Fic - A Short Week of Long Days
Jul. 4th, 2013 09:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redfiona99Title: A Short Week Of Long Days
Author: Red Fiona
Disclaimer: The characters are not mine; they belong to the wrestlers themselves or to TNA. No money is being made from this piece of fiction. This story is fiction, it is not real.
Fandom: TNA wrestling
Characters: Petey Williams and Gail Kim, with appearances from Chris Harris, James Storm and Scott D'Amore.
Genre/rating/warnings: PG-12 gen fic
Setting/Spoilers: The fallout from Impact on 14th December 2006
Notes: I’d like to say thank you to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
opera142 for her kind, thorough and patient beta-ing. Any remaining mistakes are all mine.
Summary: Gail and Petey trying to keep everything together in the aftermath of the break-up of America’s Most Wanted.
~~~~
Petey found Gail at the hospital. She may have been shaken, but that was all. There was a little blood on her, a splash on her right arm, but she hadn't been harmed.
"How is he?" Petey asked.
"They're still treating him. They're washing his eye out, I think, and then stitching him up."
"I'm going to kill Storm." That was why he was late. Security had let Storm go first and given him a fifteen minute head-start. Petey hadn't been sure whether to go after Storm or to come here. He'd chosen the hospital, and, on balance, he thought he'd been right to; he'd been worried about Harris.
"You do that. Smash him up good for me." That was one of the reasons Petey liked Gail, because she held it together when it mattered, like tonight, and she could be just as bloodthirsty as the boys when she wanted to be. He couldn't blame her; Lord alone knew what Storm thought he was doing.
"I'll get right on it. Tell Chris I was asking after him, would you." He didn't want to crowd Harris when he came out and he thought that Chris would rather see Gail than him.
"Will do."
Petey left the hospital planning to track Storm down.
~~~~
The next afternoon, having failed in that mission, Petey went to check in with Gail. He followed Gail into the kitchen of her house. She was making coffee and continued to stir it as they talked.
"How's Chris doing?"
"He's not said much."
"Mmm." Petey didn't blame Chris. It had to be a shock, your best friend turning on you like that. "You know what Coach says, 'these things make you'." Coach finished that saying with 'or break you', but Coach tended to say things like that and right now, Gail didn't need to hear it. "Chris will be alright."
~~~~
The day after, it was Petey's turn to make the coffee. They were at his house rather than hers, he’d invited her over when he’d rang to see how Harris was and Gail had told him that he’d been released from hospital into Gail’s care. Petey needed the caffeine hit. He’d spent a long night deep in thought, missing his sleep. Another of the Coach's sayings, whenever a team split, was that it happened to everyone. Petey had thought that he'd never forgive TNA management for splitting his team up, but if it had spared him this, then he might well already have done.
He couldn't see this happening to them though, not his team. Bobby, Eric, Ralph and Johnny, they'd never have turned on him, sure they were all ambitious for themselves as well as for the team and Eric was a bit of klutz who might have hit him with a bottle by accident, but none of them would ever do a thing like this, deliberately bottling a team-mate. They just wouldn't.
Petey had been almost certain of that. But, and this was where the dread and insomnia came in, if you'd asked him a week ago, he wouldn't have thought that Storm would have hit Harris. He thought back, tried to see if there'd been any warning signs. Sure, they'd argued, but everybody argued, and the accident at Turning Point had undoubtedly been exactly that. But Storm's anger had to come from somewhere, and he didn't think Storm's present explanation held up.
Then, and goodness knew he'd tried to stop his mind from going there, he thought back and looked for any of those signs in his friends. Would Eric have snapped over the teasing, Devine over the yelling, Ralph because they never treated him as part of the group the way they had Johnny, or Bobby over them always expecting him to help them out? No, Bobby wouldn't have turned on him, and Eric couldn't have, Devine, before Nash and Raven got their hands on him, he would have had too much sense to do it, the same went for Ralph. But still, they could have, and his mind kept probing that possibility like a tongue with a loose tooth. It was sunrise before he knew it, so he gave up on his restless lack of sleep and went to the gym as soon as it opened. It hadn't helped as much as it usually did.
~~~~
Gail’s night hadn’t been any easier. She’d managed to convince Chris that he wanted to stay at her place while he recuperated. Convincing probably wasn’t the right word, Chris hadn’t disagreed with anything she’d said, he really hadn’t responded to anything that anyone had said, not even the doctors. It was why she’d been so adamant, despite there being no argument from Chris.
Gail handed Petey his coffee. "I really am worried about Chris." She took a drink from her own cup. "I mean, I know he's quiet but ...," the quiet one and the drunk one. She'd got to know them better than that, but those first impressions ran deep. The silence was driving her mad. Wrestlers, she'd noticed, were an extroverted bunch in the main, and for all that Chris was quieter than Storm - then again, who wasn't - he hadn't been this withdrawn shell. "He hasn't said a word since yesterday. Couldn't you try to talk to him?"
Gail thought Chris would take better to being comforted by Petey than by her. "You're one of them," and she wasn't, and couldn't ever be. She'd taken her fair share of knocks, but it didn't matter. There was a camaraderie that she couldn't share. She was both jealous and glad at the same time. It would be nice to share that, being the only female wrestler on the roster at the minute was a little lonely, but at the same time it meant she didn't get caught up in these insane blood feuds that sometimes developed between the boys. She had a horrible feeling that this could turn into one of them and she was worried that Chris would come off worst, because he was a nice guy and James wasn't. Even before a couple of nights ago she'd known that. Storm had this tendency of taking losses out on her, nothing physical ever, but how he'd shouted and what he'd said, it had been enough to convince her that he was no good.
"How about I give it another couple of days?" Really, it was an excuse, because Petey didn't know what to say that could help and didn't want to upset Harris further. Did not wanting to speak to him because of that make him a coward or a wise man? "It's probably shock more than anything; give him a couple of days to process it all."
~~~~
He wasn't surprised to be having coffee with Gail the next day; it was the location that was unexpected. She'd sought him out at the gym and they'd gone to Starbucks. He'd run an extra couple of miles tomorrow to burn it off.
"Sorry about this,” Gail pointed at her mocha-frappa-latte something, the kind of thing Petey would never drink, “but I just had to get out of the house."
"No better?"
"Oh miles," she said, sarcastically, "he said thanks for breakfast today." She took a deep breath and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Sorry, Petey, I shouldn't lash out. I'm just not used to him being like this. Please talk to him."
~~~~
The next morning, Petey arrived at Gail’s to have that talk. First he had more coffee with Gail to fortify himself, this week was playing Hell with the macros in his diet. He'd spent half the night trying to think of what to say. He'd never had to cope with this before because, sure there'd been injuries, especially Johnny's, but not anything like this. The closest they'd come was after being torn apart, but the Coach had been there to smooth things over.
When he reached the top of the stairs, Harris's room door was open. He still knocked on it anyway, it was only polite, but there was no response. He gently pushed the door open.
"Chris, you in here?" No reply.
Petey scanned the room quickly; no sign of him and Harris was too big to lose in a room of any size. His bed was against the wall so there was no way he could have fallen out of it on the other side and banged his head or anything like that. Petey raced back down the stairs.
"Gail, he isn't in his room."
Gail reacted with panic. She ran upstairs to conduct a quick search. No, he wasn't collapsed on the floor anywhere, and her room was still locked. Something about the hospital rang in her head.
"What day is it today?"
"Friday."
"He must have left for his appointment with the eye doctor. He must have gone out early while I was picking up groceries." That sneaking out, it worried her. She'd done her best to be both available for him while trying not to crowd him, yet he was still slinking away.
Petey was quietly relieved that Harris wasn’t there, because he hadn't been able to come up with anything, even after all his tossing and turning. It was a weird situation, because he'd spend most of his TNA career fighting against Harris, for belts, glory, the flag and or his country. They'd done some terrible things to each other and for all that he'd been helping them, AMW and Gail, recently, that was more because he disapproved of LAX than out of any fondness for them, except maybe Gail. You didn't need to like each other for an alliance like that. But still, it made it hard to come over as a friendly ear.
It wouldn't have been so bad, he thought, if all the matches had been fought in the spirit of pure competition but, well, when national pride was at stake, who could be fair and just? It wasn't like AMW wouldn't have stooped just as far as they had.
But you couldn't go up to a guy and say, 'tell me you troubles, see if it helps,' when you weren't his friend and the only thing in your favour was 'I never hit you with a glass bottle,' when that was about the only foreign object that you could say that about.
Gail dragged him off to Starbucks again on Saturday. She desperately needed someone to talk to, and obviously, it couldn’t be Chris.
"I don't know what the eye doctor said to him yesterday, but he came back as white as a sheet with the patch still on. I haven't seen him since. The only way I know he's alive is that he brings his dirty dishes down." That would explain why she looked so upset, far more than she had done yesterday. "Then, at ten I got a call from the office saying that they want me to go in tomorrow to do an interview with Mike about the whole thing. I've no idea what to say." The truth was that she had no clue about what was going on and that Chris had said all of twenty words to her in nearly a week and none of them concerned his condition. What could she do? Tell them what she assumed, that the doctors had given Chris bad news, lie and say it had been good news, avoid the question and say the doctors weren't sure either. Would Chris be happy with what she said, or at least satisfied, not that he was giving her much material to work with. She knew she shouldn't blame him, he was the victim here, but she was definitely starting to feel like collateral damage.
Gail started to speak again. "The final icing on the cake was Storm calling me." Petey looked like he was going to start yelling. "It was nothing outrageous. Just the usual drunken threats. That man's a dick!"
It was strange for Petey to see Gail like this. Before her matches her make-up and hair were usually flawless, and for all her interference and being batted about, she wasn't far off that state at the end of the night. Even out of the ring she was normally smart and impeccably dressed. Today, her hair was in a messy ponytail that looked more like Bobby's or his own. Her clothes looked like they'd come off the 'least dirty' pile.
He excused Harris for his part in causing her to feel this bad, which she had to be, because Petey knew how much pride Gail took in her appearance, although Chris really could do with telling her something. Petey wondered how much of Gail's distress was due to not knowing how Harris was feeling, rather than the trouble that Storm was giving her. Petey still didn't know exactly what the score was between Gail and Harris, he'd never known and never found the right moment or way to ask. It was possible that there wasn't a good way, and that he would have been told if he'd needed to know. It would have been nice to know one way or the other though; it might have helped him have even half a clue about what to say to Gail. As it was, all he could give her were general platitudes.
~~~~
Gail tried to keep Petey in the coffee shop for as long as she could but he had to leave eventually. She would have done anything to avoid going home, which would mean having to deal with Chris and the rest of the mess. She knew what tomorrow was going to bring. Tomorrow was Wednesday, which meant another taping. She had to return to the same venue, the same backstage set-up, say hello to the same stage crew and get styled for the camera by the same make-up team. Same everything, except the tag team that mattered most to her.
Author: Red Fiona
Disclaimer: The characters are not mine; they belong to the wrestlers themselves or to TNA. No money is being made from this piece of fiction. This story is fiction, it is not real.
Fandom: TNA wrestling
Characters: Petey Williams and Gail Kim, with appearances from Chris Harris, James Storm and Scott D'Amore.
Genre/rating/warnings: PG-12 gen fic
Setting/Spoilers: The fallout from Impact on 14th December 2006
Notes: I’d like to say thank you to
opera142 for her kind, thorough and patient beta-ing. Any remaining mistakes are all mine.Summary: Gail and Petey trying to keep everything together in the aftermath of the break-up of America’s Most Wanted.
~~~~
Petey found Gail at the hospital. She may have been shaken, but that was all. There was a little blood on her, a splash on her right arm, but she hadn't been harmed.
"How is he?" Petey asked.
"They're still treating him. They're washing his eye out, I think, and then stitching him up."
"I'm going to kill Storm." That was why he was late. Security had let Storm go first and given him a fifteen minute head-start. Petey hadn't been sure whether to go after Storm or to come here. He'd chosen the hospital, and, on balance, he thought he'd been right to; he'd been worried about Harris.
"You do that. Smash him up good for me." That was one of the reasons Petey liked Gail, because she held it together when it mattered, like tonight, and she could be just as bloodthirsty as the boys when she wanted to be. He couldn't blame her; Lord alone knew what Storm thought he was doing.
"I'll get right on it. Tell Chris I was asking after him, would you." He didn't want to crowd Harris when he came out and he thought that Chris would rather see Gail than him.
"Will do."
Petey left the hospital planning to track Storm down.
~~~~
The next afternoon, having failed in that mission, Petey went to check in with Gail. He followed Gail into the kitchen of her house. She was making coffee and continued to stir it as they talked.
"How's Chris doing?"
"He's not said much."
"Mmm." Petey didn't blame Chris. It had to be a shock, your best friend turning on you like that. "You know what Coach says, 'these things make you'." Coach finished that saying with 'or break you', but Coach tended to say things like that and right now, Gail didn't need to hear it. "Chris will be alright."
~~~~
The day after, it was Petey's turn to make the coffee. They were at his house rather than hers, he’d invited her over when he’d rang to see how Harris was and Gail had told him that he’d been released from hospital into Gail’s care. Petey needed the caffeine hit. He’d spent a long night deep in thought, missing his sleep. Another of the Coach's sayings, whenever a team split, was that it happened to everyone. Petey had thought that he'd never forgive TNA management for splitting his team up, but if it had spared him this, then he might well already have done.
He couldn't see this happening to them though, not his team. Bobby, Eric, Ralph and Johnny, they'd never have turned on him, sure they were all ambitious for themselves as well as for the team and Eric was a bit of klutz who might have hit him with a bottle by accident, but none of them would ever do a thing like this, deliberately bottling a team-mate. They just wouldn't.
Petey had been almost certain of that. But, and this was where the dread and insomnia came in, if you'd asked him a week ago, he wouldn't have thought that Storm would have hit Harris. He thought back, tried to see if there'd been any warning signs. Sure, they'd argued, but everybody argued, and the accident at Turning Point had undoubtedly been exactly that. But Storm's anger had to come from somewhere, and he didn't think Storm's present explanation held up.
Then, and goodness knew he'd tried to stop his mind from going there, he thought back and looked for any of those signs in his friends. Would Eric have snapped over the teasing, Devine over the yelling, Ralph because they never treated him as part of the group the way they had Johnny, or Bobby over them always expecting him to help them out? No, Bobby wouldn't have turned on him, and Eric couldn't have, Devine, before Nash and Raven got their hands on him, he would have had too much sense to do it, the same went for Ralph. But still, they could have, and his mind kept probing that possibility like a tongue with a loose tooth. It was sunrise before he knew it, so he gave up on his restless lack of sleep and went to the gym as soon as it opened. It hadn't helped as much as it usually did.
~~~~
Gail’s night hadn’t been any easier. She’d managed to convince Chris that he wanted to stay at her place while he recuperated. Convincing probably wasn’t the right word, Chris hadn’t disagreed with anything she’d said, he really hadn’t responded to anything that anyone had said, not even the doctors. It was why she’d been so adamant, despite there being no argument from Chris.
Gail handed Petey his coffee. "I really am worried about Chris." She took a drink from her own cup. "I mean, I know he's quiet but ...," the quiet one and the drunk one. She'd got to know them better than that, but those first impressions ran deep. The silence was driving her mad. Wrestlers, she'd noticed, were an extroverted bunch in the main, and for all that Chris was quieter than Storm - then again, who wasn't - he hadn't been this withdrawn shell. "He hasn't said a word since yesterday. Couldn't you try to talk to him?"
Gail thought Chris would take better to being comforted by Petey than by her. "You're one of them," and she wasn't, and couldn't ever be. She'd taken her fair share of knocks, but it didn't matter. There was a camaraderie that she couldn't share. She was both jealous and glad at the same time. It would be nice to share that, being the only female wrestler on the roster at the minute was a little lonely, but at the same time it meant she didn't get caught up in these insane blood feuds that sometimes developed between the boys. She had a horrible feeling that this could turn into one of them and she was worried that Chris would come off worst, because he was a nice guy and James wasn't. Even before a couple of nights ago she'd known that. Storm had this tendency of taking losses out on her, nothing physical ever, but how he'd shouted and what he'd said, it had been enough to convince her that he was no good.
"How about I give it another couple of days?" Really, it was an excuse, because Petey didn't know what to say that could help and didn't want to upset Harris further. Did not wanting to speak to him because of that make him a coward or a wise man? "It's probably shock more than anything; give him a couple of days to process it all."
~~~~
He wasn't surprised to be having coffee with Gail the next day; it was the location that was unexpected. She'd sought him out at the gym and they'd gone to Starbucks. He'd run an extra couple of miles tomorrow to burn it off.
"Sorry about this,” Gail pointed at her mocha-frappa-latte something, the kind of thing Petey would never drink, “but I just had to get out of the house."
"No better?"
"Oh miles," she said, sarcastically, "he said thanks for breakfast today." She took a deep breath and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Sorry, Petey, I shouldn't lash out. I'm just not used to him being like this. Please talk to him."
~~~~
The next morning, Petey arrived at Gail’s to have that talk. First he had more coffee with Gail to fortify himself, this week was playing Hell with the macros in his diet. He'd spent half the night trying to think of what to say. He'd never had to cope with this before because, sure there'd been injuries, especially Johnny's, but not anything like this. The closest they'd come was after being torn apart, but the Coach had been there to smooth things over.
When he reached the top of the stairs, Harris's room door was open. He still knocked on it anyway, it was only polite, but there was no response. He gently pushed the door open.
"Chris, you in here?" No reply.
Petey scanned the room quickly; no sign of him and Harris was too big to lose in a room of any size. His bed was against the wall so there was no way he could have fallen out of it on the other side and banged his head or anything like that. Petey raced back down the stairs.
"Gail, he isn't in his room."
Gail reacted with panic. She ran upstairs to conduct a quick search. No, he wasn't collapsed on the floor anywhere, and her room was still locked. Something about the hospital rang in her head.
"What day is it today?"
"Friday."
"He must have left for his appointment with the eye doctor. He must have gone out early while I was picking up groceries." That sneaking out, it worried her. She'd done her best to be both available for him while trying not to crowd him, yet he was still slinking away.
Petey was quietly relieved that Harris wasn’t there, because he hadn't been able to come up with anything, even after all his tossing and turning. It was a weird situation, because he'd spend most of his TNA career fighting against Harris, for belts, glory, the flag and or his country. They'd done some terrible things to each other and for all that he'd been helping them, AMW and Gail, recently, that was more because he disapproved of LAX than out of any fondness for them, except maybe Gail. You didn't need to like each other for an alliance like that. But still, it made it hard to come over as a friendly ear.
It wouldn't have been so bad, he thought, if all the matches had been fought in the spirit of pure competition but, well, when national pride was at stake, who could be fair and just? It wasn't like AMW wouldn't have stooped just as far as they had.
But you couldn't go up to a guy and say, 'tell me you troubles, see if it helps,' when you weren't his friend and the only thing in your favour was 'I never hit you with a glass bottle,' when that was about the only foreign object that you could say that about.
Gail dragged him off to Starbucks again on Saturday. She desperately needed someone to talk to, and obviously, it couldn’t be Chris.
"I don't know what the eye doctor said to him yesterday, but he came back as white as a sheet with the patch still on. I haven't seen him since. The only way I know he's alive is that he brings his dirty dishes down." That would explain why she looked so upset, far more than she had done yesterday. "Then, at ten I got a call from the office saying that they want me to go in tomorrow to do an interview with Mike about the whole thing. I've no idea what to say." The truth was that she had no clue about what was going on and that Chris had said all of twenty words to her in nearly a week and none of them concerned his condition. What could she do? Tell them what she assumed, that the doctors had given Chris bad news, lie and say it had been good news, avoid the question and say the doctors weren't sure either. Would Chris be happy with what she said, or at least satisfied, not that he was giving her much material to work with. She knew she shouldn't blame him, he was the victim here, but she was definitely starting to feel like collateral damage.
Gail started to speak again. "The final icing on the cake was Storm calling me." Petey looked like he was going to start yelling. "It was nothing outrageous. Just the usual drunken threats. That man's a dick!"
It was strange for Petey to see Gail like this. Before her matches her make-up and hair were usually flawless, and for all her interference and being batted about, she wasn't far off that state at the end of the night. Even out of the ring she was normally smart and impeccably dressed. Today, her hair was in a messy ponytail that looked more like Bobby's or his own. Her clothes looked like they'd come off the 'least dirty' pile.
He excused Harris for his part in causing her to feel this bad, which she had to be, because Petey knew how much pride Gail took in her appearance, although Chris really could do with telling her something. Petey wondered how much of Gail's distress was due to not knowing how Harris was feeling, rather than the trouble that Storm was giving her. Petey still didn't know exactly what the score was between Gail and Harris, he'd never known and never found the right moment or way to ask. It was possible that there wasn't a good way, and that he would have been told if he'd needed to know. It would have been nice to know one way or the other though; it might have helped him have even half a clue about what to say to Gail. As it was, all he could give her were general platitudes.
~~~~
Gail tried to keep Petey in the coffee shop for as long as she could but he had to leave eventually. She would have done anything to avoid going home, which would mean having to deal with Chris and the rest of the mess. She knew what tomorrow was going to bring. Tomorrow was Wednesday, which meant another taping. She had to return to the same venue, the same backstage set-up, say hello to the same stage crew and get styled for the camera by the same make-up team. Same everything, except the tag team that mattered most to her.
