alright, well. I got back from watching A Girl’s Guide to Cheating  Something Borrowed, and decided to try and wash that crap out of my head. That hasn’t worked so far, so I’ll type up one of my prompts. Paved or Waiting… hmm… Paved it is!

——- prompt: TEAMMATES ——-

The worst part about moving to a new country in order to be with your lover is leaving your life and friends behind. It only gets worse when you find all your hopes and dreams shattered in the wake of infidelity, before you even manage to get yourself settled in. The loneliness is almost too much for her; she only knows two people on campus as anything more than acquaintances. One of them is, of course, the cheating ex, while the other is a man with his own classes and life to live. 

She’s been at the center of a gaggle of girls for so long that she’s all but forgotten how to be on her own. She’s forgotten how to make friends that haven’t come as part of the “Serenity package”, and even how to separate herself from a woman who has been dead for thousands of years. It seems impossible to move past this.

Although she knows that she could easily call home and talk to her friends, she finds herself unwilling to do so. She hasn’t managed to find a job yet, not that she’s looking all that hard, and long distance calls are just so expensive. She can’t afford it, and calling on her communicator just to sob seems like a waste of resources.

She knows that she can always count on Brady. She’s been spending as much time as she can with him, but he’s in pre-med and she’s busy with politics. Their schedules don’t exactly line up with each other, and she finds herself spending a lot of time on her own. 

“Join a club or a sport or find a hobby or something!” is Brady’s suggestion when she brings it up. And after she finishes yelling at her for using her communicator for non-senshi business, Rei fully agrees with him. She needs something to be focused on, something to get her mind off of the fact that the only reason she strived so hard to get into Stanford is the man who broke her heart.

So she starts to read the notices that are taped to bulletin boards, light poles, and on the university website. She pokes her head in on a few meetings here and there, but she just can’t seem to find anything that sparks her interest. There is no one and nothing that can pull her out of her broken heart and ease her loneliness.

She’s almost ready to give up entirely, to pack her belongings and head home because she just can’t do this anymore, when she gets the flyer for tryouts. Some enterprising soul had stuffed one under the door of every room on her floor; she takes it as a sign. Some small part of her, a wisp of the girl she’d been once upon a time, jumps excitedly at the opportunity. She doesn’t let herself dwell on anything else right up until tryouts.

It turns out that a half decade of running about on rooftops and saving the world has given her a touch of gracefulness. Growing into her full height and settling into her limbs seem to have finally rid her of the clumsiness that has plagued her for so long. It helps that the acrobatics that she learned by necessity seem to translate into gymnastics routines pretty well, too.

Before she really realizes what’s going on, Usagi is at practices and meets. Her smile is steadily growing wider and brighter with every day, and she’s putting that terrible first day behind her. Her newfound teammates may not have been the Senshi that she has relied on for so long, but they are quickly finding their way into her heart right beside them.

She is a social girl, and always has been. She needs to be surrounded by people, and they need to be happy for her to be happy and bright. The girls she meets through cheerleading, through this new adventure she’s found herself in, they give her that. In turn, she gives back everything she can, throwing herself into the team and letting them take the weight off her back. 

The girls might not understand to the full extent just what left Usagi’s heart so bruised, but they understand break ups. It’s a team effort to distract her, to put her back together after the devastation left in Mamoru’s wake. To see her smile and laugh and get her life back.

Usagi always had faired better in a team than on her own.