Fic (Figure Skating RPS/ Stargate Atlantis): Centripetal (Crossover, Johnny/ Stéphane)
Centripetal
Figure Skating RPS/ Stargate Atlantis (Crossover, Stéphane/ Johnny, PG-13)
Author's Notes: 2530 words. Inspired by this picture here and much flailing in the comments about how Atlantis would love Stéphane Lambiel (because everyone does). Also, inspired by something aurora_84 said to me in the same post.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction and is not intended to reflect on the personalities or behaviours of the persons mentioned within. Pure fantasy.
-adjective
1. directed toward the centre
In the end, everything is about spinning. Magnetic fields, planets in orbit, wormholes, the universe itself.
Stéphane knows this intuitively, if not intellectually. Johnny used to say an intellect was a disadvantage in their sport, and Stéphane knows he skates best when he switches his brain off. There are many things he can't explain and, as an athlete, he doesn’t have to.
But here he is. Another galaxy. A city on water that lights up around him. If asked, he would say he doesn’t know how he got here. There was a show in Lausanne, three men (and one woman) in black, a US military jet and a meeting with Madame Président. Everything after that is a blur. He remembers being told his DNA was special. He remembers they said he once gave a sample to a group of geneticists investigating athletic genes. They searched gene banks worldwide and that’s how they found him. A one in a million discovery.
Then they took him away. Barely gave him time to say goodbye. “It’s important,” they kept telling him. “More important than anything else you’ll ever do.” Once he saw Atlantis he understood why. Atlantis is the stuff of fantasy, and yet here it is. Real enough to hold in his hands.
They say he is special but there are others with the gene and, for those not born with it, there’s gene therapy. Such a procedure ought to negate the need for people like Stéphane but Stéphane lights up the walls around him, makes the corridors come to life and machines appear out of walls and floors. No amount of gene therapy can do that.
The Canadian with the receding hairline, the one they call McKay, thinks it's amusing. "Looks like Atlantis has a new crush," he says to the Colonel.
The Colonel frowns. “Just like a woman,” he says.
If he has a problem with Stéphane, he doesn’t show it. Mostly, he says nothing at all. When they met he told Stéphane he knew nothing about figure skating. "Don't take it personally," he said. "I don't like hockey either."
Stéphane shrugged. “Neither do I.”
“Well, maybe we’ll get along after all,” the Colonel said, smirking at McKay.
The Colonel told Stéphane Atlantis takes some getting used to. And when consoles and screens appear out of nowhere when Stéphane’s in the shower, he knows what the Colonel means. Stéphane wakes up in the morning and Atlantis has rearranged his room, lined his shoes up in the closet and pushed the bed over by the far wall.
It’s a little disconcerting. “Don’t touch my skates,” Stéphane tells Atlantis. She must be listening because they’re the only thing in the room still in the same place he left them. He’s not sure why he brought them. There’s no skating on Atlantis. He just couldn’t imagine leaving them behind.
Stéphane spends his days trying to work out what the assortment of alien technology appearing around him actually does.
McKay follows him around, making notes and offering suggestions. He’s like a puppy Stéphane once had, always at Stéphane’s heels and constantly barking.
“I don’t want to put any pressure on you,” McKay says. “But if you could think about a machine that takes energy from dark matter and converts it to EM waves or - well, something our computers can handle - I don’t want to limit Atlantis’s imagination just because science hasn’t come up with a word for her preferred energy form... ”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Stéphane says, interrupting him. The screen that has appeared in front of him is showing pages of alien writing, scrolling it past him at a pace no human can read. Stéphane frowns at it.
McKay is unfazed. “It always does that,” he says. “Try to think: energy conversion. E=mc squared. I mean, you’re Swiss, right? Don’t they teach relativity in grade school or something?”
“Einstein was German,” Stéphane says, rolling his eyes.
“But he studied in Switzerland,” McKay says. He throws up his hands. “Atlantis sure likes them dumb and pretty.”
Stéphane thinks he should be offended by that remark but he gets the impression McKay thinks everyone is dumb.
“You think I’m pretty?” Stéphane says, grinning.
McKay actually blushes. “Um,” he says. And he appears suddenly engrossed in his laptop.
The Colonel teaches Stéphane to fly.
“Just relax,” the Colonel says, sitting next to Stéphane in one of Atlantis’ tube shaped spaceship. “Try to think about flying straight. One point to the other.”
The spaceship flips. Stéphane takes his hands off the console instinctively. “Did I do that?” he says.
“It’s okay,” the Colonel says. “It’s just guessing. Think of it like a car hard wired to your brain. It’s going to bank left before you’ve even realised you want to turn.”
As if to emphasize the point, the spaceship turns slowly, and then turns again. “What’s it doing now?” Stéphane says.
The spaceship turns faster and faster.
“It’s spinning,” the Colonel says.
They stare out at the stars going past them anti-clockwise. Stéphane can’t feel the spin so it looks like the stars are moving.
“I don’t know how to stop it,” Stéphane says.
“Weird,” the Colonel says.
Flying is fine, but Stéphane is used to being active. Atlantis has a gym, but lifting weights and running on a treadmill isn’t really his thing. He looks up at the towers sometimes and wonders if he should take up climbing. At least he could stretch.
He mentions his problem to Teyla, and she tells him she knows just what he needs. She gives him a couple of sticks and teaches him to fight.
He’s never given much thought to martial arts before, but it’s the perfect sport for anyone who can balance, shift their weight quickly, and take a good beating. He learns fast and, after a couple of lessons, even lands a hit.
Teyla’s impressed. So impressed she invites Ronon to watch them spar. “You’ve got good reflexes,” Ronon tells Stéphane. He sounds surprised.
“He’s an athlete,” Teyla says. “You saw him skate on Earth.”
Ronon frowns. “That stuff just looked weird.”
“It requires precision and strength,” Teyla says. They take up their positions on the mat again, sticks raised.
“You should try it,” Stéphane says, ducking to avoid a swing from Teyla. “When we go back to Earth, I will teach you.”
“I’d like that,” Teyla says, and her stick barely misses Stéphane’s thigh.
Ronon grunts.
Teyla tells him she's visiting her people. "You should come with me," she says. "I have something to show you."
She tells him her story along the way: how she came to Atlantis, all the people she's lost, how they survived. Her people are refugees. They live in a village with other survivors, trying to get along with one another for the sake of security. She shows him their homes, their fields, their lives in constant reconstruction. It's cold and they trudge through inches of snow, carrying blankets and clothes. Teyla says her people are so used to moving on, they haven't had time to acclimatise. It's too hot or too cold, too rainy or windy. The snow took them by surprise.
He kicks at the snow and it flies up in a cloud, the top layer scattering in the wind. Fresh. Good for skiing. "It reminds me of home," he tells Teyla.
"I thought you would like it here," she says.
Teyla has business to attend but, when she's done, she takes him to the edge of the village and shows him a pond. It's barely half an ice skating rink but it's frozen solid.
"I saw you," Teyla says. "On Earth. It looked so beautiful. I thought you might - " She holds out her hand toward the ice. "It isn't much," she says.
He takes a step out onto the pond. It feels solid. “It’s good,” he says. He takes another step and slides a little. “It’s very good.”
He comes back the next day with skates. The village is used to strange Atlanteans with odd contraptions so they're not really interested when he sits by the pond and laces his skates. They become more curious when he starts to skate; a couple of children wander down to the pond to watch him and hover on the edge, not sure whether to come closer. He spins lazily and they take tentative steps toward the edge of the ice. He tries a jump and they “ooh” collectively. He goes into a spin, gets faster and faster until they’re cheering him on. And then he stops suddenly and throws out his arms. The children applaud. Stéphane is reminded that it’s been a long time since he’s had an audience.
“Again!” they say. Stéphane goes into another spin, and does it again and again when they ask him to. Eventually, Teyla tells children that perhaps Stéphane would like a rest, and the obediently leave him alone, while he sits down heavily on the edge of the pond and unlaces his skates. He hasn’t been skating for a while. His body will protest tomorrow.
One of the girls tentatively approaches him. “Can I try?” she says, pointing at Stéphane’s feet.
“They won’t fit,” he tells her. “But I would really like you to try.” He looks at Teyla. “Do you think Mr Woolsey will let me bring them skates?”
“I should think Mr Woolsey would let you bring them whatever you want,” Teyla says.
It turns out Mr Woolsey is mostly concerned about the insignificance of the request. “You want skates?” he says. “Really? Is that’s all? “
Within days he’s brought 50 pairs of skates in various sizes to Atlantis.
“Should have held out for a Zamboni,” the Colonel says, eyeing the boxes in the gate room.
Skates and a pond to skate on: it could be enough. Stéphane pirouettes on the pond, spins until he grinds to a halt and then spins again. He makes plans: the Athosian children are brimming with enthusiasm and none of them seem scared of falling down. Teaching them to skate is only as hard as it is to fit them on the pond. It’s a start, he tells himself. Maybe one day he’ll take them back to earth, show them a real rink. Teyla says there are worlds out there that are not unlike Earth. Maybe one of them has figure skating?
It doesn’t cure the loneliness. Competing was always lonely. But Stéphane’s retired now. He was supposed to put an end to all that.
Back at Atlantis he reads emails from friends and family. They all ask questions he can’t answer, questions he isn’t allowed to answer. He tells them he's representing the Swiss government on a highly sensitive international matter and it’s sort of true. He also tells them there’s much he doesn’t understand and that part is definitely true.
It's not like he's disappeared. Home is at the end of a wormhole, just a step away. It’s the secrecy that’s isolating.
He gets an email from Johnny. Johnny doesn't email. Stéphane has to go to another galaxy to get an email from Johnny.
"Where are you?" it says. "I know you can't tell me, but I keep thinking you're in a desert. Somewhere hot. Why else would you have given up skating?"
He had to retire from public life. Even when he returns to Earth. It’s too dangerous.
"You know," the email says. "I can't imagine you somewhere without ice."
Stéphane clicks “reply” and stares at the screen, fingers hovering over the keyboard. What would Johnny think of Atlantis? The fashion would appall him and, like Stéphane, he wouldn’t appreciate the lack of ice.
Maybe Johnny would it find it fascinating? Different people, architecture, music, languages. Johnny bores easily. And Atlantis is never boring.
The self cleaning surfaces might be a problem. Johnny wouldn’t know what to do with himself.
Stéphane smiles. He wishes he could tell Johnny that joke.
“Stéphane, can you come to the 21st sector.”
McKay’s voice in his ear is finally becoming familiar. If not particularly helpful. “I don’t know where that is,” Stéphane says.
He hears a loud sigh. “Just get in the transporter and think ‘21st sector.’ Atlantis will do the rest.”
Stéphane forgets sometimes that Atlantis always knows what he’s thinking.
“We detected some activity in this sector,” McKay says, meeting Stéphane at the transporter. “We know Atlantis repairs herself sometimes - when she can - and it wasn’t like she was using a lot of power so we didn’t worry about it for a while. But then it was the temperature readings that had us curious and well - you can see for yourself what she was up to.”
He takes Stéphane into a room. It’s large and mostly dark, but in the centre is a long, raised, rectangular shaped platform, lit from underneath and shining fluorescent blue.
“It’s ice,” Stéphane says. It’s impossible. But there it is.
"The thing about Atlantis," McKay says. "She seems strangely attuned to - well, you. John too, but she seems to like you just as much. If not more. I don't understand it - I might never understand it - but I guess she thought you needed and ice rink and - well, here it is."
"You should tell her, thank you," Stéphane says.
“You should tell her yourself,” McKay says. “God knows, she never listens to me anyway.”
Stéphane looks up at the ceiling. “Thank you,” he says.
The room lights up. A warm yellow.
“That’s some girlfriend you’ve got there,” McKay says.
The first thing Stéphane does is skate. The second thing is to plan Atlantis’s first ice show. There’s a lot of work to be done, of course. And Woolsey said he’d only agree to an ice show if Stéphane put equal time into working with the Ancients’ technology. Now there’s an ice rink to practice on every day, even the technology seems manageable.
In fact, everything seems easier now. The people, Atlantis, flying. Everything except email that is. His email to Johnny remains unwritten for days.
When he finally gets a moment, he sits down at the desk in his room and works on his reply. “I’m fine,” he writes eventually. “And there is ice here too. It’s beautiful actually. You would love it.”
He wishes he could show Johnny Atlantis, show him how pretty it is when the sun is setting on the ocean and how amazing it is that Atlantis built a rink, just for Stéphane.
He writes, “I miss you,” and wonders why he’s never told Johnny that before. Stéphane always misses Johnny. Stolen moments at competitions and exhibitions have never been enough. Retirement was supposed to be different, but then Johnny became a celebrity and Stéphane skated mostly in Europe. Stéphane imagined them meeting half way. Maybe in Russia.
But then Stéphane disappeared to another galaxy, so it wasn’t all Johnny’s fault.
Stéphane wonders how hard he would have to wish to bring Johnny to Atlantis. He looks up at the ceiling and raises his eyebrows. “What do you think?” he says.
The lights in the room fade to a warm shade of yellow.
End.
Figure Skating RPS/ Stargate Atlantis (Crossover, Stéphane/ Johnny, PG-13)
Author's Notes: 2530 words. Inspired by this picture here and much flailing in the comments about how Atlantis would love Stéphane Lambiel (because everyone does). Also, inspired by something aurora_84 said to me in the same post.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction and is not intended to reflect on the personalities or behaviours of the persons mentioned within. Pure fantasy.
-adjective
1. directed toward the centre
In the end, everything is about spinning. Magnetic fields, planets in orbit, wormholes, the universe itself.
Stéphane knows this intuitively, if not intellectually. Johnny used to say an intellect was a disadvantage in their sport, and Stéphane knows he skates best when he switches his brain off. There are many things he can't explain and, as an athlete, he doesn’t have to.
But here he is. Another galaxy. A city on water that lights up around him. If asked, he would say he doesn’t know how he got here. There was a show in Lausanne, three men (and one woman) in black, a US military jet and a meeting with Madame Président. Everything after that is a blur. He remembers being told his DNA was special. He remembers they said he once gave a sample to a group of geneticists investigating athletic genes. They searched gene banks worldwide and that’s how they found him. A one in a million discovery.
Then they took him away. Barely gave him time to say goodbye. “It’s important,” they kept telling him. “More important than anything else you’ll ever do.” Once he saw Atlantis he understood why. Atlantis is the stuff of fantasy, and yet here it is. Real enough to hold in his hands.
They say he is special but there are others with the gene and, for those not born with it, there’s gene therapy. Such a procedure ought to negate the need for people like Stéphane but Stéphane lights up the walls around him, makes the corridors come to life and machines appear out of walls and floors. No amount of gene therapy can do that.
The Canadian with the receding hairline, the one they call McKay, thinks it's amusing. "Looks like Atlantis has a new crush," he says to the Colonel.
The Colonel frowns. “Just like a woman,” he says.
If he has a problem with Stéphane, he doesn’t show it. Mostly, he says nothing at all. When they met he told Stéphane he knew nothing about figure skating. "Don't take it personally," he said. "I don't like hockey either."
Stéphane shrugged. “Neither do I.”
“Well, maybe we’ll get along after all,” the Colonel said, smirking at McKay.
The Colonel told Stéphane Atlantis takes some getting used to. And when consoles and screens appear out of nowhere when Stéphane’s in the shower, he knows what the Colonel means. Stéphane wakes up in the morning and Atlantis has rearranged his room, lined his shoes up in the closet and pushed the bed over by the far wall.
It’s a little disconcerting. “Don’t touch my skates,” Stéphane tells Atlantis. She must be listening because they’re the only thing in the room still in the same place he left them. He’s not sure why he brought them. There’s no skating on Atlantis. He just couldn’t imagine leaving them behind.
Stéphane spends his days trying to work out what the assortment of alien technology appearing around him actually does.
McKay follows him around, making notes and offering suggestions. He’s like a puppy Stéphane once had, always at Stéphane’s heels and constantly barking.
“I don’t want to put any pressure on you,” McKay says. “But if you could think about a machine that takes energy from dark matter and converts it to EM waves or - well, something our computers can handle - I don’t want to limit Atlantis’s imagination just because science hasn’t come up with a word for her preferred energy form... ”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Stéphane says, interrupting him. The screen that has appeared in front of him is showing pages of alien writing, scrolling it past him at a pace no human can read. Stéphane frowns at it.
McKay is unfazed. “It always does that,” he says. “Try to think: energy conversion. E=mc squared. I mean, you’re Swiss, right? Don’t they teach relativity in grade school or something?”
“Einstein was German,” Stéphane says, rolling his eyes.
“But he studied in Switzerland,” McKay says. He throws up his hands. “Atlantis sure likes them dumb and pretty.”
Stéphane thinks he should be offended by that remark but he gets the impression McKay thinks everyone is dumb.
“You think I’m pretty?” Stéphane says, grinning.
McKay actually blushes. “Um,” he says. And he appears suddenly engrossed in his laptop.
The Colonel teaches Stéphane to fly.
“Just relax,” the Colonel says, sitting next to Stéphane in one of Atlantis’ tube shaped spaceship. “Try to think about flying straight. One point to the other.”
The spaceship flips. Stéphane takes his hands off the console instinctively. “Did I do that?” he says.
“It’s okay,” the Colonel says. “It’s just guessing. Think of it like a car hard wired to your brain. It’s going to bank left before you’ve even realised you want to turn.”
As if to emphasize the point, the spaceship turns slowly, and then turns again. “What’s it doing now?” Stéphane says.
The spaceship turns faster and faster.
“It’s spinning,” the Colonel says.
They stare out at the stars going past them anti-clockwise. Stéphane can’t feel the spin so it looks like the stars are moving.
“I don’t know how to stop it,” Stéphane says.
“Weird,” the Colonel says.
Flying is fine, but Stéphane is used to being active. Atlantis has a gym, but lifting weights and running on a treadmill isn’t really his thing. He looks up at the towers sometimes and wonders if he should take up climbing. At least he could stretch.
He mentions his problem to Teyla, and she tells him she knows just what he needs. She gives him a couple of sticks and teaches him to fight.
He’s never given much thought to martial arts before, but it’s the perfect sport for anyone who can balance, shift their weight quickly, and take a good beating. He learns fast and, after a couple of lessons, even lands a hit.
Teyla’s impressed. So impressed she invites Ronon to watch them spar. “You’ve got good reflexes,” Ronon tells Stéphane. He sounds surprised.
“He’s an athlete,” Teyla says. “You saw him skate on Earth.”
Ronon frowns. “That stuff just looked weird.”
“It requires precision and strength,” Teyla says. They take up their positions on the mat again, sticks raised.
“You should try it,” Stéphane says, ducking to avoid a swing from Teyla. “When we go back to Earth, I will teach you.”
“I’d like that,” Teyla says, and her stick barely misses Stéphane’s thigh.
Ronon grunts.
Teyla tells him she's visiting her people. "You should come with me," she says. "I have something to show you."
She tells him her story along the way: how she came to Atlantis, all the people she's lost, how they survived. Her people are refugees. They live in a village with other survivors, trying to get along with one another for the sake of security. She shows him their homes, their fields, their lives in constant reconstruction. It's cold and they trudge through inches of snow, carrying blankets and clothes. Teyla says her people are so used to moving on, they haven't had time to acclimatise. It's too hot or too cold, too rainy or windy. The snow took them by surprise.
He kicks at the snow and it flies up in a cloud, the top layer scattering in the wind. Fresh. Good for skiing. "It reminds me of home," he tells Teyla.
"I thought you would like it here," she says.
Teyla has business to attend but, when she's done, she takes him to the edge of the village and shows him a pond. It's barely half an ice skating rink but it's frozen solid.
"I saw you," Teyla says. "On Earth. It looked so beautiful. I thought you might - " She holds out her hand toward the ice. "It isn't much," she says.
He takes a step out onto the pond. It feels solid. “It’s good,” he says. He takes another step and slides a little. “It’s very good.”
He comes back the next day with skates. The village is used to strange Atlanteans with odd contraptions so they're not really interested when he sits by the pond and laces his skates. They become more curious when he starts to skate; a couple of children wander down to the pond to watch him and hover on the edge, not sure whether to come closer. He spins lazily and they take tentative steps toward the edge of the ice. He tries a jump and they “ooh” collectively. He goes into a spin, gets faster and faster until they’re cheering him on. And then he stops suddenly and throws out his arms. The children applaud. Stéphane is reminded that it’s been a long time since he’s had an audience.
“Again!” they say. Stéphane goes into another spin, and does it again and again when they ask him to. Eventually, Teyla tells children that perhaps Stéphane would like a rest, and the obediently leave him alone, while he sits down heavily on the edge of the pond and unlaces his skates. He hasn’t been skating for a while. His body will protest tomorrow.
One of the girls tentatively approaches him. “Can I try?” she says, pointing at Stéphane’s feet.
“They won’t fit,” he tells her. “But I would really like you to try.” He looks at Teyla. “Do you think Mr Woolsey will let me bring them skates?”
“I should think Mr Woolsey would let you bring them whatever you want,” Teyla says.
It turns out Mr Woolsey is mostly concerned about the insignificance of the request. “You want skates?” he says. “Really? Is that’s all? “
Within days he’s brought 50 pairs of skates in various sizes to Atlantis.
“Should have held out for a Zamboni,” the Colonel says, eyeing the boxes in the gate room.
Skates and a pond to skate on: it could be enough. Stéphane pirouettes on the pond, spins until he grinds to a halt and then spins again. He makes plans: the Athosian children are brimming with enthusiasm and none of them seem scared of falling down. Teaching them to skate is only as hard as it is to fit them on the pond. It’s a start, he tells himself. Maybe one day he’ll take them back to earth, show them a real rink. Teyla says there are worlds out there that are not unlike Earth. Maybe one of them has figure skating?
It doesn’t cure the loneliness. Competing was always lonely. But Stéphane’s retired now. He was supposed to put an end to all that.
Back at Atlantis he reads emails from friends and family. They all ask questions he can’t answer, questions he isn’t allowed to answer. He tells them he's representing the Swiss government on a highly sensitive international matter and it’s sort of true. He also tells them there’s much he doesn’t understand and that part is definitely true.
It's not like he's disappeared. Home is at the end of a wormhole, just a step away. It’s the secrecy that’s isolating.
He gets an email from Johnny. Johnny doesn't email. Stéphane has to go to another galaxy to get an email from Johnny.
"Where are you?" it says. "I know you can't tell me, but I keep thinking you're in a desert. Somewhere hot. Why else would you have given up skating?"
He had to retire from public life. Even when he returns to Earth. It’s too dangerous.
"You know," the email says. "I can't imagine you somewhere without ice."
Stéphane clicks “reply” and stares at the screen, fingers hovering over the keyboard. What would Johnny think of Atlantis? The fashion would appall him and, like Stéphane, he wouldn’t appreciate the lack of ice.
Maybe Johnny would it find it fascinating? Different people, architecture, music, languages. Johnny bores easily. And Atlantis is never boring.
The self cleaning surfaces might be a problem. Johnny wouldn’t know what to do with himself.
Stéphane smiles. He wishes he could tell Johnny that joke.
“Stéphane, can you come to the 21st sector.”
McKay’s voice in his ear is finally becoming familiar. If not particularly helpful. “I don’t know where that is,” Stéphane says.
He hears a loud sigh. “Just get in the transporter and think ‘21st sector.’ Atlantis will do the rest.”
Stéphane forgets sometimes that Atlantis always knows what he’s thinking.
“We detected some activity in this sector,” McKay says, meeting Stéphane at the transporter. “We know Atlantis repairs herself sometimes - when she can - and it wasn’t like she was using a lot of power so we didn’t worry about it for a while. But then it was the temperature readings that had us curious and well - you can see for yourself what she was up to.”
He takes Stéphane into a room. It’s large and mostly dark, but in the centre is a long, raised, rectangular shaped platform, lit from underneath and shining fluorescent blue.
“It’s ice,” Stéphane says. It’s impossible. But there it is.
"The thing about Atlantis," McKay says. "She seems strangely attuned to - well, you. John too, but she seems to like you just as much. If not more. I don't understand it - I might never understand it - but I guess she thought you needed and ice rink and - well, here it is."
"You should tell her, thank you," Stéphane says.
“You should tell her yourself,” McKay says. “God knows, she never listens to me anyway.”
Stéphane looks up at the ceiling. “Thank you,” he says.
The room lights up. A warm yellow.
“That’s some girlfriend you’ve got there,” McKay says.
The first thing Stéphane does is skate. The second thing is to plan Atlantis’s first ice show. There’s a lot of work to be done, of course. And Woolsey said he’d only agree to an ice show if Stéphane put equal time into working with the Ancients’ technology. Now there’s an ice rink to practice on every day, even the technology seems manageable.
In fact, everything seems easier now. The people, Atlantis, flying. Everything except email that is. His email to Johnny remains unwritten for days.
When he finally gets a moment, he sits down at the desk in his room and works on his reply. “I’m fine,” he writes eventually. “And there is ice here too. It’s beautiful actually. You would love it.”
He wishes he could show Johnny Atlantis, show him how pretty it is when the sun is setting on the ocean and how amazing it is that Atlantis built a rink, just for Stéphane.
He writes, “I miss you,” and wonders why he’s never told Johnny that before. Stéphane always misses Johnny. Stolen moments at competitions and exhibitions have never been enough. Retirement was supposed to be different, but then Johnny became a celebrity and Stéphane skated mostly in Europe. Stéphane imagined them meeting half way. Maybe in Russia.
But then Stéphane disappeared to another galaxy, so it wasn’t all Johnny’s fault.
Stéphane wonders how hard he would have to wish to bring Johnny to Atlantis. He looks up at the ceiling and raises his eyebrows. “What do you think?” he says.
The lights in the room fade to a warm shade of yellow.
End.