DISCLAIMER: Nope not mine. A girl can dream though can't she?
SUMMARY: Kim's recovery continues. Another face from her past comes to visit.
Several days later, Jason and Tommy had gone to the gym to spar while Trini and Aisha worked with Kim on her standing and even taking a step or two.
Suddenly, the door flew open and a voice bellowed from the doorway. "Kimberly Anne Hart! What do you think you're doing?"
Kim's head whipped around to see her stepfather, Pierre, standing in the doorway. "Pierre! Look at me!"
"I see only a selfish child. Your mother called me in tears saying that you weren't coming home with her."
"Pierre, Mom doesn't understand. She wants me to stay a cripple!"
"Your mother wants to take care of you. The doctor told her you were pushing much too hard and were likely to injure yourself even more with this reckless pace you were setting. And I thought your friends would be listening to the doctor at least." Now he'd rounded on Trini and Aisha. "True friends would not be pushing her so hard."
"True friends do because we realize that she doesn't like to be confined to that stupid chair. We also know that if we don't help her to push herself that she'll do it without us and more than likely hurt herself even worse. That is exactly what would happen if we weren't here." Aisha stood next to Kim as Trini stood on her other side.
"Your mother and I are finished with you. You can support yourself from now on."
Pierre opened the door. "Pierre, wait!" Kim cried. When he turned back around, she continued. "Don't you want to see just how far I've come? What I can do because I pushed myself and my friends helped me?"
"Very well. Show me."
Trini and Aisha stepped away from Kim as she slowly turned herself around to face the man who had married her mother. They watched with support in their eyes as she stood there for a moment before taking six small steps toward him. They stayed just close enough to catch her if she should fall. She paused for a moment and then took three more. The look on her face told the man that she was fighting for every single step she took at this point. But fight she did and she made it all the way to where he stood after several stops along the way before collapsing.
Trini and Aisha stepped forward only to stop as Pierre caught the young woman and picked her up. Gently, he carried her back to her bed and set her on the edge of it.
"Mom just wants me with her so that she can control who I see. I love Tommy, Pierre. She needs to accept this. I love him and he loves me. He may have believed the letter she sent him for a while but he does know now that it wasn't me that sent it." She bowed her head. "Please. Try to make her see that Tommy's not a bad guy. I don't want her out of my life. After all, I'll need someone to help me plan my wedding to Tommy later on."
"I will try, petite. But you know your mother. She is stubborn." He hooked her chin and pulled her eyes up to face him. "Continue getting stronger. I will work on your mother."
He kissed her forehead and left the room.
"That was hard," she sighed. Trini and Aisha stood beside the bed, smiling down at her.
"But, girl, you certainly made an impression on him."
"I think you deserve the rest of the day to relax. How about some time at the pool?" When Kim looked up at her with a puzzled expression, Trini continued. "Just to float. No working. In fact, Aisha and I will get in with you and we'll just laze around in there until the guys get back."
The girls smiled and nodded as they started getting their suits on.
****
"Hey, girls. We're --- back?" Rocky, Zack, Jason and Tommy walked into Kim's room to find no one there. "Where could they have gone?"
"I don't know, Rock. Maybe they went out to the mall or something."
"Are the four of you looking for Miss Hart?" a nurse asked as she was walking down the hall.
"Yes." Four males voices chorused in relief at the thought that someone might know where their friends were.
"She and the girls with her went down to the pool. Apparently, Miss Hart's stepfather came in and she walked almost all the way across the room before she collapsed. She was trying to prove to him that she deserved his support instead of his anger. The other girls said something about him being angry that she wouldn't go home with her mother and let her just take care of Kimberly."
"That's because she doesn't want to take care of Kimberly. She wants to hire others to do it for her. She just wants to control her daughter completely and this looks like a good chance." Jason shook his head. "Of course, Kim probably turned Pierre's thoughts around with that little stunt."
"We need to go check on her, man." Tommy was eager to find Kim and wrap his arms around her while telling her just how proud he was of her.
Jason nodded and the four of them headed down the hall toward the pool.
****
Kim was just floating in the water with her eyes closed when Tommy walked into the room. She smiled, knowing it was him without even looking.
"In the pool alone, beautiful?" Tommy asked as he squatted beside the pool.
"Trini and Aisha are here somewhere. Billy showed up just a few minutes ago. I'm never in here alone."
He looked down the length of the pool and noticed that, just as she had said, the girls were down in the deeper end of the pool while Billy sat on the steps in the shallow end where he could get to her quickly enough if she got in trouble.
"Why don't you come over here and I'll help you out of there?"
Kim lifted her head and smiled at him. "I'd love to, handsome. But ---"
"But what, Kim?"
"I think you should catch me first." With that she dove under the water and started swimming for the deep end.
Jason noticed how she was moving under the surface almost like the dolphins. He remembered when she'd learned that almost twelve years ago. After that, they'd hardly been able to get Kim out of the lake that summer. Billy had been the only one who could really catch her because he swam much the same way. It required less effort and was much more efficient.
When he started laughing, Tommy turned to look at his friend while pulling off his shoes and socks. "What's up, Jase?"
"Good luck catching her, bro. When she swims like that, even I'm hard pressed to catch her." Tommy shrugged, whipping off his t-shirt and slipping into the water.
Tommy took off chasing Kim around the pool only to rapidly discover that Jason was right. She was really hard to catch when she swam this way.
Jason knew that Kim had to be hurting by the time they'd been at it for five minutes, stopping periodically to grab a breath. Or at least Tommy was. Kim would just slice above the surface, suck in a quick breath and keep moving.
But at one point, he noticed she stopped swimming and rolled over under the water, trying to massage out a cramp or something. "Billy!"
He needn't have worried. Billy noticed the problem even before Jason had and was already slicing through the water toward Kimberly. He made it to the young woman just as Tommy came up for a breath of air, diving to the bottom to catch at her.
As he broke the surface with Kim in hand, Tommy reached out to help hand her up to Jason who pulled her onto the deck.
When she finally stopped coughing, she looked up at seven sets of worried eyes. "I guess I pushed a little too hard today, huh?"
"Think so, sis?" Jason smarted off, leaving everyone smiling if not giggling outright.
"Maybe a little." She smiled back at him from where she lay in her brother's arms.