#it's exams season (as I've told jetcat minutes ago)

[the-hilda-librarians-wife]

I've fallen down an internet rabbit hole on figure skating ever since I began thinking about that skating AU I mentioned, I think I have an idea that might justify Kaisa only coming to the national/international competition scene later in life.

Apparently the ladies' singles discipline is. Super problematic (sorry if it's obvious, I knew literally nothing about this sport until last Saturday), and I'm imagining Kaisa could have been a victim of that. Maybe she trained under Abigail or that other nameless witch who looks like Abigail. Maybe she was a pupil of her (their?) academy, and had hopes of competing as a teenager.

But her coaches kept pushing her, to do triple and quadruple jumps without proper technique, relying on keeping her weight low and on overworking her back. Pushing her to do the routines they wanted, without the artistry elements she loved. Pushing her to diet in unhealthy ways and overtrain. Maybe they convinced her she could only be a proper skater with those technical elements, that she was struggling to master because they are hard as fuck and because Kaisa is already a scrawny person, if you stop her from eating on top of that things are not going to look good.

Her coach(es) doesn't really have her as one of her favourites, keeping her from competing for a long time since she couldn't master those jumps. But eventually she does, at the expense of her own body. The coaches sign her up for a bigger competition, then, and maybe she even makes it the first time or two, but without ever getting to a nationals. Because at some point, when she's practicing her routine full of backloaded jumps for extra points, she falls and suffers an injury.

This wrecks her completely. She doesn't want to compete anymore, because she has realized that this lifestyle that is being forced into her is sucking all the joy out of skating. Good thing too, because her coaches decide to put their energy into even younger athletes. So Kaisa goes back to the ring where she used to skate for fun when she was a child, and asks Tildy for a job.

And then, years later, Tildy asks her to give private coaching to a pre-teen who is just sooo talented. And sure, Lauren annoys the hell out of Kaisa with her attitude (something Kaisa makes sure to retribute), but in her Kaisa sees something different. Here is a teenage girl in singles figure skating who isn't destroying her body for the sake of pulling dangerous moves that will earn her points. An athlete who actively chooses to practice just for fun even when everyone tells her she should be going competitive. An artist who does amazing programs that are loved by everyone even without those technical elements that Kaisa had been so unhealthily pushed to pursue when she'd been her age.

And, well, if Lauren corners her one day to ask her why the hell she wasn't competing since she clearly liked it so much, Kaisa had always been the sort of person to need a little encouragement to be pushed into action, hadn't she?