Oneshots | Yuzuru Hanyu

Healing touch

AN: To my Queens and fellow Jail mates, thank you for always calling for me every time a sexy idea comes up... Cheers to all the boring meetings that provide good writing opportunities.

Being an athlete comes with all sorts of problems and pains. Yuzuru was no stranger to them.

Throughout his whole competitive career, the injuries that plagued him had always been a part of his life and he was always lucky enough to have a good medical team and massage therapist ready to help him out.

With his retirement from competitions, however, came the retirement of Kikuchi-san, his Physio and Massage therapist.

Like most things in life, you only truly realize the impact of certain people and things once they're gone.  Yuzu was no exception to that, even if he valued people in his life, it was easy to think he could just move on and deal with it.

Once he retired from competition, he truly believed that it would all be fine and that he wouldn't even need a massage therapist. Why would he? He didn't plan on getting injured or anything of the sort so it should be fine...

What he didn't account for was that the long hours on the ice were harder on his body than he could have ever expected. 

Yuzuru was in the process of building more and more stamina to be able to withstand the demands of his solo shows and that was very hard on his muscles. His recovery time got longer, and the muscle pain and soreness started to hit him more than ever before.

It was only when the soreness made it impossible for him to skate regularly that he finally decided to act and find someone to help.

His first instinct was to call his old therapist, only to get a big no in response. It was just that Kikuchi had moved cities and it would make it very hard for him to be there for Yuzu.

Still, the old man seemed to have an epiphany when he decided to suggest another therapist.

"There's this girl, Keiko, she trained under me after studying Physiotherapy and she was very good. As far as I know, she's still living in Sendai."

"You think she can be discrete? I don't want anyone sharing my private life with the media."

"Yuzu, she's a good girl. I can give you her number and you can call her and explain what you expect of her."

Truthfully, he didn't at all want to contact an unknown person to solve this little big problem, but at the same time, as he slowly grew more mature in his career, he understood that some things did require a bit of discomfort.

So after a couple of weeks of deep thought and way too much pain and soreness, he was almost forced to make the decision and give the girl a call. At least she was someone that his old therapist recommended and not a complete stranger.

It turned out that calling her wasn't as bad as he had once envisioned. The woman was very nice on the phone and didn't even react when he told her who he was, making him wonder if Kikuchi-san had warned her.

"I will gladly be of help, Hanyu-san. We just have to find a suitable time for you."

They didn't even talk about prices or costs. It was only when he set the first meeting at the rink that he realized he didn't even ask her if she needed any special requirements of equipment or location.

Well, there was plenty of time to figure that out.

For once, he was genuinely impressed that she agreed to meet him at the late hours that he chose to train and her willingness to adjust to his crazy schedule.

Keiko arrived at the Sendai Ice Rink 10 minutes before their scheduled time. Yuzuru had been on the ice, finishing off his cooldown when she did and almost stumbled out of surprise.