DISCLAIMER:I do not own, or have anything to do with any of the figure skating stars portrayed here. I only own Breiana.

One Last Chance

Part One: Falling


Breiana Davis knew going into this that it wouldn’t be easy; learning something new never was, she had decided long-ago, but it was usually those things that one found to be the hardest that were the most gratifying. When she was a little girl, all that she had wanted to do was sing. As she got older, she watched her interests change. She went from aspiring to be just like her role models to wanting to be a writer once she hit her teen years. She even enrolled herself in journalism classes in high school and at the community college she attended. She hoped that she would be writing an article about herself one day.
“Get it together, Breia! You can skate better than that!” She told herself silently as she picked herself up off of the ice and tried her hardest to fall back into her routine.
“Breia!” Dale Thomas, the rink owner, called out to her from the boards. She paused in her activity to look at him. “Ten minutes of free skate left! And we’ve got some high-profilers coming in today, if you want to stick around and watch,” Dale gave her a wink and then walked speedily back to the front counter. A quick consultation of her watch served to back up his statement. It was 9:43, in ten minutes the house Zamboni would wheel itself out onto the ice to smooth down all of the rough edges she had caused in the last two hours. Her daily eight-AM free skate was almost over.
She shoved off with her left foot and circled the rink twice to build up speed. She just had to land a quad today. She had told herself last night before she went to bed, and this morning as she showered, that she would land her first quad.
Breia repeated a mantra of breathing to herself as she switched from skating forward to skating backward. As she switched forward again she focused on the ice. The gentle scrape-scrape-scrape of the blades of her skates was the only thing she could hear as she readied herself for the jump. She came out of the curved end of the rink clean and bent her knees for the jump. Breia launched herself from the ice soundly, and felt herself begin to rotate in midair.
‘One…two…’ she counted the rotations to herself in midair. ‘…three…three and a half…’ The ice was rushing up to meet her slender form quickly. She knew it all too well that she had underpowered her jump. All that the girl could do was close her eyes and pray that it didn’t hurt too badly when she impacted the icy surface. She opened her eyes as her skates touched down. Had she done it?! She reacted too soon and lost her balance. Her right skate slid out from under her and the twenty-year-old girl toppled to the ice in a heap. She braced her head with her arms and lay there for a moment, furious with herself that she had quit concentrating. Breia raised her head and pounded the ice with her open palm.
“Damn it, damn it, damn it!” She shrieked, pushing herself to her knees roughly. She had nearly done it, and she was afraid that she would never come that close again. A second pair of skates came out onto the ice, and stopped to her right. Breia tried her hardest to catch her breath after the fall, and sat there on her knees for a moment before the other person spoke.
“You all right?” The words were hidden behind a musical Russian accent, the likes of which Breia had never heard before. The girl could only nod as a blush spread like wildfire across her cheeks. “Let me help you up,” the man spoke again as he held out both hands to the kneeling girl.
“Thanks,” she spoke softly, not daring to meet his gaze. She reached up her arms and two strong hands pulled her gently to her feet.
“Don’t be embarrassed, love; you almost landed it. It took me several tries to nail that one too,” a smile was in his voice, and this time Breia couldn’t resist the urge to look up. What she found were two beautiful blue orbs staring into her green ones. She should have felt naked under that gaze, but she didn’t somehow. When she realized to whom those beautiful orbs belonged, she almost lost her balance again. She recovered just in time.
“Alexei?” Her smile spread from ear to ear, and the smile that he gave mirrored hers.
A musical laugh echoed in the empty rink, and he looked at her with a twinkle in his eyes. “I was wondering when you’d notice.”

Alexei had skated with Breia back to the boards, and had held her so that she would not fall while she unlaced her skates standing, even though she assured him that she could do it by herself. Truthfully, she wanted to do anything to keep his attention. Just to be in the presence of such a figure skating great was so much of an honor, but to actually talk to Alexei Yagudin…
“Alexei, we have to discuss this season’s…a-hem!” Tatiana Tarasova cleared her throat and both Alexei and Breia looked up at her.
“Ms. Tarasova, I apologize for stealing Alexei’s attention for the moment. I fell and he was just helping me with…um…” Breia was afraid that she might have gotten Alexei in trouble with his coach. Tatiana simply smiled at the two.
“Quite all right, dear. Would you mind letting him have his practice now?” She gave Alexei a look that caused him to laugh again and he turned to Breia and leant down to whisper in her ear.
“Don’t leave. I’ll be done in a couple of hours, and then we’ll continue this,” He gave her a wink and then squeezed her shoulder as he turned back to his coach. The talk fluttered over to Breia’s ears every so often when the Zamboni was past them, and it all seemed to be business. Tatiana would motion her hands about the rink, drawing little circles in the air, one after another, with one finger while Alexei simply nodded. His arms were crossed at his chest as he listened, and Breia noted how good he looked, even in practice clothes…which quite possibly could have been from one of his older routines, but she somehow doubted it.
It suddenly dawned on her that this man, Alexei Yagudin, was the reason that she had fallen in love with figure skating in the first place. Breia stood up quickly, stuffed her skates into her bag and tried to step quietly away from the bench. She noted that Tatiana had stopped talking and she turned to glance at Alexei. Both of them were looking at her expectantly.
“Go skate, Alexei. I’m not leaving…I promise,” she gave him a wink and trotted off barefoot towards the shower room. As she went, she thought she heard Alexei tell Tatiana, something to the effect of “I didn’t even get her name.” Breia mentally slapped herself and made a mental note to correct that error later on. Right now, she thought, proper hygiene took precedence over the fact that Alexei Yagudin didn’t know her name.
Or did it?