And so, the one hour training montage began.
Mikko, to his considerable credit, had a teaching method. It was not conventional. It was not anything that would be found in any dance pedagogy textbook currently in existence. It was, by most measurable standards, completely unhinged.
But it worked.
"Okay — five, six, seven and — bunny hop to the left, scratch scratch. Final destination, zoom, getting shot getting shot. Tipsy tipsy, high high, wave your hand in the club. Egyptian — up, down, left, right. Dolphin dive, roll to a kneel, and then — aura farm."
Now.
For those of you sitting there with your heads tilted at a concerning angle, wondering what any of that has to do with choreography — allow me, as your faithful overcaffeinated narrator, to offer some translation.
Final destination, for instance. In Mikko's very specific, very committed mental landscape, this works as follows: arms raised parallel, like the wings of a plane. Standard. Fine. But then — Final Destination — because the wings tilt. Diagonal. At that specific angle that makes you think of a plane that has made some questionable aerodynamic decisions. And then zoom is the spin that follows, arms still tilted, still fully committing to the aviation metaphor, rotating with the calm certainty of a man who has complete faith in his own internal logic.
Does it make sense in a traditional sense?
Absolutely not.
Did it somehow make complete and total sense to Zen?
Reader — it did.
Because here was the thing about Zen that Liam's frustration had never bothered to investigate, that the evaluations hadn't captured, that the standard teaching methods had been bumping up against for weeks without understanding why —
Zen's problem was never the steps themselves. It was the sequence. The order. The way choreography is taught in clean numerical counts — five, six, seven, eight — or worse, when the counting disappears entirely and it becomes pure rhythm, boom ka ka da da da, feel the music, let it move you, which is a beautiful philosophy and absolutely useless to a brain that needs something concrete to hold onto between point A and point B.
Numbers floated. Beats dissolved. But images?
Images stayed.
Bunny hop. Scratch scratch. Final destination. Getting shot getting shot. Wave your hand in the club.
Each step suddenly had a face. A shape. A story attached to it that his brain could grab onto and line up in order, one after another, a whole visual narrative running alongside the music like a second track only he could hear.
The choreography that had been slipping through his fingers for days —
Started to stick.
Step by step. Eight count by eight count. Mikko calling out his ridiculous, perfect, completely made-up names with the absolute confidence of someone who had never once doubted his own system, and Zen moving through each one with growing certainty, the sequence assembling itself in his mind like something finally clicking into place.
Dolphin dive.
Roll to a kneel.
Aura farm.
By the end of the hour —
Zen knew the choreography.
"Dude." Mikko was staring at Zen like he had just watched him sprout a second head in real time. "What the hell? That was perfect." A pause, genuinely baffled. "What happened? Why couldn't you do that from the beginning?"
"I honestly don't know," Zen's phone said. "The way you taught it just made everything so much easier to remember."
Mikko considered this information with the gravity it apparently deserved. A long, thoughtful silence. The face of a man doing serious internal calculations.
"Huh." Another pause. "Am I a genius? Or am I just amazing like that?"
"Alright, Mr. Amazing," Zen's phone said flatly, "don't float too high."
And Zen — this boy who had been crying twenty minutes ago, who had stood in the rubble of someone else's anger and decided to build something out of it anyway — had a smile on his face. Not a big one. Small and soft and carrying just the faintest edge of something sharper. The precise, specific combination of baby girl coded softness and zero-warning shade delivery. Innocence and mischief, perfectly balanced, occupying the same expression at the same time.
It shouldn't have worked as well as it did.
"Pff—" Mikko laughed despite himself. "Smart ass." He shook his head, still smiling. "Anyway — keep going like that and Liam is going to be eating his own foot the next time he sees you."
"It's not perfect yet though," Zen's phone said immediately. He was already shifting back into position, already pulling the music up. "One more time. I want it perfect. For Liam."
"Dude." Mikko's body made a unilateral decision and deposited itself directly onto the studio floor — knees up, back against the mirror, done. "Chill. We have been going nonstop. Trust me, it's good. It is genuinely, actually good."
Zen blinked. Looked around the room as if seeing it for the first time.
"Has it been an hour already?"
"A full one. Sit down before I drag you down."
Zen sat. Cross-legged, across from Mikko, the studio floor cool beneath them, the music finally quiet. Both of them just existing for a moment in the particular comfortable silence of people who have just worked hard together and earned the rest.
Mikko broke it first.
"Hey — don't take what Liam said too much to heart, by the way." His voice was casual, but the intention behind it wasn't. "From what I've heard, the guy just got diagnosed with IED when he entered LEAVEN."
"IED?"
"Intermittent Explosive Disorder," Mikko said. "Fancy clinical way of saying his anger gets away from him before he can catch it."
"Ohhhh."
The robotic voice of the app delivered this with what sounded, in its flat synthetic tone, like the world's most deadpan sarcasm. A long, slow, deeply unimpressed Ohhhh that implied several things it technically had no business implying.
Mikko lost it.
"DUDE—" He pointed at the phone with the energy of a man who had been personally wronged. "That robotic voice is genuinely starting to irritate me, I hope you know that—"
He was laughing though. Fully, helplessly laughing, the kind that takes over before you can decide whether or not you want to do it.
(And listen — I say this with full love and zero malice: Mikko, if you somehow develop the ability to read author's notes and take offense at being called colorful and weird — I made you. I think you're wonderful. Please don't come for me. Thank you. Carry on.)
Anyway. Back to the story. Ehe. 😜
"From what I heard though," Mikko continued, leaning back on his hands, "Liam's been getting better and better the longer he's been in LEAVEN. Like, genuinely improving."
Zen was quiet for a moment. Then, with a small considerate glance at Mikko — mindful, in the way Zen was mindful about everything — he typed out his response and simply passed the phone over instead of letting the app speak it.
A small, quiet courtesy. For Mikko's gradually deteriorating relationship with the robotic voice.
Mikko read it:
"If he's getting better, then I think my falling behind genuinely made him feel like his dream was being threatened. I kind of understand where he's coming from."
Mikko looked up from the phone. Looked at Zen. Handed it back.
"Okay, in my humble opinion?" he said. "I get where he's coming from. I do. But that doesn't make the outburst completely okay either. He said some pretty mean things to you."
Zen took the phone back. Typed. Passed it over again.
Mikko read:
"I don't have any hard feelings toward him. In the wise words of the person who apparently created me — let it go, hoe. Let it go."
Mikko's face did the full journey — warm smile arriving, sitting comfortably for approximately one and a half seconds —
And then stopping.
He lifted his head slowly.
"Wait." He held the phone up slightly. "Wait, wait, wait. Hold on." His eyes narrowed. "I don't remember 'hoe' being part of the acclaimed children's animated classic."
Zen blinked. Looked at Mikko. Then looked back at what he had typed.
Read it.
And the smile that appeared was not the soft, small, carefully contained one. It was big. Bright. Caught completely off guard by itself, the kind of smile that arrives before you can decide whether to let it.
He took the phone back. Typed quickly. Passed it over.
"It came from a parody I came across. I don't know why but I found it really funny, so I guess it just... stuck."
Mikko stared at this message for a long moment.
Then he looked up at Zen with the expression of a man standing at the edge of a door he was not entirely sure he wanted to open.
"...What kind of things have you been watching," he said slowly.
Less a question. More a man coming to terms with something.
"Actually," he added, after a beat, raising one hand slightly, "you know what — I'm not sure I want to know the answer to that."