The January sky is still littered with stars when he wakes, eyes searching the darkness above his bed.
Forty-two years young, and he can feel every one as he rolls upright. He feels year seventeen, when his shoulder went out of place and he didn't rest enough to let it heal. The way his wrist twinges sometimes makes him wish he could just cut the whole hand off. The winter causes it to act up, but he has no time for warmer climes that would ease the ache.
Still, he counts his luck as he pushes the heavy velvet drapes back from his window and a puff of cold air reaches his face. The city still glows with artificial lighting, the concrete block towers and onion domes backlit at the horizon.
His hard work affords him this view, every day. A higher floor, a bigger window, closer to a nice park. Even if he can only dream of the Black Sea during the competitive season, he can open his drapes each morning to this.
An hour later he stands in front of his nephew and the new girl on the ice.
He sizes them up as he does every morning, walking delicately around them in a circle in his street shoes and careful not to slosh his precious morning ration of caffeine.
"Good morning," he greets them when he rounds into their line of vision once again.
"Good morning, Coach," they answer in unison.
Good. So at least they can do that together.
"Stroking," he dismisses them to drills with a gentle motion of his mug.
Ben's pained look is clear and Luke raises one gloved finger to silence him.
"These are the first steps," he repeats. "Go!"
Rey's face is a mask as she holds up her arms for Ben to take his position.
Their blades make the tiniest scratching sounds as they shuffle into place in front of him before changing to a repetitive scur, scur, scur when they hit their stride along the length of the rink. Luke retreats to the boards and watches them.
They manage two full laps in unison this morning before things begin to look rough. Ben is too tall for her, and she struggles to keep up with him. For his part, Ben does nothing to temper his strokes to fit her shorter frame; instead, he takes his frustration out on her, speeding up until she trips on her toe picks trying to match him. Luke tucks his chin and watches out of the tops of his eyes while they move into serpentines, drifting farther and farther apart until they are barely grasping one another's fingertips.
The girl is more certain on her feet now that her boots are properly fitted. The ones she arrived with were hand-me-downs, and for all Ben's private complaining about her lack of skating skills, there is something to her: a fierceness and a hunger to prove herself. She's not a bad skater, just not good enough for the state to bother developing as a singles girl, and she is the right age to switch to pairs. She has all her jumps, and for now, she is still small. As an orphan, they have no way of knowing what her parents looked like, if they were petite or hulking, if the mother widened out with age. For now, he will work with what he got: a fifteen-year-old girl with no breasts or hips who can skate halfway decently.
After all, skills can be drilled and taught. Luke sips his coffee, now cooled almost to drinkable, and narrows his eyes at them. Rey catches up with Ben at the end of the rink and they move into their next drill, skating serpentines facing each other. They match up better this way with Ben pushing Rey backwards in a dance hold. He can't get ahead of her when she's in front of him, and Luke catches a few moments that look promising.
For a stride here and there, Luke can see what the federation officials are already going wild for. There is a tension between them, a visible energy in the way their bodies move together. They look plain in training clothes this morning, but he imagines them in two, three years with good choreo and costumes, stage makeup on their faces and he sighs at the possibility of things to come.
Then it's gone in an instant when Rey catches a rut in the ice and trips backwards, sprawling across the ice and Ben groans as he manages to avoid skating over her.
"Come," he stands again and beckons them to the boards.
They approach him separately, Ben with his shoulders hunched and Rey wiping the ice chips from her leggings.
"That wasn't too bad," Luke encourages them.
Ben's eyes flash at this mild assessment but he knows better than to talk back.
"These are the first steps," Luke repeats. "You have to walk before you run or jump. Ben, you know that."
A muscle jumps in Ben's jaw near his ear.
"What is a pair?" His question is rhetorical, and they know to wait for him to expound. "Not just two of a thing-but complements of a thing. Two that work together to achieve perfection."
He rests his mug on the edge of the boards now and moves onto the ice to grasp their stiff wrists and link their hands once more.
"A flower by itself is beautiful-" His gaze rests on Rey, her eyes turned down at the ice. "-but it needs a stem to support it." He glances now at Ben, who is looking somewhere over his shoulder.
They hold hands as though the other has a disease.
"It is your job to make each other as beautiful as possible," he continues, nodding in approval at the lines their arms make.
The bottom of a heart.
"Understood?"
"Yes, Coach." They mumble in unison. He waits for them each to meet his eyes before he dismisses them.
"Start again."
