Chapter Text
credit goes to https://vgen.co/4nikki21 for artwork
Chapter 1:
Shock & Awe
Skating was the only thing that ever-made sense to him. Which is why today truly made no sense to him. Here he was performing on the biggest stage in the whole world, and he just whiffed it. He should have a gold medal around his neck, celebrating hitting the hardest quad in history at the Olympics, and instead he’s crying onto the Olympic rings, and dodging as many interviews as he can.
And the shock didn’t fully hit him until he was on the plane home.
“Brendon, NBC is calling again, they’re insisting that you do an interview ASAP,” Brendon’s press manager urged. His press manager, a short (at least to Brendon, considering he’s 5’9), Asian woman named Brenda, had been pacing the plane for hours since the seat belt sign has been turned off. Brenda didn’t particularly care that phone calls could interfere with the airplane controls, and Brendon certainly didn’t care either.
Hell, if Brendon could take control of the plane and dive it straight into the ocean he would’ve. Ever since his meltdown on Olympic ice, he had pretty much shutdown. He did his exit interviews with as little emotion as possible, congratulated the winners and got the hell out of dodge. Or Switzerland rather. He didn’t care to watch the closing ceremonies, because his Olympics were done.
When he was packing up his bags, his fellow Olympians had urged him to stay. They kept telling him that he shouldn’t be alone, and that they still had plenty of room for him in the village. But all he wanted was to be alone, and skate, which probably wasn’t healthy, but fuck it he thought.
Fuck it all, he thought. Fuck the IOC, fuck the ISU, fuck everything. Fuck the Twitter threads, analyzing what happened, and how he deserved it. Fuck the media for putting this pressure on him. And most importantly fuck himself for fucking up so incredibly badly.
Brendon sighed instead of responding to Brenda. He just continued to stare out the window, longing for another restart of his Olympic debut, and dreams.