0rA/N: Tag to Amor Fati. I would recommend reading the tags in the order they were written even though they are not in chronological order: Those Left Behind which takes place in 2020, Bittersweet which takes place in 2021, and then this, which takes place in 2016.
I mentioned on the last chapter of MKB that I caught a huge case of writer's block for that chapter, and this story cured that for me. Once I wrote this, I was able to go back and finished writing MKB's New Year's Eve.
"I'm feeling an overwhelming sense of déjà vu."
Payson looked up at the sound of her husband's voice by the door and said, "Can't you ever just be whelmed?"
A grin spread across his face, although his smile was so wide to begin with that Payson was surprised it could get any bigger. "I love it when our pop culture worlds collide."
He moved to the bed she was sitting cross-legged on and climbed behind her, one leg propped beside her and the other hanging off the bed, and Payson felt the déjà vu as well. They once sat in almost this exact same position with six Olympic medals laid out before her, but in a different country and a different Olympic Village.
"I can think of some differences between then and now," she said, bringing them back to his comment when he first entered the room. "The medals, for one."
"Ah, yes, your first Olympic bronze. You must be so ashamed."
She blushed at his teasing, mainly because it was a little bit true. That damn vault gold kept escaping her. It was the only apparatus that she didn't have a World or Olympic Championship on, so it stung a little. Not much, but a little. It was also the weak link that kept her from being the All Around Champion, but she wasn't bothered by that. She and Jess worked hard for four years to ensure a medal for the younger girl, and Payson was proud that her protégé beat her.
She was proud of Jess and she was proud of herself, both as a coach and a gymnast. There were so many pessimists out there saying that she was too old for gymnastics or that it was impossible to come back after having a baby, but she proved them all wrong. Gold for bars, beam, floor, and team, a silver in the All Around, and a bronze on vault. She was now tied with Larisa Latynina for the most Olympic gold medals in gymnastics. In all of those hard years of training leading up to London, she never could have imagined this.
"Okay, so what's the next difference?" Sasha asked.
"Well, the man. Not to get awkward here, but this time I'm sitting on our bed. Last time I was sitting on the bed I shared with Austin."
Sasha, always wonderful and supportive, breezed past the reminder. "Point taken. What's next?"
"The way I look," she said. Sasha nodded his acceptance of her point. "I'm healthy." Sasha's arms tightened around her midsection as if he was afraid she would disappear. They both hated to think about that time so shortly ago when they thought they were saying goodbye forever. Even once she was better, they almost reconsidered everything—Rio, coaching, having more children. It took everything they had to move past that fear and start making plans again. "And I'm feeling like an idiot for not knowing."
With those words, Sasha's arms unclenched from around her waist and he splayed his hands over her flat stomach. The vestiges of fear were chased away with sheer happiness. He nuzzled her neck and said, "There was no reason for you to suspect, Payson. When you had your implant removed it never even occurred to me that you might get pregnant so soon. I honestly didn't even expect it to happen now. Trying was just a convenient excuse to have sex so often the past few weeks."
She laughed. Sasha was right. She had her birth control removed two months ago because it was the only time that fit into her busy schedule, but they weren't trying to get pregnant then. They just weren't trying not to get pregnant anymore. They started trying in earnest once they reached Rio, taking advantage of the short period of time that they didn't have a three and a half year old son sleeping in the next room, but Payson didn't really expect to get pregnant yet. Conceiving Alex while she was training had been a fluke. It would take months, she thought, before her body chemistry evened out enough for her to get pregnant.
She was wrong. She hadn't been to see an obstetrician yet, but she suspected she was about five or six weeks along, which to her indicated that she was one of the most fertile women on the planet.
She felt so stupid for not realizing it before. She was trained to know her body. With Alex she'd felt that something was different for a few weeks before it occurred to her that she might be pregnant, but this time she didn't have the excuse of ignorance. She had been there, done that, and she should have realized far earlier than she did.
She thought that everything she was feeling was Olympic stress, maybe coupled with low blood levels, even though her blood test kept coming out fine. Then yesterday she got sick during a breakfast date with Elisabeta and her friend made a crack about morning sickness. Elisa was joking, but she planted a seed in Payson's head. She practically ran to Lauren's hotel room after breakfast, begging her best friend to buy a pregnancy test for her so that she wouldn't be caught by the paparazzi. The positive result surprised her nearly as much as it had with Alex four years before.
When she told Sasha she said, "Apparently all that sex we've been having was purely recreational," and let him work her meaning out for himself. It took him several seconds, but when he figured it out his eyes lit up in a way she'd never seen before. He spun her around and around, ignoring the other amused coaches in the apartment with them, and then they moved to their bedroom and proceeded to have yet more recreational sex. They had barely been out of bed since, only emerging because she had a scheduled interview appearance with the rest of the team. She took her medals to the interview with her, but when she got back to the Village she laid them out on the bed rather than putting them away. Just like in London, she needed time to contemplate what had happened over the course of the Olympics.
She gathered the medals and finally moved them to a nearby table, then faced Sasha and sat with her legs wrapped around his waist. "You know my parents aren't going to be happy when we tell them about the baby, right?"
After what happened a year ago, when her disease almost killed her, it took Payson and Sasha months to decide that they wanted to take the risk of having more children, but Mark and Kim Keeler were still dead set against the idea. They didn't want anything else to endanger their little girl's health, and that was understandable, but Payson refused to live her life in fear.
"They'll come around," Sasha promised. "Alex has them wrapped around his finger already, and I'm sure they will adore this baby just as much."
"I bet Alex will adore her, too," she said. They weren't going to tell him yet, not until they knew everything would be safe with the pregnancy, but she was so excited for him to find out he was going to have a little sister. "He's going to be a great big brother."
"Her?"
She nodded once, completely sure of herself. "Umhm, we're having a girl."
Sasha laughed and pressed a kiss to her neck. "You do realize that you got lucky guessing with Alex, right? You can't just decide that we're having a girl. It doesn't work like that."
"Just you wait," she said. "I'm right about this. It's mother's intuition." She took his hands and placed them on her stomach again, covering them with her own. "We did this, Sasha. We made a person."
He lifted her shirt so that his hands were touching bare skin, and she took the next step and pulled it all the way off. Sasha placed a kiss in the valley between her breasts and then laid her back to press a kiss to her stomach, just as he had done dozens of times in the past twenty four hours.
Later they lay in a sweaty, panting tangle with their heads at the wrong end of the bed and one of Payson's gold medals draped around her neck. Sasha propped himself on one elbow and traced the edge of her medal with his index finger. "So you've gone six and six now, only the second female gymnast in history to do so, and you're tied for the most gold medals. Going to challenge Latynina for the record?"
She laughed. In the back of her mind she was pleased with just how well-sexed she sounded, but she ignored that and said, "We'll see. Madrid is a long time from now and I'm about to have another child, so I might be a crippled old lady by then."
Sasha sat up and stared at her with wide eyes. "Are you serious?"
"Weren't you?"
"No." She raised her eyebrows at his incredulous tone so he hurried to add, "Not that I don't want you to if that's what you want, but it never occurred to me that you would want another Olympics. Is this something that you're thinking about?"
"I haven't thought about anything, Sasha, and I'm not going to until after the baby is born. I have no idea how I'm going to feel a year from now. I don't know if I'll want to compete or coach or retire altogether. Every time I've made plans they've been turned on their head, so I've stopped making assumptions."
She watched as Sasha struggled to comprehend something that he hadn't considered as a real possibility. She hadn't considered it as a possibility, either, because she meant what she said. All of her thoughts currently centered around the past two weeks and the next nine months, and there was no room for anything else. Decisions about her career could come later.
"Will you make me a promise?" he asked. When she nodded he continued, "Before you decide anything, no matter which way you go, will you talk to me and Austin about it first so that we're all on the same page?"
"Of course I will. Always." That was one thing that she could say with certainty. No matter what happened in her life, Sasha and Austin would be there every step of the way, just like they had been for the past four years and would continue to be for the rest of her life.
A/N: If you've followed the other tags and/or the Amor Fati Universe pinterest board, you'll know that this baby is Charlotte, called Lottie, so Payson is right about it being a girl. For her third baby, though, she will predict a boy and be wrong.
I started writing an extended M-rated version of this, but I can't ever seem to finish my smut lately. And yes, I am aware of the joke I just left myself wide open for there :)