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I’ll Believe In Anything

Happy pride month my friends 🩷

mental abuse/manipulation, the impact of what reader went thru shows up now but Alysa wouldn’t leave reader to deal w it alone so dw

Finallyyyyy done w this series yay and maybe listen to the song by Wolf Parade … like im not even lying i was crying listening to it while editing this part...

They had to practically force Alysa back into her own skates.

At first she refused in the only way she could manage in that moment: flatly, repeatedly, with the kind of stubbornness that came from panic rather than attitude. She was in the locker room half out of her warm-ups, hair sticking to the damp back of her neck, still feeling the phantom weight of your hand in hers, when the first round of people tried reasoning with her.

Team USA leadership was gentle about it, but firm in the way people get when they have already decided what the sensible option is and are just waiting for you to catch up. Her own coaches were worse only because they were the ones she trusted enough to hear.

“Alysa,” Philip said, crouched in front of her while she sat hunched over on the bench with both hands locked together so tightly her knuckles had gone pale, “there is nothing you can do for her this second.”

Alysa shook her head immediately, eyes fixed on the floor because if she looked at anyone she might start yelling again. “I’m not going out there,” she said. Her voice came out hoarse, scraped raw from the corridor. “I’m not skating while she’s—” She couldn’t even finish it. The image of you on the ice kept cutting through every sentence before it could land.

Massimo, standing off to the side with his arms crossed, softened his voice in a way that only made the whole thing feel more unbearable. “They’ve already confirmed the concussion,” he told her carefully. “They’re taking her to the hospital because they need to rule out internal bleeding from the fall and get fluids into her. You cannot go in the ambulance. You cannot sit in on the scans. You will only be waiting somewhere else.”

It was rational. Cruelly rational. Alysa hated that everyone around her was making sense because she knew they were right, technically. She knew that if she tore out of the venue now she would still just be standing in another hallway, barred from another room, useless in another building. But none of that touched the actual feeling in her chest, which was simple and devastating and impossible to argue with. You were hurt, you were scared, you had gone down hard enough to need a hospital, and she was supposed to go lace up and do her own run-through like the world had not just split open.

What made her cave wasn’t acceptance so much as logistics. Once it was confirmed that you were being transferred out, once it was made unavoidably clear that you were gone from the grounds and she would not be allowed near you until the worst of the testing was over, something in Alysa’s resistance flattened into a kind of numb, unwilling practicality. She still didn’t want to do it. She wanted to be furious, to keep pacing, to somehow break the day apart until it rearranged itself into something normal again. She wanted to walk out into the hall and find you upright and annoyed and intact, rubbing at a sore shoulder maybe, but alive in the easy ordinary way that would make all this panic retroactively ridiculous. She wanted you off the ice and waiting for her, tucked into one of those stiff venue chairs with your bag at your feet and your jacket half zipped, ready to roll your eyes fondly when she came over and ask if she was done so you two could just go back to the dorm together. She wanted normal with a desperation that almost embarrassed her.

Instead she had a confirmed concussion, the phrase internal bleeding hanging in the air like a threat, and people gently corralling her toward her own session because the schedule would not stop for heartbreak. So Alysa nodded once without really meaning to, stared at the wall a second longer, then pushed herself up.

“Fine,” she said, though nothing about her sounded fine. “I’ll do the practice.”

Philip touched the back of her neck briefly, that quiet reassuring gesture he used when he knew there was nothing useful left to say. “Then the second you’re done,” he said, “we go.”

———

The rink felt different when she stepped back into it, as if the whole building had shifted in her absence and was now pretending not to stare too obviously at the damage left behind. Everyone knew, word traveled fast in skating, and this was the Olympics and you were not just another skater and Alysa was not just another skater and the two of you were enough of a known fact within the circuit that people did not have to ask outright to understand what this meant. Her friends on the ice didn’t crowd her. That, more than anything, told her how bad she looked. Amber glanced at her once from across the boards with something open and aching in her face before carefully turning away. Ilia, who dropped by, gave her one of those stiff nods people do when they are trying to offer support without turning you into a spectacle. The foreign skaters were nearby at one point and all looked like they wanted to say something, decided against it, and let their concern stay in their eyes instead. Alysa was grateful for that. She could not have handled words right then. Words would have made it real in a way she was barely surviving already. So she skated. Or at least she moved across the ice in the shape of skating.

The whole session passed in fragments. Her body knew the drills with her legs pushing when they were supposed to push. She circled the rink, did the bare minimum asked of her, let the muscle memory built over years and years drag her through each required motion while her brain stayed somewhere else entirely. She wasn’t practicing in any meaningful sense. She was occupying space on the ice until she was allowed to leave it.

The thoughts in her head were now loud and disorganized and merciless.

Is she awake right now. Did she hit hard enough to damage something deeper. Were they still lying to the doctors. What exactly had the medics written down. Why didn’t I make a bigger scene sooner. Why did I let their excuses and your pleading and all those nights you fell asleep in my arms turn this into something I thought I still had time to fix slowly.

Every answer she came up with only turned back into guilt. She blamed your coaches first, correctly, viciously, but under that there was still blame for herself too, irrational and relentless. She had known enough. She didn’t know all of it, not the pills or the exact mechanics, but enough. Enough to be afraid. Enough to feel that something had been off for weeks. And still you had collapsed before she managed to drag real authority into it. She knew, rationally, that the fault was not hers but it didn’t matter. Guilt rarely cared about rationality.

When her music finally came on for the run-through, the first notes almost made her flinch. It was jarring, hearing the program start as if this were a normal training moment, as if she were not walking straight into a set of motions with the image of you collapsing still fresh enough to turn her stomach. She pushed off anyway. There was no grace in the decision. No brave inner speech. Just movement because everyone was waiting and because stopping completely would have meant thinking too clearly. The run-through was technically fine. Better than fine, probably, to anyone judging from the outside. Alysa hit jumps here and there, not with full conviction but with enough precision that her body could execute them without much help from her mind. She moved through the choreography with the strange detached quality of someone sleepwalking through something they had done too many times to need active thought. Everything came from muscle memory, from old pathways carved so deep they would function even while the rest of her was splintered.

And maybe that was what made it worse—that this was Promise of all programs. The one she had built out of leaving, out of loss. Out of the strange, painful love she still felt for skating even after it had nearly swallowed her whole. This program had always been about return, about finding her way back to the ice on her own terms, about choosing it again only once it stopped feeling like something that was being done to her. Usually that gave Alysa comfort when she skated it. Usually it reminded her how far she had come. But now, moving through it with you in the hospital and your collapse still living at the front of her mind, all it did was make your situation feel sharper, crueler. Alysa had gotten out in time. She had left, healed and come back when skating felt like hers again. You had never been given that chance. You were still being ground down by people who treated your body and your talent like things they owned and now Alysa was out here skating a program about survival and return while you had been pulled from the ice entirely. The irony of it sat bitter in her chest. Even the music, which usually steadied her, seemed to press on the bruise of it. This program was supposed to be proof that love could survive harm. All Alysa could think, as she moved through it half numb, was that you deserved the chance to find that out too.

She reached the last section of the program and suddenly all she could see was the shape of a skater standing in the middle afterward, unfinished in some spiritual sense even if the choreography had technically ended. And then she was the one in the middle. Standing where you should have been standing if the day had gone the way it was supposed to. The thought came uninvited and stupid and painful: you were not going to be allowed to compete now. The Olympics, which had been narrowing your life into one brutal line for months, were over for you in the emptiest possible way. For one second Alysa thought of your face when that reality landed, of the disappointment that would probably cut through the confusion once you were fully conscious and alert enough to understand. That thought lasted only a moment before something in her rejected it outright. She did not care about the competition. Let the programs burn. Let the placements vanish. Let every result disappear. She only cared about you being okay.

The crying came without permission. She ended the routine in the center and just stood there, chest heaving, staring at nothing. Then the tears were suddenly there, hot and humiliating and impossible to stop. Alysa covered her face with both hands almost immediately, wiping hard at her eyes because there were too many cameras, too many officials, too many people who could turn this into a moment and she could not bear the thought of that. Her shoulders shook once despite her best effort to hold still. The rink around her blurred. All she could feel was the old fear returning full force now that her body had stopped moving long enough for it to catch up. The memory of you dropping to the ice hit again with violent clarity, and with it the same sharp need to get to you, to run, to be by your side. Her chest tightened so badly it almost felt like she couldn’t get enough air in. She swiped at her face again and finally pushed herself toward the boards, blinking furiously and trying to make herself look less wrecked than she felt. Philip and Massimo were already there waiting for her, their expressions arranged into something calm enough not to make a scene and concerned enough that she nearly started crying harder just from seeing them.

“Come off,” Philip said quietly. There wasn’t even the pretense of more work to do. Alysa nodded once and gladly obeyed. She stepped off the ice with the miserable obedience of someone who had been holding herself together only because she was forced to and now no longer could.

She changed fast because urgency had returned now that there was something actionable again. Every second spent peeling off damp practice layers and yanking on clean clothes felt stolen from the place she actually wanted to be. Her fingers fumbled twice on a zipper because they were still shaking. Massimo fielded whatever needed fielding outside the immediate bubble of the locker room, and Philip stayed close enough that Alysa could feel, without looking, that he was keeping the path clear for her. Nobody tried to stop her this time. The second she was dressed and had her bag over one shoulder, she was gone and headed for the hospital. And even as she moved, that same awful mixture of dread and longing kept pressing against her ribs: the hope that you’d be awake, the fear that you wouldn’t, the guilt that she had not gotten you out sooner, the desperate childish wish that the whole thing might somehow undo itself if she just got to you fast enough. But beneath all of it was the simplest truth, the one that had cut through every other concern since the second you fell. She needed to see you. Needed to know you were still here, still reachable, still yours and hers and alive beyond the terrible machinery of the sport that had tried so hard to turn you into something breakable.

———

The hospital room was dim in a way that made everything feel quieter than it really was. One bedside lamp had been left on, casting a warm little pool of light across the sheets and the plastic rail and the clear line of the IV running into your arm. The curtain over the window wasn’t fully drawn, just parted enough for a sliver of cold evening light to leak through from outside, but it wasn’t strong enough to compete with the soft yellow glow near the bed. The rest of the room fell away into shadowed corners and low mechanical sounds.

Alysa stopped in the doorway for half a second after the nurse led her there, one hand still on the strap of her bag like she’d forgotten to let it go. She had gotten to you, finally, and somehow that didn’t make her chest unclench the way she’d hoped. It just made everything more real. You were awake, propped up slightly against the pillows, a little too pale under the dim light, your face stripped of makeup and sharp with exhaustion in a way that made Alysa’s whole body ache. There was a bandage near your temple, and the sight of it made something in her stomach turn over. She moved carefully at first, almost cautiously, because the last time you had really spoken you’d been furious and depleted and throwing your coaches’ words at her like stones you didn’t even have the energy to aim properly. Alysa didn’t know what version of you she was walking into now. She only knew that all the fear she had been carrying was suddenly trying to become tears the second she saw you upright and looking back at her.

Then you recognized her fully and lifted one weak hand toward her, and that was it. Whatever careful distance Alysa had been trying to maintain disappeared instantly. She crossed the room like something pulled on a string, fast and helpless and completely sure. “Hey,” she breathed, the word coming out thinner than she wanted. She took your hand in both of hers and bent over it immediately, pressing one kiss after another to your knuckles, your fingers, the back of your hand, because she was terrified of hurting your head and because this was the only place she could pour all that pent-up love and fear without caution. “I’m here,” she kept murmuring against your skin. “It’s okay. I’m here now.” Your hand was warmer than it had been in the corridor.

You gave her the best smile you could manage, small and tired and so painfully familiar that Alysa had to lock her jaw for a second to keep her own face from breaking apart. The urge to cry hit her hard enough to feel physical. It crowded up behind her eyes and sat heavy in her throat, because you looked sad and worn and fragile in a way she had never wanted to see on you, and because relief and grief were doing awful things to each other inside her chest. But she would not cry in front of you, not when you were the one in the hospital bed, the one with a concussion and bruises and a body that had finally given out under too much pressure. So Alysa swallowed it down and stayed anchored to your hand instead, kissing it once more before straightening just enough to look at you properly.

For a moment neither of you said much. Alysa stood close beside the bed, still holding your hand, and felt strangely unsure of what shape to take. She wanted to ask a hundred things at once. How bad is the headache. Did they tell you everything yet. Are you scared. Do you want me closer. Are you mad at me still. But all of those questions seemed too loud for the room, too demanding for the state you were in. So she just watched you, trying to read what hurt and what didn’t, how alert you really were, whether your eyes were focusing cleanly or still drifting with that awful dazed lag from earlier. You were the one who broke the quiet.

Your voice came out scratchy and soft, smaller than usual in a way that made Alysa’s chest tighten all over again. “I’m sorry,” you said. Alysa’s brows pulled together immediately.

“No,” she said, almost before you’d finished the first syllable, but you kept going in that same tired, careful tone.

“I know I must’ve worried you. And everyone else.” You swallowed and your gaze moved somewhere near your lap instead of to her face. “I’m not really sure what happened. I just felt so sluggish after the run-through and my legs were, like… really heavy. And then everything just kind of stopped for a bit.” The apology in it nearly killed Alysa. Even now, even after collapsing, after being taken off the ice on a stretcher, after ending up here. You were still apologizing for being the one something happened to. Alysa tightened her grip on your hand and shook her head hard enough that a few loose strands of hair slipped out around her face.

“Don’t apologize,” she said quietly, urgently. “Please don’t apologize. This isn’t your fault.” She leaned a little closer, making sure you were looking at her for this next part. “You did what you were told to do. You trusted people who should’ve been trustworthy. That’s not your fault.” You looked at her for a second, and she could tell you were holding onto every word, not fully believing them yet but wanting to.

Your mouth moved in a tired little line before you said, softer still, “I should’ve listened to you.” That would have been the easiest opening in the world for an uglier kind of person, for a pettier kind of love. Alysa didn’t even feel the temptation.

“No,” she said immediately. “That doesn’t matter. I swear, it doesn’t matter.” And because she couldn’t quite bear where her own mind wanted to go next—to all the ways she blamed herself too—she added, with a gentleness that cost her something, “I should’ve done more. But I’m here now, and you’re okay, and right now you just need to rest your head.”

You seemed to understand what she was doing for you there, even if neither of you said it aloud. Alysa wasn’t rubbing your face in anything. She wasn’t making this into proof that she had been right and she wasn’t touching the awful little landmine of I told you so because she would rather cut her own tongue out than make you feel smaller in this bed than you already must have. So instead she sat down in the chair beside you, still close enough to keep your hand, and let the room settle again.

After a little while you asked, almost shyly, “How did your run-through go?”

Alysa let out a breath that might have become a laugh in a less wrecked universe. “Didn’t really think about it,” she admitted. “I just wanted to get to you.”

You hummed at that, eyes dropping to where your fingers were threaded with hers, and the quiet that followed felt less uncertain now, more tired. Alysa didn’t push conversation because she could see the signs of the headache all over you. So she just stayed there, thumb brushing slowly over your knuckles, trying to offer steadiness rather than questions. She listened to your breathing and counted the rise and fall of it without meaning to.

And in the silence her own feelings kept moving under her skin in ugly currents. She felt sadness so deep it sat almost like nausea, fear still not gone even now that you were awake and under both of those, the anger. Her anger had not left. It had just gone quieter for the moment, settling into a simmer so hot and constant it felt fused to her bones.

When you spoke again, you still weren’t looking at her. Your eyes stayed on your joined hands, your voice low enough that it almost blended into the hum of the room. “I’m out of the competition.” It wasn’t a question but rather a fact laid between you. Alysa closed her eyes for half a second because she hated it so much what it meant. The sentence itself sounded in your voice subdued, like you’d already started turning it over in your head and were trying to make yourself accept it before anyone else could confirm it for you. She remembered California suddenly, so vividly it hurt—both of you up too late in bed talking about Milan like little kids planning a trip, tossing around schedules and outfits and silly things you wanted to trade in the Village, the actual excitement in your voice back when this had still been joy and not survival. She remembered how happy you’d been when the Olympic countdown got close enough to feel real. That memory pressed so hard against the sight of you here now that it only made the anger in her rise again, this grief sharpened immediately by blame.

Still, when she answered you, her voice was quiet and careful. “Yeah,” she said. “With the concussion… they’re not going to clear you.” She braced herself then, expecting the obvious next wave of tears, disappointment, some cracking open around the loss of it.

Instead you smiled. Or something close enough to a smile that most people would have missed it entirely. It was tiny, faint, crooked around exhaustion and if Alysa hadn’t known every shift of your face by heart she might have thought she imagined it. “It’s kind of a relief,” you admitted.

Alysa stared at you. “Relief?” she echoed, because the word felt so backward in this setting she needed to hear it twice.

You made that small humming sound, your neck too stiff to nod properly, and after a moment you said, “I’m too tired.” The honesty of it was brutal. “I’d just go out there and embarrass myself.” Alysa’s face tightened immediately at that, but before she could object you kept going, still in that low, almost thoughtful voice. “And now I’ll be able to watch and root for you without feeling guilty.” That got the briefest flicker of a smile out of her despite everything. The idea of you watching her, all your attention and love pointed in one direction without any of the usual twisted competition logic around it, tugged at something soft in her. But then you added, “Plus it’ll keep them off my back at least until Worlds.” And just like that the softness was gone.

Alysa went still, but not in the stunned way she had before. This was different because it was harder and sharper. Because even now—even after the hospital, after the collapse, after the concussion and the IV and the unmistakable proof that your body had been pushed far past its limit—you were still speaking about your coaches as though they belonged in your future. As if this had only bought you a brief pause from them, a few weeks of relief, before everything slid right back into place: next goal, next deadline, next competition. You’re talking about them as if of course you would return to them and of course they would still be allowed near you. The thought hit Alysa so hard it almost felt physical, like a clean strike right across everything raw and protective in her chest. You had already admitted it had gone too far. You had already ended up here, in this bed, because of them. So hearing you talk like there was still a way back to them felt almost unbearable, a slap in the face not because Alysa wanted to be right, but because she could not understand how the people who had done this to you could still feel normal to you. Could still sound, in your mouth, like something inevitable.

“No,” she said.

The word came out plain and calm, which somehow made it more serious. You finally turned your head a little toward her, brows pulling together in tired confusion. “What?”

Alysa didn’t raise her voice. That was the part she held onto with real effort. She would not argue with you in this room. She would not push you into another sobbing collapse. But she also would not pretend. “You’re not working with them anymore,” she said. “You can’t.”

You blinked at her like the sentence had arrived in the wrong language. “Yes, I can. I will,” you said after a beat, brows furrowing deeper. “What are you talking about?”

Alysa’s mouth tightened. The anger was there now, not at you exactly, but at the whole structure of this, at the fact that even in a hospital bed you still sounded half prepared to hand yourself back to them once the monitors came off. “No, you won’t,” she repeated, still quiet, still deliberate. “Not after what they did to you.” You opened your mouth, probably to argue and to say something practical and frightening like that you needed them or that Worlds was soon or that this wasn’t the time. Alysa saw it coming and cut in before you could get there, desperately. There was no pride left in her posture now, only fear. “Please,” she said, and the nakedness of the word hung in the room between you. “Please don’t do Worlds. Not with them. Just… take a break. Please. Until you feel like you again.” That was what she wanted most and maybe what she had wanted for longer than she’d admitted even to herself. Not just for you to leave them, but for you to return to yourself; for you to return to the version of you before the sport and those coaches and the last several months had wrung you dry. To the girl who laughed too much in California and got excited over stupid Olympic pins and fell asleep halfway through talking because she was content, not because she was collapsing. Your eyes softened at the edge then, not because you agreed fully but because you heard how scared she was.

You sighed, and it was such a tired sound that Alysa immediately regretted making you use even that much energy. “We’ll talk about it later,” you said. “When I’m out of here. When you’re done with the Olympics.” You were clearly trying not to argue too, trying to defer instead of fight. It should have comforted her. Instead it just brushed up against the next panic waiting in her.

“I’m not competing,” Alysa said. The sentence came out before she had fully checked it against reason. “I can’t. Not with you like this in the hospital.”

Your eyes widened, just a little. “What?” You sounded almost more awake for that than anything else. “Yes, you are.”

Alysa shook her head. “I’m really not. I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do.” Her voice had gone stubborn again, that particular edge she got when emotion outran logic and she stopped caring whether the practical world agreed with her. “I just want you.” It was not a sensible conversation. Neither of you were in shape for sensible. You with a concussion and a headache and your whole Olympic dream abruptly cut off. Alysa with guilt and fear and fury making every thought come out too absolute. After a second, maybe you both realized that at the same time, because the tension in the room shifted from argument into something more exhausted and sad.

“We’ll table it,” you murmured finally. “Okay? Can we just be together? ” Alysa hated not resolving anything and leaving these huge things dangling. But what you wanted in that moment was simple and immediate and she could actually give it. You wanted her close. There was no argument in the world that would make Alysa deny you that.

So she did the only thing that felt right. She stood up, lowered the railing on the side of the bed as carefully as she could, and got as close as the bed allowed without jostling anything. Then she draped one arm gently across your waist, light enough not to bother the IV or tug at any wires, and rested her head on the mattress beside where you were propped up. It was not the most comfortable angle in the world, but the second she settled there and felt your warmth through the blanket, some small frantic part of her finally eased. You were close and alive and doing okay. Alysa kept one hand over yours and listened to every breath as if it mattered, because right then it did.

The sadness was still there, huge and aching. The anger too, simmering hot the second she thought of Elena and Martin and the fact that you had still mentioned them like an open future. But laid under all of it now was the oldest instinct she had with you, the one that survived every fight and every fear which was to stay and to give you whatever steadiness she could. The room stayed dim and quiet around you. Outside, the Olympics kept moving without permission. Inside, for a little while, there was only your body finally still for a reason other than collapse, Alysa anchored at your side and both of you too tired and too emotional to solve the rest of your lives tonight. So she didn’t try. She just stayed there with her arm across your waist and her cheek against the bed, close enough that if you shifted even slightly toward her, she’d feel it immediately.

The room had barely settled again before it started filling with officials.

It happened gradually at first, a quiet knock, then another, the sort of careful hospital-room choreography where everyone entering seems to lower their voice a notch out of respect. Alysa straightened from where she’d been folded against the side of the bed, her arm still draped lightly across your waist until the last second, and stepped back just enough to give them room without really leaving your orbit. The Team USA Chief Medical Officer came in first, calm and measured, followed by the U.S. Figure Skating Team Leader with a thin folder tucked under one arm and the kind of face people wear when they’re trying to keep something procedural from feeling cruel.

The bedside lamp still cast the room in that low amber light, making all their official seriousness look almost too sharp against the softness of the bed and the blanket and your pale face on the pillow. Alysa felt herself go taut the second she saw the folder because she already knew what it meant. Withdrawal official paperwork. The formal end of something you were supposed to still have in front of you. Even after you had called it a relief, even after you had admitted you were too tired to keep going, some part of her still braced for the sight of it to break you open because this was not just any competition being signed away with a borrowed pen in a hospital room. This was the Olympics. The very thing every skater grows up reaching toward, whether they admit it out loud or not. Alysa knew what it had meant to you because she had heard it in your voice before, in those rare softer moments when the future still looked bright and untouched. She had seen the hopeful look in your eyes when you talked about getting there one day, about what it would feel like to step onto Olympic ice, to finally have all those years of work culminate in something that big, that impossible, that sacred to people like you. And now here it was, not as a dream realized, but as paperwork at the edge of your hospital bed. All because the very people who were supposed to get you there safely had pushed you so far past your limits that your body had given out before you ever really got your chance.

That was the part that hurt Alysa most as she stood there watching. It wasn’t just that the Olympics were being taken from you, but that it made everything you had suffered through feel suddenly, cruelly pointless. All those brutal mornings and the hunger and the pain and all the ways you had made yourself smaller and harder and emptier in service of one shining goal. You had let so much be done to you because there was always the Olympics to justify it, a next milestone, a next thing to survive for. But now there was no next skate here. No short program tomorrow. And no chance to step out and prove that all the years and all the damage had led somewhere worthy of what they cost. It’s now just a form with a signature and a hospital room quiet enough for Alysa to feel the grief of it pressing in from every side. So yes, when the team leader explained gently that your name needed to be officially withdrawn before the start order for the singles short program was locked, Alysa felt the loss of it like a bruise being pushed on. She really didn’t care more about the event than your health, but she knew exactly what was being buried here with a few strokes of your hand. The version of this that you had once looked at with hopeful eyes and believed would be yours.

And still, you surprised her. You did not shatter or go quiet in that wounded, inward way she had half expected, as if the papers themselves might cut something out of you. You went strangely still, yes, and your mouth flattened a little, but when the team leader explained what had to happen, you only listened. You asked one or two small questions in that scratchy voice of yours, mostly practical ones, then took the pen they handed you and signed where they indicated with hands that shook only a little. Alysa watched your name appear on the line and had the unbearable thought that this should have been attached to accreditation, to starting orders, to the kind of Olympic paperwork people keep forever because it means they made it. Instead it was attached to your exit. Then you handed the papers back and apologized, because of course you did.

“I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” you murmured, and the whole room reacted to that at once.

The chief medical officer immediately shook his head. The team leader’s expression softened. “No,” he said, firm and kind. “Don’t apologize. None of this is your fault.” Alysa felt a brief, fierce burst of gratitude toward every adult in the room who answered you that way, because if she had heard one ounce of blame aimed at you after all this, she genuinely might have lost her mind again.

But it was when the USOPC Safeguarding Officer arrived that the air changed.

She came in with that particular calm that didn’t read as softness so much as training, someone who knew exactly how to enter a room where the wrong tone could send everything sideways. She introduced herself clearly, quietly, then explained in careful language that there had been allegations raised regarding medical neglect and athlete safety, and that certain protocols would now follow while those concerns were investigated. Alysa had a brief, ugly flicker of hope hearing it spoken so plainly. She wished it wasn't happening like this with you in a hospital bed, but she was glad that finally someone with authority was naming the thing for what it was. This was neglect and harm. This was going against safety. It was something damaging enough to require intervention. For a second she thought maybe this would be a relief to you too, maybe some part of you, buried under all the exhaustion and fear and conditioning, would feel the shape of a door opening. Maybe you'd hear it and understand that this was what safety looked like even if it showed up late and in an ugly form.

Then the officer explained, in the same measured voice, that because of the investigation your coaches would not be permitted access to you while this was ongoing. And Alysa watched your face shift in real time.

It wasn’t anger first. And it wasn’t confusion either. It was deep, immediate, involuntary fear. The kind that bypasses logic entirely and lands straight in the body. You looked up too fast, the movement making pain pinch visibly through your expression, and the fragile composure you had kept through the withdrawal paperwork vanished all at once.

“What?” you said, and the word came out sharper than anything you’d said since Alysa had gotten there. The safeguarding officer repeated herself, slower this time, grounding every sentence in safety and temporary measures and alternate support staff who would be assigned to you in the meantime. But you were already spiraling in a way Alysa knew, and knew too well. This was trauma, plain and simple. Years of it, probably. Years of being shaped by Elena and Martin, measured by them, hurt by them and then taught to call that hurt necessary. They had been there from the start of your career. They had attached themselves to every success, every milestone, every piece of progress until your nervous system no longer knew how to separate them from skating itself. To you, in this moment, they were not just two people being taken away. They were structure and routine. They were the system your body had learned to equate with survival, achievement, longevity, worth. Losing them did not feel, to the part of you that was panicking, like being rescued. It felt like freefall.

Alysa knew that feeling. She knew it well enough that watching it happen in you felt almost unbearable. She had lived inside her own version of it before she retired, had once defended the very things that were eating her alive because she did not know who she would be without them. It had taken her far too long to understand that the way she was training, the way she was being treated, was not sustainable and was never love. It had taken leaving, grieving, breaking her own heart a little, before she could accept that care had to mean more than what someone could get out of her on the ice. So she recognized exactly what was happening now as your panic sharpened and took on the frantic, cornered quality of someone trying to claw back toward the only system they knew, even as that system had nearly broken them.

You pushed yourself a little more upright despite the obvious discomfort and looked from the officer to then finally Alysa, your eyes wide and bright with that brittle kind of alarm that made Alysa’s stomach drop. “What?” you repeated, more breathless now. “No. They’re my coaches. I want to work with them still.” The officer didn’t challenge you directly. She stayed in that grounded tone and tried to explain again that the investigation had to proceed and that support would be arranged. But you were slipping faster now, words tripping over each other as your brain tried desperately to grab onto what felt familiar before it was taken away. “No, no, I—” You stopped and looked straight at Alysa then, and she knew before you even said it where it was going. “You did this, didn’t you?” Your voice cracked around the accusation. “You said something?”

Alysa opened her mouth, but you were already going, panic talking faster than thought. Panic was doing the talking now, but panic in the shape your coaches had helped build. All those weeks of telling you Alysa was making you weak. That she was softening you on purpose. That she got in the way because you were her competition and every bit of energy you gave her was energy taken from your skating. That she wanted you distracted, tired, emotional, off balance. In a healthier state you might have heard those things and rejected them. But trauma has a way of making the worst narrative feel suddenly plausible the second your foundation is threatened. And now here was Alysa, tied directly to the moment your coaches were being removed from your reach. So of course the fear turned toward her. Of course it made horrible sense to you, in that fractured second, that she was not protecting you but taking something from you. “Really?” you said, and now there was anger in it too, but helpless anger, the kind that belongs to panic more than conviction. “Why? Why would you do this? I need them.”

Alysa took one step closer to the bed and made herself keep her voice low, because the instinct to argue hard was there and she knew it would only make you panic worse. “You don’t need them,” she said carefully. “At all. Please, this is for your own good.” She meant every word, but even as she said it she could see how unreachable you were in that second. You weren’t hearing reassurance. You were hearing loss. This was control being stripped from a situation where you already felt out of control. What Alysa wanted for you was real safety and real love, the kind that cared about you beyond skating, beyond output, beyond usefulness. But abuse does something vicious to a person’s sense of safety. It teaches you to fear the wrong thing and blinds you to gentleness because gentleness feels unstable, unfamiliar, too unstructured to trust. So when Alysa stood there offering you the truth, you couldn’t reach for it while your whole nervous system was screaming that survival was being stripped from your hands.

You let out a weak, disbelieving scoff and looked away from her as if the sight of her hurt too much to process right then. “Can everyone just leave me alone?” you muttered, then louder, more frayed, “Please. Just leave me alone.”

The officer glanced at the others and gave a small nod. It wasn’t a refusal of what was happening, only a recognition that pushing further in this moment would do more harm than good. One by one, people started filing out. Alysa hesitated, rooted there by the bed for an extra beat because every instinct in her screamed not to leave you while you looked like that—pale, frightened, angry in the helpless way fear often looks angry. She knew, better than almost anyone else in that room, that your meanness right now was not cruelty but rather it was a trauma response. Your eyes stayed averted, your whole body drawn inward now, and she knew enough to understand when closeness was no longer comfort for the moment. So she backed away too, slower than everyone else, and left with that awful feeling of abandoning you even while knowing you had asked for space.

-------

The hallway outside was louder, harsher, all fluorescent glare and tension with nowhere to soften it.

Alysa had barely cleared the doorway when she saw them. Philip and Massimo were several yards down, squared off with Elena and Martin in a formation so tense it looked like it had snapped into place mid-conflict. Elena was furious already, her posture pitched forward, one hand cutting through the air as she talked in that clipped, poisonous way she got when her self-control was fraying. Martin was trying for composed but failing; there was a tightness in his jaw and shoulders that made it obvious he was just as desperate to get past as Elena was. Philip and Massimo were holding the line physically without making it look like a brawl, bodies placed just so, shoulders broad and still, not touching unless they had to but making it impossible to advance.

Alysa felt the temperature in her body change immediately. All the care she had just been trying to channel toward you, all the restraint she had used in that room, curdled back into something hard and dangerous.

Then the safeguarding officer stepped out behind Alysa and said, in a cool, formal tone, “Excuse me. You cannot be here.” Elena spun toward the voice, already halfway through an objection, and the officer kept going before she could build momentum. She explained the immediate restriction, the investigation, the fact that they should already have been notified of the no-contact order. That was when Elena exploded.

Her whole face twisted, all the polished professionalism finally splitting open to show the ugly underneath. She pointed one shaking finger straight at Alysa. “You,” she snapped, the word almost spat. “You did this.” And then she moved. She launched herself forward in that hot, impulsive way of someone who has lost all sense of optics. Massimo was on her in a second, one arm out to block, another staff member catching from the other side before she could get close enough to actually touch Alysa. Martin stepped in too, but whether to restrain Elena or keep control of the scene was impossible to tell. Alysa, for her part, didn’t shrink back, didn’t freeze. She didn’t even really think. The fury that had been simmering under her skin all evening rose so fast it almost felt cathartic to have the people it was aimed at standing in front of her finally. She stepped forward too, stopped only because Philip’s arm shot out across her middle.

“Alysa,” he warned, but it was already too late for warning. Everything she had been carrying—every bruise she’d seen on you, every late-night collapse into her arms, every meal missed, every cruel word thrown at you and then echoed back at her this morning, the sight of you on the ice, the hospital bed, the panic in your face when they were taken away—came tearing out of her in one blistering wave.

“You don’t get to act like this is my fault,” she shouted, her voice ringing down the corridor so sharply that people farther down actually stopped moving. “You did this to her. You did every single part of this.” Elena tried to talk over her, but Alysa was beyond letting anyone interrupt now. Her whole body shook with the force of it, hands open and flexing uselessly at her sides because if Philip let go she would absolutely lunge. “You starved her, overworked her, you kept pushing her when she was exhausted, and then when she collapsed you stood there and lied about it all like she did this to herself.” The last sentence came out ragged with disbelief, because even now that part enraged her fresh each time she thought of it. Elena’s face had gone mottled with anger, but Alysa didn’t stop. “You made her afraid of everything good,” she yelled. “You made her feel guilty for eating, for resting, guilty for loving me, guilty for needing anything at all. You kept feeding her this disgusting bullshit until she didn’t even know what was real anymore. I'm not the problem when all I was trying to do was keep her alive long enough to get out from under you.” Martin tried then, in that maddeningly controlled voice, to say something about Alysa being emotional and inappropriate and not understanding the demands of elite sport, and that was almost enough to send her physically over the edge. She twisted against Philip’s hold so hard his grip had to tighten. “Don’t you dare,” she snapped, face contorted with hatred. “Don’t you dare stand there and make this about skating. This is abuse. It’s cruelty.” Her voice broke and then sharpened again. “I hate you. I hate both of you so much. I wish you would just leave her alone. Just leave her the hell alone.”

By then her rant had become less clean, less organized, the accumulation of weeks and months spilling out in whatever order the pain handed it to her. “You took everything she was excited about and turned it into punishment,” she said, shaking all over now, tears stinging again because anger and grief were inseparable at this point. “She was happy to be here. She was supposed to be happy. But you turned it into this. You turned her into somebody who's sorry for collapsing because that’s what you’ve taught her to do, and you still think you’re the victims? You still think you get to stand here and be offended?” Elena was shouting back now too, something about Alysa meddling, about distraction, about how she had derailed your focus and poisoned your season, but Alysa barely heard the content because all she could really process was the sound of Elena’s voice existing at all this close to your room. “Shut up,” Alysa screamed over her. “Shut the fuck up. She is in there because of you.” And then, because fury had tipped fully into something feral and her body needed an outlet for it, she surged again. Philip caught her around the middle before she got more than half a step, Massimo and another official working at the same time to force Elena backward.

In the chaos of it, before the distance between them widened enough to make it impossible, Alysa did the ugliest, most impulsive thing she’d probably ever done in her life: she spat. It hit Elena square enough to land. The silence that followed was split-second and shocked. Then everyone moved at once.

Elena recoiled with a strangled sound of disgust and disbelief, wiping at her face furiously while shouting something incoherent. Martin lunged toward her, or maybe toward the officials, and was blocked. Philip hauled Alysa back hard against him, one hand hooked across her ribs and the other at her shoulder, while Massimo put himself physically between the groups with startling ease for someone not especially large. Hospital security, already alerted by the noise, arrived almost immediately and that finally shifted the balance from chaos into forced separation. Elena and Martin were dragged farther down one end of the corridor, still protesting, still insisting this was some kind of outrageous misunderstanding, trying to salvage authority even while being removed from the floor entirely.

Alysa was pulled the opposite direction, breathing like she’d run miles, still straining for one more second to get at them. She stopped only when the physical distance made it truly pointless. By then the anger was still roaring through her, but underneath it there was also the same unshakable truth that had driven all of it. This wasn’t about winning some hallway confrontation. It was about you. It always comes back to you. You in the room nearby, confused and hurting and still half-defending the people who’d broken you because that’s what survival had trained into your nervous system. You, who Alysa cared about enough that watching you unravel had turned her from one of the most carefree people in the building into someone who genuinely wanted blood for a second. That was the thing no one but a few people close enough to love you both would ever really understand. Alysa wasn’t yelling because she wanted drama. She wasn’t even yelling because she needed to vent. She was fighting with the only language left in her body because love had nowhere else to go when it got cornered by this much harm.

As the corridor finally settled into the aftermath, Alysa stood there shaking and breathless, hair a mess, face hot with the remnants of screaming, and felt the last ugly waves of hatred still breaking under her skin. She knew she had crossed lines. Knew spitting on someone was insane and childish and probably indefensible in any neat moral framework. But she didn’t care, like, at all. What she cared about in that moment was that they were gone, at least from this building, at least from your door. And even as Philip’s hand stayed steady on the back of her neck and Massimo muttered something low about her needing to breathe, Alysa’s focus was already turning back toward the room you were in, toward what shape your panic might be taking now, toward how to get back to you in whatever way you’d allow. Because beneath all the rage and all the destruction, that was still the center of her. She just wanted you safe. She just wanted you free of them long enough to remember what safety even felt like.

So she waited.

She waited because that was what you had asked for and because loving you had taught her by now that sometimes the hardest thing was not fighting for closeness but staying still enough to let you come back on your own. An hour passed strangely in the hospital, all stretched and blurred at once. Alysa stayed nearby. Phillip and Massimo stayed with her for part of it, then drifted just far enough away to give her the illusion of space without leaving her alone. Alysa hardly noticed much of any of it. She kept her eyes trained on the door, every now and then hearing movement inside and feeling her chest tighten.

She replayed everything while she waited. She saw your face when the officer told you your coaches would be kept away. She heard the fear in your voice when you turned on her. She remembered the way panic had made her look like the threat instead of the person trying most desperately to protect you. Alysa didn't hold that against you because she understood where it all came from. Still, understanding it did not make waiting easier. It only made her heart ache in a quieter, more helpless way.

When the nurse finally came to tell her you were asking for her, Alysa was out of the chair before the sentence had fully landed. She stopped herself at the doorway, though, suddenly careful again, aware that the last time you had looked at her you were panicked and accusing and terrified of what she had taken from you. But the second you saw her, your face changed so that the tightness in your mouth eased and your eyes softened with something closer to recognition than fear. Alysa crossed the room slower this time, and you reached for her before she could overthink anything. She sat down immediately, close enough to touch, and for a moment the two of you just looked at each other in the low hospital light like you were both trying to recalibrate after the violence of the day.

When you finally spoke, your voice was quiet and tired and stripped of all that frantic edge from earlier. “I know you weren’t doing anything with bad intentions,” you said. The words came haltingly, as if you had to feel your way through each one. “I know that.” Alysa’s whole face shifted at that. Some guarded part of her loosened. She tightened her fingers around yours and nodded once, unable to trust herself with too much speech right away. You swallowed, looked down at your joined hands, and then said the thing that mattered even more. “Just… be patient with me, okay? While I get better.” It was such a small ask compared to everything else, and yet Alysa heard all the weight under it. Be patient while I untangle this. Be patient while I grieve what I thought those people were to me. Be patient while I relearn what safety looks like.

Alysa’s eyes burned immediately, but she kept her voice steady. “I don’t care how long it takes,” she said. “I’m here. I’m always gonna be here.”

And for the moment, that was enough. It did not erase the trauma or snap anything neatly into place. It would take weeks before you could really name what your coaches had done as abuse instead of strictness, coercion instead of care. Weeks before the reflexive defending stopped. But right then your world had narrowed in the same way Alysa’s had. Down to pain, exhaustion, and the one person who still felt safe enough to reach for. You were focused on Alysa now, and almost immediately that focus turned outward. Because even bruised and concussed and reeling, some part of you was still thinking about her. About her competition. About what came next for her.

When Alysa hesitated around the subject of the Olympics, you caught it before she could even shape the words. You asked her what she was going to do, and Alysa was honest because there was no point pretending with you. She told you she didn’t know. That she wasn’t sure she wanted to go back out there. Alysa had become someone who only did things she was fully sure about, and right then she was sure of almost nothing except that she wanted to stay in that room with you. But she was also sure of one other thing, and that certainty sat deeper than all the rest, which was if you asked something of her, she wanted to give it to you. So when you made it clear, gently but insistently, that you needed her to finish this, that you needed her to skate, Alysa listened. Not because medals suddenly mattered more than they had an hour before, and not because she stopped being scared for you. But this was what you wanted and loving you had always made obedience in certain directions feel easy.

Alysa competed for you.

Once she said yes, that became the line she held all the way through the rest of the Olympics. Through the short program. Through the free skate. Through the cameras, the noise, the pressure, the thousand little demands that came with standing at the center of something as huge as the Games. Alysa kept you in her chest the whole time. It made everything simpler. She wasn’t skating for judges or skating for headlines or federation approval or even entirely for herself. She was skating for both of you. This was for the girl in the hospital bed who should have been there doing this too. For the skater who had been robbed of the chance to step onto that ice on her own terms. For the life you had both been trying to claw back from the people who had turned skating into punishment. That was what pushed her more than ambition did. Love pushed her. Love, and the fierce, almost unbearable desire to carry something through to the end for the person she loved most in the world. It changed the feeling of the programs. Alysa did not skate empty. She skated full. Full of you, full of grief, full of the need to make something beautiful out of what had been made cruel. And when she won gold, the feeling that hit her hardest was not triumph. It was relief. Vast, exhausted, almost dizzying relief. Relief that it was over. Relief that she had done the one thing you asked of her. Relief that she could stop splitting herself between performance and panic and turn the full force of her attention back where it had wanted to be all along—toward you, toward home, toward helping you heal.

Later, before the worst of your concussion eased enough that the light from a phone screen no longer made you miserable, you heard secondhand from her family and friends how often Alysa had talked about you during all of the interviews, speeches. She spoke about you in those glossy, triumphant moments when the world wanted to frame her gold as a singular feat belonging only to her, she kept finding ways to bend the story back toward you. She never did it in a way that exposed what you didn’t want exposed. She was careful with your privacy, always. But she still kept threading you into it, kept making it known in every safe way she could that she had not done this alone in spirit, that there was someone at the center of all of it. You found that embarrassingly sweet when people told you. More than sweet, really.

Moving in a way you didn’t quite know what to do with at first, because you were still relearning what it meant to be loved without conditions attached. When you told Alysa as much, told her quietly that it meant something to you, she only smiled in that shy, crooked way she got when praise made her blush and shrugged like it was obvious. And to her, it was obvious. Of course she had done it for you. Of course she had wanted to make you happy. Of course every medal in the world felt smaller than seeing your face soften when you realized how much of her heart she had carried out there. That was the truth underneath all of it. Alysa loved you in a way that made devotion feel less like sacrifice and more like instinct. And once the Olympics finally ended and the two of you flew home to California, that instinct had somewhere quieter to go. No more cameras. No more podiums. No more hospital corridors or Olympic schedules. Just ordinary days. And that, finally, was where the real healing could begin.

-------

Once you were home, healing did not arrive in any clean, inspiring rush. It did not sweep in and make sense of everything all at once. It came in uneven pieces, some so small they might have looked meaningless to anyone not living inside them. Alysa turned almost ridiculously hands-on once you were home. She tracked your headaches like they were weather alerts, lowering lights before you even had to ask, keeping the TV low, catching the moment your eyes went unfocused and steering you gently back toward the couch or bed before the pain spiked too hard. Recovery from the concussion came in increments. First the headaches stopped owning every hour. Then light bothered you less. Then the exhaustion started feeling like normal tiredness again instead of something frightening and bottomless.

She made sure your body was fed and watered with the kind of attentive, practical devotion that would have felt suffocating from anyone else. With Alysa it only took time before it started to feel safe. At first you resisted more than either of you talked about. You accepted water like it was some strange test your body had forgotten how to pass. You accepted food like it was a negotiation, sometimes finishing it, sometimes stopping halfway and insisting you were done even when Alysa could tell you weren’t. A second serving felt excessive and dessert felt illicit. Hunger itself had become so tangled up with guilt that even wanting something could make you tense. Mornings were often the worst. There were days when you woke before dawn and couldn’t fall back asleep, your body too trained to expect demands at impossible hours, so you’d end up pacing the apartment at six in the morning with restless energy you didn’t know where to put. Alysa would wake to the soft sound of your footsteps and find you in the kitchen or near the window, not upset exactly, but unable to settle. She never made a big deal of it, she’d just come up behind you, press a sleepy kiss somewhere easy like your shoulder, the side of your head, the back of your neck, and ask if you wanted tea or if you wanted to go back to bed and just lie there even if sleep never came. Sometimes you said yes. Sometimes you said no and kept pacing. But over time your body began to learn that dawn no longer belonged to somebody else. That no one was waiting to punish you for resting

And still, none of this was Alysa “fixing” you. That was never the full truth of it, and on some level both of you knew that. You were doing the work too, slow and often miserable work, the kind that did not look dramatic from the outside but cost a lot internally. Therapy helped, though even that was not a neat thing. Some sessions left you lighter while others left you raw and quiet for the rest of the day. Sometimes you came home and climbed straight into Alysa’s lap without saying much, and she understood that this was one of the days where talking had already taken too much out of you. Some days you cried out of nowhere because something ordinary had scraped against an old nerve. Sometimes you were angry in a directionless way, not at Alysa, or really at anyone in the room, but at the sheer exhaustion of having to teach yourself a different way to live. There were nights when you admitted, voice shaking with embarrassment, that you felt guilty about the investigation. Guilty that it was happening and that people were asking questions. You felt guilty that Elena and Martin might get in trouble. And then, because trauma is circular, guilty for feeling guilty at all, because some rational part of you knew what they had done and still your body reacted like you were betraying them. Alysa learned not to pounce on those moments with correction, even when she hated what your old coaches had built inside you. She did not say how can you still feel bad for them? even when some exhausted part of her wanted to. She understood that what you were grieving was bigger and stranger than just two awful adults. You were grieving your childhood, your idea of success. The version of your life where all the suffering had a point and all the control was leading somewhere worthy enough to justify it. You were grieving the lore of your own career. So when you said, tired and ashamed, that maybe they hadn’t meant it that way, or that maybe they had only pushed because they cared, Alysa no longer argued every time. She held you, rubbed your back, kissed your temple, your knuckles, the corner of your mouth. She told you softly that it was okay to be confused, okay to miss people who hurt you, okay to mourn a version of your life that was never actually safe. She kissed it better the only way she knew how, not because kisses solved anything, but because tenderness gave your nervous system somewhere else to live while the larger truths caught up.

Overall, the trauma showed up in mundane places more than anywhere else. In the way you’d pause before opening the fridge, as if you needed permission from someone no longer there. In how quickly your body tensed if you slept later than you meant to, even on days with nowhere to be. In how often you apologized for things that did not need apology. Alysa noticed all of it and each time, whether she spoke or not, she was reminded with a renewed, deep hatred of exactly what had been done to you.

The hatred did not burn as hot as it had in the hospital hallway, but it ran deeper now, more constant, because it had seeped into the ordinary fabric of your life. Any time you hesitated over food or water, any time you looked guilty for resting, any time your body reacted to safety like it was something suspicious, Alysa felt that same ugly certainty settle in her. She hated them for this and how they had trained your body against itself. Distance kept them out of the apartment, out of the rink, out of your days, but it did not immediately keep them out of your head, and Alysa hated them most for that. The investigation moving in the background made everything feel even weirder. Ugly and necessary all at once. You had to revisit things you did not want to revisit. There were nights after talking to officials when you cried from pure emotional exhaustion, and Alysa held you through those too. She never asked you to be brave in some glamorous way. But the truth was, you were. You were brave every time you told the truth, even when it made you feel disloyal. Brave every time you woke up beside Alysa and chose, again, not to turn away from the person your coaches had spent months trying to frame as your enemy. You had been trained, in a hundred subtle and not subtle ways, to resent softness, to mistrust love, to view Alysa as a distraction, a threat before your comfort. And still, every morning you went against that. Every morning you let her help. Alysa saw it and felt it every time you stayed in bed beside her a few minutes longer instead of leaping up. Every time you took the glass of water she handed you without flinching first. Every time you leaned into her touch rather than bracing against it.

As your body eased, Alysa began helping you find pieces of yourself that had nothing to do with skating or discipline or pain thresholds. She made your days wider. You went to the movies and sat in the dark with popcorn between you, Alysa glancing over every now and then simply because she genuinely loved seeing you react to things, loved the easy laughs slipping back out of you. You walked in the park slowly at first, then longer, the kind of aimless walks that had no training goal attached, no stopwatch or critique waiting at the end. You stayed up past nine because you wanted to, talking about stupid things, talking about nothing, laughing in that loose breathless way that only happens when nobody is trying to manage you. Alysa got you to eat sweets without commentary attached to them. Now it wasn't some dramatic act of rebellion, but as part of life—half a pastry stolen from her plate, ice cream melting too fast while you sat outside, dessert because it sounded good. At first each of these things felt small and weirdly difficult, little moments where old guilt still flickered. But Alysa met every hesitation with the same steady, unembarrassed reassurance until your body started learning a new pattern.

Then the findings finally came down, and your old coaches were banned officially. Permanently that the world seemed to tilt into a slightly more breathable position. It did not erase what they had done. It did not make your grief disappear or your healing linear. But it mattered to the both of you. It mattered that an institution had finally named them correctly and shut the door behind them. Alysa felt something unclench after that, something she had not fully realized she’d been carrying with her every hour: the fear that they might somehow still get back in. Once the ban was real, the hatred changed again. It did not vanish cleanly. She still hated them. Probably always would, at least a little, for what they had made you feel about yourself. But the hatred no longer ruled the room. And with that absence, the life in front of both of you got bigger. By the time you were six months out from the Olympics, summer had done some of its own work too. It had given you sunlight and time and days not measured by scores. Alysa had watched you return not in one grand transformation but in tiny unmistakable ways. You laughed more easily. Your shoulders stayed back instead of folding in. You moved through rooms like someone allowed to take up space in them. You were back on the ice by then with a new coach and choreographer, and the difference in you there almost hurt Alysa to look at sometimes because it showed so clearly how wrong the old life had been. You knew life outside of skating now in a way you hadn’t before. You had lived a whole summer where your body belonged to you and your joy mattered. You were beginning to understand, deeply, that skating could still be yours without devouring you.

One night months after the Olympics, the two of you were in bed talking yourselves toward sleep in the easy, stupid way couples do when the world is finally quiet enough to let silliness breathe. It was one of those conversations that started nowhere and kept mutating. You were laughing about dreams, but like, actual dreams, the ridiculous kind your brain invents at three in the morning, and you told Alysa about one where you were somehow on the moon and had what you were sure was the best movie idea of your life but were in full panic because there was no pen, no paper, nothing to write it down with before you forgot. Alysa, already half smiling into the pillow, admitted that she sometimes dreamed she was ruler of the entire world and had made you her co-ruler for no reason beyond the fact that it seemed correct. You laughed so hard at that you had to bury your face in her shoulder for a second. Then the laughter softened.

You went quiet in a thoughtful way, not sad exactly, just a little far away for a beat, and finally said, “You kind of already are ruler of the whole world, though. The way everybody loves you post-Olympics.”

Alysa shrugged against the pillow, as if the answer were obvious. “I don’t care about winning gold,” she said.

You looked at her and gave that small knowing hum that meant I know. Then, after another second, you admitted in a voice so soft it almost dissolved into the dark, “I had another dream too. I was competing my short program at the Olympics, but then the rink turned into a beach, so I never got my score.” You huffed a little laugh after saying it, like you were offering it up as something absurd rather than tragic, and you were not self-pitying when you said it.

But the image still hit Alysa somewhere deep and bruised. For a second she could see it too clearly because it did happen in a way. She saw you gliding out ready to begin, only for the whole world beneath you to change shape before you got the chance. It made her quietly, fiercely sad in a way she did not fully show. She turned her head on the pillow and looked at you.

“You’ll get a score one day,” she said softly. “Trust. I believe in that.”

You laughed under your breath and shook your head a little. “You believe in anything.”

Alysa smiled then, small and certain in the dark. “Yeah, I do.” Then, after a beat: “But I mainly just believe in you.” The room went quiet after that, full. It was the kind of silence that belongs to love when it has survived enough to stop needing to prove itself every second. You stayed there together in the dark, close and breathing the same air, both of you still brave enough to love each other after everything. And that was the thing that mattered most in the end—not that the fear had been small, because it hadn’t, and not that healing had been simple, because it wasn’t, but that every day since Milan, in ways tiny and enormous, the two of you had kept choosing each other anyway.

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You were back on the ice before the season started, and so was Alysa, but it felt different in a way that went beyond schedules or training plans. You were working with a new coach and a new choreographer, people whose presence didn’t make your body flinch before your mind had even processed them. The first few weeks with them were almost surreal for Alysa to witness because she kept waiting, at some low stupid level, for the old tension to reappear. It didn’t. Your new team was supportive in a way that seemed to keep surprising you too. They asked instead of demanded. They explained instead of demeaned. You set boundaries because Alysa had spent months helping you believe you could, but more and more you found you didn’t need to wield them like armor every second because the people around you were not trying to take pieces of you. More important than that, you had lived enough outside the rink by then to understand something much deeper than any coaching note could teach; skating was not the whole world. Results were not the whole point. You could love the feeling of movement again without attaching your worth to what some panel did with it afterward. Alysa saw that understanding take root in you and it made her feel almost absurdly proud. Proud in the quiet, overwhelming way that sits behind the ribs and makes everything look softened at the edges. Watching you change like that felt, somehow, like falling in love with you all over again while also realizing she had never once stopped.

One afternoon near the start of the new season, Alysa stood by the boards and watched you in the middle of the rink with your new coach. The air had that familiar sharp bite of an indoor rink, cold enough to sting your lungs a little if you breathed too deep, and the overhead lights glinted off the clean ice in long white streaks. Your coach had just stepped back after speaking to you, leaving you alone for a moment in the center while you reset. Alysa’s hands rested on the top of the boards and she found herself staring in that helpless, full-hearted way she still did with you. She had spent months looking at you like this, searching for signs without always meaning to. She would look for hurt, for hesitation, for the old instinct to fold inward and for that terrible hollowed-out look that used to live in your face when being watched felt like being measured. But that was not what she saw now. What she saw was you standing there with your shoulders easy and your chin lifted with a quiet kind of ease that still had the power to stop Alysa cold. You stood tall now. There was life in the way you held yourself again. No hollowness. You looked awake inside your own body. The contrast to February hit Alysa so suddenly it made her chest ache, but not with the old awful grief. This ache was almost lovely. It was the ache of seeing someone you love come back to herself one piece at a time and knowing you got to witness it. Alysa had wanted, for so long, to take everything bad out of your path by force. She wanted to take the fear out of your body, the guilt out of your throat, the shaking out of your hands, the old voices out of your head. She had wanted to absorb every hit for you if that was what it took. Wanted to strip away everything that had been assaulting you until all that was left was a life the two of you could actually share without flinching through it. She had learned, eventually, that love did not work like that. She could not pull every splinter out herself. Could not heal you by sheer will. But she could stay and she could love you in all the quiet practical ways that made safety real. She could help build a life wide enough that you could begin to breathe differently inside it. And now, watching you out there on the ice with no cruelty pressing in at your back, she felt something close to wonder. Healing hadn't made you into someone new, but it was returning you to yourself, and Alysa had always believed in that self with a kind of stubbornness that bordered on faith.

Alysa felt a surge of affection so pure it overrode every other impulse. She didn’t overthink it, didn’t weigh whether the moment needed words. There were no evil coaches to intercept her now, no atmosphere of fear to make your closeness dangerous. There was only the wide simple fact that she loved you and wanted to kiss you because she could. So she pushed off from the boards and skated toward you just as your coach drifted away to speak to the choreographer nearby.

You turned when you heard her coming and smiled immediately. It was not the careful smile you used to wear when you were trying to manage everyone else’s reaction to you. It was yours. Soft and genuine, reaching your eyes without effort. Alysa felt it like warmth. She didn’t waste time trying to invent some clever line because there was no need. She got close enough to touch, one hand settling lightly at your waist, and drew you in.

The kiss she gave you was soft and slow, unhurried in that way only safe love gets to be. Your bodies found each other naturally, skates angled close, breath mingling in the cold air above the ice. It wasn’t a desperate kiss, not like the ones stolen in elevators or tunnels under pressure, none of that old hungry need to take whatever closeness you could get before someone came to rip it away. It was something calmer and deeper than that, it was just love. Real love, the kind that survives the worst things and comes out more tender rather than less. Alysa kissed you like she had all the time in the world. Like the point of the kiss was not escape but presence. You kissed her back with the same easy certainty, and she felt something in herself go soft with gratitude. Because that's what this really was, underneath the sweetness of it is relief and bravery and love.

When you finally pulled back, your face had gone a little pink, and you smiled at her in that shy, pleased way that still got her every single time. Alysa just looked at you for a second, almost overwhelmed by how glad she was to have you like this again. You were alive in yourself, standing steady, smiling because you wanted to. You were not healed in some final permanent sense, because neither of you were naïve enough to think healing worked that way. Healing was still happening in those slow, ordinary ways that only became visible when you looked back and realized how far you’d come. But you were here. Steady in the ways that mattered. Softer without being diminished. Stronger without being hardened. Alysa had spent so much of the past year wanting to protect you from everything, wanting to stand between you and every sharp thing in the world, and maybe she still would forever. But here, now, she could see something even better than protection. She could see your own life returning to you. Your own appetite for the world. Your own willingness to believe there could be more for you than endurance.

And that was enough to make Alysa feel happier than any medal ever had. The old coaches were gone. They couldn’t hurt you anymore, couldn’t hurt anyone else again. What was left instead was the rest of your lives, the rest of your careers, and all the ordinary extraordinary time in between. And standing there on the ice with your mouth still soft from kissing her and your face open in that quiet, real way, Alysa felt the truth of her own heart with complete clarity. She believed in anything when it came to you. Believed in the stubborn way of someone who had seen you dragged through the worst of yourself and still get back up. She believed in your joy, in your future, in your softness. Most of all, she believed in the simple fact that you were still here, still reaching for her, still willing to love and be loved after everything.

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And tho kisses can’t solve real world problems,,, I think it’s the love behind them that can lead to steps forward :))) the end

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