Prologue
The rink was empty at this hour. It always was.
Dawn had not yet decided to arrive — the sky outside the high windows sat in that colorless space between night and morning, neither dark nor light, neither one thing nor the other. The overhead lights hummed low, casting the ice in a pale, sickly glow that made everything look like a memory of itself.
Itsuki stepped onto the ice.
He didn't stretch. He didn't pause at the boards the way he used to when he was eleven and the cold would hit his face and feel like the first clean breath after a long time underwater. He simply stepped on, and began to move.
His body knew what to do. It had always known. Even when everything else had come apart — and everything else had, in the end, come apart completely — his body remembered this. The weight shift, the edge of the blade finding the ice with a sound like a whisper, the arms following somewhere behind the intention. He didn't think about it. He didn't think about anything.
That was the point.
Somewhere behind his eyes, in the place where Itsuki Tanaka usually lived, there was nothing. Not silence exactly. Not peace. Something closer to the feeling of a room after everyone has left it — the shape of things still present, the warmth already gone.
His sister used to say he skated like he was trying to leave his own body behind.
He moved through a step sequence he had built when he was sixteen, alone in a rink much smaller than this one. He moved through it cleanly, precisely, the way water moves through a place it has moved through a thousand times.
She hadn't been wrong.
The air was cold enough that his breath came out in small ghosts, rising and dissolving. His blades carved into the surface in long, curving lines that nobody would see, that nobody would remember. He went into a spin and the rink blurred around him — the boards, the empty seats, the pale windows — until there was nothing left but the axis of himself, turning.
He came out of it slow. Slower than he needed to.
And for a moment, just a moment, standing alone on the ice in the gray early morning with the silence pressing in from every direction, Itsuki felt something that took him a long time to recognize.
He was glad.
He didn't know yet — or perhaps he did, somewhere underneath the place where thoughts lived — what the morning would bring. What was already moving toward him. He only knew the ice under his blades and the cold in his lungs and the strange, quiet gladness sitting in his chest like an ember.
He began to skate again.
