#trans Lewis | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

red-flagging · 4 months ago

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can i have a 💛 reunion kiss/relief pls!

(kiss prompts!)

There’s no one in the rink parking lot when Valtteri pulls in, which isn’t unusual. The front door is unlocked, which is. Valtteri drops her things off in the staff room and wanders towards the main rink. All the lights are still off, but she can hear the quiet scrape of someone on the ice.

They’re on the opposite side of the rink when she walks in. Not one of her students–they’re too tall, and too good at skating besides. As Valtteri watches, they take a lazy half-turn, then pop up, light and airy, into a lovely salchow.

Valtteri whistles under her breath. The sound carries further than she expects over the ice. Whoever it is looks over their shoulder, mid-stride.

The jolt of recognition catches Valtteri dead center in her chest. “Lewis?” she blurts out, before she can catch herself.

Lewis meets her eyes. Too late, it hits Valtteri–does Lewis even know–but before she can even finish the sentence, Lewis is gliding towards her, disbelief flashing across her face.

“Oh my God,” she says. “Val?”

She doesn’t look how Valtteri remembers. Her hair’s not in the braids that she started wearing during their last season together; it’s tied behind her head in a curly puff that pokes out from under her toque. The frizzy edges catch the morning light streaming in from the high windows. Back when they were younger, she used to straighten it religiously before every competition until Valtteri could practically see her reflection in the smooth, unforgiving shine. She can almost smell the hairspray now. Even the memory of it makes her a little dizzy.

“Lewis,” she repeats. “Fuck. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

“Yeah, jeez,” Lewis says. At least she looks equally thrown off balance. “Wow. I didn’t–I had no idea you’d be here.”

“I had no idea you were going to be here.” After all, Valtteri’s the one who’s been working nights and weekends at the rink for the past three years. She hasn’t watched a tournament in years. The only times she hears anything about Lewis are when she’s scrolling through the figure skating news accounts that she knows she needs to just put her foot down and unfollow. Valtteri saw a picture of her a few weeks ago, celebrating with George in the Skate Canada kiss-and-cry about going into the free skate in 4th. She didn’t see any more headlines about them after that, so she can hazard a guess at how things ended up going.

Lewis shrugs, fiddling with her gloves. “Yeah,” she says. “Honestly, I didn’t know either, but my flight layovers worked out this way, and then Bono let me bribe him to get in here, and–” she shrugs again. “Here I am, I guess.” She glances up at Valtteri. “What are you doing here?”

Valtteri nods towards the duffel bag beside her. “Coaching,” she says. “I run the youth team here. Hockey.”

Lewis’s face actually lights up. “Oh my God,” she says, sounding genuinely delighted. “That’s so–wow. You used to play, right?”

“As a kid.” And then she’d hit puberty and gotten just tall enough to be able to lift all the girls but not tall enough to take a check from any of the other boys, and that had decided that. “I was never very good, but. Enough for the basics, I suppose.”

Lewis shakes her head. “Nah, come on, I bet these kids love you,” she says. “It really suits you. You look–happier.”

Valtteri doesn’t flinch, exactly, but something on her face must twitch, because Lewis’s expression shutters again, something in her eyes going a little more subdued. She scrapes a skate over the ice, drawing patterns in the bits of slush collecting at the edges of the rink. The sound echoes through the empty air between them.

“Sorry, I’m–am I in your way?” Lewis asks suddenly. “I kind of just–barged in here.”

Valtteri’s first class isn’t until 10AM. Valtteri should tell Lewis to get out anyways. Valtteri is technically still mad at Lewis–at least, she thinks she’s supposed to be mad at her. At least as mad as Lewis was the last time they talked to each other, in Lewis’s hospital room after the second back surgery, when Valtteri told her she was quitting for good.

You’re fucking running from a fight, Lewis had snapped. She’d been dropping weight that whole season, trying to get her shoulders to look less broad compared to Valtteri’s; she’d looked tiny against the sheets, practically shaking from anger or exhaustion or both. You’re being selfish. Like Valtteri hadn’t bitten the bullet and buzzed her hair short and grown her beard out this season, just to see if it made a difference; like she hadn’t ignored the way her shoulder creaked every time she hoisted Lewis up over her head; like she hadn’t done the goddamn Carmen program, after eight years of resisting.

Valtteri had been too tired to argue with her; had left and gone home, laid in bed to open and close Instagram over and over and fantasize about posting Fuck the ISU with a picture of herself flipping the bird across all her socials.

In the end, she’d just posted the meticulously-edited, purposefully meaningless retirement statement they’d sent her the night before, then texted Didi and asked him to reset the passwords on all her official accounts.

Want me to send you the new log in? Didi had texted back.

No, Valtteri had answered, and then turned her phone off.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have,” Lewis says, jerking Valtteri out of her thoughts. “This is–I know this is kind of crazy.”

She’s chewing on the side of her lip. She always used to leave an extra lipstick with Toto, in case she picked a scab off while waiting for their group to get called and there wasn’t time to run back to the locker room. That’s how Valtteri learned to do her own lips; ten years of touching Lewis up rinkside, Lewis’s eyes bright and her breath on Valtteri’s numb fingers hot enough to make something in her stomach burn.

There’s a tube of chapstick in Valtteri’s pocket. If she let muscle memory win, she’d reach over and tug Lewis’s lip down right now.

She reaches down to take off her own skate guards instead. “There’s time,” she says. Watches Lewis swallow, her eyes darting between Valtteri’s face and the ice. “Come skate with me?”

–

Even after all these years, the way Lewis’s body moves is more familiar than Valtteri’s own. Valtteri doesn’t even notice they’re matching strides until Lewis turns to skate backwards and Valtteri automatically moves to stay on her right as they round the corner.

Lewis gives her an amused look. Valtteri shrugs. “Old habits die hard, I guess,” she says sheepishly, and feels her cheeks go surprisingly, pleasantly hot when Lewis laughs.

“Does it translate?” Lewis asks, falling back into stride beside Valtteri. “You know. The–” she mimes shoulder checking Valtteri, lightly bumping against her.

Valtteri hums. “It’s different.” Half the kids on her team are shit skaters, for one. The only reason most of them show up to practice is because they like running headfirst into each other. But Valtteri doesn’t have any real reason to drill them into shape, so she lets them be. There’s worse things to teach kids their bodies are good for than casual, good-natured violence. “Hard to compare.”

“Mmm.” The rink’s quiet except for the soft scrape of their skates against the ice, rasping like breaths in sync. Valtteri sneaks a glance over at Lewis. She’s gotten more piercings. They somehow make her look softer than Valtteri remembers; or maybe she’s just grown into her features, after all these years. There’s a tattoo on the nape of her neck, almost covered by her hair, that Valtteri doesn’t think she’s ever seen before. She’s just as beautiful as Valtteri remembers.

“So, uh,” Lewis says, into the silence. She clears her throat. “When’d you start growing your hair out?”

Ah. So they’ve made it to this part of the conversation. “Basically as soon as I retired,” Valtteri says. As soon as she could. She gives Lewis a wry grin. “My head was getting cold, you know, so.”

Lewis half-laughs, shaking her head. “That was it, huh?”

Valtteri shrugs. “It’s my hair,” she says. “Did I need a better reason?”

Lewis doesn’t say anything to that. They round the corner, back onto the long end of the rink, before she opens her mouth again. Valtteri internally braces herself for the usual onslaught–if anyone deserves an explanation, or at least an acknowledgement, it’s Lewis, she supposes.

“Is the mullet new?” Lewis asks.

Valtteri blinks. “Uh,” she says. “Yeah. Mullet’s new.”

Lewis nods. “Mullet’s pretty good,” she says, giving Valtteri a grin over her shoulder. Valtteri grins back. It’s not as hard as she expected.

They turn another corner. Lewis tucks a curl behind her ear. The light from the high windows is starting to creep up past the edge of the ice. It’s above Lewis’s ankles now, glinting off of her blades as they skate through the patches of sun.

“I should have said something back then,” Lewis says.

Valtteri’s skate sticks on a chip in the ice. She barely catches her stumble.

“What,” she says. “About–what about?”

Lewis doesn’t say anything. She reaches out to slow herself against the boards, gliding to a stop by the benches. She isn’t looking at Valtteri. “I just mean–” she has a funny look on her face. It takes Valtteri a second to place it as uncertainty. “I don’t know,” she says eventually. “Everything, I guess. They way they–were. About you.”

“They were pretty terrible to you, too,” Valtteri says, after a moment. Her throat feels like it’s been filled with sand.

She’s said as much to Lewis before, though maybe not in such blunt terms. The last time, it was after they’d gone minorly viral after some commentator made a joke about how they were the first pairs team where the man was the one who got lifted by the woman. Aren’t you tired about never being enough for them, Valtteri had said, and Lewis had snapped back, and that’s why Nico and I won Worlds, and you and I didn’t.

This time, Lewis just makes a vague, noncommittal noise, tapping her fingers against the boards. “More of a reason to have said something, isn’t it.”

Valtteri squints up at the skylight. Swallows. “You’re saying something now,” she says quietly. “Counts for something.”

Lewis shrugs. “Maybe.”

The front door of the rink opens. Valtteri hears a few of the older students’ voices filter in, their laughter overlapping and echoing through the hallway. Lewis’s shoulders stiffen. She half-straightens up, like she’s thinking of leaving.

“You still haven’t told me why you came here,” Valtteri says, before she can. She has some guesses. The slight bulge of a brace along Lewis’s lower back that Valtteri might have mistaken for a fold in her shirt if she hadn’t been looking; the gossip accounts that have all been reporting for weeks about how sources have seen George trialing new partners, that they might do the swap before the end of next season, even. The Grand Prix de France gold medal sitting in her trophy cabinet, after all those years she and Valtteri spent winning everything on the circuit except that one.

Lewis stops moving. Outside in the hallway, a kid shrieks. Someone in skate guards clomps, muffled, up the stairs. Lewis swallows. Valtteri hears her throat click when she does.

Just as Valtteri’s about to give up on her and change the subject, Lewis clears her throat. “I think I’m going to cut my hair,” she says. “After the season. Maybe sooner.” She makes a chopping motion with her hand, near her temple. “Just–all of it off.”

Valtteri blinks. Lewis is staring over the ice, still not looking at her. She’s chewing her lip again. There’s a mulish, sharp set to her jaw. Valtteri looks at her and thinks, suddenly, of skating into a twist lift, her hands tight around Lewis’s waist; Lewis’s hands resting over hers, steady and sure, certain that Valtteri would be able to let her go and then catch her on her way back down.

“It would look good on you,” Valtteri says softly, and means it.

The corner of Lewis’s mouth twitches. “Yeah?” she asks, with a small smile. “Maybe I’ll get you to cut it.”

A gaggle of kids bursts into the rink behind them, their voices echoing over the ice as they dump their equipment onto the benches. Lewis glances backwards over her shoulder. “Jeez, I just ate up your entire break, huh,” she says, straightening up. “I should get going. I still need to–”

“What are you doing tonight?” Valtteri interrupts, before she loses her nerve. Lewis blinks at her. “There’s a bar that just opened near here. If you wanted–we could go check it out.”

“Oh,” Lewis says, sounding surprised. “I–uh. Actually, yeah. I don’t have anything planned for tonight, so.” She looks back up at Valtteri, a small smile on her face. “Yeah. We could do it.”

Something flutters in Valtteri’s chest. “Okay,” she says. “Uh. Great. I’ll see you tonight, then?” And then, before Lewis can answer, she leans forward and presses a quick kiss to Lewis’s cheek.

Before she can lean away, Lewis grabs her, pulling her back in. It almost knocks Valtteri off balance; Lewis braces against her to keep both of them upright, squeezing so tightly that her chest hurts. Her nose presses into Valtteri’s shoulder. Valtteri cups the back of her head and feels Lewis sigh against her skin, has to close her eyes against the sudden ache in her chest.

It’s three full, long breaths before Lewis lets go. She crosses her arms and clears her throat, taking a step back. “Yeah,” she says. “It–yeah. I’ll see you tonight. But it was–” she looks back up at Valtteri with a small smile. “It was good seeing you, Val. I’m glad I got to.”

Right after retiring, Valtteri would lie awake in bed some nights, making lists of what she’d say to Lewis if she ever spoke to her again. I’m sorry. I forgive you. I don’t. I wish we’d met anywhere else except where we did. I don’t know if we’d ever have been friends without skating. I’m glad I got out. I wish I hadn’t had to leave you to do it. Everything jams up in Valtteri’s throat trying to get out.

She takes a deep breath. There’ll be time. Lewis is standing there, warm and real in the morning light, for the first time in longer than she can remember. There’ll be time for all of it. For the first time in longer than she can remember, she actually believes it.

“Yeah,” she says softly. “I’m glad, too.”

#milflewis #sorry this like SO barely fulfills the prompt but i got really attached to trans butch val and couldn't think about anything else #did i have to go to dark places (my tumblr figure skating era circa 2011) in order to write it...yes.....but it was worth it #anyways come talk to me about this AU lol i'm very attached to it #i've only had lewis/val pairs skaters for one day but if anything happened to them i would kill everyone in this room and then myself etc #also thank u for the good wishes on my exam!! i got a low enough passing score that it got me a very funny passive aggressive email #from the dean. but i DID pass so huge W #asks #my fic

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