Playing with Fire | Yuzuru Hanyu

1. Despair

A few weeks before...

There are some circumstances that can make you feel like the end is near, that everything you do is useless, and that there's not a single prospect of a good future on your horizon.

That was exactly how he was feeling at that moment.

Yuzuru had just come back to Toronto after the painful World Championships that rewarded him with a mere silver. As much as he hated the damned medal, that was far from his biggest problem at that time.

His ankle.

The damned foot had to act up every time he couldn't afford to have any troubles.

There were plenty of things well within his control but injuries were something that he couldn't predict or solve easily. They were a part of what he did and how he did it.

Truthfully, the season had started out great, maybe even better than he could have expected after everything that had happened the previous year. From getting hit on the ice to undergoing surgery, there were a lot of uncertainties as he came back to the sport with a complete determination to win.

He did win, over and over again. The scores were only getting higher and higher.

Record by record, he was quite aware of the impact he was having on figure skating and even if sometimes it got a bit too much, he was still very proud of his achievements.

Success, however, often comes with failure.

The pain had been there since the beginning of the season but it was light enough for him to ignore. The tiny ping of the burn was lingering but never bothered him.

Well, not for a while.

Yuzuru had been doing this for long enough to know that you should never ignore these things, that you should act before it's too late, or at least get things checked out to make sure it was nothing crazy. Like he always did, he ignored that knowledge.

The result, you might ask?

Just a few weeks before the arguably most important competition of the season, the pain only got worse.

No one knew. Not his coaches, not his mother, not his physio. Yuzuru had kept it a complete secret until then and the reality was that when he finished the short program at Worlds it was just completely impossible to hide.

Having his foot swollen to the point of barely fitting it in his skate was a big indication that ignoring the problem had probably been a very bad idea.

No going back now.

The diagnosis only came when he returned to Canada. Several specialists looked at his foot, some of them even flew from Japan but the conclusion was all the same. A Lisfranc injury. For the regular person, this wasn't such a concerning diagnosis and it was even rare but for someone whose life was figure skating, this could very well be a career-threatening injury.

It's crazy how something that started so innocently could progress to the point of leaving him no choice but to spend the next few months on complete rest and purely hope for the best.

Safe to say that it was easier said than done.

Yuzuru wasn't one to go out much, he wasn't even one to spend a lot of time with friends. His whole life outside of the ice consisted of studying, playing games, or thinking about skating.

Well, he was now more than tired of seeing the same game, and for once in his life, all of his homework was done and every subject well prepared before the upcoming exams.

Let's just say that it didn't take too long until the despair of feeling bored started.

His mother's words about his ridiculousness had long settled in his brain. She was right. He was suffering purely out of his own responsibility, in more ways than one. For once, if he had taken enough care to see a doctor before it got bad, none of this would be happening and second, he could always get out of his anti-social bubble and hang out with his friends.

The reality was that even if he did like a lot of his rink mates, the reality was that the language barrier was often there and Yuzu hated the feeling of not being able to properly convey his thoughts.

Even so, his mother's advice lingered in his mind. He knew she was right, but it was more a matter of courage than anything else.

So when he went to his next physio session at the rink and was approached by one of the girls, that advice came to his brain quicker than it should have.

Julia.

They had met before, of course, but it was clear that they hadn't even crossed the path of casual acquaintances.

On that day, when she said hello, his returning smile was bigger and brighter.  He answered her with enthusiasm and it was easy to tell that the girl enjoyed it.

From that day forward, every time they met in the halls he made sure to greet her, trying his best to make a new friend that wasn't Javi.

The one thing Yuzuru didn't realize, and maybe it was due to his emotional immaturity, was that girls don't always want friendships, sometimes they want boyfriends.

Make no mistake, finding a girlfriend in the middle of the chaotic mess that was his life at that moment was the last thought in his brain but with every shared exchange the girl managed to lower his guard just a little bit more. Maybe it was a talent of hers, finding his weaknesses and immediately being able to tell what to do.

For the first time in his life, Yuzuru found himself being with a girl for something other than sex or friendship. 

It took just the span of three weeks of hanging out until she asked him to be his girlfriend. He was all for female independence but it felt weird that she was so comfortable in their connection with just a few weeks of knowing each other properly. 

The way she broke his weaknesses managed to get to him in such a delicate time of his career and he dutifully accepted despite all the uncertainties in his mind. What could it hurt?

Well, he would soon find out that it could hurt far more than he ever expected and the worst was that it became the tipping point of his already fragile confidence.