Chapter Text
Tessa
She couldn’t listen to music anymore. She was a dancer who couldn’t listen to music. She tried again and again, but every song, every note, every lyric, every everything was like a kick to the stomach.
The truth was music was too sad without him. All of it. Even when she tried to listen to 90s bubblegum pop all she could think of was him singing and dancing to it in the car on the way home from Canton. The radio gave her nothing - Ariana Grande was now forever attached to Moulin Rouge thanks to Jordan Cowan, and Cardi B was the tour, and even the flashback stations provided no solace - there were endless songs they had skated to and wanted to skate to and argued over whether or not they should skate to. Of course country was simply out of the question; the last thing she needed when she was heartbroken was country, the music of pain. Even Hall & Oates. Flashes of his exasperation when she would add them to any shared playlist, his adamant refusal to skate to them even during warmup, that one breathless cozy unforgettable time they had curled together under a quilt in Osaka and he’d murmured the lyrics to You Make My Dreams Come True against the skin of her neck.
It hurt. Every song hurt.
She didn’t even really know what happened. It almost felt like the last three years had been some kind of wonderful fever dream. They had fallen together in the most simple, comfortable way, both single-mindedly focused on one goal - Pyeongchang - and after the mess that had been left of them after Sochi, all they had wanted was to be near each other. They needed that physical contact, something that had been a constant in their lives since they were children, just the feeling of the other there with them. But then they’d needed more than that. They had needed each other mentally, and emotionally, and sometimes she almost felt spiritually. It was so strangely easy. They hadn’t talked about it, not really, it just was what it was. She had wondered what would happen after the Olympics, if they would have to have the talk, the one she didn’t know the ending of, but it hadn’t happened. They’d continued on in this blissful togetherness, collapsing exhaustedly together after every SOI show across Canada, every show across Japan, across Belgium, keeping each other going in their post-Olympics haze.
Then she was in France and he was home and even then they were still who they had become. They were them but more . They finally got the sleep they so desperately needed, recharging apart, but so ready to reunite after those weeks. She realized that apparently they could still be this when they weren’t physically together, it still worked, it spanned continents and oceans, and maybe, finally, they had figured it out.
But then they had stumbled. He’d gone on that podcast and they’d swerved into that talk that they didn’t have an end for and for days he couldn’t look at her and she was desperately trying to make sense of what she felt and what he felt and what they were. Then one night, days later, he had slid into bed with her and held her tightly and they had paused it. It didn’t need to happen yet. They could still be this. For now.
Then it was prep for the tour and the tour itself and they were clinging to each other through Moulin Rouge, and laughing their way through Nasty and Pony, and teasing their way through 4 Minutes, and curling up in his bunk as the engines rumbled beneath them. He was getting distracted by her doing yoga live on national television, and she was caught on camera with - what did people call it? heart eyes? - her Scott heart eyes, and it was fine, more than fine, it was great.
But then they were in Nova Scotia and he had asked her the question. Not the question, but the one that just wanted to know what was next, where did he fall on her list of priorities, and where did they fall, and what about a family and building a home, and he didn’t use those words but she knew what he’d meant.
And she’d frozen. She’d gone still, unable to reach for him to beg him to help her make sense and make a plan and not be so scared , to tell her that they could meld what he wanted and what she wanted into what they wanted, but she couldn’t move. All she’d managed was a stilted, stuttered, “I - I’m not - I -” and he’d let out a heavy breath that it felt like he’d been holding for three years and said “okay,” rolled over, and then he was gone.
The next day she had clasped his hand and looked at him, hoping he would see what she couldn’t say, and he was still Scott and he looked at her like that , but he wasn’t hers anymore. They were still Tessa and Scott, just not the more anymore. She couldn’t do anything with the pain she was feeling so she turned it off. That was always how she handled what she couldn’t control - she pretended it didn’t exist. So they went to Nashville and they were playful and silly and skated to 21 Summer and it was like the last three years had never happened. They danced with their old friends and their new friends and people they loved after the show, and she pushed away the feelings she couldn’t handle until she found out that Jackie was coming to Toronto.
It was not unlike how she had felt when she’d fallen through the cracked ice at Harrison Park that one winter only this time Scott wasn’t there to pull her back out.
That’s when music stopped being an escape and started being a punishment. Silence was all she could listen to now.