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2010 Winter Games Kink Meme
Figure Skating Post!
Only figure skating/ice dancing prompts/fills go here!
Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Other Sports and Crossovers are here.
Speed Skating is here.
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It’s not like there’s any inflection to it - Lysacek is one-note in all things - but he still oozes look how much of a self-sacrificing martyr I am. Johnny inhales sharply through his nose. There is not anything inherently noble about sleeping in the fetal position because your freakishly long limbs don’t fit the bunks, he wants to say, but he sees Mirai’s anxious face out of the corner of his eye.
Even now, after days of seeing them interact like brother and sister, it’s difficult to imagine what Evan could have done to endear himself to her. She’s a sweetheart to everyone, but sweet only goes so far, especially when you’re 19. It looks like she might be about to give up her hotel room for Evan Lysacek. He supposes Frank Carroll keeps them at the rink for long enough hours that Stockholm syndrome is a genuine possibility.
“Don’t be ridiculous, we’ll share,” Johnny says finally, taking care to keep his voice level and disinterested. He can pretend that he is sharing a room with Jeremy Abbott. That should help with thinking bland thoughts, at least until they’re alone and any sarcasm can go whooshing over Evan’s head.
“I - are you - really?” Evan asks. He leans closer, away from the hotel desk, darting his eyes from side to side like they’re in a bad spy film and he has a top secret message for Johnny. “You know there’s only one bed, right?”
Or like he’s a rabbit and Johnny’s the fox who’s going to eat him for breakfast, Christ.
“I’m not going to make you sign an ass-virginity waiver form,” Johnny says, annoyed, and watches with horrified fascination as a dull flush creeps up Evan’s neck.
“Oh my god,” Evan says. “That’s, like. That’s not what I meant, at all. Never mind.”
Johnny turns back to the clerk, who is watching them bemusedly. “Uh, here are your keycards,” he says, and slides them forward.
“Thank you.” Johnny smiles at him because it’s not his fault that the tour organizers can’t count, and because Paris used to work at a hotel. Johnny knows all about the sneaky retribution tactics of service sector employees.
He turns, tucking his keycard into his pocket and reloading himself with his luggage. Most of the other skaters and tour staff have brought minimal overnight bags and left the majority of their stuff on the buses, but Johnny doesn’t like feeling he might have forgotten something or might leave something somewhere. He likes having everything in one place. Besides, you never know when you’ll need an extra fur or two; some hotel room thermostats are only there to give guests a false sense of control.
Apparently he’s not doing so well with remaining outwardly aloof - as soon as he approaches the knot of skaters hanging out in the middle of the lobby, Charles asks him what’s going on.
“He and Evan are going to be roomies,” Mirai says cheerfully from just behind him. She doesn’t seem to notice the generally incredulous reactions.
“How nice,” Tanith interjects blandly, lips twitching, before anyone else can say anything.
“Sleepover!” Ben grins, waggling his eyebrows ridiculously.
Meryl says, “Jeremy and I can bring over nailpolish and Disney,” with a completely straight face.
Jeremy starts singing “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”, and Meryl chimes in with harmony while Charles and Ryan do the background vocalizing.
Rachael and Denis are the only ones who look even moderately sympathetic, but the effect is kind of ruined by the grins on their faces.
It figures that all ice skaters need to unite is someone to mock, and since Evan has gone to get his hair gel and protein powder from their bus, and has no discernable facial expressions besides, Johnny makes a natural target.
He doesn’t even bother to respond to the baiting, just walks away; it’s good practice, since Lysacek baits him simply by existing. Thankfully he doesn’t have to wait for the elevator, which would ruin his conspicuously undramatic exit.
When the doors start to slide shut, Adam darts in. He smiles, deceptively mild, so Johnny waits for it. Around the fourth floor, Adam says thoughtfully, “Lysacek would make a great big spoon, you know.”
And yeah, that’s great, Johnny thinks exhaustedly, just great. They can fucking snuggle.
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It’s entirely possible that Evan sleeps with his medal the way young children do stuffed animals. It would probably serve as nice reassurance when he wakes up from nightmares about only giving 100% of his effort.
Right now, though, the fact that it’s hanging out of Evan’s gym bag, casually enough that it can’t possibly be casual at all, is just making Johnny feel very tired, and more than a little irritated. It’s been two years, surely the novelty has worn off.
By the time Evan emerges from the bathroom in a cloud of steam, looking like the orange swamp monster trying his hand at underwear modeling, Johnny has tucked himself into the double bed, facing away from the medal. He shuts his eyes quickly, feigning sleep, listening to the noises of Evan moving around the room.
Soon, the noises stop completely, and after a few minutes Johnny rolls over and snaps, “What?”
Evan mumbles, “I could sleep on the floor, if you wanted.”
The last thing Johnny needs in the morning is Evan passive-aggressively falling asleep over his Powerbar and using his atrocious under-eye circles for sympathy votes.
“I said it was fine, didn’t I?”
He did, if not in so many words, but Evan stares at the bed with something approaching actual emotion - dread, probably, but it’s hard to differentiate with him - and doesn’t move.
“Were you hoping for a more…congenial welcome to our bed? Sorry to disappoint,” Johnny says as sweetly as he can, and whether Lysacek understands the words or not, he definitely reads the tone. His face turns blotchier than usual, and he starts to stammer out a reply but stops when Johnny rolls his eyes and flops back over onto his side.
Finally, the mattress dips with Evan’s weight, and the overhead light shuts off, then turns on and shuts off two more times before staying off.
They’re both lying there so rigidly that the sheets don’t even rustle, a careful foot between them. It reminds Johnny of siblings on a long car trip, this is my side and this is yours, cross the line on pain of wedgie.
“Sorry,” Evan says quietly.
Johnny sighs, letting the tension leak out of his muscles. “It’s fine,” he says, primarily in the interest of getting Evan to shut up and sleep, but to his surprise, he even kind of means it. He’s not bitter over Vancouver anymore, not really; he’s happy with his life now.
He wouldn’t have a problem with Evan at all now, except he’s not sure he can forgive putting winning before maintaining any sense of personal integrity. Actually, he might be able to forgive it if Evan hadn’t done it at the expense of other people, including but not limited to Johnny, or if he wasn’t participating actively in propagating the “kiss the USFSA’s ass” school of figure skating.
“How do you sleep at night?” he murmurs, and laughs a little at the absurdity of the double meaning created by improbable context.
“Badly,” Evan replies, and Johnny laughs harder. “I have to fall asleep at the right time, under the right conditions.”
“If you fall asleep before you count 500 sheep, you have to wake yourself up and start all over?” Johnny is only half-kidding - in the little time he’s spent around Evan, he has learned that Evan has enough compulsions to give Howard Hughes a run for his money.
The mattress shakes a little with Evan’s silent laughter, startling Johnny. “Something like that,” Evan agrees.
Johnny guesses he couldn’t have fake-dated Tanith without adaptively developing a sense of humor about himself - Tanith is cranky before coffee, and Ben is goofy right up until he’s sharply sarcastic.
Still, it’s weird, realizing that Evan laughs, bathes himself, and generates body heat. In Johnny’s head, he’s always been like neoconservatism - connected with certain people, but mostly just a smug, stupid set of principles - more of a concept than anything.
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Johnny’s internal clock wakes him up at six; apparently no amount of vitamin D resets Galina-set circadian rhythms. He tries to roll over and go back to sleep, but his muscles protest. When he opens his eyes and shifts his limbs a little, the reason becomes clear: Evan has wound himself around Johnny like strangling ivy.
In fact, they are cuddling; there’s not really another word for it. There is a threshold around here somewhere, but is it before or behind them? Johnny is too discombobulated to tell, and Evan’s limbs may have cut off blood flow to his brain.
Evan has woven his legs around each of Johnny’s, and he’s craned his neck over Johnny’s shoulder and tucked his chin into Johnny’s shoulder blade. He’s flung one arm over his head and one like a seatbelt over Johnny’s torso and back. He shifts around to try to dislodge Evan, but Evan just makes a sleepy noise and holds on tighter.
The rhythm of Evan’s breathing and heartbeat are too slow and deep and lulling for consciousness, even for a motivational trance state. Lying there is hot and constricting and he better not get self-tanner or drool on my shirt, Johnny thinks, just before he falls back asleep.
-
When he wakes up a couple hours later, he’s surprised to find Evan still asleep, still in roughly the same position. More than four consecutive hours of sleep seems abnormal for Evan.
At this point, Johnny has to pee and, if he wants to meet the rest of the crew on time, start getting ready, so he considers the best way of waking Evan. He decides on gentle poking, after regretfully rejecting the idea of a sharp elbow in the stomach.
“Evan? Evan. Evan.”
Evan makes a low noise of protest and burrows his face into the juncture between Johnny’s shoulder and neck.
And well, that’s it. Snuffling is not allowed for even those with sex privileges, and no one can say Johnny didn’t try the more humane method first.
“Evan? I think Frank is on the phone? He’s saying something about you being really unforgivably late for practice.”
Admittedly Johnny probably enjoys the way Evan bolts upright and scrambles out of bed way too much, especially since in the process, Evan shoves his elbows and knees into some of Johnny’s most persistent bruises. He mutters an impressive litany of profanity under his breath and doesn’t even appear to notice Johnny, or where he is, in his frenzy to get ready.
Because he isn’t that cruel, “Yeah, okay,” Johnny says, “you’re not really late for practice, Evan, you’re retired.” He stretches luxuriously as Evan finally notices him and pauses. “Got you out of bed, though,” he adds airily.
“I’m retired?” Evan sounds devastated, and Johnny is briefly torn between an urge to mock the pathetic and a disturbing empathy. Dreams can feel weirdly real, and sometimes Johnny wakes up like it’s still 2006.
“I’m retired,” Evan repeats, shaking his head. “Right. Total reflex. Dick move, though, dude.” He points at Johnny, who shrugs philosophically. Sorry, dude.
“It was that or a jab to the ribs.”
“Whatever. Of course you choose psychological warfare, no surprises there.” He yawns. “What time is it anyway?”
The clock, digital and requiring no skill to read, is not five feet from him, but pointed silence is lost on Lysacek.
“Uh, Johnny? Time?”
“8:40,” he concedes.
“What, seriously?” Evan turns around, and now he looks at the clock for himself. Frowning, he kneels to rummage in his gym bag for his cell, presumably to verify the time.
“No, I changed all the clocks while you were sleeping,” Johnny deadpans as he darts into the bathroom.
Most hotel showers are the bane of his existence, with their low pressure sprays and insubstantial towels and shitty conditioner samples. Unfortunately, the Albany Holiday Inn does not prove the exception, so Johnny is once again justified in bringing as many of his own supplies as possible.
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*ahem*
I am not in any way a SwanGoose fan but I am really enjoying this (damn you!) and I look forward to future installments (damn it!). I've read all the way to the end of what you've posted so far, but I wanted to comment here due to the Albany mention.
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As Johnny realizes he’s standing awkwardly in the doorway waiting for Evan to say something, he shakes his head sharply and heads out of the room. Whatever’s going on with Evan, it has nothing to do with him.
-
“Oh, no. No, no, no.” Johnny covers his eyes. His knees feel weak with horror. “You didn’t.”
“Quick, get the man a chair,” Meryl laughs, and someone takes Johnny’s arm and seats him at one of the breakfast tables.
“We so did,” Adam says, audibly unrepentant.
“Is okay, Johnnik,” Yu-na says, laughter in her voice, but no, not even Galina imitations can save her now. “Was fun!”
“Worth braving your wrath,” Adam agrees, and Johnny opens his eyes to see him and Yu-na fist-bump.
“You are dead to me,” he says, picking up his fruit salad and getting up to walk to another table. “Do you understand? Dead.”
He sits instead with Tanith, Ben, Charlie, Ryan, and Meryl, who maintain an amused silence while he picks at his breakfast. Adding insult to injury, it’s crappy, mostly unripe honeydew and overripe canteloupe.
“It’s not so bad,” Ben ventures. “It’ll be visually stimulating.” He grins winningly.
“They dyed their hair green, Benjamin,” he says dangerously. “They have magenta and red costumes. Do you know what a color wheel looks like?”
“Nope, but it sounds like they’ll look like fuschia plants and Christmas to me,” Ryan chirps.
Meryl pokes him in the side. The duty of calming him down seems to have fallen to her and Ben, since Tanith and Charlie are using up all their energy being disgustingly cute, eating waffles and reading the comics together. Johnny is convinced they use the couple bubble to give them the excuse and appearance of obliviousness without the reality of it; they are devious individually, but together they scare him a little.
“It could be worse,” Meryl soothes. “They could have shaved off all their hair.”
At this, Ryan looks disturbingly intrigued. Johnny shudders.
“Where’s Daisuke?” he says. “I need beautiful hair before me as soon as humanly possible.”
-
Privately, Johnny refers to this tour as Pipe Dreams on Ice.
The only reason the tour is so big - for skater name-recognition, if not number of cities hit - is also the only reason Johnny has a degree of tourwide creative control: charity. Guilt and cost savings are the driving forces behind Dreams on Ice, so Johnny got the job of “creative consultant” (after only two years honing his design and choreography skills and with no real experience working for anyone but himself) mostly because he accepted one salary for doing two jobs.
It stings a little, knowing that if the sponsors offered up more funding he wouldn’t even have been considered. Regardless, Johnny’s determined to take advantage of the opportunity; it’s an amazing chance for visibility early in his new career. He’s determined to prove that while this one break is luck, he is not a fluke, not a joke, not dabbling.
It would have been stupid to choose a career on the basis of spite - to refuse to entirely leave a sport because he hadn’t accomplished what he’d sworn to himself he would, or because from fifth or sixth place people could dismiss him too easily. But Johnny would be lying to himself if he didn’t admit it gave him satisfaction, imagining becoming enough of an influence on the next generations of figure skaters that it pissed people off, and maybe even changed the sport a little.
So while his reaction to the hair dye situation is mostly jest, part of him takes it as a cue to freak out. It’ll only worsen as the dye fades, especially for Adam, whose hair, sometime in the next week or so, will begin to look highly chlorinated.
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“I did not mean to upset you, Johnny,” she says.
“It’s okay,” he says gravely. “I know Adam is the mastermind behind this. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Yu-na looks grievously offended. “You do not think I can be mastermind? I can be very evil mastermind,” she says.
“Do tell,” Johnny says.
She glances over to a corner of the lobby, where Rachael and Mirai are playing Egyptian Ratscrew while Denis officiates, then lowers her voice conspiratorially.
“I have stolen the iPods of Adam, Mirai, Rachael, Denis, and mixed up their music!” She beams. “Rachael, she likes the -” Yu-na mimes playing a violin torturously. “- the classical, but she will get Adam’s dance pop.” She mimes this as well, brushing peace signs by either eye and bouncing to an imaginary beat.
“And Mirai is Evan’s musical protégé,” Johnny supplies. He knows because he’s tried to convert her with Back to Basics and Gaga’s latest, but she remains stubbornly committed to a bizarre blend of Jay-Z and shouty, outdated indie rock.
“She will get Denis’s music of the folk,” Yu-na explains. Denis has been going through a very earnest Joan Baez phase.
“This is all very well and dastardly,” Johnny says -
“But you are thinking I have not planned well enough. You doubt me?” She sighs. “I have as well taken the synchro - how do you say it?”
“Their synchronization cables?
“Yes,” Yu-na says delightedly. “Their synchronization cables. They will be stuck on different buses with wrong music until we arrive.”
He acknowledges Yu-na’s status as a true evil mastermind; Johnny can’t imagine riding on a bus without his favorite and most effective method of insulation. Napping, reading, subtly eavesdropping, and having a ready excuse for ignoring everyone else would all go out the window.
But he smiles at Yu-na and tells her he’ll be careful to stay on her good side, after digging in his own bag to make sure his playlists remain intact. It’ll be nice if there’s something other than his own career anxiety to spice up this tour.
-
When they get to the venue, Johnny works for a while with Denis and Mirai, going over their individual routines, cleaning up elements and editing portions that haven’t worked well. In between runs, they bend their heads together, gesticulating wildly and glancing furtively over to where Yu-na is practicing triple Axels, which Johnny guesses means a prank war is brewing among the young’uns.
For Johnny, the hardest part of choreographing, especially choreographing exhibition programs, is resisting his urge to mold the skater to fit his ideal image of them.
”Not everyone wants to skate to Lady Gaga in a sparkly onesie,” Paris told him when he had just gotten started.
And it’s the sad truth. Johnny thinks exhibitions should be fun, but most skaters prefer skating to Tragic Love Songs, Vol. 49, looking like giant ads for Prozac.
“What if you did a spiral sequence there, instead?” he says, skating over to Mirai. “That way you could time that jump with the trill in the music.”
She nods and tries it. “Mug for the crowd a little!” he laughs, when she maintains her very serious competition face. All of Frank Carroll’s skaters have this one same face, and it makes Johnny imagine them all crowded in front of a full-length mirror while Carroll chants, “Be the skate! I know you can do better than that! Feel your edges! Be the skate!”
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It’s what Johnny tries to get from all the skaters, even more than upbeat song choices - something unexpected, something performative, something that draws the audience in or questions their assumptions. But it’s (perhaps not surprisingly) difficult, especially because performative is what has almost always been expected of Johnny himself.
“Lovely,” he tells Mirai when she finishes, and after working with Denis for a few more minutes, he goes to see what costumes he can rustle up for Adam and Yu-na’s new number. He thought they wouldn’t be able to debut it tonight, but now he’s thinking they can play it for laughs - set up a narrative where Adam and Yu-na are wannabe punk rockers with no actual musical skill.
For that matter, he thinks, screw costuming, where are Ben and his guitar?
-
By Wednesday, he thinks he can count himself fully recovered from any Evan-cuddling related trauma. Nothing has changed - they still don’t talk to each other much at all, and any teasing about it has died off. The focus has now shifted to taking sides in the Great Prank War; Johnny has avoiding doing so thus far, but he thinks he’ll end up on Adam and Yu-na’s team. He admires the way their recruiting technique blends and alternates coaxing and threats.
He has done his best to block the memory entirely and assumes Lysacek has done the same, so when the buses stop briefly for gas, and Evan plops down in Daisuke’s seat on the opposite side of the Go board, Johnny is surprised. Most of the other skaters move freely between buses, but Evan stays on his own bus pretty religiously.
He recovers his aplomb well, if he does say so himself, and raises an eyebrow. “Yes?”
Evan starts fidgeting. He looks worse than usual, with greasy hair and baggy eyes. Johnny settles back in his chair and crosses his arms over his chest. With Evan, you just have to wait. Ask any questions, and all you’ll get is non sequitur.
“I have never slept for nine consecutive hours in my life,” Evan blurts. “Like, my entire life.”
Then again, Evan manages to make statements that don’t logically follow silence, which is perversely impressive. “Okay?”
“I’m lucky if I can manage to get three or four at a time!” He runs both hands through his hair and pulls on the ends. “Don’t you think it’s kind of weird that I slept so much longer that night? In a Holiday Inn! Without doing all my rituals first!”
Evan looks at him expectantly, so, not a rhetorical question. “No? Maybe you were just really tired,” he says, and looks back down at the board to contemplate strategy. He’s determined to beat Daisuke at least once before the day is out.
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“Right now I’m really tired,” Evan drones, ducking his head to rub at his eyes, and Johnny softens a little. He really does look awful.
“Why don’t you take some Ambien or something, okay? I can give you some, hold on.”
He’s halfway stood-up to get some out of his bunk when Evan mumbles, “Can’t. It’s a short-term thing, and even like, the highest dosage doesn’t work anymore.”
Johnny studies him for a few seconds. “Okay,” he says slowly, “I’m not sure what you want me to do.” Something tells him it’s not lend Evan his ocean sounds CD and heat him up some milk.
“I - take a nap with me?” When Johnny feels his eyes widen, Evan holds up a hand in response. “Just a quick one! Like, I can figure something out, I just need to be able to think first,” he says miserably.
Johnny opens his mouth and shuts it, then tries again. “You realize this is not some magical power I have? How can you have gone this far in life without realizing you sleep better with another person?” This seems the pertinent thing to latch onto right now. God, only Evan Lysacek would have an epiphany like this at 26. What does constant low-level sleep deprivation do to your brain?
“I’ve never slept with anyone before! I mean, slept with, yes; slept with, no!”
Again Johnny finds himself at a loss for words. Of course Daisuke chooses this time to return to the bus from the convenience store, just in time to hear Evan euphemistically affirm that he has had sex. He pauses a few feet from them.
“I will come back later,” Daisuke says. “Now that I think, I think Denis would like to have some Goldfish, too.” Before he turns around, he gives them a tiny wave.
“How is that even possible?” Johnny says. He’s starting to see Tanith and Charlie’s cutesy clinginess in a new light.
“I don’t know.” Evan shrugs. “Most of my relationships have been long-distance. I’ve been competing or on tour for like, all of my adult life, so it’s not like I ever spent the entire night in bed with anyone else.”
“That is truly taking figure skater relationship dysfunction to a new level, God.”
“Oops?” Evan ventures. “But seriously, Johnny, I’ll. I don’t know, I’ll let you choreograph a totally new program for me, and pick the costume and everything. Just, please, I have to sleep.”
That’s…actually pretty tempting. He weighs the endless possibilities - “Teeth” and pink finger gloves? “Barbie Girl” and a wig? - against the awkwardness of acting as Evan Lysacek’s life-size teddy bear. On the one hand, explaining to anyone else why he’s in Evan’s bunk spooning him will be a lost cause, and he’ll be signing up to sleep with Evan; on the other, it’s also Evan he gets to make ridiculous.
In the end, it’s not really even a contest.
“All right,” he says.
“All right?” Evan looks and even sounds disbelieving, and for a second Johnny wonders himself just how bad an idea this will turn out to be.
But he can’t back out on zombie Lysacek now, so he huffs, “I am the gift horse in this situation.”
“Oh, okay.” Evan bobs his head. “I’ll avoid looking you in the mouth,” he says, because right, cliché-speak is Evan’s native language. Johnny laughs as he turns to leave the bus, with Evan right on his heels, thinking, well, I did ask for something to spice the tour up.
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Everyone is so charming and Johnny with a position of power on a tour is very compelling. Also, yay, cuddling! And poor Evan... I love how you've written this and want more more more <3
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“Oh, okay.” Evan bobs his head. “I’ll avoid looking you in the mouth,” he says, because right, cliché-speak is Evan’s native language.
absolutely perfect. :D)
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