tramitem_comm | Text to Ben (Obi-Wan)

Yeah. Where you want to go?

>> my roof? i dont know. i didnt think this through. i just dont want to be alone because that would be sad.

Your roof sounds good. You can't open your present until I leave though, okay?

>> lol
>> whys that
>> what do you want to drink?

Because I asked nicely.

Water's fine. Just make sure it's cold!

>> okay. ill wait
>> you sure you dont want something else? i can pick it up
>> what time are you free?

I am positive - water's good. Maybe pick up a cake for yourself, though.

And I'll be there about 7.

>> ill prop the front door open.
>> ignore how shitty the elevator looks. its perfectly fine

[Anakin had, indeed, left the front door open with a brick. It was a common thing people in his building did and he usually didn't mind.

Anakin was waiting up on the roof, he had a small cooler with ice, bottled water, and bottles of rootbeer.

The night was clear and the air was heavy with humidity, but Anakin thought it was a fine enough evening to have a drink on the roof.]

He shows up with a wrapped box, a half-dozen cupcakes from a bakery, and a kind of traumatized expression on his face.

He sets the box down out of the way, takes the cupcakes to join the cooler, and - "I don't think I believe you about the elevator."

Anakin was sitting on the waist high brick wall surrounding the top of the roof. When he heard the roof door open he turned around to face it.

He tipped his head to the side while taking everything in- he hadn't been expecting cupcakes but they were a welcome addition. Ben's pronouncement confused him the most.

"What do you mean? You're alive, right?"

"Yeah, but I'm not sure by how much!" He's teasing, though, about his trauma. He even flashes a grin. "It's got... charm. Would make a good setting for a ghost movie, though."

"Okay, that's fair," Anakin said, hopping down from the wall to approach Ben. He would agree that the elevator did appear frightening.

"Want me to take anything?" He held up his hands to help.

"Nope. You can't open your present until I'm gone, though," he reminded Anakin with a quick, playful, grin. "Actually, I changed my mind. You grab the water, I'll bring the cupcakes up there and we can eat." Up being the ledge.

Anakin grabbed the water and headed back to the wall. He reached down and grabbed a rootbeer for himself. He placed the rootbeer and then a water for Ben on the wall before hopping back up.

He popped open the rootbeer.

"One year older, but I don't feel like I know what I am doing. And I have therapists helping me figure that out."

He put the cupcakes between them and folded one leg under himself on the wall. "I question anyone who says they know what they're doing, with or without help, at any age."

He wasn't trying to be dismissive but the general thing called life? Who ever really knew.

"You seem to have it all- well, most of it together," Anakin said.

"Yeah, except the things you seem to have together. Maybe smash us together and you'd come up with someone who actually did?" He peels the wrapper off his cupcake and takes a bite.

Anakin cast Ben a look. "Aside knowing how to use-" He lifted his arm, "What do I have... together?"

"I know your career isn't what you want it to be, but it is a career. I'm still... playing." He might be having a tiny bit of an issue about that.

Anakin looked over at Ben in confusion while taking a lick of his cupcake's frosting.

"You have a career," he said, not at all following Ben's logic. "You teach skating." So, yea, obviously (according to Anakin) Ben had a career.

"I have a job I love. To get to career I think I'd have to stop, use my degree, and have opportunity for advancement." He still isn't sure when that point will happen. It needs to, though. He thinks. Somehow.

"So," Anakin said, trying to put that together. He took another lick of his cupcake. "A career involves a degree and advancement opportunities?"

"I actually looked up the definition," he warns, because it's fair to warn. He'd looked it up because he was a bit unclear himself and was trying to make decisions, "but yes, it involves opportunity to progress."

"And... that's what you want?" Anakin asked. "Something with advancement opportunities?"

"I don't know," he admits. "Because I don't have it together."

"What's wrong with teaching skating- you said you love it," Anakin said. "Do you need better pay? I know New York is fucking expensive."

"No, I'm okay." He wasn't going to get rich, but he did all right. "And I do love it. I just don't know how ambitious I am."

"What do you mean?" Anakin asked.

Answering that is hard, but only because he had to put feeling into words, and his feelings are... fuzzy. "Just that I don't know if I have a... drive for making more money and to advance."

Anakin nodded. His cupcake was frostingless now and he finally took a bite.

"Then what's wrong with sticking with teaching skating?"

"For now, nothing." He took another bite of his cupcake. "But I can't do it as long as I'll need to work. Which makes me feel... less than together, I guess."

"Why not?" Anakin couldn't see the limits here.

"Physical breakdown," he says, once he's swallowed that bite of cake. "If one of my more serious, older, students gets even more seriously, it'll allow me to do better paid private coaching for fewer people for longer - but it also means more physical demand from me. I'll be able to teach tiny kids until I die, probably, but that won't pay the bills. I could cut out doing exhibition skating and extend that way by... conserving what I'm using my body on, but frankly that doesn't sound like fun. Mostly, it's just an athletic career, and unlike most you're at the height of your game when you're young. I have had more stress back and ankle fractures than I can count, my ankles are trash, and my knees aren't far behind. It just... isn't a viable lifelong plan."

Anakin nodded, "Ya, I can see that about performing... but... Okay, maybe I'm missing something, but last winter Olympics I watched, most of those coaches looked like they couldn't do one of those triple spinny things if they tried. Skate? Ya, but a lot of them looked a bit, um, athletic and I bet they could but not all the stuff you can do right now. And they still seemed successful at teaching skating." Their students were in the Olympics, after all.

"There are a few things going on there," he says, without offense or being more than conversational. "But most of them come down to who they're teaching and how many people they've got on a team around those Olympic Skaters. If I got someone with serious Olympic aspirations, I would be much higher paid and also have more room to delegate - and I'm not going to claim it's impossible that it could happen - just that it isn't where I am right now."

Might be kind of nice to be able to counter some of the bullshit in the sport, too.

Anakin snorted. "Oh, ya, totally sounds like you're not ambitious at all," said with a gentle teasing tone.

He wondered if this was another facet to Ben's complex around feeling like he deserved, or didn't deserve things. Did Ben think he didn't deserve to have those kinds of aspirations?

"Do you want that? Coaching someone and helping them go to the Olympics?"

"I really don't know." That's just the truth, as is what comes next. "There is so much toxic bullshit at that level of competition.... If I could mitigate it, I would love to. I just don't know if I could."

"What's the toxic bullshit?" Anakin asked, he genuinely didn't know.

He is a little bit reluctant to verbalize it, but he was much more willing with Anakin than he would have been anyone else.

"A lot," he says, with a faint smile that's sad and a little grim, rather than amused. "Non-stop criticism of your body, not just for what it can do but what it looks like in spandex. Constant pressure to cut weight for a better appearance and increasing the height of jumps and number of rotations you can get. Hours in the gym and on ice. Having your body treated like a machine in general and if something breaks you tape it if you have time, don't if you don't, and either way you grit your teeth and get through it, see the physical therapist when you're done. The knowledge that the next time you fail to land a jump, that you're attempting after eating 500 calories today, spending 4 hours in the gym, and landing it on 2 sprained ankles you risk breaking your leg. And that if you really break your leg, you are out, your shot is gone."

Edited 2020-08-15 18:47 (UTC)

"Wow," Anakin said. And he was surprised. "I didn't know that. That's... a lot."

In some ways, he understood a flavor of criticism of his body, but that was just because he now looked different from others. But it wasn't linked to performance, and then self-worth through that performance. That was something completely all its own type of experience.

He wondered how much of that Ben had dealt with directly, but didn't ask. That seems a bit too forward.

"That's a lot to fight against."

"It is. Build a team right and it's possible, but it would be really hard." He isn't going to volunteer information, either.

He finishes his cupcake and takes a drink of water.

"Enough about me, anyway. it's your birthday."

Anakin shrugged. He balanced the water bottle in the palm of his hand, slowly it started to rise in the air just about his hand. He was getting better at using the Force this way. He much prefered this power of the Force than the empathic abilities.

"This is all I wanted for my birthday," he said. "Not being alone. I don't care what we talk about."

Text to Ben (Obi-Wan)

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CW: Disordered Eating/Exercise

Re: CW: Disordered Eating/Exercise

Re: CW: Disordered Eating/Exercise

Re: CW: Disordered Eating/Exercise