Chapter Text
r/FigureSkating — Post-FS Thread: U.S. Nationals, Men
u/lutzandfound · 2h
ok someone check on the judges. that's a +2 jump since GPF for orlov. in SIX WEEKS.
u/quadgodcomplex · 2h
his coach has never choreographed like that in his life, no offense to tommy
u/inasnowbauer · 1h
I keep thinking about the spiral into the final spin. very sustained, very Russian. but who wants to start baseless rumors anyway.
u/quadgodcomplex · 1h
you can't just say that and log off
u/inasnowbauer · 58m
watch me
u/bubblewrapstan · 1h
rip the flamingo costume, he lied to us
u/kissandcryalot · 44m
has anyone seen a video from thesecondmark yet? she's usually up within a couple hours and it's been radio silence since the SP breakdown. of all the skates to go quiet on
u/lutzandfound · 40m
she's probably rewatching it 400 times like the rest of us to figure out what happened
u/kissandcryalot · 38m
that's what I mean. she goes on and on about how he’s just a jump machine. this is his redemption and she’d better apologize.
***
It had taken Maren only a few moments more to realize that if she had the press pass, she could also wander into the conference and see it first-hand. She justified it to herself as something she should already have had access to anyway as part of the creator program. Sachiko’s friend wouldn’t mind. She would just sit quietly in the back and take notes.
She trailed in behind the Mercury News reporter, who had consolidated down to one laptop for the occasion, and nodded politely to the volunteer in the purple shirt who glanced perfunctorily at her pass before nodding that she could go in. As she did, she turned the badge around so that the name on it wasn’t obvious, feeling guilty. She’d find a way to make it up to Yu and Sachiko.
The setting was decidedly unglamorous, like much of the backstage work at the shows, a dingy conference room with folding chairs in uneven rows, a long table on a riser at the front. A backdrop clustered thickly with sponsor logos was being carefully pinned behind it for maximum visibility as another purple-shirt volunteer fussed with the three placards: LIN, ORLOV, ROBBINS.
The seats didn’t seem to be assigned, so she slid into one at the back, behind the door. It would be hard to see her from the riser, she thought, unless you deliberately went looking. She didn’t think that was likely.
Tyler Lin came out first, still flushed and fresh-faced, with the expression of a kid who had been told he could stay up late. Then Niko sauntered in, his jacket now zipped over the costume to display the embroidered logo there—Maren strongly suspected Dani’s work—his hair less wild and more press-appropriate. He dropped into his chair with easy grace, adjusted the microphone with a careless gesture, and leaned over to say something to Lin in an undertone that made the kid grin, then flashed a thumbs-up as Josh Robbins slid into the last seat with a slightly panicked look at the clock.
Dani came in a few moments later by the side door, leaning against the wall with her phone in one hand as she took in the room with a practiced gaze. When she thought she was unobserved her carefully applied charm faded away, leaving only a knife-edged patience. Maren could practically see her counting journalists, cataloguing outlets, sorting the room into useful and not-useful. The scan reached the back row and at last reached her, snagging slightly. Then it moved on, and Dani was leaning over to say something to the official next to her. For a half second Maren was sure she was the subject. But nothing happened and she breathed again. Silly, to think Orlov’s publicist would care at all about a brief hallway conversation.
She uncapped her pen, pulled out her notebook, half-glancing at her scribbled note from Orlov’s performance earlier. Up at the table, Niko was pouring water into a plastic cup. If he had seen her come in, he gave no sign of it. She frowned, trying to decide why she even cared.
With a polite cough for attention, the moderator started the session. Maren placed her left hand against the badge to make sure it was still turned backwards.
A journalist in the front row asked Tyler Lin what it felt like to be the future of American men's skating, and Lin said he was much more focused on the future of tomorrow's practice, which got a laugh from everyone except Niko. His smile seemed a bit fixed, perhaps because the answer was similar to what she thought he might say in the same situation.
Maren wrote Lin: media trained or naturally likeable? and then crossed out the second half, because she already knew. Social media had produced skaters who understood how to take a video clip, a selfie, a good press quote. The ones that did not were weeded out early.
Niko fielded a softball question about Worlds, then a more pointed one about Park Seo-jin. The smile on his face was less fixed, but still artificial. Maren remembered how he had smiled in the corridor at her, how the expression had lit up his whole face until he had looked like an irreverent angel with his hair haloed in the lights. The difference was, now that she’d seen it, startling. She tried to imagine a younger version of him learning to arrange his features this way, practicing in a mirror the way he must practice his jumps, until the smile landed perfectly every time.
Niko’s answers were as polished as his smile. He was honored to represent the United States at Worlds. His priority was focusing on his own skating. Seo-jin was a phenomenal competitor and—after a quick, magnanimous glance over at Tyler Lin—the field was lucky to have so many excellent skaters.
Dani smiled from her perch against the wall.
Maren caught herself looking down at her phone, where her conversations with Niko were locked safely away behind her passcode. She was so practiced at looking at him through the camera, through media, that she hadn’t realized how different he seemed in their messages. This version of Niko was as filtered as her painstakingly clipped footage.
Robbins was finishing up a visibly less-polished response about his short program when the AP reporter two rows ahead put her hand up.
“Niko,” she said warmly in a way that suggested they’d known each other a long time. Maren stared fixedly at the woman’s dark hair, wondering what she looked like. “Your program was a bit different tonight. Can you tell us a little about what changed?”
Niko smiled slowly in a way that Maren would have bet money was designed to buy time. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Dani lean forward very slightly.
“I realized that at some point I had fixated on my jumps,” Nico said. To Maren’s surprise, his answer sounded honest. “I spent so much time working on my quads that maybe I paid less attention to the actual skating.”
His choreography is an excuse to get into position to jump, Maren had said, or at least strongly implied, on that viral video. She hadn't realized that Niko had actually listened to it before he tore it apart in the interview.
The smile faded as he looked down, and he adjusted his water cup a quarter-turn with long fingers before looking up again. “I guess I decided to have the jumps come out of the movement instead of replacing it.”
The AP reporter said something else, but Maren heard none of it. She was frozen in place, her half-charitable thoughts towards Orlov already gone. His quote, but her words to him, from just before the press conference. Her eyes flicked to her notepad, where she had scribbled the same words down during the performance, intending to use it in her recap of Nationals. The phrase stared blurrily back at her, proof she hadn’t imagined it.
She had a sinking feeling he wasn’t even aware that he had reached out and stolen them from her. She’d thought he was being polite, when he asked. She’d thought—what had she thought? That he actually wanted to know what some figure skating fan thought of his performance? Her analysis, her hard-earned perspective, carelessly repeated to the press as his own revelation. He didn’t care at all.
The moderator was working down his list. There was a question for Lin about the lutz. Robbins gave a surprisingly gracious answer about longevity in skating to a room already composing its Orlov-and-Lin narratives. Maren used the time to rebuild her composure and had nearly finished when the moderator looked at the sheet in front of him and called, "Japan Daily."
Her stomach dropped through the folding chair. This can’t be happening. She reached for the badge, clutching it so it wouldn’t rotate around and betray her. From the back of the room, she couldn’t see anyone who might be the real correspondent. The helpful volunteer at the door must have been writing down names after all.
She wondered if she could fake a sudden coughing attack and duck out of the room. But the moderator was scanning the rows, and she could see the Mercury News reporter turning in her direction. And up on the podium, Niko’s gaze was tracking Dani’s, who had already unerringly located her in her tucked-away spot.
Maren heard her own voice arrive from somewhere surprisingly steady, as if she’d had this question planned before she walked into the room.
“We all saw the changes to the program tonight,” she said, ignoring the laser-like focus of Niko’s attention as it snapped to her. The faces on the podium were a blur even as her heart beat sped up. If her face was flushed, there wasn’t time to care about it now. “Do you think there’s enough time between now and Worlds to make such an ambitious artistic change to your program?”
She stared at him, chin lifted defiantly.
You can’t just decide to be artistic, she had told him at the beginning of this. At the end of the day, he’d only ever be a series of athletic jumps strung together by some slightly redone choreography.
He picked up his cup, took a sip, set it down. He’d heard the edge in her voice, she was sure of it, and he was aware that the answer to this might show up in all the articles tomorrow.
“I think,” he said, his voice low and unhurried, “that the time between now and Worlds is exactly long enough for the changes I want to make.” He paused. The room was quiet in a way that felt expectant, almost theatrical, and his gaze was locked on her so intently that she was unable to look away.
"And I guess I'll find out if I'm right," he said, "when I get there."
A good answer; Dani smiled from over by the wall. Maren’s face was hot. He had to have heard the challenge in her voice, and instead of answering it, he’d managed to sound actually humble about it all. It was a reminder that no matter what he had said to her in private, this person was who he really was.
The moderator had already called the next question, which Lin was answering. She looked up to see Niko, who was still looking directly at her with an expression she couldn’t quite read, a faint line between his brows.
By the wall, Dani had put her phone away. She was looking at Niko with her head at a slight angle, eyes slightly narrowed. Then the person next to her tapped her on the shoulder, and she responded, and the press conference was wrapping up.
***
Maren grabbed her things and fled through the side door, turning off the main corridor as quickly as she could.
"Cross.”
Maren stopped. She was in one of the smaller service corridors, bare concrete with bundled cables. There was a jumble of folded tables stacked loosely against the wall, narrowing it even further. Niko had come up behind her, slightly out of breath. The ribbon from his medal trailed loosely out of his jacket pocket where he must have shoved it as he tried to catch up with her.
"That was a hell of a question," he said. And there was a question in his voice too, as if he didn’t understand what had happened in the room.
That decided her. She turned around and came back toward him, and something in her face stopped him mid-corridor.
"You used my line."
He blinked. "What?"
"Up there. On the record. ‘I decided to have the jumps come out of the movement instead of replacing it,’" she repeated back to him, hearing both his voice in the press conference and her own from before that. There was a slight shake in her voice, which somehow made it even worse. She wanted to be in control of this, to not care, but he’d stolen that too.
"Maren—"
"It's a good quote." She was close to him now, close enough to jab a finger at him without quite touching him. "But if I use it in my own video now, I’m just a fan channel sucking up to the champion.” She took a deep breath, huffed it out. “You heard me say it and you took it!”
"I didn't—"
"I know you didn't." And that was the unbearable part, because she knew it even as she hated him for it. Her voice was cracking again before she could get it back under control. "That’s the worst part. You didn't even do it on purpose. You just smiled down at everyone, the glorious champion, and you took my words, my analysis and used it like anything else you wanted.”
She stood there, breathing hard. There was no sound in the corridor but the distant interrupted buzzing of the overhead lights.
Niko had gone very still. For once, there was no practiced smile. There wasn’t even the jittery, pent-up energy from when he was in the rink, or the iciness from when he first met her at the gala. Only a careful expression, like someone who had reached for the stove and unexpectedly burned his fingers.
"You're right," he said. "You did say that.” He looked faintly puzzled now, as if just realizing it.
"I know,” she said, anger and indignation still running through her like live current.
“I didn’t mean to steal them,” he said quietly. “But you’re right. I heard you say it, and it must have stuck with me.” He ran a hand through his hair, mussing it back into its earlier wildness. “But Maren—”
It felt strange, to hear him call her that. They didn’t use names when they talked, or he called her Cross.
“Don’t,” she said. “Can’t you see that you just keep doing that? Taking the best of what other people say, or twisting it all up, or—”
“Maren,” he said again, cutting across her. “I’m sorry. But if I said it—if I stole it—it was because it was true.”
Maren pressed her lips together. Her notebook felt heavy in her hand, clenched hard between her fingers as if she might throw it at him.
“You told me I didn’t understand my own programs,” he continued, taking a half-step closer. He was right in front of her now; she could see the faint red line on his throat was still there. “You…weren’t wrong.”
Maren stared at him, searching for the lie. She was still furious, but his face was open in a way she hadn’t seen before, the press conference mask completely gone.
“Telling me that I was right doesn’t justify it,” she said. Her voice was finally steady, which was good, because inside she was shaking.
Niko was looking at her like he actually meant it, like he was actually sorry, and that made everything worse, because it meant she couldn’t just keep being angry with him. And there was something else she felt underneath it all, something she didn’t want to name.
“I know—”
He didn’t finish. Instead, his hand came up to the side of her face, fingers brushing her cheek tentatively, as if he expected her to pull away. Her hand had found the front of his jacket without conscious decision; sequins pricked at her fingertips through the thin material.
He was just tall enough that she had to tilt her head as he leaned forward, so close that she felt his breath warm against her face—
—and the lanyard, wedged between them, dug painfully into her chest. Maren jerked back reflexively, letting go of him. The forgotten notebook slipped from her other hand with a flutter of pages. Her face burned. Niko stood frozen, hand still raised where her face had been. She could see his chest rising and falling rapidly beneath the jacket.
“What are we even doing here?”
She’d said it aloud, not just in her head. But she didn’t know the answer. One minute she had been incandescently angry and the next…something else. Nothing else would explain how utterly stupid she had been. There was nothing here for her. She couldn’t want someone who had taken her words and her work and made them his without asking.
“I don’t know,” Niko said, his voice rough. He lowered his hand slowly, as if it hurt to move it.
She looked down at the notebook, splayed out on the concrete floor, her handwriting there for anyone to see. All her notes from the past week, the past season.
He was looking at her with that same openness she’d seen before, and she couldn’t stand it. Hair wild, breathing hard, the ribbon from his medal slipping even further from his pocket until she wanted to tuck it back in. But that would just be giving him something else he could use without asking.
“You should go,” she said, hating how the words came out. They weren’t angry enough.
“Maren—”
Not Cross. She had no defense against that, it seemed. Anger drained away, leaving only numbness. “You have people waiting. Dani’s probably looking for you.”
“I don’t care about Dani.”
Where the lanyard had gouged into her was a physical ache now, throbbing. She pressed her hand up against it, over the badge that belonged to someone else, trying to think of anything else at all, to bring her thoughts back to herself and away from the expression on his face.
The opening notes of the Chopin piece drifted through her head, soft and searching. She closed her eyes for a moment, opened them again, then finally bent to gather her notebook, her pen, the floor cold through her tights.
“Congratulations,” she said as she stood, clutching the notebook to her like armor, and this time the words came out just right, slightly distant. Almost steady. “Go celebrate.”
And just like that, the openness was gone. His face tightened, some of the old arrogance coming back in. “Right.”
From the far end of the corridor came the sound of a door and Dani's voice, still distant, asking a volunteer a question with an obvious answer. Dani would be here any moment.
She made herself turn and walk in the other direction carefully, and it wasn’t until she pushed through the convention center doors and into the cool air that she let herself blink, hard, and felt the burn behind her eyes that she was not going to call tears.
***
When she was safe in her hotel room and in her PJs, Maren leaned against the headboard with her laptop perched on a pillow in her lap and called Yu, who picked up on the first ring.
“And a big hello to Japan Daily,” Yu said. “Do you have a comment for our readers?”
Maren closed her eyes and slumped down against the pillows. “You watched the livestream.”
“Oh, I watched it,” Yu confirmed, the smirk audible in her voice. “When I heard your voice I died.”
Maren groaned. “I’m so dead.” She bolted upright with a sudden horrible thought. “Tell me there wasn’t video of me.”
A chuckle from the other end of the line. “No, all you can see is the skaters. Sachiko isn’t going to fire you. But you do owe her drinks. Lots of drinks, she says.”
Maren let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding.
“You asked Orlov a question,” Yu continued, her delight still obvious even flattened on the phone line. “You sounded like you wanted him to fall off the podium. The press one, not the medal one. Although—”
"I didn't—"
"Maren.” A pause. “I know you so much better than that. You have a professional voice, and that wasn’t your professional voice. What did he do?"
Maren was obscurely grateful that this was audio only. There was a moment where she thought she would deny it all, but she needed someone, anyone to understand.
“He stole my line,” she said, and there it was. The most honest truth she could offer Yu.
“He…what?”
She was afraid of the lies that were starting to stack up. Yu knew she had met Orlov at the gala, knew that he had told Maren he thought her work was terrible because she didn’t skate. But she had never really explained the bet, the messages they’d exchanged.
She felt so small, thinking about all she hadn’t told her friend. Yu deserved better.
“You know what he said at the press conference? About the jumps and the movement?”
“Uh huh.”
“I said that to him. Before the press conference. And he took it and said it to that reporter as if he’d made it up himself.” Her voice picked up speed as it went, the anger starting to filter back through the numbness from before.
But Yu had picked up on the one part that Maren really didn’t want to discuss. “Wait. You said it to him? As in, face-to-face?”
Maren winced, looked over to where she had flung the dress over the chair in the corner. “I ran into him backstage on the way to the conference.” It sounded plausible. And it wasn’t exactly wrong.
She could still feel the ridge of the sequins under her fingertips. Resolutely, she squeezed her eyes shut, banished the sensation.
“And he repeated what you said to that reporter,” Yu said slowly, and Maren had a horrible feeling that she wasn’t convinced. Then, gentler: “You think he did it deliberately?”
“No,” she said immediately, remembering that dawning realization on his face. “I mean, I wish he had. He just…takes things, and doesn’t care where they came from and then they’re his, and now I can’t have them back.”
“Huh,” said Yu. “So you were mad, and that’s why you asked him if he had enough time to fix his program. I was going to ask what you thought about that.”
Maren pulled the laptop closer and opened the editing timeline, the evening laid out in thumbnails. "I have some thoughts. More importantly, I need a couple more hours to finish it and it’s already eleven.”
"Okay," Yu said. "Send me the video when it's up. And Maren."
"Mm."
"You sound weird."
"I’m tired."
"Sure," Yu said, but let her go.
Maren felt obscurely guilty as she opened up the video, which she would have finished hours ago if her thoughts hadn’t been spinning in circles. She usually used her notes as a guide for her videos, but that was before her notes had suddenly become a quote from the skater in question.
She wanted to say how he had improved, because his skate did deserve that. But she also wanted to point out how the middle section forced him lower and slower and had nearly cost him that quad toe. And she had to be careful with the Worlds question, because if her video wondered the same thing out loud, in the same voice, someone might put the pieces together and realize the Japan Daily correspondent sounded a great deal like @thesecondmark.
Before all of this happened, she had promised Niko Orlov that she wouldn’t mention Katya, would let him reveal it on his own timetable. She would keep her word, even now.
She cut the video anyway, though her fingers kept wanting to linger on the frames where he looked most changed. It took almost twice as long as she had told Yu, but what came out was the truth as she had seen it, a review of the skate that used maybe half of what she could have put into it. Twice she found herself reviewing the more lyric parts of his skate, cutting them out only to begrudgingly put them back in. She took a break, drank her long-cold tea, and came back and finished like a professional.
By too early in the morning the video sat rendered and waiting, and the title field blinked at her.
She typed: Great Quote. Wonder Where He Got It.
She was tired. Sighing, she held down the backspace until the field was empty.
She typed: Orlov's New Free Skate: What Actually Changed.
It was accurate, safe. She’d allowed herself only minimal speculation on whether the changes he was making would survive to Worlds.
Maren hit upload, and loaded up Park Seo-jin’s Chopin at the Olympics, feeling the ache again where the lanyard had scraped her as he began to skate.