#she's not just 'lanhua' throughout the fic i promise

[harocat]

For the ask game... 37, canglan

So I was going to write canonverse, but then @crisdrawsandcries posted figure skating AU art, so I wrote the beginning of figure skating AU. There is no actual dancing in this, but there will be eventually of course. Also I'm used to writing for THE figure skating anime fandom where I did assume a level of knowledge, so if any of this is confusing, I apologize. I'll probably add some footnotes.

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It’s not that Lanhua was a bad skater. Objectively, you could not be someone competing at the elite level without being a good skater. There were thousands of athletes that did not manage to reach the heights that she had.

But, he remembered the one year, when they were both younger, that she had managed to reach the Junior Grand Prix Final, and he did catch her free program. She was older for a skater competing in the junior division; eighteen and soon to turn nineteen, and she had finished in last place with a disastrous short program. Her free skate was gutsy and mostly clean, and she climbed up to fifth, but whoever coached her jump technique should have been banned from the sport forever. She had one of the worst hammer toes he had ever seen. She slowed down and came to almost a complete stop before she jumped. Her flip edge was abysmal. 

Dongfang Qingcang did not usually pay attention to other skaters. They were irrelevant to his goals. The athletes in his own discipline could not beat him, let alone those in others. But he did remember that Lanhua had been loved. Her skating skills were immaculate, her spins breathtaking, and her musicality was second to none. And she was cute, apparently. She had a bright, slightly silly personality that appealed to fans. Not that he was paying attention, but he did recall her almost falling on her face on the way to the Kiss and Cry after that free skate. People found that charming, supposedly. 

Musicality, grace, emotional expression, were all things that fans loved. “Bare your soul on the ice” or some such. Changheng skated like that, and for that he was maybe, more popular a skater than Dongfang Qingcang was. But the results did not favor him. Perhaps if he spent more time cleaning up his quad lutz than he did working with modern dance troupes, he could actually win a few gold medals to go along with his endless collection of silver. 

Because none of that alone brought results. Changheng’s fangirls did not decide whose name would be etched in the history of the sport. The victories were not his, the world records were not his. 

 Lanhua vanished from international competitions only a year or so after that Junior Grand Prix Final. She’d been forced by age to move up to the senior level, and she couldn’t hold her own there, quickly overshadowed and outscored by several other skaters from her federation. It was the fate of so many young skaters. Dongfang Qingcang’s younger brother had been one of them. Though perhaps Xunfeng could have gone further in the sport if— never mind. 

His father had always told him to focus on only himself. The enemy was nothing more than a distraction, and who they were was irrelevant. On the ice there was only him, and in competition, the only skater that mattered was him. He stood atop a podium so high above the other men he skated against, that they were not worth breaking his concentration for. He was the prodigy. He was the son of his father’s dreams. There was nothing that could break him if he merely did what his father told him. Skated like his father told him. Ate like his father told him. Lived like his father told him. Dressed like his father told him. Practiced until his father told him to stop. 

His father was wrong. He had always been wrong.