We Call Everything On The Ice "Love"
To: @tr4sh-c4n Message From Your Santa: hoi from your secret santa :) i have stalked you and now i know where you live (or rather, know all your interests and want to be your friend right away) (please forget the ‘where you live’ part) (i actually feel really bad for writing that) (but i can’t find the heart to delete it for humour reasons) (okay enjoy the story now) (bye).
~*~
“Dan, you’re being silly,” Phil says as he sits on the bench near the ice rink. “You honestly can’t get away that easily.”
“It’s a completely valid excuse!” Dan protests. “I don’t want to skate because if there are fans here, the amount of Yuri!!! On Ice edits will break Tumblr...again.”
“You complain about anime edits like there’s no tomorrow, yet you have no problem with edits of your tongue down my throat.” He ties the final loop on his skate and looks up at Dan, whose skates are still beside him.
Dan crosses his arms. “I appreciate the art, but I don’t know how I much ice skating AU’s I can handle as it is.”
“Dan, I think you are just throwing this excuse because you don’t want to skate with me,” Phil retorts, and, if the cold weather wasn’t enough, Dan’s cheeks flush red.
“Of course that’s not it,” Dan nearly stammers.
“Then skate with me and admit that there is nothing wrong with phan — with a ‘ph’ by the way — Yuri!!! On Ice edits are completely fine with you.”
Dan sighs, defeated. “I’ll admit that I have no problem with the edits.” He presses his thumbs together and adds, “I’m not skating though.”
Phil pouts. “Why not?”
Dan looks down and mumbles something. Phil leans forward.
“Repeat that for the people in the back, Dan?” he asks sarcastically. Dan sighs.
“I don’t know how to skate.”
He looks up at Phil almost sadly and a mix of confusion and guilt flashes on Phil’s face.
Suddenly, Phil breaks into a smile and stifles a giggle. Dan’s frown instantly turns into a small, smug smile. “Stop laughing at me, you spork,” he mutters. “This is a very serious issue that constantly bothers me in my everyday life.”
“You should’ve just told me that you didn’t know how to skate!” Phil goes on his knees and Dan covers his mouth. Phil reaches over past his shoulder and grabs the ice skates beside Dan.
“Always leading me on, Lester,” Dan mumbles, and when Phil looks up with a confused face, Dan hides his blush behind his gloves and doesn’t repeat the sentence.
“Anyway, I am going to teach you!” Phil says brightly as he begins to take off Dan’s shoe and replaces it with an ice skate. Dan blinks.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m putting on your skate,” Phil replies, almost confused as Dan is. Dan shakes his head.
“You’re an actual spoon,” Dan says with a smile, grabbing the other skate. “I know how to put on ice skates.”
“Yeah, but you want to put them on properly, you see—”
“Phil, stop it, you’re squeezing my toe!” Dan says over Phil’s instructions. He continues to push Dan’s foot into the skate until he succeeds, and stands up proudly. “There, see?” Phil says happily. “This proves that skating is easy already! You should be able to put the other skate on properly as long as yo—”
“I already put the skate on five minutes ago,” Dan points out, and Phil looks down to see that yeah, it is on, but not in the way that his dad taught him.
He tells Dan that as he helps him walk, and Dan laughs at him — just as it should be.
~*~
“I can’t believe you convinced me to get a hot chocolate before we started,” Phil mutters as they sit on the same bench they were at half an hour ago.
Dan sips his drink and shrugs. “If this isn’t procrastination at its best, I don’t know what is.”
“Well, now that we are both done,” Phil sets both cups aside and pulls Dan off the bench, “it’s time to start skating!”
“I don’t know what possessed me to do this,” Dan mutters to himself as Phil drags him onto the rink.
Phil immediately glides onto the rink and oh my god he is an angel.
Dan watches on the side how Phil spins around with a big smile on his face and does a lap around the rink with his eyes closed and his head up proudly.
People watch Phil as well, pointing at him and smiling, as if amused at his performance. Dan stands there, almost dumbfounded. Phil spins around and holy shit he’s actually really good—
“Dan!” Phil’s voice snaps Dan out of his awestruck stupor. “Are you going to come skate with me or what?”
People are staring at Dan now — no doubt because, yeah, he was friends with the equivalent of Viktor Nikiforov — and it’s almost impossible for Dan to stop blushing now.
“I-I’m not sure I want to,” Dan says tentatively as Phil skates towards him. “I mean, you seem to be...pretty good.”
Phil immediately perks up. “Thank you! I hope you’re regretting laughing at my dad’s ways now, aren’t you?”
“Uh-huh,” Dan says slowly. “So do you want to go back for another round of hot chocolate…?”
“Oh no you don’t!” Phil says, grabbing Dan’s wrist. “We are going to skate, and it is going to be fun. I bet that by the time we are done, you are going to be a skating expert!”
Without time for Dan to react, Phil drags him onto the ice.
As soon as Dan makes contact with the ice, the only thing he can see is a blur of Phil and the sky because oh my god I’m falling.
“Gahhh!” Dan exclaims, and he’s falling forward—
—right into Phil’s arms.
A few huffs later, Dan’s vision clears and he sees Phil smiling down at him.
“Well, you sure know how to make an entrance,” Phil says, pulling him onto his feet. When they are both standing up, Dan can literally see Phil’s breath in front of him.
“Skating,” Dan says, looking down.
“Right,” Phil murmurs with a tiny grin.
~*~
“Okay, so it’s just like walking,” Phil says, skating beside Dan slowly, “and walking doesn’t require holding the edge of the rink.”
“I don’t want to break a leg, Phil,” Dan protests. “This seems like a perfectly good way to enjoy my skating experiencing while you continue to be a skating prodigy.”
Now Phil’s blushing, but he desperately tries to hide it.
“Why don’t you try skating a bit?” Phil prompts sweetly, skating in front of Dan and holds his hand out towards him. “My dad says that the more you fall, the more you learn about falling.”
Dan smiles shyly and takes his hand. Phil instantly pulls him off the ledge and walks him through a slow skate.
“All you have to do is kind of push with your strong foot backwards to give yourself a ‘running start’,” Phil instructs. “Lean on your weak foot.”
“It’s weak for a reason,” Dan manages to say, but goes anyway.
He stumbles a bit first — ”If you’re tripping, that mean’s your toe blade is hitting the ice first!” Phil says five trips later — but he eventually gets it. Afterwards, he’s skating without the help of the ice rink’s ledge, and then he’s skating without Phil.
“Good job, Dan!” Phil calls out from the sidelines as Dan slowly makes his way around the rink. “Remember to bend your knees a bit! And when you are gliding, you have to have parallel feet!” “Yes, master!” Dan yells with a smile as he passes Phil. He stops in front of him, shedding some snow off the ice.
“This is exhausting,” Dan comments when Phil leans over the edge of the rink. “Did you do this all the time when you were growing up?” Phil smiles, looking down. “My grandma used to skate all the time. She was the one who taught my dad, I think.” “Well, she was damn good at it,” Dan says with a matching smile. “Though I think two hours of skating is good enough, is it?”
“I guess,” Phil hums, nodding.
Dan hobbles back to the bench where they began and leaned forward to untie his laces.
“We should’ve filmed today, you know?” he says. “It would’ve been a pretty cool ‘Day in the Life of Dan and Phil’ for the audience — especially how you are such a good skater.”
Phil blushes. “Well, maybe for another time, I guess.”
Dan looks up at Phil and frowns. “You’re not taking off your skates.”
Phil looks down at his shoes and smiles. “I was kind of hoping that we’d get to skate before we leave...I know it sounds weird, but I haven’t skated with anyone in a really long time.”
Phil’s words could’ve melted the ice off the rink if Dan had anything to say about it. The glow around Phil was so infectious that it made Dan smile too.
“Of course we can skate together,” Dan beams. “It would be pretty cheesy, but I don’t see why we can’t.”
The corner of Phil’s lip lifts up slightly.
“Thanks!” Phil says, grabbing Dan’s hand and pulling him off the bench and onto the ice.
Dan holds his hand forward.
“Shall we skate?” Dan asks, mocking a regal tone, but Phil smiles despite his teasing attitude.
“Of course.”
~*~
And they skated for longer than both anticipated to. One skate became one hour, and one hour because three.
Eventually the sun began to set, and everyone left except for Dan and Phil, who were still smiling.
“Now is skating really that bad?” Phil says with a smug smile.
Everything around Dan seemingly froze, the wind through Phil’s hair being the only thing that was still moving. There was a dead silence around them, with old feelings resurfacing.
“Let there be edits,” Dan whispers when Phil is close enough, his lips barely grazing Phil’s. His eyes widen, and Dan smirks. “After all, we call everything on the ice ‘love’.”
