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The crowd is always that loud for such a talented professional.
In fact, it was loud than ever when he failed on his only strength. One trip and they told him to retire.
Well... He should? The once champion now fell on his own knees, being the "walking second-place medal."
Luke Ravenscoft, a gifted figure ice skater who was seen as a figure in that sport, is now thrown to the side because of one failed jump.
Having every pair of eyes in your country staring at you for every step you take on the journey is hell. - That is what he must say.
Year by year, Luke gained reputation through each Grand Prix, like collecting achievements in a video game. It sometimes was an easy one, and at other times, it was more challenging but still possible. Newspapers called him the "all-year-round champion" or "ice rink prodigy." Luke hated those names. A lot. It made him feel like the people around him viewed him only for the glory he brought, not the tears and blood that he shed along the way...
20xx, Winter Grand Prix Finals
The numbers appeared on the screen like a death sentence read in silence right after his free program:
Technical Score: 78.42. Presentation: 81.15. Total: 159.57.
Luke's eyes were widened. He had never seen a number begin with a one-five before. Not in seniors. Not since juniors. Definitely not since he was eleven and still skating to whatever his coach said and taught. The digits hung in the cold air of the kiss-and-cry booth. The so-called "Prodigy" didn't believe in his own eyes, as if the screen showed someone else's catastrophe. Then the silence hits. The broadcast silence, the one where the arena crowd forgot to applaud and instead let out a low, shifting murmur, the sound of ten thousand people redirecting their attention to the main attraction. The frosty-haired man turns aside to stare at his coach. At a glance, he just saw it... The door is closing on him and his career. Luke had been the country's investment , and investments that failed to yield were quietly liquidated. A stuffed snow leopard landed near his skates. That was child’s play, probably...from a fan who’d already bought the plush toy before the free skate began.
The plush, sewn-on smile mocked him from the rubber floor. The atmosphere was almost suffocating for the skater that he stood, picked up his blade guards, and clicked them into their places with trembling fingers. Everything was reduced to silence, and Luke walked out of the hall where no one would meet his eyes.
A few hours earlier, the ice had been a cathedral to Luke, and he was the Saint to it.
Luke had glided to center ice for his free program warm-up under a dome of shimmering lights, the kind of light that erased every shadow and left a skater’s face naked to the cameras. He had been perfect, for four years, unbeaten. The streak had become a myth, and mythologies demanded feeding. Reporters no longer asked if he would win. Instead, they asked by how many points he'd lead. Even his sponsors had built campaigns around the word "invincible." Somewhere in the midst of those events, Luke had stopped being a skater and become a figure... a monument that had to remain upright.
His music was Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and opening chords rolled through the arena like a storm gathering. Luke pushed off into his first jump, a quadruple Salchow. The takeoff was textbook. The rotation was tight and fast, a blur of color and light. But the landing came a fraction of a second too soon, and instead of a clean run-out, his ankle buckled, and his hand touched down. No fall, but the mistake was a crack in the monument’s facade. Luke’s mind, one was trained to be a fortress since juniors just faltered in the blink of an eye. The rest of his program became a battle of his own self doubt against him. A triple Axel that he doubled... A footwork sequence where his edges chattered nervously. He was no longer skating the choreography but rather was surviving it, measure by measure.
When the final note died down and Luke struck his ending pose, the silence that fell was not the breath-held hush of anticipation. His chest was heaving after that long battle, his eyes staring at the crowd. Somehow he felt the glares, and he heard in every future conversation that would begin with "What happened to him?"
The fall from grace was swift and absolute, as one's saying: "When it suits you, you're a god; when it doesn't, you're a child."
Just a few hours after the scores were posted, Luke’s phone was completely spammed by notifications. A text from his agent, couched in corporate condolences: "We need to discuss the future of your partnerships." What else could be worse? Those who see him as a figure, an idol even... Now call him a "washed goat."
Luke sat in his hotel room with the lights off, no longer in the skate costume. The hoodie completely covered his face, isolating Luke from the rest of the world. He could still smell the metallic scent of freshly sharpened blades, still feel the vibration of the bass notes through the ice. Still hear the thwack of his hand hitting the surface. The sound had echoed in his chest like a second heartbeat. Feeling like this might be the end of it all, he rose from his hotel bed and grabbed the skates with him to the rink around midnight.
The rink was empty now, house lights extinguished. The brightest source of light was the emergency strips along the dasher boards, casting a dim green glow. The ice itself seemed to emit its own faint luminescence of a frozen lake under a nonexistent moon. Luke pushed onto the ice without permission, not music. He just did it, mindlessly. No fancy jumps nor spins; he just stroked in slow, lazy circles, his edges whispering against the frozen surface. The cold seeped through his thin hoodie; his breath misted in front of his face. Luke finally had some time to feel this silence in years... It made him feel...well...at ease.
Then a light flickered at the far end of the rink.
It was the red glow of a charging indicator, small and blinking, attached to a laptop set up on a photographer’s station near the boards. And behind it was a familiar face? Luke must have seen this guy somewhere... hasn't he? Before even speaking up with his question, the frosty-haired male tried to dig up his memories for that familiar figure.
In the three years Luke trained at the Callaghan Ice Complex, he had never truly noticed Isaac. He was always there. A quiet, unobtrusive figure in black jeans and worn sweater, moving along the boards with a camera that looked just as professional as those they used in the league. He showed up during morning practices when the light slanted gray through the high windows, and he showed up during evening sessions when the rink emptied and the ice glowed blue under the floodlights. Isaac took photographs, hundreds of them, as Luke drilled his quad Salchow and triple Axel, until the edges of his blades carved grooves into the ice. Isaac was the photographer for Luke’s sponsors, the man who captured Luke mid-flight, face taut with concentration, body a sculpture of controlled violence; and turned those moments into glossy advertisements.
Luke stopped skating and flared at the shrouded figure in the dim light:
“What are you doing here?"
The blonde looked up, didn’t startle. This is the first time they've ever talked outside the line of work. He simply closed his laptop and met Luke’s gaze with calm that felt like an intrusion:
“Editing.” - Isaac said. - “The ad campaign shots from last month. They want them by Friday.”
The reminder landed like a dull blow. It felt like a punch to the aching wound that is yet to heal, now torn open once more.
“I think you can stop editing.” - Luke said, his voice colder than the ice. - “There won’t be any new campaigns. The streak is over. I’m not marketable anymore.”
Isaac didn’t flinch, and instead he just leaned back in the wooden chair, his face half-lit by the dim glow of the rink:
“That’s not what I’m editing.”
“Then what?"
Isaac hesitated for a second before turning his laptop screen toward the other male. Even from a distance, Luke could make out the image of a figure on a darkened rink, arms extended and head tilted back, body carved into a spiral that looked less like athleticism and more like longing. It took him a moment to realize the figure was him.
“What is that?” - Luke asked, his irritation cooling into something harder to name. He didn't expect to get photographed during practices.
“It’s from three weeks ago.” - Isaac answered. - “Tuesday night. You thought the rink was empty, so you actually skated for two hours with no music, no program."
Luke’s memory stirred. It was a chilly night when training had ended early and his coach dismissed him with a curt nod. There were no one else but him in that complex. Luke remembered checking every corner but somehow this man still made it through his sharp vision.
“You were there?” - Luke asked with more curiosity in his voice this time as he makes his way on the ice towards the photographer.
“I’m always there.” - He shrugged. Isaac’s voice was quiet, without accusation. - “You just never noticed.”
The blonde stood up from the chair, lifting his camera from the table. He walked to the boards, close enough that Luke could see the lines around his eyes, the yellow hue threaded with early gray, and the way his hands cradled the camera like something precious.
“I’ve been photographing you for three years” - His voice trailed off as if he was sulking in front of the ice skater. - The jumps and the landings. Even the podium moments. Thousands of frames of Luke Ravenscoft, The Champion. And in all that time, you never once looked at me. Not really.”
Luke felt the sting of the words. In fact, he does feel bad for Isaac when he first heard that, as they both share the same burden in someway. It was simply a fact, delivered with a strange, aching gentleness.
“I was focused.” - Luke confirmed. - “I had to be.”
“I know.” - Isaac raised the camera, not clicking, just framing. - “But you missed something. While you were focused on the medals, I was focused on you."
He turned the camera’s display toward Luke. The image glowed in the dim rink. It was him, suspended in the half-second before a quad Salchow landing, not from the competition but from a training session months ago. His form was perfect, but it wasn’t the perfection that made the image catching one's attention. It was the expression on the skater's face. Eyes half-closed, lips parted; that's a look not of victory but of surrender, of losing yourself in motion so completely that you become motion itself.
"Isn't that for an ad?" - Luke raised a brow as he glanced at the image again.
"Nope. That's just it! Not for anything else."
Isaac scrolled through more images of Luke mid-spiral, his reflection mirrored perfectly in the ice below. Or when he bent over his skates in a quiet moment, lacing them up with the weight of the countries on his shoulders. Luke, actually laughing at something a junior skater had said, his guard down. And images of him skating in the dark, when only a blurred streak of light remained against the endless white. Luke's eyes were captivated by those pictures taken by Isaac. He had never thought about what he looked like in those practices because he was simply too busy focusing on other matters.
“Why?” - Luke asked as the photographer scrolled through more pictures. - "Why did you take these?”
Isaac lowered the camera. Luke noticed for the first time Isaac's eyes; they were the color of the ice at twilight, flecked with something warm.
“Because the ads were never what made you beautiful.” - Isaac just smiled as he spoke up the thoughts he had whenever his finger was about to click the shoot button. - “The medals were never why I stayed. I stayed because on Tuesday nights, when you thought you were alone, you skated like a man in love with the ice. Not with the scores nor cameras. And that man… he’s the one I’ve been photographing all along. The rest was just what they paid me for.”
Luke felt his breath stop, white and slow in the cold air. He looked down at his skates.
“The streak is over.” - Luke growls at the other man. - “Everyone’s gone. Coach, the sponsors, the federation. They all wanted the champion, and the champion doesn’t exist anymore.”
“Good.” - Isaac said.
“Good?” - Luke’s head snapped up
“Good, yeah.” - Isaac repeated - “Cuz now they’ll stop looking, which means that you can finally figure out who you are when no one’s watching.”
Isaac lifted the camera one more time. The shutter clicked, soft as a heartbeat. Luke didn’t flinch. He simply stood there, on the edge of the ice. His breath misting, skates carving small, absent arcs into the frozen surface. Isaac then lowered the camera; his expression shifted into something almost mischievous. He glanced at the dark ice, then back at Luke, and let out a small, deliberate exhale.
"Ice rink?” - Isaac chuckles while slinging the camera strap over his shoulder. - “What about ice cream instead? I bet you just need something sweet."
Luke blinked. The question was so absurd, so wildly disconnected from the cathedral hush of the rink and the weight of his collapse, that a startled laugh escaped him before he could stop it.
“Ice cream? It’s midnight. And it’s freezing.”
“Exactly.” - Isaac nodded. - “It’s midnight, freezing, and you’ve been standing on a slab of frozen water for hours. I know a place. A twenty-four-hour diner with terrible lighting and the kind of ice cream that comes in a plastic cup or comes and tastes like childhood. No cameras or scores, so you don't have to stress out over it. Just sugar and bad coffee.”
Luke stared at him. The cold still clung to his skin, and his legs ached with the memory of every failed jump, but somewhere beneath the exhaustion, a tiny, unexpected hunger stirred. It was not the hunger for glory, reputation anymore... Just wanted something warm and simple and utterly unrelated to the ice.
“I don’t even know your name." - Luke said, realizing as he said it that it was true. All these years, and he had never asked.
“Well, it's not too late to ask. I'm Isaac Blackwood.” - Isaac finally got a chance to introduce himself properly to this colleague, perhaps. - “Photographer, and also archivist of your secret Tuesday-night skates. Occasional ice cream enthusiast. And you’re Luke Ravenscoft, the Prodigy, but you already know that.”
Luke looked down at his skates, then at the empty ice stretching out behind him.
Tomorrow, the world would have its say.
Tomorrow, the calls would come, the contracts would dissolve, and the narrative of his failure would harden into fact.
But tonight, there was a diner somewhere, and a man who had seen him clearly long before the fall.
The skater bent down and clipped his blade guards on:
“Alright, Isaac.” - Luke turns his head to the photographer while stepping off the ice and onto the rubber floor, his voice still raw with the ache of sorrow but steadier now. - "We can get some ice cream, and during that, I want to see the rest of those photographs.”
Isaac just smiled, a full one this time, warm and unguarded, before closing his laptop and putting all of his equipment back in the backpack:
“Deal.”
Outside, the snow had begun to fall over the complex, dusting the empty parking lot in white.
Two figures walked side by side down the corridor, one carrying a vintage camera and the other with skates slung over his shoulder.
The diner was three blocks away with neon sign flickering pink and blue against the winter dark. It smelled of stale coffee and waffle cones, and the booth vinyl squeaked when they sat down.
Luke ordered a double scoop of mint chocolate chip in a plastic cup. As soon as they settled, Isaac began to scroll through some older images of the skater. They spread the laptop between them, and as Luke ate, he scrolled through image after image. It was a body in love with motion and a face he was only just learning to recognize. The ice cream dripped onto the table. Isaac quickly noticed and handed him a napkin.
Outside the window, the snow kept falling... But for the first time since the numbers had flickered on the screen, Luke felt something other than the weight of the fall.
He felt warm.
(Luke BTW. But without the ears ^^)