N/A: Hey all. =) I'm a terrible, terrible person who's unofficially abandoning my other WIP to start a new story and also a total hypocrite who hates authors who unofficially abandon fics. Yippee. This story may or may not get finished, will have very irregular updates, has no plot currently planned, and is an utterly unabashed Naruto OC Self Insert. =) Enjoy.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
Warnings: occasional swearing
Prologue
"Anyway, so I told him we were through, and do you know what he said?"
Drying her hands on a tea towel as she balanced her phone between her shoulder and ear, Sara grinned. "What?"
"He said," her friend affected an unflattering nasal tone, "'You're never gonna find another guy as good as me, baby-'" both girls snorted, "and then he had the gall to say he'd be waiting for me to come crawling back, and I was like, 'Are you shitting me, Dave?' and I just left. I just- ugh. Can you believe this asshole?"
"He was a dick," Sara agreed supportively, beginning to wipe down the bench top. "I'm glad you're not taking his crap anymore, Ti."
"Yeah, me too." Tiarna let out an explosive sigh, the sound tinny over the phone's sub-par speakers. "I'm just... this is so frustrating. Do I just attract assholes, or something? Fuck, I'm so over this."
Sara scrubbed at a patch of an unidentifiable sticky substance, mulling over how to respond. It was true, sadly; her gorgeous, extroverted best friend had had a string of bad luck on the dating scene, starting with her old crush who'd asked her out on a dare before publicly dumping her a week later, and culminating in Dave Herrings, who was apparently no less than a arrogant, misogynist pig.
"Maybe you're just too nice," she offered after a moment. She snickered, "Or maybe their brains just aren't grown yet."
Both girls laughed.
"Mm, maybe."
They fell into a comfortable silence, Tiarna just breathing softly while Sara finished wiping down and hung the cloth up to dry.
"How's gym going?" Sara asked eventually, falling back on the familiar topic. Casting a critical eye around the kitchen, which revealed no hidden messes, she cracked her back and padded down the hall to her room.
Tiarna made a vaguely annoyed sound. "Chloe and Bridget are arguing again," she revealed dryly, referring to the two juniors whose notorious tiffs had sent the drama level in the gym skyrocketing ever since the latter had joined at the start of the year. "Debbie sent them home early yesterday, and now Claire's pissed at Bridget too 'cause their mum had to take them both at once, and Debbie's annoyed with me 'cause apparently I should have been there to break them up. Never mind that I wasn't even involved."
Sara laughed, feeling a little pang of nostalgia in her chest. "Sounds fun," she commented lightly.
"Mm, yeah, totally. Anyway, I finally got my Stalder-Hiccup connection on bars yesterday, so that's something."
She cheered. "Hey! Congrats!"
"Yeah," Tiarna laughed. "Took me forever, though. You got it back when we were Level 6."
"Hah! My technique was crap, though. The number of times I stacked..." She trailed off, grinning as she recalled face-planting into the mats again and again. On one memorable occasion she'd even cracked her head on the high bar before bouncing off to lie dazed and groaning on the floor.
Her friend giggled. "Haha, true. I thought you were gonna give yourself a concussion!"
"Nah, had vault for that."
"Oh my god, your tsuk, yes! I remember that! You almost broke your nose, haha! How did you even do that?"
"I had the mats too high," Sara groaned ruefully. "'Cause I'd been doing it into the pit before that. Debbie wanted me to start going to mats, but I'd already walked back so I just left Steph's mats in. I didn't realize there were two. From my mark it just looked like one."
"Lol. Smart one."
"Mm, the doctors thought so too."
They both laughed.
"...I kind of wish I could go back," Sara admitted, after a pause. "Like, I know, at the time, quitting was the best choice, 'cause I'd been on rehab for, like, three years, and my stupid osteochondritis dissecansor whatever kept coming back, but..."
Gymnastics was my whole life, she didn't say.
She didn't need to. There was an unspoken acknowledgment between elite gymnasts that past a certain point in the sport, there was no going back. Gymnasts sold their souls to be the best, to be the one standing on the first place podium at the end of the day, and gymnastics kept those souls forever - regardless of whether one had quit two years ago, or a lifetime.
"You could," Tiarna offered quietly, sounding hopeful. "You could come back. It'd be just like our old team again."
For a moment, Sara allowed herself to dream.
It'd be like coming home, walking into the gym again - the equipment strewn everywhere like one giant tripping hazard, as per usual. Tiarna and Steph would be there, her old teammates, practicing beam drills or gossiping around the chalk bucket. Debbie, her coach, yelling at them to get a move on. Her junior coach, Elena, calling instructions in heavily accented English interspersed with Russian. Everywhere, younger girls busily at work, trying not to let their coaches catch them watching the senior's routines instead of training.
She opened her eyes.
Two years was a long time to be out of competitive gymnastics. She'd always known, as a junior, that time was against her, that eventually puberty would catch up to her and wreck havoc on her body. But it was one thing to weather the change in her strength to mass ratio while training five days, eight sessions, twenty-eight hours a week, and quite another to get back into the sport after two years spent doing no more exercise than was required to fit into her jeans.
Sara let out a slow breath. "...I think I'm a little old, Ti," she said, trying not to sound bitter.
"Seventeen is not too old!" Tiarna protested loyally, but they both knew it was a lie.
"It's too old to be competitive," Sara amended. "I could come back, but I'd be back at Level 6, if that. I've lost all my strength, Ti," she admitted, voice pained. "I'd be out with injuries within a month. And my arms wouldn't even last that long."
Therein lay the truth of the matter. Though it had broken her heart, she'd been forced from the sport by a serious injury in what should have been her prime. If she went back now, taller, heavier, weaker at seventeen, she'd be risking not only new injuries, but also the reappearance of her osteochondritis dissecans, which had nearly cost her her arms.
The crushed cartilage in her elbows, which even now ached and spasmed with the slightest hyperextention of her arms, wouldn't survive the brutal training she'd require to get back into shape.
"I wish I could," Sara said quietly. "I do. But I can't, and that's life. And it's not the end of the world," she said, trying to inject some positivity into her voice. "I do taekwondo, now, remember. That's pretty fun."
It wasn't the same, and they both knew it. She was too old to go back to gym. Too old to be anything amazing in taekwondo, what with the way black belt gradings were spread out years apart for each advancing level. She'd poured her childhood into gymnastics, her dreams, her fears, her pride, her pain, her ambition. And now she was too old.
Sara almost wanted to laugh, or maybe cry. Seventeen, not even an adult, legally, and she was already too old.
What a waste.
Biting her lip before the tears could spill out, she quickly made her excuses. "Hey, look," she said, proud that her voice was only a little rough, "I was about to head to the park, so I'll talk to you later, 'kay?"
"Alright, see you."
She disconnected with a tap, then immediately doubled over with a wave of wretched, gasping grief, curling into her pillow.
"Oh god," she croaked, voice cracking.
All she'd wanted, all she'd ever wanted, was to be something incredible. The gold medals didn't matter, never had. The judges' scores didn't. It had been performing, dancing, flying, landing, that mattered. Being the strongest, the best, not because she'd won, but because everyone could see it and it wouldn't have mattered if the scores never came, if they'd never existed at all, because she was going to be so fucking good that there'd be no question that she was the best in the room, the best in the whole goddamn world-
But no.
She'd fucked up, gotten injured and, despite all the warnings, despite common sense, she'd hidden it. She'd hidden the ache, the ache that turned into splitting pain, because she'd been scared she'd be pulled out before Nationals. She'd hidden it until it left her lying crumpled on the gym floor, crying and shaking and in so much pain she blacked out.
"Alright, given your condition, you have three options, Sara," Dr Andrew Graham said seriously, steepling his fingers.
"Firstly, you could quit. Given a few years of rest, the damage to your cartilage may possibly be reversed."
Frozen in the slightly too-cold office, Sara could only bite her lip, arms immobilized by the double sling.
"Secondly, you could go in for surgery. This would involve a metal pin being inserted into each of your elbows to hold them together, which, after a few months rehab, would theoretically allow you to continue gymnastics." Sara straightened minutely, but he waved her down. "I must warn you though: this type of surgery has only a seventy percent chance of success, and has been known to cause complications later in life." He looked at her gravely. "Something to consider."
"Thirdly." He paused. "This is not truly an option, and you'll understand why in a moment. You could, of course, choose to disregard either of the first two options, and continue training regardless. But I will tell you now - should your elbows continue to deteriorate at the same rate until you are eighteen years old, the damage will be irreversible. You will never be able to use your arms again."
In the end, the choice to quit had been the most logical one.
Knowing that hadn't made it hurt any less.
Her breathless sobbing having subsided, Sara lay on her bed, staring blankly up at the ceiling. A final, lonely tear trailed its way down her face; it clung to her nose, caught in the dip of her lip for a moment, then fell away to join the wet stain on her pillow.
She would have given anything, she thought suddenly, desperately. She would have given anything in her power to have a second chance. To be young again.
"But that's not how life works," she whispered, smiling wetly; bitterly, resignedly.
She closed her eyes and sighed, and when she opened them again she felt slightly better. Groping at her bedside table her for her tissue box, she groaned when her fingers met nothing but air.
"Ugh, fine. Downstairs it is."
Not bothering to turn on the light, though the sky had darkened considerably while she'd been wrapped up in her self pity, she stumbled out of her room and began to feel her way down the stairs, grumbling all the while.
So caught up in her thoughts was she, she failed to spot the lone sock decorating the staircase, and slipped.
Like a bizarre, ironic parody of every time she'd ever stacked a skill in training, her feet went out from underneath her and her skull slammed into the ground. Only, this time, the ground was not a soft foam mat, but a concrete step under hard tiles.
By the time her brother arrived home from work, the pool of blood under her head had dried to a reddish brown stain, and Sara, the teenage ex-gymnast, the high school student, the supportive friend, the sister, the daughter... was undeniably dead.
...
N/A: Wow. Okay so writing what is, essentially, my own death-via-sock is a little... morbid. Also, I'm now a little traumatized at the thought of going down the stairs, seeing as in my house the stairs are regularly home to random slippery paraphernalia. Yikes.
Jokes aside, this fic is going to be quite painful for me. To be honest, this fic is a bit of psychological experiment. I'm hoping that by getting some of this down in writing, I'll be getting it OFF my chest. And seeing as this character, Sara, is based on myself, you'll be privy to a lot of things I don't usually tell people. Things I'm scared of, things I dream about, things I think and hope and hate and love, poured out for you in narrative form. So please be gentle with me. I guess that's all I can ask.