Chapter Text
Sayeon is indifferent to the off-season.
She knows that some of her teammates hate it. They've complained about it enough, she'd have to be deliberately ignoring them to miss that. She also knows that some of her teammates love it, given how they look forward to it every year, and occasionally bring it up as a silver lining whenever their season ends earlier than she'd like. Opinions are mixed, as she's sure they are for most other teams in most other sports.
Sayeon herself isn't strongly swayed one way or the other. On the one hand, she loves hockey, and she'd love to play it all year long. On the other hand, she likes the chance to take in-person classes over the summer semester, when the rest of the time she's stuck getting her Master's online in between practices and games. So, in general, she's indifferent. The off-season and the game season both hold their own appeals.
However, this generalized indifference does not extend to this off-season.
It started the same as any other off-season. The finals were held- her own team, the Crows, sitting in the audience by virtue of losing gracefully in the semifinals- and the cup was taken home by someone else. April slid easily and naturally into May, and Sayeon was meant to be working on her thesis (a boring in-person semester, if it even counts as one, but time marches inexorably on and the thing about earning credits is that you only need a finite amount of them to get a degree out of it) up until she got a collect call from a city jail at least an hour away by train.
The details are unimportant. The main point of it is that Samin, her one and only dear sister, the woman who raised her when their parents were dead and she was just a girl herself, was arrested for something that she definitely did and would appreciate Sayeon and her clean hockey money to come and bail her out. Sayeon, unfortunately aware of just how much she owes Samin for putting up with her own childish stunts, had simply sighed, asked her advisor if their summer meetings could be done online instead, and took the train back to her childhood hometown.
Which leads her to where she is now: stuck in her sister's house and tapping away at her beat-up old laptop, while Samin putters around and pretends like she's not trying to think of ways to outsmart her ankle monitor. Sayeon sincerely wishes her luck on that endeavor, so long as that luck is short lived, and only present when Sayeon is demonstrably not home and cannot be held responsible for it.
Samin may have provided for her when she was a kid, and she may make it abundantly clear that she would move heaven and earth for Sayeon if she needed it, but Samin has also made her bed and she ought to lie in it. Organized crime is a felony, whether you're the great Samin Lee or not.
All of that aside- and there is a lot of all of that to put aside, but Sayeon's been putting it aside and beating it with her hockey stick when necessary for a significant portion of her professional life- Sayeon's off-season isn't as great as she was hoping it would be. She's been (temporarily) uprooted from her place in Seoul for the sake of a sister that she owes far too much to to ever pay off, missing a significant chunk of her bank account, and stuck scheduling advising meetings around court dates that Samin's parole officer comes to escort her to personally.
The advising meeting schedule dance is, at least, a familiar one, so long as she swaps out court dates for games. That particular dance is one she's doing right now, plunking out an email with her preferred next available three-hour window, with four alternate dates and times in case he is unavailable. The rest of her inbox sits patiently behind her typing window, mostly unread promotional emails from various vaguely entertainment-related people who want her to promote something for someone and also to sell them her soul for a check for 750,000 won.
"Battle of the blades sounds fun. What is that, a new and interesting way to tell you that you've been traded?" Samin makes her presence known by reading email subjects over Sayeon's shoulder. Sayeon, pointedly unamused, does not bother responding until her email has been sent and she can focus on what Samin's looking at properly.
"Trading doesn't begin until September," She corrects absently as she searches for what caught Samin's eye. "Besides, I still have to agree to the terms of whatever new team wants me. There's room for negotiation. I'm not just told that I'm traded." She neglects to mention that this was, more or less, what happened with the Crows- she was not consulted on the matter, and it was simply decided by various people in various management positions that she was meant to go there.
As she says this, her eyes land on the email that Samin must have been referring to: Battle of the Blades! it announces, with several emojis and half a glimpse at the word Premiering at the beginning of the body of the email. Its sender is some entertainment company that Sayeon's heard of in passing, mostly reaching out to various athletes in their respective off-seasons for reality shows, guest appearances, cameos, and other business-boosting fluff pieces that require no significant amount of brain power to arrange or to participate in. Despite a few tepid communications with them, her complete and total lack of hunger for any kind of spotlight is abundantly clear in every meeting she has with their agents. She only plays hockey for the love of the game, not out of any love for shoe ads or Jimmy Kimmel interviews.
"Sure," Samin agrees placidly, in that way of hers that makes Sayeon feel like she's nine years old again instead of a full-grown adult that's most of the way to a Master's degree and is successful enough to be able to afford Samin's bail. She can't say anything about the tone, though, not unless she really wants to dig her heels into that elementary-school feeling, so she simply sighs and ignores it.
Samin, the queen of being aggravating for no discernible reason, reaches out and taps the email on her screen. Sayeon's laptop is, unfortunately, new enough to be a touchscreen, so the email opens and displays the offer to drag Sayeon onto a short-run reality program, for contract pay and the possibility of a cash prize.
The offer itself is only tempting for a moment- Samin's bail was a hefty chunk of change, and her bank account is more bereft than she likes it to be- but she's not so desperate for money that the idea of gritting her teeth and smiling for the cameras is better than the idea of getting by on the money she has in savings until the new season starts.
"You should accept it," Samin says behind her, and Sayeon can't tell if she's joking or not. "It says it's only six weeks, and you'll be hanging out with other people who do other skating sports. You should diversify your circle. Make some friends."
Samin's fascination with the idea of Sayeon making friends is something that she's been harping on about for nearly as long as Sayeon can remember, much to her endless chagrin. The only time that Sayeon even made a friend was Jugyeong, whose police officer father somehow managed to connect Samin to the gang she'd affiliated with back then and caused a lot of trouble. Sayeon wanted nothing more to do with friends after that, considering how high-risk they evidently are.
That attitude- despite the significantly lowered risk associated with friends now, considering that Samin's gang activity is much better hidden now, and Sayeon rarely associates with her unless there's a statistically significant chance that she's not actively committing crimes, and therefore not actively reflecting poorly on Sayeon and destroying her future chances at normalcy- has persisted throughout Sayeon's adolescence and adulthood, leading her to now, when she refuses to do more than the occasional full-team hangout during the season or just at the beginning of the off season.
"They're even professionals at what they do," Samin continues, oblivious to Sayeon's internal thought process on the entire idea of diversifying her circle. "That means they're your kind of neurotic."
"My kind of neurotic is academia. I just happen to also play professional hockey," Sayeon snaps without thinking, clicking out of the email and tabbing over to the draft of her thesis. She rereads the part she's been working on most recently, restructures a sentence so it doesn't sound like she's a toddler that's just repeating herself, and then tabs over to the case report that most of this subsection hinges on.
"You should do something over the summer," Samin presses, "So you're not cooped up inside all day, every day."
"I'm working on my thesis, as you can clearly see. Degrees don't earn themselves." Sayeon rebuffs, and commits to trying to ignore her. It's never worked in the past, so it stands to reason that it won't work now, but she can try.
"We both know that if that thesis is the only thing you're working on, you'll overthink it to the point that you'll wind up with less than you started with. Don't think I don't know how you work. Get out of the house and do something else with your time, for your own sake." Samin, unfortunately logical and correct, has a point that Sayeon can't really contend with, at least in the privacy of her own mind.
Out loud, however, she has plenty of ammunition. "You don't know how I work. In case you've forgotten, it's been six years since we lived together and shared more than the occasional phone call. Things chnge."
"You're busy and you want nothing to do with your mean old big sister. Don't try to spin this on me. Either sign up for that reality show thing and get paid to make friends, or I'm signing you up for the knitting circle at the library." Sayeon- terrible at knitting and other activities that require small, repetitive motions with her hands due to the beating they've taken in hockey- sighs in exhaustion, while Samin walks away with the argument won.
It somehow hadn't occurred to her that she would be required to wear makeup.
She never wears it during games, she rarely- rarely- wears it on camera outside of the rink, and she never does more than lipstick and eye stuff. The producers, meanwhile, seem to believe that if even a single skin cell on her face is directly visible, it's a personal failure on their part and it must be corrected posthaste.
This is the first point against the entire concept of Battle of the Blades!® and she's certain that there will be far more before the day is through. She hasn't seen who else signed up for this sorry excuse of a television series, and she's not entirely certain if she hopes she knows the other contestants or if she hopes she doesn't know anybody. They'll know her, almost certainly, because she was asked to wear her Crows uniform to the shoot and the massive red 44 on the back of it is hard to miss. There's also the Lee sitting right above it, but she's ironically more well-known for her 'unlucky' number.
She chose it for a reason, of course. Luck is unnecessary for her to succeed, especially in hockey. It's skill, plain and simple, and Sayeon has that in spades. She chose her number with the express purpose of making sure that everybody knows it.
Finally, the woman with the makeup brush steps away, and someone starts adjusting the camera that's sitting menacingly in front of her. The director, a man she shook hands with about four hours ago (at least, that's how it feels, considering the entire time after that was spent sitting absolutely still and putting far too much trust in the makeup artist's ability to refrain from poking her in the eye), comes rushing over, his iced coffee noisily rattling in his hand as he checks the view that the cameraman set up.
"Perfect," He says, though not to Sayeon, and then he actually focuses on whatever Sayeon's doing in this chair, in front of this camera. She's not sure what's supposed to be going on- she imagines that the actual premise of this show will be revealed in some dramatic play for the cameras- and she's not sure what she's supposed to say, if anything at all.
"Hello, Ms. Lee," The director- a man who she's unfortunately forgotten the name of, as it was slipped into a whirl of other names and introductions- nods at her, and she nods back.
"Hello," She greets, even though she's already said hello to him today, "Is there anything I'm supposed to be doing right now?" Hopefully, she is- she wants the episode filmed as quickly as possible, so she can wipe this suffocating makeup off. She hates the feeling of it, and she's quite glad she never got in the habit of wearing it regularly.
"As a matter of fact, yes! Just introduce yourself to the camera, say a little something about your career and background- many of our viewers are going to be unfamiliar with women's hockey, since this show is technically multidisciplinary, so a quick overview would be great!" He doesn't mention what other people have been saying, either to her face or behind her back, that nobody knows anything about her whether they like women's hockey or not. She's a private person, a quality that's somewhat at odds with her status as a semi-public figure.
"Alright," She nods, and then turns to the camera. She smiles, a little, but only briefly.
"Hello, TV audience," She nods at the camera in greeting, feeling a little silly, "My name is Sayeon Lee, and I play hockey. I am currently the center forward of the Crows, and I hope to do well in this game... whatever the game may be."
"Anything about your personal life?" The director asks, pointedly, and Sayeon breaks eye contact with the camera to blink at him. She hums in thought for a moment, and turns back to the camera.
"I am currently pursuing my Master's in criminology. I'm hoping to finish my thesis soon," She smiles again, hoping to undercut most people's immediate reaction to that (negative, in her experience) with friendliness in her facial expression, but she's not sure how well that works. A camera can't exactly make a face to give her feedback.
Before she can find out how the director feels about it, her thoughts are interrupted by loud footsteps coming up behind her. Sayeon turns halfway around in her chair, and comes face-to-face with someone who must be one of the other contestants, if only because she already knows who she is.
Ryujin Kang, a figure skater who very nearly qualified for the Olympics the last time the winter one came up, was recently all over the news for an arrest on charges of assault and battery. Whoever she assaulted- if she assaulted them, innocent until proven guilty and all- dropped the charges soon after her arrest, which fueled the media storm even more than if she were to be found not guilty.
She's also walking towards Sayeon, grinning a roguishly charming smile that's more graceless than she would expect of an apparently exceptionally talented figure skater, and suddenly leaning in her space and waving at the camera.
"Nobody told me where to go, so here I am!" Kang says to the camera, but she's clearly addressing the actual people around more than the camera itself. Sayeon's found that she's involuntarily stiffened up from the contact, and Kang backs off quickly. Only when she's further from Sayeon- not by much, considering that she's still very much in Sayeon's space- does she visibly look Sayeon up and down.
"Damn, I didn't realize this was the big leagues," Kang says, and Sayeon has no idea if this is supposed to be an insult, and if it is, who the target is supposed to be. "You guys got Lee? Fuck the Crows, but at least it's not just C-listers like I thought."
"... What?" Sayeon finally asks, to which Kang does nothing except cackle.
"Don't worry, Glasses, I don't bite. Especially not the best players in the game."
"Are rookies fair game, then?" Sayeon asks, recognizing this kind of humor from the other women she's played with before. Kang evidently appreciates it by the snort, and she makes finger guns at Sayeon as she backs away. Sayeon smiles a little, real, at the idea that maybe she has made a friend here.
At least, based on the news, this new friend can protect herself.
