Work Text:
It doesn’t matter that Casey has all the access she could want to Tina’s rink, nothing makes her feel quite like Casey like her own frozen little pond.
It was a war at first. When she realized that skating was her greatest passion, it felt like she had to be at the rink, that skating on the pond was childish and a way to stretch her legs after long bouts of studying. But Casey missed the open sky. She missed the raw and merciless chill of the wind cutting through her clothes. She missed the challenge of ice that isn’t perfect even when her calculations are.
Truthfully Casey just enjoys it. There’s a separation from the constant need for perfection her professional life requires. There are no fans or sponsors watching. No competitors praying that she’ll tear or snap something from a poor and sloppy landing. It’s just her, the ice, and the beauty of the art itself. No costume, of course. She’s a little overdressed for anything spectacular, but anything that would require the aerodynamics of a skimpy little dress would be too impossible to execute here without risking an injury.
So she hugs her sweater, and she glides around in lazy circles and figure eights in three pairs of leggings hidden beneath a pair of sweatpants her mother tried to throw out ages ago.
Gen has managed to save them all out of pure stubborn sweetness alone.
Beautiful, wonderful, perfect Gen. She doesn’t wear worn and terrible sweatpants unless they’re Casey’s, and then she wears them so much that Casey spends half of their mornings trying to find something to wear.
“You could just try wearing something other than sweatpants,” Gen said that morning while in Casey’s sweatpants and Casey’s Science is Cool shirt from middle school in front of a plate of food that would give both Tina Harwood and Joan Carlyle a stroke. Casey’s mom has lightened up a little on allowing bacon in the house, but turkey only and like everything else, it must be organic. Gen doesn’t really know the difference, thanks to growing up with Tina, so she doesn’t complain.
She didn’t come to skate with her. Gen doesn’t love it the way Casey does, and Casey doesn’t blame her. There are parts of her that still resent her equations and all the time spent bleeding herself over questions and answers that were already finished by someone else, someone she was supposed to admire or impress, if they were still living.
They ate breakfast together though. Casey kept to the meal her dietician planned for her, but Gen indulged herself in eggs scrambled with all the cheese she could want, smiling like the sun while she barely avoided spilling ketchup all over Casey’s shirt. The ketchup was also a recent compromise, but since they were able to find a brand with no extra sugar added and made from pesticide-free tomatoes, Casey’s mom allowed it.
There have been so many compromises these last few years, but Casey is happy. Gen and Tina have found the common ground they desperately needed, and although Tina wasn’t thrilled about managing an athlete in a public relationship with her daughter, the Subaru sponsorship (and Gen’s apparent happiness) made it a little easier to swallow.
Casey holds her arms out to her sides and closes her eyes. The bumps and ridges catch her blades, but she focuses on balancing herself in spite of them. There’s a certain kind of peace here that she can’t get from jumps and spins. When she’s in the air, if she falls, it’s because she wasn’t fast enough or she didn’t process the velocity required to get her from point A to point B in the microsecond of time it took for her body to catch up with her brain. If she falls here, it’s because the ice is wrong.
But Casey doesn’t need perfect ice to skate. She just needs ice, and until spring comes, this pond is her solitude.
“Looking good, Scarecrow!”
Casey opens her eyes and wobbles slightly as she startles out of her thoughts. She loops around and sees Gen trudging towards her, bundled from head to toe against the cold. She’s supposed to be in bed sleeping the morning away. Casey’s mom is teaching, so they have the house to themselves. It’s not exactly the freedom either of them want, but Casey and Gen are on the road too much to have a home of their own yet and their moms are both too eager to make up for the loss of shattered plans to exactly let them go. The arrangement somehow works.
“Shouldn’t you be asleep?”
“Someone has to keep an eye on you,” Gen says as she trudges towards the pond with a travel mug in each hand, and Casey glides towards her, eager to accept whatever waits inside. “Imagine if you broke your leg and had to drag yourself back to the house through the snow. You’d probably freeze to death.”
“With the thermal layering, hyperthermia would actually take longer than–.”
“Casey,” she says, and Casey presses her lips together.
“Right. Sorry.”
“Anyways, I was cleaning up from breakfast and didn’t want to go back to bed without you,” she says. “So…”
She holds out one of the mugs, and Casey accepts it. She can’t feel the temperature through her gloves, but when she pulls back the tab, she can see the steam coming out like a promise.
“Don’t burn your tongue,” Gen says. It almost sounds like Tina, but Gen would kill her if she said so.
Casey blows at the top before taking her first sip. It’s sweeter than she expected. “You made hot chocolate?”
“From scratch,” she says with the kind of casualness that suggests she’s used to impressing people. Well, it is true.
“I didn’t know we had chocolate in the house,” she says.
“I bought some yesterday,” Gen says. “It’s going to warm up soon, so I wanted one last taste of winter before the ice melts.”
“Do you think Tina would let us have this at the rink?”
“I think my mom would kill me and then have you doing jumps until Teddy’s zamboni breaks down for thinking about it.”
Casey smiles and takes another sip. “It’s delicious.”
“I’ve never made it before, but apparently you just have to keep stirring so the milk doesn’t burn,” she says, and then the corner of her mouth twitches with a flash of mischief. “Mine has marshmallows.”
“Gen!”
She laughs brightly. “Hey, you’re the pro here! I’m just making up for lost time.”
Casey can’t deny that. “When I retire, I’m going to sit down with an entire tub of Cool Whip and a spoon.”
“Your mom just convulsed a little and doesn’t know why.”
“So did yours.”
Gen laughs again, as beautifully as always. Her cheeks and nose are pink from the cold like she just put on blush, except the only makeup she wears is a smudge of eyeliner that didn’t quite wash off last night.
The edge of the pond and the uneven mixture of dirt and sand are suddenly unfair.
“You should get your skates,” Casey says.
“Oh, hell no,” Gen laughs. “You might be crazy, but I’m not breaking my neck out here.”
“You’ll be fine,” Casey says. “You’re one of the best skaters in the world, and I won’t let you fall.”
“If I bring you down, my mom might kill us both.”
“So? I thought you weren’t scared of Tina Harwood anymore,” she says.
“Anymore? Oh I have never–.” Gen stops as Casey skates away with a taunting grin. Casey sips her cocoa and she slides backwards in another eight that she could make with her eyes closed. Well, she has been making them with her eyes closed for most of the morning. “Are you serious?”
“I’m always serious,” Casey says. “That’s why you love me.”
“Sure, sure,” Gen says. “Alright, tell me about science camp.”
“Science camp?” Casey says. “You don’t want to hear me justify why it’s fine to practice on a pond?”
“No, I want to know where this shirt came from so the next time someone sees me in it, I can pretend it’s mine and not my nerd girlfriend’s.”
“Hey!”
Gen smiles at her from behind her mug. Casey glares as she skates past her with no real bite at all.
“Hey, science is cool,” Gen says. “Or something.”
“It killed you to say that, didn’t it.”
“A little bit,” she says.
Casey sighs as she glides along the ice and raises her voice so Gen can hear her clearly. “When I was 12, I begged my mom to let me go to science camp.”
“Of course you did.”
“Do you want to know the story or not?”
“Go on,” Gen waves. “I’m listening.”
“And on the first day of camp, we all got a t-shirt,” Casey says.
“That said ‘Science is Cool’,” Gen says.
“Because science is cool.”
Gen smiles at her again so magically that Casey loses her footing and slips, crashing down on her ass as her mug shoots across the ice into the snow, spilling cocoa everywhere. “Oh, fuck!”
Gen scrambles onto the ice, her grip-bottomed boots keeping her from tumbling down with her as she tries to get to Casey as fast as she can.
“Oh, that hurt,” Casey says towards the sky.
“Are you okay?”
“I think I broke my tailbone,” she says. “Oh god, I’m done. I broke my tailbone.”
“Casey!” Gen shouts in horror, but then Casey grabs the front of her shirt and smiles as she pulls her to her lips. She’s fine. “That’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny,” Casey says.
Gen smiles against her mouth.
She tastes like chocolate.
Casey pushes herself up to sit on the ice, and Gen sits next to her, leaving the perfect opening for Casey to steal her mug.
Man, she missed marshmallows.
“Are these organic?”
“Unfortunately,” she says.
Casey hums and takes another sip before Gen steals her mug back.
“I want to go back to bed,” Gen says.
“Me too,” Casey says.
And the two of them head back for a rare morning off. It’s back to business as usual tomorrow or they’ll both be facing the wrath of Tina, and no one wants a taste of that.
Hot chocolate, however, Casey thinks she’s earned a second cup. Gen has earned the entire pot.