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Austin never thought of himself as the kind of person who cheated.
That was the first lie.
He preferred other words. Efficient, prepared, unwilling to waste potential. He could dress it up in discipline if he tried hard enough. He could even make it sound noble – if the body is a weapon, shouldn’t it be sharpened? If the inch between gold and second place is a tremor in the wrist, a breath lost too soon, then what is morality measured against that?
The first time he swallowed the pill, it tasted like nothing. That offended him more than anything else. He had expected something cinematic – bitterness, a metallic tang, a signal from the universe that a boundary had been crossed. Instead it dissolved on his tongue like chalk and slid down his throat without ceremony. No thunderclap. No crack in the floor beneath him. He trained that afternoon exactly the way he always did.
Except he didn’t.
His jumps held longer in the air. His landing felt lighter, as if gravity had been persuaded to loosen its grip for a fraction of a second. When he drove the qiang forward, the air tore around it in a cleaner arc. There was a steadiness in his limbs that bordered on serenity. He finished the routine and stood still at the end, chest rising and falling, and realized he wasn’t winded.
That was when the second lie began.
He told himself it was temporary. Just until nationals. Just until he knew he could. He had always been close – always the one with the sharp lines, the ruthless focus, the technique that judges described as surgical. But there had always been someone just a breath ahead. Someone whose extensions were a hair higher, whose recovery was half a second faster. He hated that half second. He hated the idea that his body could betray him at the edge of perfection.
So he adjusted the body.
No one noticed.
That might have been the worst part.
His coach praised his consistency. Teammates asked what he’d changed in his conditioning. He shrugged, gave vague answers about sleep and diet, about dialing in details. He’d always been disciplined; improvement looked believable on him. That was the thing about Austin – he had built a reputation sturdy enough to hide behind. He was the reliable one. The one who stayed after practice, who drilled forms until the lights flickered off. It felt almost unfair that someone like him would need an advantage.
He didn’t think of it as need.
He thought of it as eliminating weakness.
The drugs did not make him stronger in the obvious way. They did not bulk him up or alter his shape. They slipped into subtler places. His recovery time shortened. Bruises faded more quickly. The faint tremor in his thigh after repeated aerials disappeared. He could train harder, longer, without the quiet erosion that usually followed. It was less a surge of power and more the absence of fatigue. A smoothing-out of limits.
He began to crave that smoothness.
Not the substance itself – he wasn’t reckless about it. He measured doses with care, researched interactions, memorized half-lives the way he memorized combinations. He was meticulous. The sin, if it was one, was handled responsibly.
But the feeling of control – that was intoxicating.
Wushu is a sport of illusion. You must look effortless while your muscles burn. You must land from impossible heights and make it seem like you’ve merely stepped down from a curb. Austin understood performance not as deception, but as refinement. The audience did not need to see the strain. They came for beauty, not for the cost.
He extended that philosophy inward.
When his heart raced at night – faster than it should, even at rest – he ignored it. When sleep thinned into restless fragments, he told himself it was adrenaline from training. When his temper shortened, when irritation flared too quickly at minor mistakes, he blamed pressure. Competition season did that to anyone.
The second time he took the pill, it felt easier.
By the tenth time, it felt necessary.
By the middle of the season, he no longer marked the days. The routine had absorbed it. Wake up. Stretch. Swallow. Train. Refine. Repeat. The pill became as ordinary as taping his wrists. As unremarkable as lacing his shoes.
He did not see himself as dishonest. That word implied cowardice, and Austin was not a coward. He faced his routines head-on. He did not flinch from difficulty. He simply refused to be limited by flesh when there were other options available.
Sometimes, though, in the quiet moments after practice, he would watch the others. Watch the way exhaustion claimed them honestly. The way they laughed through it, collapsed on the mat, limbs heavy and earned. He would stand there, still alert, still humming with energy, and feel a flicker of something he refused to name.
Isolation, perhaps.
Because his victories began to feel private in the wrong way.
When he won his first major title that season, the applause crashed over him in waves. He bowed, straight-backed, expression composed. On the podium, medal cool against his skin, he felt a sharp, piercing clarity: he had never executed that routine so perfectly in his life. Every movement had aligned. Every landing had locked into place. He had been, objectively, brilliant.
And yet.
There was a quiet subtraction at the center of it.
Not guilt – he would not allow himself that. Guilt implied wrongdoing, and he had long since reframed the act. This was strategy. This was preparation. If others were naive enough to rely solely on willpower, that was their choice.
Still, when his coach embraced him, pride radiant and unguarded, Austin had to swallow against something thick in his throat.
The drugs changed him in ways no one else could see. His body felt like a machine tuned too tightly. There was no softness left. No natural ebb. He existed in a state of constant readiness, like a bow drawn and never released. It made him sharper in competition, yes. It also made him brittle.
He began to measure himself only by output. How high. How fast. How clean. The mirror became less about form and more about proof. Proof that the investment was paying off. Proof that he had not compromised himself for nothing.
Because that was the unspoken terror; that it might not be enough.
Performance-enhancing drugs do not guarantee transcendence. They shift the odds. They amplify what is already there. And Austin, for all his discipline, carried an old fear inside him: that he was almost extraordinary, but not quite. That without an edge, he would always hover just below legend.
He told himself he deserved to win.
He did not tell himself why he believed he wouldn’t otherwise.
Over time, the line between Austin and the enhancement blurred. He could not remember the exact sensation of training without it. His baseline had shifted. On the rare days he skipped a dose – travel complications, misplaced supply – he felt sluggish, exposed. The ordinariness frightened him in a way he can’t find the words to describe.
The drugs have stained his body so much that to him: ordinary meant he was replaceable.
He began to guard the secret not out of fear of punishment, but out of fear of erasure. If people knew, what would remain of his achievements? Would the medals tarnish in their eyes? Would his routines be replayed not for artistry, but for scandal?
He imagined headlines. Disappointment. The recalculation of everyone who had admired him.
So he kept silent.
Silence suited him. He had always been private. Reserved. It was easy to tuck another truth into the locked rooms of himself. No one thought to look for rot in something that gleamed.
The real cost was not physical.
It was the slow erosion of trust – trust not from others, but in himself. Each success required reinforcement. Each victory raised the stakes. If he stopped now, would he fall back? Would his body remember its old limits and resent him for pushing beyond them artificially?
He stood one evening alone in the training hall, long after the others had left. The lights hummed overhead. His reflection stared back at him from the mirror – posture impeccable, lines clean even in stillness. He tried to imagine confessing. Tried to imagine stepping onto the mat with nothing but his unaltered body and seeing what happened.
The thought made his chest tighten.
Not because he feared losing.
Because he feared discovering that he could have won without it.
That possibility was more unbearable than guilt. If he could have done it on his own, then what had all this been for? What had he traded his certainty for?
He realized then that the drugs were not just about enhancement. They were about absolution. If he failed, he could blame the chemistry. If he succeeded, he could attribute it to preparation. It removed the rawness of pure self-exposure.
Commit a sin twice, and it will not seem to you a sin.
But commit it a hundred times, and it becomes part of your reflection.
Austin did not see a villain in the mirror. He saw a competitor who refused to accept mediocrity. He saw someone who made difficult choices. He saw a body honed to its sharpest edge.
He also saw, faintly, the outline of a boy who once trained for the sheer, uncomplicated love of movement. Before medals. Before the inducing panic of almost.
The tragedy of Austin is not that he cheats.
It is that he cannot imagine himself enough without it.
And so he continues – measured, controlled, and unflinching. He swallows. He trains. He wins. No one knows. The world applauds.
Somewhere beneath the applause, beneath the polished landings and suspended leaps, there is a small, persistent question he refuses to answer.
If he stopped, who would he be?
For now, he does not want to find out.