♊
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.
