisper is a raw, ragged thing.

“I wanna fuck you.”

All the air leaves Hokuto’s lungs. The knot in his chest pulls so tight he thinks it might snap. This is it. He doesn’t want to talk. He doesn’t want to figure out what this means. He wants to consume the experience before he boards the plane.

And Hokuto—he is the experience. The willing, aching subject.

His grip on Taiga’s shirt tightens. He doesn’t have words. His voice is gone. So he just gives one small, almost imperceptible nod against Taiga’s temple.

Taiga pulls away. He’s moving toward his suitcase, rummaging through it with a quiet, focused efficiency. He’s looking for something.

Hokuto sits there, his heart a frantic bird, and watches him. This is the part where he should say something, but his voice is gone. All he can do is watch Taiga’s hands move through folded clothes.

He finds what he’s looking for—a small paper bag from a convenience store. He turns back, his expression unreadable.

He comes back to the bed and sits beside him, so close their thighs touch. He opens the bag. Hokuto watches, mesmerized, as he pulls out a small, square foil packet—a condom—and then a small bottle. He holds it up slightly.

“Lube,” Taiga says, his voice flat.

When did he get this? Hokuto opens his mouth to ask, but then Taiga is leaning in again, his free hand coming up to cup Hokuto’s jaw, and his mouth finds his before the words can form.

The kiss is different this time. Softer. Almost apologetic. Or maybe that’s just what Hokuto needs it to be. It’s a gentle press, then a deeper pull. The taste of him is familiar now, and Hokuto loses himself in it.

Taiga’s hand on his jaw slides back, fingers threading into his hair, and he guides him backward. Hokuto goes willingly, letting himself fall onto the mattress. Taiga follows him down, his body settling over his, knees bracketing his hips. He breaks the kiss just long enough to look down at him, his eyes dark pools, and then he’s kissing him again.

They kiss like that for what feels like hours, cycles of tenderness and hunger. Then Taiga’s mouth leaves his, trailing a line of soft, open-mouthed kisses along his jaw, down the column of his throat. His breath is hot against Hokuto’s skin. He finds a spot just below Hokuto’s ear, and when his teeth scrape lightly over the sensitive skin there—

A sound escapes Hokuto. A soft, broken gasp, entirely involuntary. It’s a sound of pure, shocked pleasure, and the moment it leaves his lips, he wants to pull it back.

But it’s too late. Taiga’s heard it. He goes very still above him, his breath hot against that same spot. Then he pulls back just enough so Hokuto can see his face. His expression is intent, focused. But his eyes are darker, his pupils wide.

“Good,” he murmurs, the word a low vibration. “I want you to make those sounds.”

His mouth returns to Hokuto’s neck, sucking gently, and another helpless gasp shudders out of him.

“I want to hear them,” Taiga continues, his lips moving against Hokuto’s throat. “When I’m inside you.”

The image flashes behind Hokuto’s eyes. Taiga. Above him. Inside him. The intimacy is so profound it short-circuits every other thought. His breath hitches, and a fresh, urgent heat floods his veins. He can feel his body responding.

Taiga feels it too. He shifts his hips, just a fraction, and the pressure is electric. A soft, punched-out sound escapes Hokuto.

“Okay,” Hokuto whispers, the word barely audible. His throat is tight. So he nods against the pillow.

For a long moment, Taiga just looks at him, his gaze searching. Then, without another word, he pushes himself up, kneeling over him. He reaches for the buttons of his own shirt, his movements unhurried. The sight is mesmerizing—the pale strip of skin revealed as each button comes undone.

Hokuto scrambles to do the same, his fingers clumsy and trembling. His mind is a white noise of sensation and panic.

He’s only managed to get his shirt open when Taiga leans back in. He doesn’t help him with the rest. Instead, he kisses him again, deep and consuming, one hand cradling the back of Hokuto’s head. The kiss is a distraction.

Then his mouth leaves Hokuto’s. It trails a wet, burning path down his jaw, over his throat, across the hollow of his clavicle. Hokuto’s breath comes in shallow pants. He feels exposed.

Taiga stops at his chest. His mouth—warm, wet, unbearably soft—closes over Hokuto’s right nipple.

A jolt of pure, electric sensation arcs through him, radiating out from that single point. Hokuto arches off the bed with a choked cry, his hands flying to Taiga’s hair, holding him there.

At the same moment, Taiga’s free hand finds his other nipple. His fingers circle it once, teasing, before he pinches, just enough pressure.

The dual sensation is too much. A broken, ragged moan tears itself from Hokuto’s throat, a sound he doesn’t recognize as his own.

Above him, Taiga makes a low, approving noise. He releases the bud with a soft pop, blowing gently on the wet, sensitized skin. The cool air is its own exquisite torture.

“Again,” he murmurs, his voice thick with hunger. “Just like that.”

And he does it again. There is only this: the sharp, sweet ache of his teeth, the soothing lap of his tongue, the way Hokuto’s body arches off the bed of its own volition. He is a map of nerve endings, and Taiga is reading him.

Hokuto doesn’t notice the tug at his waistband. It’s a distant rustle. His world has narrowed.

So when the cool air finally hits the skin of his stomach, his lower belly, it comes as a sudden, intimate exposure that makes him gasp.

“Touch me.”

The command is a low vibration against his sternum. Hokuto’s hands flutter down. He fumbles, his fingers clumsy, until they find Taiga’s cock, already hard and hot. He wraps his hand around him, and the feel of it is a revelation. He’s terrified he’s doing it wrong.

But then Taiga moves, thrusting up into the circle of his fingers, setting a pace. He kisses Hokuto again, swallowing his startled moan. Then his mouth is on Hokuto’s neck, sucking a mark. He returns to his chest, his tongue circling a peaked nipple before he bites down, gently, cruelly, and Hokuto cries out, his hand tightening reflexively.

He alternates like this until Hokuto is nothing but a collection of raw, singing nerves. Hokuto is trying to keep up, but he is lost.

Finally, Taiga pulls away.

The loss of his warmth is immediate. He kneels between Hokuto’s legs, his own breathing ragged, and his hands go to the waistband of Hokuto’s trousers and underwear. He pulls them off in one efficient motion, and Hokuto is laid bare. The hotel room air feels suddenly very cold.

Taiga reaches for the nightstand, for the small bottle. The click of the cap is loud. Hokuto watches as he pours a clear, cold slick of gel onto his fingers.

He looks at Hokuto, his eyes dark. “Tell me,” he says, his voice low and steady. “If it hurts.”

His fingers, slick and cool, press against him. The pressure is insistent, a blunt, impossible demand. Hokuto’s whole body goes rigid, and he hears his own breath stop in his throat.

Taiga doesn’t push. He just holds the pressure there.

Hokuto can feel the frantic beat of his own pulse. He closes his eyes. He focuses on the sensation. The feeling of being opened where he is meant to be closed.

Then, with a slow, inexorable glide, the tip of Taiga’s finger breaches him.

A sharp, bright gasp tears from Hokuto. It’s not quite pain—it’s a stunning, overwhelming fullness, a stretching sensation so profound it feels like it’s rearranging something inside his soul. He is utterly, completely filled by this single point of contact. His fingers clutch at the sheets.

Taiga lets it sit there, buried to the knuckle, and doesn’t move. He looks at Hokuto, a silent question.

Hokuto lets out a shuddering breath. The initial shock is receding, replaced by a deep, aching pressure. His body is adjusting. He manages a small, jerky nod. “Okay,” he whispers. “It’s… okay.”

Taiga moves then, a slow, shallow withdrawal followed by a gentle push back in. The drag is smoother. He does it a few times, a patient, rhythmical exploration.

Then the pressure changes. A second finger joins the first.

This is pain. A bright, searing stretch that makes Hokuto cry out. His back arches off the bed in instinctive retreat. He feels split open.

Taiga stops immediately. His free hand comes to rest on Hokuto’s hip. He doesn’t speak, just waits, his two fingers motionless inside him.

The pain ebbs, slowly, replaced by a deep, throbbing ache. The stretch is still immense, but it is no longer a knife’s edge. He breathes through it.

“More,” Hokuto hears himself say. He doesn’t know if he means it, or if he just wants the waiting to be over.

A third finger.

The stretch is obscene. A feeling of being turned inside out. A choked sob escapes him. But Taiga doesn’t wait long this time. He begins to move.

His three fingers slide in and out with a slow, deliberate rhythm. The drag is slick now, the pain subsiding into a dull, heavy fullness with every thrust. Hokuto’s mind whites out.

Then—his fingers curl. They brush against something deep inside, a place Hokuto didn’t know existed.

A shockwave of pure, electric pleasure erupts from that single point. Hokuto’s entire body seizes, and a broken, startled cry is ripped from his throat.

Taiga does it again, a deliberate press.

Stars explode behind Hokuto’s eyes. His hips buck off the bed, seeking the pressure. All coherent thought is gone. There is only this bright, blinding point of pleasure.

Above him, Taiga lets out a soft, controlled breath. His movements become more precise. “Do you want it?” he asks, his voice rough-edged. “My cock. Do you want it inside you?”

Hokuto is beyond words. His body is answering for him, clenching around the invading fingers. He can only nod, frantic, desperate, his face pressed into the pillow.

Taiga withdraws his fingers.

The emptiness is immediate, shocking—a hollow, aching void. Hokuto’s hips lift off the bed almost involuntarily.

He watches through half-lidded eyes as Taiga reaches for the foil packet. He tears it open with his teeth and rolls the condom down over himself.

And that’s when it hits Hokuto: this is his first time.

He’s thought about it, of course. But he never imagined it like this. In a hotel room with the world bronze medalist. With a boy who is leaving the country.

Taiga looks up then, his gaze finding his. His eyes are dark, unreadable, but his voice is quiet. “We don’t have to do this,” he says. “If you don’t want to.”

The offer hangs in the air. Taiga could leave. He could go back to the banquet, find Airi with her beautiful smile. He could spend his last night with someone who makes sense.

But he’s here. In this dark room. With Hokuto.

He chose this. He chose the awkward junior from Shizuoka over the ice princess of Japan. He chose the confusing, secret thing over the easy, public one.

The realization blooms in Hokuto’s chest. It doesn’t erase the nervousness, but it layers over it. For tonight, at least, he is the choice that Taiga made.

“I want to,” Hokuto whispers. The words are barely audible, but they feel like the most important ones he’s ever said.

He sees something shift in Taiga’s eyes. Then he’s moving, returning to him, his body a welcome weight. His mouth finds Hokuto’s, and this kiss is different. Softer. Slower.

As they kiss, Hokuto feels the blunt, insistent pressure of him. He doesn’t push. Not yet.

Then, with a slow, inexorable certainty that steals the air from Hokuto’s lungs, he begins to press inside.

The stretch is immense—more than his fingers, more than Hokuto could have prepared for. It’s a burning, full-bodied invasion that makes his eyes sting. A soft, pained sound escapes him, muffled against Taiga’s mouth.

Taiga stills immediately, his body tense, his kiss gentling. He waits until the initial tightness begins to ebb. Then he pushes forward again, another slow, deliberate inch.

With every fraction Taiga claims, Hokuto feels a part of his old self recede. The pain is still there, but it’s tangled now with something else—a profound, shocking fullness.

Taiga pushes forward again, and then—there is no more room. He is inside him, fully, a solid, burning line of heat.

The fullness is absolute. Hokuto can’t breathe. He can only feel.

And then Taiga goes still. Completely, utterly still. For a long moment, there is only the shared, ragged sound of their breathing.

Then Hokuto feels a shudder work through him, a fine tremor. Taiga lets out a broken, ragged sigh—a sound Hokuto has never heard from him—and he buries his face in the hollow of Hokuto’s shoulder. His lips move against Hokuto’s damp skin.

“You feel… so tight. So good.”

The confession is raw, stripped of all his usual control. And it unlocks something inside Hokuto.

I did this.

Matsumura Hokuto made Kyomoto Taiga sound like that. Wrecked. Undone.

The power of it is dizzying. In answer, his body clenches around him, an involuntary, possessive squeeze that draws a sharp, choked gasp from Taiga’s throat.

“Move,” Hokuto whispers into the darkness. His voice is rough, unfamiliar.

Taiga goes rigid for a second. Then Hokuto feels him take a deep, steadying breath. He’s composing himself.

When he finally moves, it is with that same deliberate slowness. A long, slick withdrawal, followed by a steady return. The initial, sharp edge of pain has been worn smooth, replaced by a deep, aching friction.

He kisses Hokuto then, a soft, searching kiss. And Hokuto opens for him—his mouth, his body—willingly. He lets the rhythm of Taiga’s thrusts become his rhythm.

The slow rhythm is a kind of torture. But then something shifts. A tension coils in Taiga’s back. His hips draw back further, and when he pushes forward again, it’s faster. Sharper. The angle changes.

It happens.

A bright, electric shock of pleasure detonates somewhere deep in Hokuto’s core. It’s the spot from before, but amplified. A sharp, punched-out cry tears from his throat.

Taiga does it again, and again, his pace quickening. Each thrust lands with a precision that feels brutal and miraculous.

The world narrows.

Then Taiga’s hand slides between them. His fingers wrap around Hokuto’s cock. He begins to stroke him, his grip tight, his rhythm a mirror of his thrusts.

The dual sensation is catastrophic. It’s too much input. Hokuto is babbling, broken words. His hips are moving helplessly.

The pleasure crests, a wave so immense it feels like it will crack his ribs open. His body seizes, back arching, and he comes with a sound that is ripped from someplace primal inside him. Release pulses through him in hot, endless waves. The intensity is so profound it borders on pain.

He clings to Taiga as his orgasm pulls Taiga over the edge. Hokuto feels the pulse of him inside.

The tension drains from Taiga all at once. He collapses onto Hokuto, a dead weight of warmth and sweat. His forehead rests against Hokuto’s clavicle, his breath coming in ragged gusts.

They lie there, tangled. The only sounds are their labored breaths and the distant hum of the hotel. The smell of sex and salt fills the air.

In the heavy quiet, Hokuto’s mind begins to flicker back online. He stares up at the dark ceiling, feeling Taiga’s weight. His heartbeat thuds against Hokuto’s chest.

Time becomes liquid.

Hokuto feels the exact moment Taiga decides to move—a subtle tension in his muscles. Then he’s pulling away. The cool air rushes in. It’s a shocking loss of heat.

Taiga sits on the edge of the bed, his back to him. Hokuto hears the crinkle of the tissue box, the soft, efficient sounds of him cleaning himself up.

Then he turns. Hokuto feels the press of tissues against his stomach, Taiga’s touch impersonal. He cleans him with focused efficiency. There’s no eye contact. His face is a mask of composed quiet. The boy who came apart is gone.

He gets up. The mattress sighs. Something soft and heavy settles over Hokuto. Taiga tucks it around his shoulders with a gesture that isn’t quite tender.

His footsteps retreat. The creak of his own bed frame. The rustle of sheets. Then silence—a thick silence that fills the space between their beds.

Hokuto lies perfectly still under the blanket that smells like hotel linen. The warmth Taiga left is already fading. He stares at the dark shape of him in the other bed.

The wish rises: that he had just stayed. That he had curled his body around his in the aftermath.

But he didn’t.

And the space beside Hokuto is just empty space, already cooling, already turning into memory.