Chapter Text
The snow in Wisła smelled different from Austria. Jan couldn't have explained it in a way that would have made sense to anyone, but after so many years on the go he learned that every place had its own particular smell. Austrian snow was dry and slightly sharp, like the air had teeth. Here it was heavier, wetter, it stuck to your boots and stayed on your sleeves long after you'd come inside. It didn't bother him. He liked Wisła, though he'd never have said so out loud - Manuel would have immediately started implying things about Polish women, or something equally inappropriate. He went outside earlier than the rest, as usual. The morning was still grey, the sun hadn't decided to show up, and the hill stood dark and quiet, as if it was only just gathering itself for the day. Jan liked this moment, before the real madness of the day began, before anyone asked him anything. A few minutes in which he could simply stand and look.
The season started here, like every year. Except this year was different, because this year everything carried a word behind it that you tried not to say too loudly in case you jinxed it: the Olympics. Not that Jan had any reason to worry. He knew where he's standing and where he stood for the last few seasons. His shape was good, stable, tested in conditions where others fell apart. Nobody on the coaching staff said it directly, because in sport nothing is certain until it happens, but Jan could read between the lines, and between the lines it said clearly: take it steady, don't do anything stupid, your spot is there.
Everyone else had it harder.
Stephan especially - younger, quicker than his age suggested, and precisely because of that even more nervous. Jan had watched him train. Watched him check the scoreboard, watched him talk to the coach after every jump with the particular expression of someone who knows the answer but is afraid it's wrong. Embacher was jumping well. Really well, but well wasn't enough when every mistake could cost you your Olympic ticket and five other guys were just waiting for you to slip up.
Jan finished his coffee, which had gone cold in his hand, and walked down toward the hill.
×
The pre-competition training in Wisła had that specific early-season energy, when everything is still fresh and nobody has had the chance to get properly tired or properly nervous yet. Equipment checked, skis waxed, wind reasonably cooperative. Wildhölzl was walking around with his tablet and the expression of a man who sees more than he says, which in his case was completely standard. Jan was waiting for his turn in the holding area, staring at the hill. Beside him, Kraft was drinking tea and saying nothing, which was also completely standard. A little further along, Manuel and Maximilian were arguing about something to do with Formula One, while Stephan stood at the railing adjusting his suit with the concentration of a master jeweller. Hörl was watching him out of the corner of his eye, for no particular reason. Just watching.
Bambi was focused, maybe too focused for an ordinary training session. He had that characteristic vertical crease between his brows that Jan usually saw on athletes before an important competition, not before a training run in Wisła. The kid checked the zip at his collar, then checked it again, then turned away from himself with a mild irritation and blinked a few times.
"Something wrong?" Jan asked, before he had a chance to consider whether he wanted to ask.
Stephan looked at him as if he'd only just noticed Jan was standing there, which was unlikely, but fine.
"The zip's not sitting right," he muttered. "Too low on the left."
Jan set his thermos on the railing.
"Here."
Embacher narrowed his eyes suspiciously.
"I can manage."
"I know you can manage," Jan said calmly. "But you've been standing here for five minutes, so you're not managing quite as well as you think."
For a moment something like a protest crossed Stephan's face, but in the end he turned around without a word so his friend could reach his collar. Hörl stepped closer, found the place where the material was sitting wrong with his fingers, and straightened it - efficiently, so the zip fell where it was supposed to. It was a second, maybe two. But before he drew his hands back, Bambi turned his head slightly, which brought their faces closer than Jan had anticipated when he'd started. Close enough to feel the warmth of his skin through the cold air. Close enough to notice that Stephan had, for a moment, completely forgotten about the zip.
Jan withdrew his hands calmly and took half a step back.
"Done."
Embacher just cleared his throat.
"Thanks."
The silence that followed was as unexpected as it was awkward. Hörl reached for his thermos and turned his gaze toward the hill, pretending to be interested in whatever Maximilian was doing on the inrun. Fettner, who was standing close enough to have seen something and far enough to pretend he hadn't, chose not to comment. Which in itself was suspicious, because Manuel Fettner usually commented on everything.
×
The competition in Wisła was the kind of event that looks like a good result in the standings and tastes like something unfinished when you're actually there. Jan put in a solid first round jump, landed where he was supposed to, collected his points, and came off the outrun with that characteristic composure of his. It wasn't spectacular, so he wasn't even thinking about getting excited. Wisła wasn't a big stage, yet the crowd was loud, Polish flags dominated the stands, but the atmosphere had that specific November rawness, when everything is still ahead of us and nobody quite knows what the season will bring. Hörl appreciated places like that. Less pressure, more room to observe.
And he observed plenty. Stephan was jumping in the second round with a start number that meant he was doing well, but not well enough to feel secure about his Olympic place. His result after the first round was technically correct, no fireworks. The brunette was quiet in the locker room afterward, which was unusual for him. Normally he'd comment on something after a jump, whether the flight, the wind, or his own mistakes. Now he was sitting with his elbows on his knees, staring at the floor.
Jan knew that state. He'd been through it himself, years ago, when a spot in the squad was still a goal rather than a given. He didn't say anything, there was no point in saying anything, because the kid knew perfectly well what he needed to do in the second round, and no word from Hörl was going to change that. Instead he just stood up as he was passing and clapped him on the shoulder without a word - briefly, as if trying to pass at least half of his own calm across in one quick touch. Stephan looked up, but the blonde didn't stop. He went to get his suit, as if nothing had happened, and headed up the lift.
The second round gave Bambi a better result. Not the best possible, but an honest one, clearly stronger than the first jump. Coming off the outrun, Stephan came out with a face that for a moment showed relief, before composure managed to cover it. Jan watched from about fifteen metres away and found himself thinking that relief looked good on the brunette's face. The moment he noticed that thought, he immediately stopped thinking it.
×
The bus left Wisła late in the evening, when the town had already buried itself under fresh snow and looked like a postcard nobody needed, because nobody was going to send it. The road ahead was long and a little winding, and the interior lighting had that specific, yellowish, muffled quality that made everyone look like they'd had a week without sleep. Most of the squad fell asleep within the first twenty minutes. Manuel was first, which was no surprise to anyone. The man fell asleep everywhere, at airports, in waiting rooms, allegedly once in the middle of an interview, though Hörl treated that particular story with caution. Stefan was sitting two rows ahead, reading something on his phone. Maximilian had his headphones on. Daniel was playing some games on his phone. An ordinary journey back after a competition, really nothing special.
Jan was sitting by the window, in the back seat, his head resting lightly against the glass. He wasn't asleep, but he wasn't admitting that to anyone. Outside, snowy fields and dark lines of trees passed by, and you could count the lights of the villages they drove through, or you could count nothing at all. The second option seemed like the better idea.
Stephan got on the bus as one of the last, when everyone had already taken their seats and the coach was closing the attendance list. He glanced around the interior looking for a free double seat, didn't find anything particularly convincing, and finally sat down next to Jan. Probably because there simply happened to be a free spot there.
"Tired?" he asked, as the bus pulled out.
"Mhm, as usual," Hörl answered quietly.
Embacher nodded and leaned back against the seat. For a moment he looked ahead, then took out his phone and stared at the screen for about forty seconds, then put it away again. He was restless, and Jan could hear it - small movements, shifting legs, quiet breathing through the nose of someone who hadn't decided yet whether they were satisfied with the day.
"The second jump was good," Jan said, without taking his eyes off the view outside.
"The first wasn't," the younger one answered.
"I know. The second was good."
Stephan was quiet for a moment. Then he muttered something under his breath that could have been agreement or disagreement, and decided not to argue about it. The bus got warmer, the heating working a little too loudly for such a quiet night. Someone up front shifted, and a seat creaked. Maybe three hours passed, maybe more. Jan noticed Stephan starting to fall asleep when his head dropped forward for the second time in five minutes. That kind of sleep where you fight it for a while, then give in, then fight again, until your body decides for you. The third time his head dropped sideways, not forward this time, but onto Jan's shoulder.
Hörl went completely still. Not that he'd been particularly loud, because nothing had changed on the outside. He was sitting the same way, looking the same way out the window, breathing the same way. But somewhere underneath that calm exterior his thoughts did something like a sudden step backward. Stephan was asleep. He was warm and heavy, breathing steadily, using Jan's shoulder as a pillow.
Move away? Easy. One movement and the kid would wake up, shift, nothing would have happened.
Yet Jan didn't move away.
He sat motionless for a moment, trying to decide what to do with this, and then - very slowly, with the precision of someone who wants it to look like an unremarkable gesture - shifted slightly so Bambi had a better position. So his head would sit more steadily, so it wouldn't slip at a curve. It was a practical reflex, rational, entirely devoid of any additional significance. The kid had such a terrible time falling asleep anyway. At least that was the version Jan decided to go with. Up ahead, Manuel was snoring softly. Stefan's phone screen was still glowing. Nobody was looking at them. The bus drove through dark Polish roads and the snow outside was getting thicker. Stephan slept on Jan's shoulder with the peaceful expression people have when they genuinely trust where they are. Jan, meanwhile, looked out the window and thought about nothing in particular. Or that was exactly what he was thinking about, only he didn't want to admit it even to himself.
×
Ruka greeted them a week later with temperatures that made November in Wisła feel tropical. Finland at the start of the season had something brutally honest about it. No decorations, no compromises, just snow, wind, and a long list of reasons why they should have stayed home. The whole team took it with the composure of professionals who had spent years learning that weather is something you ignore rather than comment on. Manuel was the one exception, and for the first half hour after arrival he commented on the Finnish climate using words Jan would rather not quote, though this surprised nobody.
Training in Ruka was good. The hill was fast, the air cold and predictable, and Hörl felt in his jumps that particular lightness that comes when everything is working in agreement with itself - body, balance, timing. He landed twice where he wanted to, the coach gave him a nod, which in his vocabulary amounted to a three-sentence compliment. The rest of the squad was working noticeably harder. Maximilian was having trouble with the takeoff, Daniel was fighting the wind on every jump more than he should have been. Stephan was jumping well but inconsistently - one jump technically perfect but too short, the next long but stylistically painful. Wildhölzl watched all of this without expression, which was itself a sufficient comment. In the breaks between jumps Jan stood at the railing and watched the outrun. He wasn't looking for anyone in particular. He was just standing there, looking.
"How does this hill feel for you?" Stephan appeared beside him from nowhere, shaking snow from his hair.
"Fine," said Jan without hesitation. "It's fast."
"Maybe too fast for me," Embacher muttered. Not quite to Jan, more to the hill itself. "Or I'm miscounting the timing..."
"Your timing's fine, you're just late on the takeoff somehow."
Stephan narrowed his eyes.
"How do you know?"
"I've been watching you for an hour."
"And?" asked the brunette, tilting his head with something between curiosity and concern.
"And you're late on the takeoff by maybe half a second," Jan repeated. "Like you're trying too hard to control the first moment of the flight instead of just trusting yourself."
Stephan was quiet for a moment, looking at the hill. Then he muttered something to himself that sounded like conceding the point, and tightened his grip on the railing.
"Go back and try again, you've still got a practice run," Hörl said.
"I was just heading up, actually," the younger one answered, without moving.
"Go."
"I'm going."
He wasn't going. He stood and looked past the hill for a moment, where car lights flickered between the trees, with the expression of someone thinking about something other than what they're talking about. Jan gave him the moment, because there are things you don't walk into uninvited.
"Thank you," Stephan said finally.
"For what?"
"For watching."
Hörl opened his mouth to say something along the lines of it's normal, teammates observe each other, it's no great favour and instead said nothing, because the answer he had was true, and for that reason entirely unnecessary. Bambi was already walking back to the lift. Jan watched him go for a moment and looked away.
×
The competition in Ruka was different from Wisła. Colder, sharper, with wind that spent the entire event unable to decide whose side it was on. The first series ran under conditions that Borek Sedlak watched with the expression of a doctor debating a genuinely difficult case. Some jumpers got badly calculated gates, some got lucky with a push from the front. A lottery - the oldest sport alongside ski jumping. And it was precisely that lottery that made Jan not qualify for the second round.
Thirty-fifth place.
He knew how bad it had been before his position even appeared on the scoreboard - he felt it in the jump itself. It wasn't a catastrophic failure, nothing that would alarm the coaching staff or require a conversation, just a quiet, flat defeat. Too cautious at the takeoff, too much thinking and second-guessing in the air.
Thirty-fifth place.
Jonas hadn't made it through either, which changed absolutely nothing about his own situation. He stood on the side, jacket zipped, hands in pockets, watching the rest of the competition with the composure of a professional. Stephan had made it through the first series without spectacular results, after the first round he was twenty-fifth, which wasn't comfortable but was enough. And Jan watched him from the side with the same attention he stopped expecting from himself somewhere around Wisła. Before his first jump, Embacher had been standing at the top with his arms crossed and that vertical crease between his brows, the same one Jan had caught back in Poland. Someone said something to him. He answered in one word and went back to wherever his thoughts had been a moment before. The jump was decent, safe, slightly held back. Hörl watched him land and straighten up on the outrun.
Twenty-fifth. Enough to go through, but for a young eagle, still not enough. Jan found him before the second series started, on the path between the locker room and the lift, though he hung back slightly before approaching. The brunette was standing with a helmet in his hands, grinding his teeth in the way he did when he was particularly wound up.
"Don't do that," the older of them said finally, walking over.
Embacher looked up, visibly surprised to find him there.
"Don't think about the first jump before the second one," he added. "That one's behind you. Now it's time for the next one."
Stephan looked at him for a moment with an expression that communicated roughly that he disagreed, even though he knew Jan was right.
"I know that," he said quietly.
"You know it, which is why you've been grinding your teeth for a good five minutes."
A short pause, after which Stephan's shoulders dropped slightly, as if he'd been holding air he hadn't asked to be holding.
"It's not cool to watch people without them knowing," he said, without a trace of edge in his voice.
"I wasn't watching you, it was just hard not to hear."
"Yeah, sure."
Hörl said nothing. Bambi put his helmet on and looked at Jan through it for a moment with a gaze that carried the weight of all the unexplained things that had been accumulating since November... Which the blonde was carefully filing under things that didn't require a response right here and right now.
"Go," he said.
So Stephan went.
Jan watched from the edge of the outrun, wandering through the mixed zone. The second jump was different from the first. Looser, more instinctive, as if the brunette had genuinely stopped thinking about the result and was simply jumping. It wasn't enough to move him significantly up the standings, but it was visibly better, even if the scoreboard didn't fully reflect it. On the outrun, Stephan stood straighter than he had after the first round. Not satisfied - Embacher was rarely satisfied with himself - but it looked something closer to being calm.
Twenty-fifth in the final standings. Jan stood further back and said nothing, watching his young colleague receive the "motivational speech" from the coach, because there was nothing to add. He knew that a conversation between a jumper and his coach after a result like that didn't benefit from an audience.
The atmosphere on the way back to the hotel was dark and cold, the sun had gone down just before four, and the hotel parking lot lights spread a yellow glow across the fresh snow. Someone had doubled back for a forgotten bag, someone was smoking a cigarette around the corner, hoping nobody would notice. Jan walked at a steady pace, and Stephan fell into step beside him - just a meaningless walk to decompress before sleeping. They didn't talk. The snow was coming down steadily, cooling their thoughts, making everything feel slightly outside of ordinary time. Both of them were trying to remember as much as they could from the moment.
Inside it was noisy and bright, especially compared to the world outside. The hotel lobby television was showing a replay of the competition with Finnish commentary, and Manuel had, with his characteristic agility, already disappeared into the lift, waving to his teammates as if he took particular satisfaction in the fact that they'd have to wait for it to come back down. Jan stopped at the reception desk to pick up his key and stood there a moment longer than necessary. He thought about thirty-fifth place. He thought about standing on the edge of the outrun, watching Stephan fly cleanly over the hill in his second jump. He thought about that moment by the locker room, and about the fact that his I'm not watching you had been further from the truth than he'd want to admit.
Neither of them could name what had started to grow between them, and neither of them was looking for a name for it. But something was there. In the way Stephan had fallen asleep on Jan's shoulder on the bus from Wisła, and he hadn't moved. In the way Hörl stood at the railing for an hour and hadn't lied when Bambi started talking to him. In those seconds at the top of the hill when the air had been half a degree warmer than it should have been, and today, there by the locker room, in the looks that were melting the snow swirling in the air between them.
The season was only just beginning.