Disclaimer: I don't own MIOBI or these characters, and I'm not making any money off of this story.
A/N: I know I was supposed to post this yesterday, but I got home from work, fell asleep, and then didn't wake up for the next 15 hours. Which probably gives you a little bit of an idea of why I went missing for a couple of weeks ;) Life is crazy right now.
There are definitely sections of this that are an ode to writer's block. I just started writing random stuff to get past the block and I left it in as a tribute lol.
Kaylie was in a strange sort of limbo when it came to practice. Lauren and Emily were training one event each. Kaylie was training all four, but she would never get to perform them. She wasn't in any of the finals, but she was the alternate in the All Around, vault, beam, and floor, so she couldn't just stop training. This would be her last day to train bars. Ever. She would drop off one apparatus at a time as her best friends performed in, and likely won, the event finals.
At the moment, Payson and Kelly's training situation was even more unusual. As in, they weren't. Lauren, Emily, Kaylie, and Marty got up at their usual time and took a bus over to the practice gym. Payson, Kelly, and Sasha slept in.
Sasha said that they needed rest more than practice, so they were taking the morning off and coming in after lunch for a light warm up before moving to the arena. It was an unconventional strategy to say the least, and it had the added benefit of intimidating the hell out of the competition. Word had spread to the other teams (through Lauren) that the American's were sleeping in, and it was screwing with everybody's heads. Lo had cultivated an extensive network of spies, and the word coming in from the international practice gym was that Genghi and Ivanka were both having a rough day.
Kelly and Payson got mobbed when they walked into the gym. The girls rushed to them in one chaotic, excited hug where lots of words flew around, including "good luck," "kick ass," "I love you," and "I'm so proud of you." Kaylie wasn't sure what surprised her most—that she was saying these things to Kelly, too, or that she actually meant them.
She thought it would be hard, watching her friends get ready for the All Around while she sat on the sidelines, but it wasn't. It almost felt… relieving. Kelly and Payson were excited for the All Around because they loved doing gymnastics. Kaylie stopped loving it around the time she became an elite, when everything became about winning. She never felt the drive to be the best like they did; she just felt the pressure. Now that the pressure was gone she could have fun again. It was nice.
The men came to wish them luck, too, and Austin drew Payson away from the crowd. They stood together making out like their friends weren't just a few feet away, and Kaylie was surprised by how much emotion seemed to be in the kiss. The progression of Austin and Payson's relationship was so confusing that Kaylie couldn't keep track. First they were friends, and then Austin went crazy over her and she didn't even notice, and then they hated each other. Then the girls found out they were dating and a few days later found out that it was all a lie, that Payson was just hooking up with him, which turned into a weird pseudo-relationship and now was a real relationship. But there was something going on between Sasha and Payson for a while there, too, and Payson kept insisting that it wasn't romantic even though it damn well seemed like it was. Now all Payson would say about her relationship with Sasha was that nothing had changed but they were "being more careful." Who would have ever thought that Payson Keeler would have such a complicated love life?
Nobody else was competing until at least Sunday, so they decided to take the afternoon off and cheer on Kelly and Payson while they practiced. It must have been a surreal feeling for them to be the sole athletes working in the large gym while five men, three women, and four coaches sat around watching them and cheering. There was a fair amount of heckling from Steven and Jake, as well, which kept the whole gym laughing. Someone should be recording this, Kaylie thought, to show the world just what a strange and wonderful family they were.
Sasha wasn't kidding when he said that they were going to have a light warm up. They practiced their tumbling and ran through their choreography, but they didn't put the two together, and neither of them did a full bars set. All they did was loosen up their muscles and mark their timing before they left for the arena. As was the case during the team finals, they were relaxed and smiling. Nobody could touch them and they knew it.
The girls went with them to the locker room when they got to the North Greenwich Arena. They were sharing the room with several other finalists, all of who were looking at the Americans with a bit of fear and awe. It was intimidating enough just being in the same room with Payson and Kelly, much less when they were laughing and joking around just an hour before the biggest competition of their lives. It meant that they were either incredibly self-assured or a little bit crazy.
Lauren did the hair and make up for both of them, and the last thing they did before heading out for the official warm up period was change into their competition leos. Then they gathered their belongings and turned to go, but when Payson and Kelly faced each other full on for the first time since coming into the locker room, they both burst out laughing.
Lauren glanced back and forth between them and asked, "Did you guys just go insane?"
Kelly was clutching at her stomach, but she managed to choke out, "The purple!"
"The blue!" Payson cried in response.
Purple and blue were the colors of their leos, but Kaylie had no idea what was so funny about that. Apparently Emily did, because she started giggling.
"Can someone explain this to me? Because I'm not following."
"It's just so Payson," Kelly said, reining in her laughter. "I haven't seen her in anything but red, white, and blue since we got here, but of course she would wear purple when she got to choose her own. I don't know why I didn't realize that before."
Kaylie took a second look at Payson's attire. It was two different shades of purple, a rich dark velvet and lighter spandex sleeves, and suddenly it occurred to her that of the several dozen leos that Payson owned, nearly all of them were purple. Why had she never noticed that before?
With that revelation in mind, she looked at Kelly again and realized that she had a signature color, too. They had been on the same competitive circuit since they were twelve, but somehow Kaylie had missed the fact that her teammate almost never wore anything but blue. The two-toned blue leo and devil horns were so familiar that they looked natural on her, like she might have been born that way. An image danced through Kaylie's head of an infant Kelly wearing blue spandex and her hair in buns. She snorted.
"Hey, at least it's not pink," Payson said, holding her hands up in defense of her color choice.
Kaylie glared at her. "What's wrong with pink?"
Kelly ushered them all toward the door as she said, "It's pink. Enough said."
She wanted to respond, but an event coordinator stepped in and herded Payson and Kelly toward the competition area and shooed the rest of them away, so they made their way up to the stands to meet the men.
Ava was already there with them, managing to look like a super model wearing nothing but jeans and a men's Team USA polo tied up at the waist. She waved them over.
"Hey, Emily," she said, indicating for the bars-specialist to sit next to her, "I downloaded Damon's album last night and listened to it. I'm guessing seven of those were about you?"
"Actually, it's nine, right?" Kaylie said, looking to Emily for validation.
She shook her head. "No, Ava's right, it's seven. Most people guess nine, but two of those he wrote before he met me. How did you know?"
"I don't know, they just sound totally different. And Black Widow, that's about you, isn't it?" she asked Lauren.
"Yes," she said with a frustrated huff. "And he thinks it's so funny. It's not nearly as clever as he thinks it is."
Ava chuckled. "It kinda is. All those gymnastics references that nobody else would ever notice, like the line about the high heels where he talks about 'the way her hips sway while she balances on those four inches,' and the clock going tic toc, and then that hilarious line about mounting."
Lauren hated that song. Mentioning it was a guaranteed way to make her snap at you, but for some reason she didn't tell off Ava the way Kaylie expected her to. She just said, "Yeah, you think it's hilarious now. Just wait until he writes something embarrassing about you."
"Well, when he does you have my permission to make fun of me. I'm pretty hard to embarrass, though."
It was a casual statement, but there seemed to be a deeper meaning to it, like she was saying that she would be around for Lauren to make fun of her. Like maybe she was planning to stay.
o-O-o
Mental toughness. Some people have it, some people don't. Ava Tucker had it in spades. She just had this one, tiny chink in her armor. And it kept getting bigger and bigger until it took over her entire life.
It had been three years, and every single day she woke up and had to tell herself that she didn't need to be perfect. She was fine the way she was. Most days she believed it. Because she had that mental toughness.
Payson Keeler had it, too. The whole world thought she was perfect, but Ava knew the truth. She was just as broken as Ava was. She was scared, and sick, and she had no idea what she was doing—with the baby, with Austin, with her life—but she woke up every morning didn't need to be perfect. She was fine the way she was. She didn't have to convince herself because she knew it was true. Ava was more than a little jealous of that.
She watched the women's qualifying on television. She watched the Secret U.S. Classic, and Nationals, and Olympic trials, too. She hadn't watched, talked about, or done gymnastics since the day she fell off the bars and got taken to the hospital in an ambulance, but when Austin started talking about Payson Keeler she knew that something had to change. He didn't talk about her the way he talked about any of the models he dated, or even the way he talked about that Kaylie girl. It was different. She was different. So one day Ava turned on the TV and flipped to Universal Sports and watched Payson Keeler perform Swan Lake.
That very first day at the Olympics, when she performed on the floor, she brought the whole world to tears. She brought Ava to her knees. It was an expression of pain, fear, and desperation—all the things that Ava battled on a daily basis—and it brought those feelings flooding to the surface. She sat on the floor of her Dallas apartment and cried for hours after she watched that routine, not even noticing the rest of the competition, but when the tears stopped falling she felt… cleansed, somehow.
The next morning, she didn't have to fight her demons quite so hard. She watched Austin compete and it didn't hurt quite so much. She packed her bags to go to London and wasn't quite so scared.
The problems the two girls were facing weren't similar, not even close, but somehow their journeys seemed linked, probably because Austin loved them both so much. So when she sat in the stands at the Women's All Around finals and watched Payson dance out her hope, it gave Ava hope to. For the first time in years, she looked ahead and saw a future that made her smile. She was going to be an aunt.
Austin wrapped his arms around her shoulders and pulled her closer. It had been a long time since he did that, or, rather, it had been a long time since she'd let him do that. In the darkest times she didn't let people touch her. She went for an entire year without touching another human being except for Austin, who never stopped trying. He didn't care that she pushed him away every time; he would do it anyway. She saw how happy he was when he introduced her to his friends and she hugged them, just like she would have before.
"She looks so much better today," he said. "We're two rotations in and she doesn't even look tired yet."
"Didn't you say she just had a transfusion yesterday, though? Will this last?"
Emily, on her other side, said, "She'll still probably go downhill again, but it doesn't seem like it's happening as fast. If you'd seen her before… This is a huge improvement."
"So what's changed?" Ava asked. "I mean, I know she's on that medicine now, but it can't have worked that fast."
"Probably not," Austin agreed, "It's probably just starting to kick in, but even a small difference in her blood makes a huge difference in everything else. And things have been a lot better for her here, she's not getting as sick and she's getting a lot more sleep, so I'm sure that's helping."
"Do you think she's going to be okay?" There was a lot of fear in her question, and for a lot of reasons. She was scared for Austin, because he loved Payson so much and she didn't want him to lose her; she was scared for the baby, because as crazy and unexpected as that development was, she loved that kid already; she was scared for herself, because she way too invested in Payson's wellbeing for her own good. She needed Payson to be okay.
Austin gave her shoulder a comforting squeeze. "She will be. She's a fighter, just like you."
She threw off her melancholy with a toss of her head, and lightened the mood by saying, "Well, obviously, just look at how well she's fighting tonight. She's kicking ass."
She was. She'd scored a record-breaking 16.7 on beam, higher even than Lauren had ever scored, and a giant 16.35 on floor. She was 1.7 points ahead after just two rotations, so as long as she could keep up her energy she would have no problem taking the gold. She could even take a fall and still win. Of course, she was trying to avoid falls at all costs to protect the baby, so that wasn't likely to happen.
Kelly was holding her own, too, edging out Ivanka for 2nd by a few hundredths of a point. The two girls had traded out best and worst apparatuses during the first two rotations. Kelly was weak on beam and strong on floor, while Ivanka was great on beam and weak on floor, so they were neck and neck so far, but Kelly was better on both vault and bars. Barring disaster, Kelly Parker would be the silver medalist and Payson the gold medalist. Bronze was still up for grabs between Genghi and Ivanka.
Ava heard Lauren, sitting a couple of seats away, say, "I really hate the vault rotation during finals. It's always the exact same vault over and over again."
She was right, at least for the rotation that Payson and Kelly were in. The top six ranking girls were grouped together, and Payson was the only one of them not doing a Yurchenko. There were two doubles from the Chinese gymnasts and three two and a halves from the other girls. It was boring as hell.
"Why do Genghi and Jinnin do doubles?" Ava asked. "Especially Genghi, being a medal contender. Why not an Amanar?"
"They don't weigh enough." Lauren threw the answer out offhandedly, and an uncomfortable silence settled over the group. Lauren winced when she realized what she said, but she didn't apologize for it, which Ava appreciated. She hated when people walked on egg shells around her.
"Huh. That's an object lesson, isn't it? Too skinny for silver. Because she'd have a good shot at beating Kelly if she had an Amanar."
Emily took the opportunity to change the subject and ran with it. "Yeah, maybe, but it would still really be a toss up. Even if Genghi had that extra seven tenths, Kelly would be stiff competition."
"Does anyone else think it's kind of weird how the U.S. is dominating this year?" It was unbelievable how well they were doing. Nastia and Shawn set a really high standard in '08, but the 2012 gymnasts were just soaring past it.
"It's not weird," Austin said, "It's Sasha. He's the best coach in the world."
Nicky, on Austin's other side, elbowed him in the ribs and jerked his head toward the end of the row where Kevin was sitting. Austin hastily amended, "Uh, you know, the best Women's coach. Between Sasha and Kevin, of course we're doing well."
Ivanka increased her lead over Genghi to seven tenths, and then it was Kelly's turn to vault. All conversation was at an end while they cheered for her and watched while she did a near perfect vault. 15.975, close to the vault that beat Kaylie out of the event finals but still not quite that good.
Austin took her hand when Payson stepped up to the vault run. He was never that demonstrative of his worry—with the one exception that she never thought about—so he was really nervous. She would be to, in his position. Hell, she was worried in her position. Just one fall could be catastrophic to the pregnancy.
It was over before she could think too hard about it. Payson was running toward the vault and flying through the air, and then she landed light as a feather, like her half on, one and a half off was no big deal. Her lead over Kelly increased to nearly two points.
One more rotation to go.
A/N: As always, pictures of the leos on my pinterest :) The website is on my profile, as is the link from the last chapter if you missed that. The site has figured out all of the sneaky tricks we use to put in web links and got rid of them.
If anyone would like to write me lyric for the song "Black Widow," I would love you forever. Maybe even enough to give you a scene from Sasha's POV ;)
