Gift for frankiness
Title: So Much We Have Dreamed
For: frankiness-I'm afraid I was feeling ambitious
Pairings: Jana Khokhlova/Mao Asada
Rating: Hard R
Summary: The world championships hold a pair of surprises.(SPOILERS!)
Disclaimer: Work of fiction. Never really happened.
Word Count: 3152
Having begun her campaign to win this World title and establish herself as the favorite for Olympic gold, Jana Khokhlova left the kiss and cry with mixed feelings. She would've liked a higher score; even Shilband's teams could easily break 37. But she knew they were lucky to get as much as they had; they could've performed that paso doble much better.
At any rate, now she passed the other three big teams milling about, waiting for the lesser Canadians to finish so the competition could resume, and then hastily excused herself from Sergei and her coaches with a gesture. Mr. Svinin and Ms. Zhuk looked confused, but Sergei nodded in understanding, and attempted to placate their coaches with another gesture. He knew, which they could not, that she really didn't want to go back into the warm-up area, and possibly run into Meryl Davis. The reporters could wait; they had more paso dobles to watch anyway.
Why had she been so foolish as to let things get that far with Meryl, anyway? They had been in Detroit to get used to the time zone, not to have sex with their competition. Sure, Sergei had probably been hopping around with most of the Detroit boys, but there was a difference between that and never sleeping in your hotel room, because every night you slept in the same girl's bed. Until the last night, when...Jana still couldn't think of that night without wincing. What Meryl had said, what she'd said in retaliation...this wasn't a good mental state to be skating for a World title in.
Wanting to be alone for a minute, she ducked into an office, hoping it was unoccupied. She was disappointed to instead see a female profile in a Japanese team jacket sitting at the desk with her back to Jana, looking at an open laptop showing the ISU website and a monitor showing the lesser Canadians finishing up.
But she felt much better when the girl turned around and Jana recognized her as Mao Asada, possibly the only person who had recently had a break up worse than hers. The sheer nastiness of her split from Yu-Na Kim was a little infamous these days.
"Hello," she said, turning away from the screens. "Very good program." She spoke in okay Russian, which surprised Jana, who had assumed she'd talk to her in English-but when Jana remembered her coaching history, she supposed her knowing some Russian made sense.
"Thanks," she said. "Why are you back here?"
"They try find me, I not want find me," she explained. "Here, they not find me."
"Makes sense." Not caring to see how her competitors were doing, Jana sat down on the floor against the wall to her right, carefully arranging her costume to keep too much of it from touching the probably dirty floor. Abandoning her vigil of the competition-if she wasn't educated about ice dance she was probably bored by now anyway-Mao sat down against the wall opposite her. Jana tried to think about what to say next. She didn't want to talk about Meryl, she assumed this girl did not want to talk about Yu-Na Kim, and that left them with nothing to talk about.
Mao found a subject. "I want know," she said. "What Olympics feel like."
That was something Jana never minded talking about. "Crazy, really; if I had to use one word, it would be that. It's like you're plucked out of the world and put in this closed off alternate dimension where you follow directions every single moment of your life for a weekend if you're a pairs skater and two weeks if you skate ladies singles and all around you people are going mad because if they don't do this or that exactly this way their lives, are over and there's no point to existing anymore-in Torino, I was lucky; I was the third entry, no pressure. They were telling me to just soak it up, and I was wondering if I wanted this insanity in my system! In Vancouver, you know, the two of us will be the ones going mad. It's getting hard to even think of that as a bad thing, though, I've changed so much these past three years. There was this time, the day of the free dance in Torino, where I ran away from Sergei and our coaches and fled the village and just wandered at random through the adjoining streets like a madwoman, and I was trying to breath the entire time because I felt like I was going to suffocate if I didn't get away. You can say we live our lives like that anyway, that all elite athletes do, but we don't; we do our thing for much of the day, sure, but then we go home and we're on our own, we're ordinary citizens of the world once again. At the Olympics you're not, you don't get that respite. But haven't people told you about this already?"
"They say...they say it is big, it is important, it is...they say things that everyone say. They say you have big feelings, big happiness or big sadness. They say you are proud. They say it is different from everything else. They do not say anything...anything real. They do not say about...different, or directions, or suffocate."
"They never do, do they?" agreed Jana; she'd heard all the speeches about what it was like at the Olympics, both before and after experiencing it for herself. "And now, you know, I don't know how to talk to my training mates. Ekaterina Rubleva and Ivan Shefer, who've got a serious chance of going with me and Sergei to Vancouver next year. They listen to all the Olympic propaganda and they just eat it up, and of course it's all got real truth to it so it's harder to explain to them...there might be nothing for it but to let them get the shock treatment Sergei and I did. Maybe that's only way you believe it's the way it is."
"Fumie, though," said Mao, "she say some things to me once. She say about meeting people, about official people and long time you listen to them, about first week is long...she talk about sex."
"Oh, yes, the sex," laughed Jana. "Sooner or later, someone talks to you about the sex. One of the first things Katia asked me was about the sex! That's got it's unpleasant side too, though; I got pawed by a few guys who were less than appealing. I felt like everyone wanted me."
"You have anyone you want."
"Well, not exactly, because I wasn't the only girl they wanted! Thankfully. But yes, I had my pick, once I was done skating. Normally I don't have a problem with sex during competitions, either, but there were strict rules against it from the Russian Olympic team leaders, and I didn't want to defy them. I mean, you think Tatiana Antonlievna and the ISU officials are scary? They're not scary. Those guys, they were scary. So I didn't bed all the people I had my sights on, but for only having about four to five days, it's kind of disturbing how many people I fucked." She thought, too, of that final night, and of Oksana Domnina, but only for a fleeting moment-that pain, at least, was now long gone.
She noticed that both while mentioning she didn't mind having sex during competitions, and saying "people" twice as a gender neutral term, Mao Asada had perked up. Now the Japanese girl scooted towards her, and said, "Say more to me."
Jana considered it. Mao was a little young-not that had stopped her before-but she wasn't underage. Her face, in Jana's opinion, wasn't too attractive, but she had a strange attractiveness anyway; Jana couldn't quite figure it out. Having sex in an office in the arena while the segment of a competition was still going on was kind of reckless, but hey, she'd already skated, and Mao didn't skate at all for three more days-or maybe they could just wait and have sex later. When she was done considering, Jana found she didn't at all dislike the idea. At all. Even a little bit.
"What's there to say?" she replied. "You go wild when your event's complete at the Olympics. Not just sex, either; you lose every single inhibition you've ever had. I'm not even going to attempt to describe that; I can't do it justice. I haven't even experienced the full-blown version of it yet, though that'll come for both of us in Vancouver." Was it just her imagination, or was Mao still inching closer? Jana resisted the urge to move back; that might damage her dress. "Of course, I suppose it's different if your event concludes so near to, uh, the end, uh, of the Olympics..." Mao was definitely inching closer.
"What you think now?" she asked.
"Are you trying to flirt with me? That's what I'm thinking."
Mao pulled back a little, suddenly seeming a little scared. "Maybe," she said.
"You are," said Jana immediately; this was behavior she didn't care for. "But don't go back and forth about it; if you don't have the nerve say so immediately and we'll forget the whole thing."
She'd said it the wrong way. Mao was immediately leaning over her, practically climbing into her lap, saying, "Don't nerve? Not me!"
Then her mouth was on Jana's, aggressive, bold, like the champion skater she was, and she was pushing Jana down, and Jana's first response was to wrestle them over so Mao was underneath her, because she could not get her dress all pressed up against this floor.
Once she was on top it was easy, but for a couple of minutes, in fact, they just made out, tongue to tongue, breast to breast, hand to hand as Mao's arms scrambled across the floor before moving up and grasping Jana's shoulders, and Jana thought it'd be okay if they just did that, at least at the moment; this was pleasant and harmless and she was liking Mao's body, the feel of her muscles, the taste of her lips and neck.
It was Mao who first moved her hands down, fumbling them under her skirts, poking at the edges, trying to find a way in. Jana stopped her. "Only way past that's if I take the whole thing off, and I don't know if that's-oh!" On hearing this Mao had abandoned her attempts in favor of pressing her fingers hard against Jana's crotch through the cloth, and she had found her clit.
She got more "oh"s out of Jana as she rubbed through the costume, sending stabs of pleasure through Jana-it probably wouldn't make her come, but it made her feel all too good. Jana herself easily flicked open Mao's pants and got her hand into her underwear. When she slid the first finger into tight, wet, heat, Mao made a little sound and squeezed around it in a way that made Jana moan and grind down on Mao's hand.
Jana supposed it must have felt even stranger for the girl, getting finger-fucked by an ice dancer she'd never really talked to on the floor of a rink office to the sound of paso doble music still playing on the monitor, though at some point that stopped at the group ended. But then Jana figured out how to use her fingers to make her really start gasping, and felt her grow hotter inside, and her eyes screwed shut and her head lolled from side to side, until she moaned so loud Jana had to clamp her mouth over her as she dug hard into Mao's body, feeling the first tightening spasms, barely even aware of Mao's hands slipping on the wet fabric of her costume as she drove the girl out of her senses, finally making her shake as she came on Jana's hand.
"Ohhhh," she sighed, as Jana took her hand out and moved off her, carefully settling on her knees. "Oh," she said, looking a little confused, but mostly still pleasure-dazed. Her hair was rumpled about her head and the color in her face made her look lovely.
"Oh..." she said again as she got onto her feet and tried to take a breath, falling against the door. "Oh....oh.....oh, other team get forty."
"What?" Jana's blood froze, and she leapt up and flew to the laptop, where Mao had noticed the result; the monitor showed the final warm-up going on. She stared in disbelief; she'd known Oksana and Maxim were good at compulsories; but they weren't supposed to get this high, not now, when she and Sergei were supposed to be the top Russian team. With further dismay and disbelief she looked at the other two top teams; both over 39. They weren't supposed to do that; Virtue and Moir were injured and Shilband's, and Belbin and Agosto were supposed to be awful at compulsories.
This wasn't supposed to have happened. At the very least, she and Sergei should've been in the mix to shoot for gold. They weren't supposed to be over three points out of first, first being the one team whose success was certain to mean their failure.
If only they'd skated it better...but some cynical part of Jana had to demand if it would have made a difference. The federation had always preferred Oksana and Maxim. It was only their injury that had made anyone think Jana and Sergei might have had a chance.
"Only three points," Mao tried to assure her.
"This isn't singles!" Jana cried at her. "Three points may be nothing to you, but now, Sergei and I might as well be ten points behind!" She sank back to the floor, not even caring if she messed up the dress now. It all flashed in front of her; world title, Olympic gold, the hopes they'd built up after Europeans, had driven them here, destroyed within the past half an hour.
Mao got down on her knees as well, trying to offer a comforting hand. Jana scrambled back up. "I'm sorry," she said. "I've got to go." She needed to see Sergei and their coaches, she needed to talk over this with them so she could believe it was real. She needed the coaches to convince her she and Sergei still had some sort of future.
She fled Mao, she fled the warmth the girl would have offered, for the cold water of the Russian press, the foreign press, Sergei's grief, and the sharp, brutal stab she felt in her gut, later, when Meryl and her partner went ahead of them too.
And for the rest of the week, when it just got worse and worse, until they found themselves in sixth with Oksana and Maxim winning, which sealed their fates until Vancouver at the very least; they'd be lucky to get a medal, because it would take much for Oksana and Maxim to not win gold there, and modern ice dance politics didn't allow for two Russian teams to medal. She took some satisfaction in Meryl fallling short of the podium the way she had, but even that was marred by everyone howling about how good she and Charlie were, and she quickly vowed she'd never, ever watch their performance because she was terrified she'd have to agree with everyone.
By the time the Ladies event was wrapping up, Jana had decided that the half hour spent with Mao was the only good part of this Worlds for her whatsoever, which was why she was even more pissed off when Mao, against all sensible expectations, somehow didn't medal either. Jana didn't get how; sure, she'd fallen, but wasn't that triple axel combination supposed to be big?
Sunday morning she saw Mao at breakfast, and recognized the same deflation she'd been experiencing for most of the competition, and went to sit with her. "How are you holding up?" she asked as she sat down.
"I try," replied Mao. "Thank you." She said this last phrase with a surprising amount of force in her voice, as if she was trying to thank Jana for more than just the question. "And you? I watch you, I watch videos, old videos. I like last year free."
"Yeah, that was our big one," said Jana, smiling at the memory. At least she and Sergei had that world medal, she thought, and nothing could change that. "I watched you this week; you really are a beautiful skater."
They got odd looks from the other Russian skaters; Mao was trained by Tatiana Antonlievna, after all. When Mao seemed to notice, Jana mentioned this under her breath. When Mao looked confused, she added, "Let's get out of here when we're done eating, and I'll explain."
They finished as quickly as possible and left together, and when they were away from others Jana explained, about Russian politics, and how their coaches didn't get along.
"But you come to me," said Mao. "You come with me now."
"Yes," said Jana. "I'm here, I guess." There were multiple reasons this didn't make sense. The age difference, the discipline difference-though some might say that was an advantage-the way they simply came from such different walks of life; there could be no certainty they'd have anything in common besides being elite skaters.
But they went all the way back to Mao's room talking about Moscow and coaches and trying to find a sense of home in one's life. When they got there, of course, they had sex again, and Mao was very happy that she could make Jana come this time. She glanced anxiously at the clock when they were done, but apparently she didn't have to go to the practice for the gala just yet, because she relaxed and smiled broadly.
The smile initially faded when Jana got out of bed, but she said quickly, "Don't worry, you can stay there. I just don't like being still, that's all." She groped for her bathrobe.
"I know feeling," offered Mao, but she still stayed there, smiling again, lazily watching Jana move about. Jana liked it; she often enjoyed being watched by a lover.
"So when will you next be in Moscow?" Jana asked her.
Mao shrugged. "Maybe before team competition."
"Hope so," said Jana. "I'll see about seeing you again?"
"Yes," squealed Mao, as if she hadn't been sure of it, and had really wanted it. Jana liked that a lot. She supposed it might go disastrously when she sees Mao again, but somehow she felt they'd enjoy it. Who knew what their chances really were, but if she didn't want to try to defy odds, she'd probably be retiring right now, and in fact, she probably would have never aimed for the World title in the first place, but she'd aimed for that, so why not for this?
For: frankiness-I'm afraid I was feeling ambitious
Pairings: Jana Khokhlova/Mao Asada
Rating: Hard R
Summary: The world championships hold a pair of surprises.(SPOILERS!)
Disclaimer: Work of fiction. Never really happened.
Word Count: 3152
Having begun her campaign to win this World title and establish herself as the favorite for Olympic gold, Jana Khokhlova left the kiss and cry with mixed feelings. She would've liked a higher score; even Shilband's teams could easily break 37. But she knew they were lucky to get as much as they had; they could've performed that paso doble much better.
At any rate, now she passed the other three big teams milling about, waiting for the lesser Canadians to finish so the competition could resume, and then hastily excused herself from Sergei and her coaches with a gesture. Mr. Svinin and Ms. Zhuk looked confused, but Sergei nodded in understanding, and attempted to placate their coaches with another gesture. He knew, which they could not, that she really didn't want to go back into the warm-up area, and possibly run into Meryl Davis. The reporters could wait; they had more paso dobles to watch anyway.
Why had she been so foolish as to let things get that far with Meryl, anyway? They had been in Detroit to get used to the time zone, not to have sex with their competition. Sure, Sergei had probably been hopping around with most of the Detroit boys, but there was a difference between that and never sleeping in your hotel room, because every night you slept in the same girl's bed. Until the last night, when...Jana still couldn't think of that night without wincing. What Meryl had said, what she'd said in retaliation...this wasn't a good mental state to be skating for a World title in.
Wanting to be alone for a minute, she ducked into an office, hoping it was unoccupied. She was disappointed to instead see a female profile in a Japanese team jacket sitting at the desk with her back to Jana, looking at an open laptop showing the ISU website and a monitor showing the lesser Canadians finishing up.
But she felt much better when the girl turned around and Jana recognized her as Mao Asada, possibly the only person who had recently had a break up worse than hers. The sheer nastiness of her split from Yu-Na Kim was a little infamous these days.
"Hello," she said, turning away from the screens. "Very good program." She spoke in okay Russian, which surprised Jana, who had assumed she'd talk to her in English-but when Jana remembered her coaching history, she supposed her knowing some Russian made sense.
"Thanks," she said. "Why are you back here?"
"They try find me, I not want find me," she explained. "Here, they not find me."
"Makes sense." Not caring to see how her competitors were doing, Jana sat down on the floor against the wall to her right, carefully arranging her costume to keep too much of it from touching the probably dirty floor. Abandoning her vigil of the competition-if she wasn't educated about ice dance she was probably bored by now anyway-Mao sat down against the wall opposite her. Jana tried to think about what to say next. She didn't want to talk about Meryl, she assumed this girl did not want to talk about Yu-Na Kim, and that left them with nothing to talk about.
Mao found a subject. "I want know," she said. "What Olympics feel like."
That was something Jana never minded talking about. "Crazy, really; if I had to use one word, it would be that. It's like you're plucked out of the world and put in this closed off alternate dimension where you follow directions every single moment of your life for a weekend if you're a pairs skater and two weeks if you skate ladies singles and all around you people are going mad because if they don't do this or that exactly this way their lives, are over and there's no point to existing anymore-in Torino, I was lucky; I was the third entry, no pressure. They were telling me to just soak it up, and I was wondering if I wanted this insanity in my system! In Vancouver, you know, the two of us will be the ones going mad. It's getting hard to even think of that as a bad thing, though, I've changed so much these past three years. There was this time, the day of the free dance in Torino, where I ran away from Sergei and our coaches and fled the village and just wandered at random through the adjoining streets like a madwoman, and I was trying to breath the entire time because I felt like I was going to suffocate if I didn't get away. You can say we live our lives like that anyway, that all elite athletes do, but we don't; we do our thing for much of the day, sure, but then we go home and we're on our own, we're ordinary citizens of the world once again. At the Olympics you're not, you don't get that respite. But haven't people told you about this already?"
"They say...they say it is big, it is important, it is...they say things that everyone say. They say you have big feelings, big happiness or big sadness. They say you are proud. They say it is different from everything else. They do not say anything...anything real. They do not say about...different, or directions, or suffocate."
"They never do, do they?" agreed Jana; she'd heard all the speeches about what it was like at the Olympics, both before and after experiencing it for herself. "And now, you know, I don't know how to talk to my training mates. Ekaterina Rubleva and Ivan Shefer, who've got a serious chance of going with me and Sergei to Vancouver next year. They listen to all the Olympic propaganda and they just eat it up, and of course it's all got real truth to it so it's harder to explain to them...there might be nothing for it but to let them get the shock treatment Sergei and I did. Maybe that's only way you believe it's the way it is."
"Fumie, though," said Mao, "she say some things to me once. She say about meeting people, about official people and long time you listen to them, about first week is long...she talk about sex."
"Oh, yes, the sex," laughed Jana. "Sooner or later, someone talks to you about the sex. One of the first things Katia asked me was about the sex! That's got it's unpleasant side too, though; I got pawed by a few guys who were less than appealing. I felt like everyone wanted me."
"You have anyone you want."
"Well, not exactly, because I wasn't the only girl they wanted! Thankfully. But yes, I had my pick, once I was done skating. Normally I don't have a problem with sex during competitions, either, but there were strict rules against it from the Russian Olympic team leaders, and I didn't want to defy them. I mean, you think Tatiana Antonlievna and the ISU officials are scary? They're not scary. Those guys, they were scary. So I didn't bed all the people I had my sights on, but for only having about four to five days, it's kind of disturbing how many people I fucked." She thought, too, of that final night, and of Oksana Domnina, but only for a fleeting moment-that pain, at least, was now long gone.
She noticed that both while mentioning she didn't mind having sex during competitions, and saying "people" twice as a gender neutral term, Mao Asada had perked up. Now the Japanese girl scooted towards her, and said, "Say more to me."
Jana considered it. Mao was a little young-not that had stopped her before-but she wasn't underage. Her face, in Jana's opinion, wasn't too attractive, but she had a strange attractiveness anyway; Jana couldn't quite figure it out. Having sex in an office in the arena while the segment of a competition was still going on was kind of reckless, but hey, she'd already skated, and Mao didn't skate at all for three more days-or maybe they could just wait and have sex later. When she was done considering, Jana found she didn't at all dislike the idea. At all. Even a little bit.
"What's there to say?" she replied. "You go wild when your event's complete at the Olympics. Not just sex, either; you lose every single inhibition you've ever had. I'm not even going to attempt to describe that; I can't do it justice. I haven't even experienced the full-blown version of it yet, though that'll come for both of us in Vancouver." Was it just her imagination, or was Mao still inching closer? Jana resisted the urge to move back; that might damage her dress. "Of course, I suppose it's different if your event concludes so near to, uh, the end, uh, of the Olympics..." Mao was definitely inching closer.
"What you think now?" she asked.
"Are you trying to flirt with me? That's what I'm thinking."
Mao pulled back a little, suddenly seeming a little scared. "Maybe," she said.
"You are," said Jana immediately; this was behavior she didn't care for. "But don't go back and forth about it; if you don't have the nerve say so immediately and we'll forget the whole thing."
She'd said it the wrong way. Mao was immediately leaning over her, practically climbing into her lap, saying, "Don't nerve? Not me!"
Then her mouth was on Jana's, aggressive, bold, like the champion skater she was, and she was pushing Jana down, and Jana's first response was to wrestle them over so Mao was underneath her, because she could not get her dress all pressed up against this floor.
Once she was on top it was easy, but for a couple of minutes, in fact, they just made out, tongue to tongue, breast to breast, hand to hand as Mao's arms scrambled across the floor before moving up and grasping Jana's shoulders, and Jana thought it'd be okay if they just did that, at least at the moment; this was pleasant and harmless and she was liking Mao's body, the feel of her muscles, the taste of her lips and neck.
It was Mao who first moved her hands down, fumbling them under her skirts, poking at the edges, trying to find a way in. Jana stopped her. "Only way past that's if I take the whole thing off, and I don't know if that's-oh!" On hearing this Mao had abandoned her attempts in favor of pressing her fingers hard against Jana's crotch through the cloth, and she had found her clit.
She got more "oh"s out of Jana as she rubbed through the costume, sending stabs of pleasure through Jana-it probably wouldn't make her come, but it made her feel all too good. Jana herself easily flicked open Mao's pants and got her hand into her underwear. When she slid the first finger into tight, wet, heat, Mao made a little sound and squeezed around it in a way that made Jana moan and grind down on Mao's hand.
Jana supposed it must have felt even stranger for the girl, getting finger-fucked by an ice dancer she'd never really talked to on the floor of a rink office to the sound of paso doble music still playing on the monitor, though at some point that stopped at the group ended. But then Jana figured out how to use her fingers to make her really start gasping, and felt her grow hotter inside, and her eyes screwed shut and her head lolled from side to side, until she moaned so loud Jana had to clamp her mouth over her as she dug hard into Mao's body, feeling the first tightening spasms, barely even aware of Mao's hands slipping on the wet fabric of her costume as she drove the girl out of her senses, finally making her shake as she came on Jana's hand.
"Ohhhh," she sighed, as Jana took her hand out and moved off her, carefully settling on her knees. "Oh," she said, looking a little confused, but mostly still pleasure-dazed. Her hair was rumpled about her head and the color in her face made her look lovely.
"Oh..." she said again as she got onto her feet and tried to take a breath, falling against the door. "Oh....oh.....oh, other team get forty."
"What?" Jana's blood froze, and she leapt up and flew to the laptop, where Mao had noticed the result; the monitor showed the final warm-up going on. She stared in disbelief; she'd known Oksana and Maxim were good at compulsories; but they weren't supposed to get this high, not now, when she and Sergei were supposed to be the top Russian team. With further dismay and disbelief she looked at the other two top teams; both over 39. They weren't supposed to do that; Virtue and Moir were injured and Shilband's, and Belbin and Agosto were supposed to be awful at compulsories.
This wasn't supposed to have happened. At the very least, she and Sergei should've been in the mix to shoot for gold. They weren't supposed to be over three points out of first, first being the one team whose success was certain to mean their failure.
If only they'd skated it better...but some cynical part of Jana had to demand if it would have made a difference. The federation had always preferred Oksana and Maxim. It was only their injury that had made anyone think Jana and Sergei might have had a chance.
"Only three points," Mao tried to assure her.
"This isn't singles!" Jana cried at her. "Three points may be nothing to you, but now, Sergei and I might as well be ten points behind!" She sank back to the floor, not even caring if she messed up the dress now. It all flashed in front of her; world title, Olympic gold, the hopes they'd built up after Europeans, had driven them here, destroyed within the past half an hour.
Mao got down on her knees as well, trying to offer a comforting hand. Jana scrambled back up. "I'm sorry," she said. "I've got to go." She needed to see Sergei and their coaches, she needed to talk over this with them so she could believe it was real. She needed the coaches to convince her she and Sergei still had some sort of future.
She fled Mao, she fled the warmth the girl would have offered, for the cold water of the Russian press, the foreign press, Sergei's grief, and the sharp, brutal stab she felt in her gut, later, when Meryl and her partner went ahead of them too.
And for the rest of the week, when it just got worse and worse, until they found themselves in sixth with Oksana and Maxim winning, which sealed their fates until Vancouver at the very least; they'd be lucky to get a medal, because it would take much for Oksana and Maxim to not win gold there, and modern ice dance politics didn't allow for two Russian teams to medal. She took some satisfaction in Meryl fallling short of the podium the way she had, but even that was marred by everyone howling about how good she and Charlie were, and she quickly vowed she'd never, ever watch their performance because she was terrified she'd have to agree with everyone.
By the time the Ladies event was wrapping up, Jana had decided that the half hour spent with Mao was the only good part of this Worlds for her whatsoever, which was why she was even more pissed off when Mao, against all sensible expectations, somehow didn't medal either. Jana didn't get how; sure, she'd fallen, but wasn't that triple axel combination supposed to be big?
Sunday morning she saw Mao at breakfast, and recognized the same deflation she'd been experiencing for most of the competition, and went to sit with her. "How are you holding up?" she asked as she sat down.
"I try," replied Mao. "Thank you." She said this last phrase with a surprising amount of force in her voice, as if she was trying to thank Jana for more than just the question. "And you? I watch you, I watch videos, old videos. I like last year free."
"Yeah, that was our big one," said Jana, smiling at the memory. At least she and Sergei had that world medal, she thought, and nothing could change that. "I watched you this week; you really are a beautiful skater."
They got odd looks from the other Russian skaters; Mao was trained by Tatiana Antonlievna, after all. When Mao seemed to notice, Jana mentioned this under her breath. When Mao looked confused, she added, "Let's get out of here when we're done eating, and I'll explain."
They finished as quickly as possible and left together, and when they were away from others Jana explained, about Russian politics, and how their coaches didn't get along.
"But you come to me," said Mao. "You come with me now."
"Yes," said Jana. "I'm here, I guess." There were multiple reasons this didn't make sense. The age difference, the discipline difference-though some might say that was an advantage-the way they simply came from such different walks of life; there could be no certainty they'd have anything in common besides being elite skaters.
But they went all the way back to Mao's room talking about Moscow and coaches and trying to find a sense of home in one's life. When they got there, of course, they had sex again, and Mao was very happy that she could make Jana come this time. She glanced anxiously at the clock when they were done, but apparently she didn't have to go to the practice for the gala just yet, because she relaxed and smiled broadly.
The smile initially faded when Jana got out of bed, but she said quickly, "Don't worry, you can stay there. I just don't like being still, that's all." She groped for her bathrobe.
"I know feeling," offered Mao, but she still stayed there, smiling again, lazily watching Jana move about. Jana liked it; she often enjoyed being watched by a lover.
"So when will you next be in Moscow?" Jana asked her.
Mao shrugged. "Maybe before team competition."
"Hope so," said Jana. "I'll see about seeing you again?"
"Yes," squealed Mao, as if she hadn't been sure of it, and had really wanted it. Jana liked that a lot. She supposed it might go disastrously when she sees Mao again, but somehow she felt they'd enjoy it. Who knew what their chances really were, but if she didn't want to try to defy odds, she'd probably be retiring right now, and in fact, she probably would have never aimed for the World title in the first place, but she'd aimed for that, so why not for this?