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At some unspecified point between the third and fourth call, she had stopped, made the long and shameful trek from the sprint track to the bureaucratic offices, and handed the phone off to her trainer for safekeeping under pain of first-rate death. Her trainer— bless their soul— made carefully no particular face at all when she asked if they had a drawer with a lock, and perhaps then a key, that she might fling satisfyingly and dramatically into the ocean. In any case, it was gone. The effect was embarrassing. Pathetically instant. When she caught her reflection in the window, though, washed out by the hallway fluorescents in the trainers’ wing, she could breathe.
King had always thought it was such an impersonal building. It wasn’t as if the trainer halls had students coursing through it like the others, and now, with the sun dipping, even its inhabitants had largely gone home. She didn’t know what she would have done if that had been the case. Scream, probably. Grind her teeth. Throw herself in the river, phone and cleats and all. It might have even been an improvement: she was a perfect mess now as it was. There was nothing worse than crying at school, so she never, ever did, but she stood leaning on the wall panting and batting miserably at her own sweaty flyaways and feeling quite sorry for herself, altogether.
She didn’t have anything to record her lap times with now, did she? Goddess preserve her.
It was somewhat gratifying to find that whatever nervous sickness the phone had imparted onto her was also in her, not just that wretched little object. Traditionally, kings were not known to be cowed by their own possessions. They also were not known to sit on the floor in an empty hallway, but everyone was learning something new about her this week, weren’t they?
King was trying her hand at gratefulness. She had more than halfway expected her mother to storm the academy in the flesh, that first cold and gray morning after the Takamatsunomiya Kinen. In the three days since then, each and every call had been summarily declined. King had never done that before. The impropriety. She wouldn’t dare. The first time it happened, she’d scared poor Haru nearly half to death— stumbling to the bathroom, manicured nail gripping the sink, heaving sour and heavy all the way up until Fuji Kiseki was summoned to put a hand on her shoulder and say Oh, Pony-chan, like it was the end of the world.
King Halo never cried at school.
She hadn’t meant to make it a habit. There had even been a calmness, of sorts, a perfectly gorgeous simplicity of purpose, startled awake by Incoming Call: Goodbye Halo on the screen and thinking now that awful harpy’s going to wake Haru up too. She’d woken her roommate up herself, in the end, another coy reminder that the universe maintained its sense of humor.
It seemed as if she had overheated out on the turf without thinking. The cold tile felt heavenly under her hand, tapping out the staccato rhythm of the song she had performed only some nights ago, now: Unleash my true speed! Be all I can be! And overcome everything, beyond...
She still remembered the truth of it ringing through her entire body, like a struck bell. The last time she had led a Winning Live had been her own debut, and it was smaller. More facetious. Difficult to think about. When Kawakami had pressed her for details on what it was like to do a real Winning Live, she had been startled to find the whole of the memory consumed only by the phone call that had come before it, all muddied through with shame and dread. “Quit while you’re ahead before you have to face whether or not you lack talent.”
She couldn’t remember what she told Kawakami, in the end. Echo forth, fanfare! And the like. All of that sweet nothing. That first-rate bile.
It would be absurd to blame anyone but herself, and yet, somehow, impressively, she did. On that stage, the empty house, in the hallway, picking at her raw cuticles, alone. Only royalty could manage to be so selfish. When the end of the Chukyo 1,200m had come into sight, she felt for herself the greed and divine right of kings. Now you have to look at it, she had thought. Her mother’s acquaintances, the tutors, the damned maid. All those carnivorous newspeople. Now none of us can pretend ever again.
“You know, Laurel’s not gonna let me back in the room if she finds out I let you sleep here.” Seiun mused. “That’d be a shame.”
King did not— startle. A first-rate Umamusume did not do that, but then, regular Umamusume rarely appeared out of thin air, either. What had been an empty hallway and the whirr of air conditioning was now Seiun Sky, taking up more space than she rightly ought to leaning with one elbow above her on the flat of the wall. She looked about as repentant as she ever did, which was very little, and about as smug, which was very much. King immediately felt her face go hot with shame. Before she could steel herself to do something useful (flinging a cleat at Seiun’s face, for example), her mind scrambled for something to say, and landed on, unhelpfully, “How would she even know?”
Seiun’s mouth quirked up at the corner. This was not a promising sign for King’s handle on the situation. Neither was getting caught in the hallway, she supposed, but she had to hold on to something. “Oh, it’s Laurel. She’s got her ways. D’you—“
“No, no. No, I’m fine.”
Seiun inclined her head minutely, but she made no other move besides retracting her hand, letting King perform the suddenly complicated and mortifying task of getting her feet beneath her, hands gripping at the wall, body and eyelids heavy. She let her do it all on her own, and King was grateful. When they were at eye level again, she rewarded her discretion with a deep, fluid curtsy.
The echoey hallway caught the tinny sound of Seiun’s laugh. King Halo was grateful she had practiced this. Her posture was perfect, hands curved upwards like pale birds, plucking at nonexistent skirts. Eyes downturned, as was proper. She didn’t have to see the look on Seiun’s face to know what it was from the noise alone: wide-eyed, on the back foot, a little. Pleased to be surprised. Despite herself, she smiled.
“I wasn't sleeping. To be clear.” King said, pointing an accusatory finger at Seiun just as the other Uma opened her mouth. The irritating looseness of her posture didn’t change; she only held up the palms of her hands, the picture of innocence. This close, she could see the pattern of callouses on her hands, where they had gripped the rough handles of tackleboxes and fishing poles. Seiun was close. The hall was wide, but she hadn’t moved away when King had, watching her stumble like a newborn fawn in her gleaming eyes. This was fine, then. This was familiar. Even comforting, in its way. A king could only tolerate such impropriety from a competitor. There was the hot rush of humiliation to be seen in such vulnerability, such… wallowing, frankly, in all her triumphant misery, but Seiun hadn’t said anything yet. The blatant scrutiny in her gaze was worse.
“Hmm. Haru told me what happened.” She hummed. Careless, like they were talking about the weather. Quite a chill outside, wasn’t there? King wasn’t really in the mood to parse anyone’s intentions. She felt wrung out, overtired, out of anger or fear or anything to offer anyone at all— it did not particularly matter in the moment if Haru was worried, if Fuji was worried, if they had cooked up some inane scheme with the fools in Miho that meant Seiun Sky knew she would be on this side of campus at five p.m. in the evening. If it still was five p.m in the evening. Giving up her phone seemed to have unmoored her completely, bereft of any reference for place and meaning and time.
“And I suppose you attempted to call me.”
“Figures you’d be booked and busy!” Seiun chirped, shrugging helplessly. “The newly crowned king of the sprint, and all.”
Potentially it was for the best that she wasn’t exactly jumping to say how, exactly, she’d found her, lest they both suffer through what could only be an even more embarrassing conversation than the one they were already having. Yes, your roommate was so awfully, terribly worried, she sent out a search party for a grown racer, and it's all your fault. Riveting!
Not for the first time, King felt a surge of guilty affection for Haru. It wasn’t as if she blamed her. Not at all. If anything, the weight of someone’s worry, new and strange, was so heavy, she knew not what to do with it but to go sprinting the other way. Perhaps Seiun knew this, by the way they were both stanced: her, still leaning inwards, lanky body a whole curved bow of tension, just in case King wizened up and started a scrimmage right then to escape. King, standing there. The Takamatsunomiya Kinen had taken everything she had, for the moment. Seiun could have all the territory she wanted, in their strange little game, and she was taking it, clever blue eyes bright against the starched purple of her uniform.
“Yes, indeed. I’m the talk of the town, aren’t I?” She flicked a hand loftily, delighting distantly the way Seiun’s gaze tracked its path towards the ceiling with startling focus. She did like it, was the thing. She liked it for what she felt were very noble, understandable reasons, the stepping out of her mother’s shadow, the carving of her own path, all of it. King needed that desperately, in some vital and terrible way. But even then there was the corner of her heart that craved only to see a king’s commendation on a billboard in Tokyo, or even more traitorously, on the face of her rival, and when Seiun was here she finally felt something in this awful place and that something was thrill.
And then, naturally, she burst into tears.
Seiun’s hand was surprisingly gentle when it came down on her shoulder. In her head, when she had considered it (and she had, miserably, considered it), she would be rougher, more firm. The same hand that hooked worms and pulled bass from the lake. It had to be. Still, her thumb was soft where it moved to rub slowly at her shoulder blade, and then the collar of her tracksuit, to the sparse and feathery hair there at the base of her neck. She had always hated being held by soft hands. Like she was so delicate, breakable. A trinket behind glass in the museum. Something you kept locked in the cabinet for fine company.
Seiun Sky had a fisher’s hands. She moved to brush the damp bangs off of King’s forehead in one light sweep, and King felt malleable, for once, grounded and sturdy with weeping. She eyed the corner of Seiun’s lip where it had twisted and thought, no, not delicate one fucking bit.
“This is disgraceful, you should know. I’m told people walk here.” There was so little left to reclaim of her dignity, but she wouldn’t be first-rate if she didn’t make a gallant effort at all. Her voice was gravelly, and she wasn’t sure quite how long she had been standing, or sleeping, or crying, allowing Seiun to hold and map her face with magnetic focus. She felt an odd wellspring of calm, not unlike the morning she had declined her mother’s call for the sake of Haru’s sleep. Actionable and good. Seiun snorted.
“They let all G1 winners do this. What, they didn’t tell you?”
“Cease.”
“No, I’m serious, you should’ve gotten the pamphlet—“
King hadn’t stopped crying, necessarily, but she was laughing. Seiun slipped the hand from her shoulder to the crook of her elbow, and then, smoothly, her hand. Neither of them said anything. King didn’t think she could, actually, which was something of a relief. The absurdity of everything had crested over her long ago, the roar of the crowd, the headlines, only this moment left clattering around loud in her head. When it was clear she hadn’t pulled away, Seiun begun moving towards the way she’d came. There was something so overwhelmingly charming about it, the barely restrained pace, the smug skip to her step. King could hardly stand to look at her.
“Ritto isn’t that way.” She observed, incredibly neutral.
“Come to my room. We can take a nap.”
“I thought you said Sakura Laurel was there.”
“I lied.” Seiun glanced at her askance, smart eyes checking her face for permission, for yes, okay, it’s really fine. King had seen her grin for the first time when she won her first crown, and it clung stubbornly to her for weeks afterwards. This time, she knew what to look for. You could see her eyeteeth this way. Fittingly pointed. An ambush predator. “Come take a nap.”
As if they weren’t already halfway there. When they broke from the swinging doors outside, the motion sensor lights flickered off behind them in the trainers’ building, darkening the hallway one by one by one. Somewhere, a phone was ringing, but for now it didn’t exist. She breathed again, suddenly starved for the feeling of the cold air in her lungs, for everything.
“Well, when you put it that way,” She murmured, and for once, it was just that easy.