Part 2

Stephanie was a good deal more than occupied in the weeks subsequent to The Alliance's phenomenal win over The WWF and her father. Her days were overflowing with staff meetings, talent reviews, interviews and planning with Shane and all those impressive pecuniary advisors they had a short time ago hired - securing the fledgling company's prospects. Her nights were equally as chaotic as she tried frenziedly to put back together her precarious marriage, building a future with the man she had married only a couple of years earlier and trying to pretend that in her heart she did not long for another.

Everything was coasting along as it habitually did in the mornings. Hunter was up and gone by the time she had awoken - the typical routine as he went to work out with the physiotherapist - and she went into work alone. At least things were going that way until she arrived at the new Alliance center of operations and was called into her brother's office for an unanticipated meeting. As she walked into Shane's swanky new office - the exact same one that had been their father's until recent events - she was stunned to find that both her husband and Austin were also there.

It took her only a small amount of seconds after sitting down next to her husband before she opened her mouth and demanded an answer. "Okay, Shane. What in hell is going on here?"

"Steph," Shane began to some extent apprehensively, as if what on earth he had to say to her she was not going to like in the slightest. "Hunter and Steve have approached me with a - uh - unique idea..."

Shooting curious looks at both her husband and Steve, she butted into the conversation. "What sort of *unique* idea?"

Shane looked helplessly at his brother-in-law and new best friend, Austin before sighing heavily. "They would like us to rehire Angle."

"WHAT?"

"Stephanie... Angle can be a jackass most of the time," Austin began carefully. "But people come to see the American hero..."

"Actually they come to chant you suck at him," Hunter interposed gleefully.

Austin disregarded the disturbance, "Plus I feel the need to address some of the issues that Angle and I left unresolved. For instance his kidnapping predisposition."

"Also he needs to pay for what he almost did to you," Hunter told her. "No one messes with my wife and gets away with it, especially after pretending to be her so-called friend."

Shane hastily interpolated, "It doesn't matter why we want him to come back, and it's just good business sense to rehire him... Under specific stipulations of course."

"Stipulations? What sort of provisions are we talking about?" Stephanie could not stop herself asking or from visualizing all sorts of horrors dreamed up by Hunter, Austin and the rest of The Alliance locker room.

"A month-by-month contract for starters," Shane replied relatively nonchalantly, making Stephanie realize that the three of them had been discussing this for some time now. "Nothing long-term until he proves that he is trustworthy."

"Which will be never," Hunter murmured scarcely audibly.

Seeing that Stephanie was not in the slightest persuaded that this was an excellent idea, Shane spoke again. "Don't make a decision now, Steph. Please just think about it for a little while."

"Okay," she granted unenthusiastically. "But I am making no promises about rehiring him."

"All right. Now let's get down to some regular business," Shane said pulling out some of the subsequent day's paperwork as Hunter and Austin left the office.

The days dragged along at a snail's pace for Kurt as he settled inexorably into the drudgery of joblessness. Like a substantial proportion of the other old WWF superstars he had not received a phone call from Alliance headquarters summoning him to a talent interview and the truth is after what he had done - however good intentioned at the time - he did not expect to ever get one.

So he squandered his days checking out the employment sections of the Pittsburgh papers and thinking about Stephanie and how he had magnificently screwed up his one opportunity to prove to her that he was the love of her life. Not that his nights were any better, especially the nights that she was on television and he got to watch her and Shane co-run Raw and Smackdown. It more or less killed him each time she appeared on screen looking ever more picturesque and eternally glued to her Neanderthal husband Triple H's side.

All of Kurt's family and acquaintances were also worried about him and his detrimental activities, but none of them had absolutely any inspiration about how they could help him. They merely could do nothing but sit indolently by while the once effervescent man they had known sat locked away from the world, fading away. His mother was predominantly distraught - not only because of his cloistered conduct - by his new fascination with all things Stephanie McMahon-Helmsley. Naturally she had known about his feelings - however inappropriate - for the young woman, but now it seemed as if she was the only reason Kurt was still living, even though she had nothing to do with him anymore.

Kurt endeavored - briefly - to return to a normal life for his mother's sake, but it was basically unattainable. Out of the blue his passion for life and the conquest of gold - medals or championships - was gone and all because of his devotion to one man, a man who refused to take his phone calls - actually anyone's phone calls - anymore. He was suddenly feeling extraordinarily conflicted, torn between what he had done and what he knew he should have done instead. Kurt knew he had paid a price for his actions, but somehow it just was not worth it to him to any further extent. Unfortunately he could do nothing about it but sit there in his house and pray that the phone would ring and bring him his salvation.

Since her tenuous reunion with Hunter, Stephanie had been vigilant to leave business at the office and use her nights to completely concentrate on the rejuvenation of her marriage. Nevertheless after the bolt from the blue that Hunter, Austin and her ever-loving brother had dropped on her that morning, Stephanie had found herself powerless to give attention to anything or anyone else. All of her multifarious thoughts and feelings were focused upon Kurt and what rehiring him would do to her precarious emotional state, not to mention how his sudden re-emergence would influence her marriage.

Heaving a sigh of dissatisfaction and mystification, she turned on the television hoping to take her tired mind away from its numerous predicaments. Instead she received a view of the channel Hunter had been watching earlier that day, ESPN and their retrospective on the Olympic Games. Switching off the idiot box as quickly as she could, Stephanie began to wordlessly question why she could not simply move past her peccadillo with Kurt and move on to a less excruciating place.

Knowing that she did not have the concentration or liveliness to wait up for Hunter to return from his training session with Austin, on top of dealing with everything else; Stephanie headed upstairs to their bedroom to go to sleep. Once she had entered the copious, richly decorated room, she removed her sophisticated, yet uncomfortable business suit and slipped on the silk pajamas that had been a birthday present from her sister-in-law. Looking at herself in the mirror as she brushed out her long dark hair, she shook her head in amazement that she - just an ordinary looking woman - could be the cause of so much havoc within her own life. At last she slipped within the cool, crisp sheets on the king-sized bed and waited for sleep to overwhelm her tired mind, but it didn't. Stephanie was still awake - abet pretending to be asleep - when Hunter returned home an hour later, she simply lay there as he took a shower and climbed into the bed next to her in absolute silence.

Once she was confident that Hunter was in an unfathomable sleep, she climbed out of their bed and padded back downstairs looking for something to occupy her mind. Curling up on the overstuffed burgundy leather couch in Hunter and her study, she grabbed the cordless phone fully intending to call her brother with her decision to not let Kurt back into the company. However she somehow managed to dial Kurt's home phone number instead and she could not force herself to hang up before he answered.

"Hello?" Kurt's voice came down the line sounding enervated and disoriented. "Hello? Is anyone there?"

Stephanie wanted to answer him, but she could not bring herself to do more than listen to him. She knew that it was purely because she was not ready - may be she would never be ready - to absolve or overlook his perfidy.

"Stephanie?" Kurt's voice seemed to brighten up as he said her name.

It was all too much for her to cope with and she hastily slammed down the receiver before she gave into a dim-witted inclination and spoke to him. Placing her hands over her face she tried to salvage some emotional control once more before she headed back to bed and pretended that her young life was not in some sort of hellish state.

When Shane waltzed into his office early the next morning he was taken aback to find Stephanie sitting at his desk waiting for him to arrive. In no haste to deal with any person and apprehensive of Stephanie's soon repudiation of the proposition, Shane settled himself at his desk at a snail's pace.

Ultimately Stephanie could no longer stand Shane's procrastination. "You win. Angle can be rehired, but I want all those stipulations and provisions that you and the guys came up with reinforced."

"No problem," Shane replied, contented to have gotten his own way with her for once. "Do you want to make the call, or shall I?"

Stephanie stood up and stared her brother right in the eye, "I may have agreed to let you rehire Angle, but that does not mean that I want anything to do with him. You can baby-sit him because I won't do it anymore."

"Okay," Shane said grudgingly. "What about the changes we discussed?"

"We should still go ahead with them. We need to use them to distance our company away from the WWF," Stephanie answered him. "I also think that the sooner we can implement the changes, the better off we'll be."

"I agree," Shane said. "I'll get the lawyers working on the changes and on Angle's contract."

Stephanie gathered her things and headed out of the door, suddenly returning. "Do you think that this is going to work?"

Shane answered his baby sister as honestly as he could, "I don't know. What have we got to lose?"

"Everything."

"That's what makes it fun," Shane told her. "Pulling off the improbable is what us McMahon's are good at."

Stephanie shot Shane a look of skepticism, "We'll see."

Shane watched her leave and began to feel a little bit better about the circumstances that he had forced her into. They needed Angle, not only for ratings, athleticism, but also to keep the talent happy - there were numerous superstars that wanted a shot at him before he had even been offered a contract. However he was not utterly hardhearted and unsympathetic to his sister's emotions. He knew that she had not been the same person since Angle's duplicity - hell if he was being straightforward, she had not been herself since she had began spending all that extra time with Angle before Survivor Series. Evidently something more than business had gone on between the two of them and Shane hoped that for everyone's sake that both of them could get past it - especially Stephanie - because any fallout from this capricious situation could destroy lives, marriages and fledgling companies.

TBC...