The fluorescent lights leeched all warmth from the Fairmont Hotel's press room, leaving behind the sour tang of cheap coffee and sterile air conditioning. My nerves felt as stretched as the threadbare carpet, every question sharpening the ache behind my eyes. Three hours of restless sleep and a half-eaten protein bar barely kept me upright, let alone civil enough for the press.

I found myself wedged between Park Min-jung (landing triple axels since she was twelve, her Instagram followers outnumbering my hometown) and Kim Tae-ri, whose rhinoplasty was so fresh I could catch the trace of medical tape beneath her concealer. That's certainly one way to spend the off-season.

The plastic nameplate in front of me read "CHAE SONG-HWA" in bold Hangul, and I kept touching it like a talisman, half-expecting someone to snatch it away.

"Sarah-ssi," a reporter called out, using my English name. "How does it feel to represent Korea after competing for Great Britain?"

I leaned into the microphone. My Korean was textbook-perfect, but unmistakably foreign in its precision. “It’s an honour to compete for my father’s country. I’m deeply grateful for this opportunity and the confidence the Korean Skating Union has shown in me.”

What I left unsaid: This feels like a Plan B I don't deserve, masquerading as destiny. I’m only here because I was dismissed me as damaged goods, never mind that I outscored Isabella bloody Whitfield at every competition. Not now, Sarah.

Song-hwa. Now’s not the time.

The reporters scribbled notes. One raised her hand. "Your comeback has been remarkable. What drives you?"

Spite, I thought. Stubbornness. A touch of masochism, maybe? 

"The love of the sport," I said instead, flashing what my mother called my 'competition smile'.

The reporter persisted. "But after your funding cut—"

“I came home. Korea has always been in my heart,” I interjected, my smile tense. Min-jung stirred awkwardly beside me; here, interrupting was unthinkable. You didn’t push back against the press, and you certainly didn’t let resentment slip out from beneath your composure like a stray hem. Shut up, Song-hwa. God, I'm so tired.

And it was true—Korea had always been a second home to me. I had whole summers on Jeju Island with my father’s family: my grandmother’s gentle hands wiping my face with a damp cloth when I came in, sticky and flushed from gorging on watermelon, cicadas humming in the hydrangeas outside.

The other home was rain-soaked north London, where the rink café was no doubt abuzz with gossip over tepid flat whites. "Did you hear Sarah got dropped? Couldn’t make the comeback after hip surgery. Honestly, wasn’t she always a bit much anyway?"

Too much for England. Too much for Korea. Excellent start.

My phone vibrated against my leg. Coach Park’s message lit up the screen: You’re late. Ice time in 30 minutes. Shit.

I glanced at the team manager, still absorbed in outlining our planned training camps and dropping hints about a mysterious “campaign opportunity” to be unveiled later. PR stunt? Variety show? God help us if it involved costumes.

Min-jung fielded a question about her trademark spiral sequence. She smiled as she replied—yes, it was no longer a requirement, but she considered it essential to the artistry of her programme.

No one would notice if I just—

Except Kim Tae-ri did.

She didn’t fidget or blink; her expression remained flawless and unreadable, but the moment I shifted in my seat and stole a glance at the exit, I felt her gaze fix on me, sharp and unyielding. With a practised motion, she slipped her phone from her pocket, fingers gliding across the screen. A second later, my phone buzzed.

Don’t even think about it. Everyone’s behaviour here reflects on the team.

Noted.

So I sat there, thoroughly reprimanded by a seventeen-year-old, scratching anxious circles into the thigh of my uniform and picturing Coach Park at the rink, drumming his fingers on the boards as the minutes ticked toward ice time.

Coach Park, who had seen my competition record and x-rays of my reconstructed hip, shrugged and said, “I’ve made good artworks from worse canvases.” I could all but hear his voice in my ear, reminding me I should have planned better, should have realised a press conference would run late.

Things finally wrapped with a cheery send-off from the moderator, who invited the assembled press to wish their national team luck for the season. We never got this kind of treatment in the UK, winter sports being the ugly stepsister to the medal-churning darlings of cycling and rowing.

Once the last photo call was over and the final bows taken, I slipped out past the folding partition and into the hallway where our gear was piled. I gave my teammates a brief, awkward wave and bowed in apology, staccato little dips to each of them, mumbling about needing to be somewhere else. First press conference and I'm already bolting like I've got something to hide.

I fished my hoodie out of the heap—black, oversized, still smelling of Deep Heat—and yanked it on over my national kit. Skating bag on one shoulder, I jogged toward the lobby, the seconds ticking away in my head. 

The September air—unseasonably cold—caught me with a slap as the doors opened with a hiss. I yanked the hood up and kept moving. Mokdong Ice Rink was a thirty-minute stroll, but I had five minutes before Coach Park would start tallying my lateness in extra cardio. No choice but to run. 

Seoul at lunchtime was its own obstacle course: businessmen, delivery scooters, tourists angling for selfies. I threaded through them like a slalom, my body navigating the crush on instinct—athlete’s spatial awareness put to use off the ice for once. The city felt like a half-remembered dream. Growing up, I’d passed through Seoul on the way to visit Appa’s family often enough, but living here was something else entirely.

“Gwenchanayo,” I muttered, steadying an elderly woman whose shopping bag I’d bumped. She patted my cheek and called me pretty, which would've been sweet if I weren’t mentally running the numbers on whether I could make it to the rink without Coach Park sentencing me to suicide drills.

(I couldn’t.)

The Conrad Hotel loomed ahead, its glass facade gleaming in the autumn sun. A knot of people clustered by the entrance, not exactly rare for Yeouido-dong, but the shrieking was. That high-pitched, frantic edge usually meant—

“OPPA! OPPA, FIGHTING!!”

Oh, no.

A surge of bodies swept me along, hands clutching banners printed with faces I only half-recognised from endless subway ads. PR1SM? Their leader’s military discharge had just been on every city billboard. If it’s him, this is going to be a bloodbath.

I tried to slip past the crowd, but a security guard stepped in, nudging me back toward the hotel and behind the metal barriers. “Step back, please.”

“I’m not—I don’t care about—” My Korean faltered, brittle with panic. “I need to go that way!”

The press of people grew tighter. Someone’s elbow dug into my side—fuck, that hurt. My skating bag swung out, clipping legs at random. Coach Park was going to crucify me.

The noise of the crowd swelled to a fever pitch, the feeling of fan hysteria an almost tangible energy as I bobbed uselessly in the crush, searching for a way out.

The doors split open.

Even without the immaculately cut Saint Laurent coat or the trio of assistants materialising like designer-clad sprites, I would’ve recognised him instantly. Some people just radiate that stop-and-stare energy. And honestly, six months in Seoul is long enough to know Yoo Jinwoo’s face—billboards, bus stops, beauty store lightboxes—he’s everywhere.

And what a face. Yoo Jinwoo: PR1SM’s leader, national icon, centrepiece of approximately every Korean woman’s daydreams.

Frankly, it was irritating.

There might as well have been shoujo sparkles dancing around him as he greeted the crowd, not a hair out of place (except for the ones styled to be). He was so tall it was almost comical, broad-shouldered, dressed head-to-toe in black like someone hired to model for Glossy Beautiful People Don’t Sweat.

Meanwhile, we rink goblins show up in mismatched black at 5 AM like amateur cat burglars.

His smile was dazzling, broad and warm, even with the sunglasses. He signed autographs with practised efficiency, each movement neat and brief. Not exactly unfriendly, but definitely choreographed: look down, sign, look up, thank, move along. When a fan handed him a marker without a cap, he hesitated for half a beat, then produced a pen from his own jacket, unruffled.

Fussy, I thought.

Every few signatures, his gaze drifted over the crowd, subtle beneath dark glasses. He’d tilt his head, adjusting his angle, scanning—not searching for anyone in particular, just clocking everyone. Once or twice, his attention skimmed in my direction, impersonal and fleeting.

On any other day, I might’ve stuck around—just long enough to witness the spectacle up close, at a safe, not-a-fan-just-curious distance. Then my phone buzzed. Five minutes late. That's fifty burpees.

"Fuck." The English sliced clean through the murmur of Korean chatter.

I shoved forward with renewed desperation, forgetting the social contract that governed Seoul sidewalks. The security line broke for a second as the chaos swelled with one guard turning to address a fan who'd gotten too close to Korea's precious golden boy, and I took the opening to vault over the barrier like a track hurdle.

My bag caught on something —probably the barrier— and it almost pulled me backwards. Not now. I yanked it free without looking back, the weight suddenly off-kilter as I broke into a sprint down the sidewalk. No time to worry about that. Behind me, the crowd's screams took on a different pitch, but I didn't care. Coach Park's wrath was scarier than any sasaeng.

I made it to the rink in record time, crashing through the doors, red-faced and gasping for air. Coach Park was stationed at the boards, the picture of a general on campaign. At sixty-three, his face was craggy and severe; two Olympic champions under his belt, and the air of someone who’d decided smiling was for losers.

"Chae."

"Press conference ran long," I panted, already ripping off my hoodie and the Team Korea kit to my training blacks beneath.

“Excuses,” he replied, switching to English with clinical precision, “are for seventh place.”

The number dropped between us like a curse. Seventh at Europeans, at my Grand Prix assignments. Seventh before the hip injury that ended my season. No matter how many 5 AM sessions I logged, no matter how clean my technique, or how badly I wanted it, seventh stalked me. One of Britain’s best results in twenty years, but nowhere near the podium.

Coach Park hummed to himself, unimpressed. "Warm up. Twenty laps, then we work on your lutz. Penalties at the end—raise your threshold. Good for the back-end of your programme."

My hip twinged at the mention of my problem jump, but I nodded. This was why I was here.

Not for press conferences or identity crises or whatever circus was outside the Conrad. For the shot at proving UK Sport wrong. For the hardware that would justify the pain, the upheaval—make all of it worth something.

I shoved my outer layers in my bag and started lacing up, the familiar tug of each lace drawing me back to why I’d come. Thread the eyelets, breathe in. Pull tight, breathe out. No matter what chaos was hurled my way, this was unwavering. Ice didn’t care about my accent, about where I belonged, or how catastrophically my thoughts spiralled; ice was just ice. London or Seoul, the physics held steady even when I faltered.

My phone began to light up with notifications of some kind, and I swiped them away. Didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered now was the ache in my thighs and the triple lutz waiting to chew me up.

I pushed away from the boards, making myself ignore the familiar flicker of pain—phantom, so the physio said. Fully healed. Just nerves. 

The sting of cold against my sweat made the morning’s mess fade, just a little. This was home. My skates biting into the ice, the strict geometry of movement my body understood, the maths of velocity and spin that gave order to everything the rest of my life wasn’t.

I ran through warm-up, ignoring the sting in my fingers. I hated skating barehanded, but the thought of interrupting practice—“Um, can I get my gloves from my bag, Coach?”—was mortifying. I was supposed to be a professional. Showing up prepared was the bare fucking minimum, and here I was, bag suspiciously light, gloves apparently forgotten.

Better to tough it out, let my hands burn. At least if I didn’t complain, I could pretend it was a choice, pretend it was grit instead of carelessness. Already late, already under the microscope, there wasn't time for mistakes. I had to land the lutz first try—no wobbles, no falls, prove to Coach Park that I wasn’t just a sunk cost to balance out.

"Focus!" Coach Park snapped. "You think judges care about your feelings?"

"No, Coach!"

I can take anything he throws at me. I have to.

I launched into my crossovers, gathering speed. The triple lutz was an exercise in controlled violence: approach with poise and confidence, launch yourself backwards on the outside edge, and slam your toe pick in like you meant to break through the ice entirely.

It's not usually the jump most skaters have a problem with — that remains the domain of the triple axel and its cheeky extra half rotation — but the lutz had become my private nemesis since the surgery. 

Okay. Start the approach. Outside edge—not inside, not like Isabella with her chronic fluke edge calls—fuck’s sake, not now, Sarah, concentrate—plant the pick, and—

The takeoff was wrong. I knew it the second I left the ice, felt it in the way my axis tilted just slightly off centre, trajectory crooked. The landing came hard and fast, my edge catching wrong, sending me sprawling across the ice in a spectacular display of everything not to do.

I got up, as I always did. That was my real skill, not the jumps or the artistry, not the creepy "doll-like beauty" some clown in the press kept using as a descriptor until it caught on, and now apparently I was 인형 미모 like some idol trainee.

No, no, it was this: the falling and getting up. Fall and get up, fall and get up, fall and get up again and again, like some idiot phoenix that loves the burn. Didn't matter that I could feel the ice-burn on my non-existent ass, I'd hurl myself off the ice as many times as it took. Every elite skater had resolve and determination in spades, but I knew I had them beat on sheer, bloody-minded grit, the ability to hurt and keep hurting. I almost liked it, knowing that if I was hurting, it was almost certainly more than my competition.

I did like it.

Fourth try, and I stuck it. Perfect rotation, clean landing—good enough for positive GOE from even the stingiest of panels. Coach Park nodded, his version of fanfare.

"Better. Now combination. Triple lutz, triple toe."

Naturally. Solve one problem, face the next. Fine by me. I took the offered Gatorade, drank, and reset.

Make it worth it.