Fandom: Uma Musume: Pretty Derby
Rating: G
Characters/relationships: Agnes Tachyon, Jungle Pocket (PokeTaki), Manhattan Cafe, Dantsu Flame
Warnings: Injury (nothing serious)
Summary:
Her hands are shaking.
OR
Pocket falls in training. Tachyon has a very measured response that's totally within her expectations.
---It is a beautiful sunny day for training at the Tracen Academy's race course, and Agnes Tachyon is... not training.
She's sitting on the bleachers surrounded by her considerable amount of portable equipment and half-heartedly typing away on her laptop, throwing periodical glances at the other umas stretching below.
According to her own calculations, she actually could join them at this time. Her injury stopped giving her grief and she seems to be managing her overall condition well. There are promising signs of improvement in some of her research ventures that could potentially let her not only jump back into racing, but feasibly survive it till the end of her upcoming senior year.
The thing is, she can only fully confirm this by getting out there and running, and as mentioned, she's currently sitting.
To be frank, somewhere deep inside her own mind where no one can hear Tachyon has to admit that she's simply scared. Scared to find out just how badly her ability suffered from her hiatus spent mostly rotting. Scared even more so to feel the tell-tale pang in her feet again and crash face first into the cold and harsh reality of the unforgiving diagnosis. Scared to realize that her temporary flash of hope and determination, lit anew at the Japan Cup by one Jungle Pocket, is a naive lie that will fizzle out as soon as she actually tries.
So she's burying herself in heaps of preventive research and doing anything except get out on the track.
"Yo, Tachyon!"
Speak of the devil.
"Yes, Pokke?" Tachyon drawls, lifting her line of sight over the screen of her laptop and landing it on Jungle Pocket. The other racer is leaning on the fence at the edge of the bleachers, already sufficiently and visibly warmed up, and she's doing her best pout up at Tachyon. Sad puppy eyes and all.
It's not working, but it's amusing.
"When are you going to train with u-u-us", Pokke whines, dramatically flopping on top of the fence and waving her arms around for emphasis. Tachyon only smiles, returning her gaze back to the laptop.
"When indeed," she echoes in a teasing tone, but without much bite to it. A simple refusal to open up that door, no matter how often Pocket comes knocking.
Pokke huffs and gathers herself back up.
"Yeah, yeah. That's 'fuck off' in Tachyonese, isn't it?"
Tachyon smiles ever so slightly wider, while Cafe takes the initiative to answer with a definite, if tired, "Yes."
"Do check that your monitors are safely attached and working before you start, hm?" Tachyon calls out when the other three begin lining up for their run. Today she convinced all of them to wear some light equipment on them — nothing too serious, just monitoring their vitals, physical condition, oxygen intake. Basic parameters. If Tachyon is not running herself then at the very least she can extrapolate a lot from their data.
Pocket just shrugged and agreed, Cafe only demanded explanation and proof and that there would be no needles or sudden chemicals involved, and Dantsu... surprisingly took the most convincing, but not for the reasons Tachyon typically expected.
"Are you sure you want to measure me, too?" she asked somewhat quietly, causing Tachyon to stop mid-preparation with wires in her hands.
"I do believe I made that clear?" Tachyon said with mostly genuine confusion. "If you're worried about the integrity of the experiment I can give you the same demonstration I did Cafe, she found it quite satis--"
"No, Tachyon, I mean I haven't even... won anything," Dantsu interrupted her with a smile that was more sad than timid. Tachyon blinked at her blankly, her default smile stuck to her face.
"You came second to Pocket at the Derby," she said. Dantsu shrugged slightly.
"Yeah," she nodded. "Second."
Ah. Devaluation of anything short of taking first. A common pitfall in competitive sport, especially for those with purely athletic approach or those with lofty dreams of grandeur. Or simply genuine racers like Dantsu Flame, it seems. Perhaps repeated seconds take a toll on one's mental state?
"You kept up nose to nose with Pocket almost the entire last stretch," Tachyon stated then, flatly, factually, leaving no opportunity to be misinterpreted as pity. "You showed the same drive she did and you broke your own limits in doing so. That is something that matters to me and my research, not how many gold trophies you have on your shelf."
Tachyon personally stored tools in hers, although even she had enough social awareness to not mention that at the moment.
"...oh come on-- I mean, Pocket is strong, and Cafe is awesome, and me--"
"And you are persistent." Tachyon outstretched her hands with the monitor towards the girl, her look final. "I do not choose my subjects lightly and this isn't charity, Dantsu. I can promise you that."
It was unclear whether Dantsu believed her, but she definitely looked like she wanted to. And she took the monitor, which was the important thing.
Back in the present all three of them line up. Tachyon hovers her finger over the stopwatch button.
They go.
She clicks.
And then it's back to observing.
Something Tachyon was always so good at. Ever since she was a kid and it turned out that she couldn't train like others did.
Bleachers are both comfortable and melancholic in their familiarity.
But she doesn't dwell on it, 'cause her eyes are darting from one runner to another, watching, analyzing, filing notes in her mind.
Cafe's stride got a bit longer, she's putting more power in pushing off the turf. Dantsu is managing her stamina better compared even to the Derby, her form has gotten more precise, more tight. Were she in this state before, who knows how that final stretch could've worked out.
Not with today's Pocket though. Today's Pocket is flying.
Tachyon wasn't the only one who came back to live at that racecourse. Pocket herself clearly gained much from her victory. There's a weight that's not in her anymore, no confusion or desperate effort in her step, she's just running. It's a training run, she's not going full speed, and yet she's still leaving the other two in the dust. Muscles working in a perfect rhythm, light on her feet, signature grin on her face. A genuine one. Unlike some horses Agnes Tachyon has to meet in the mirror every day, Pocket wears her emotions openly. Perhaps even too openly.
Tachyon glances down on her screen. Strong, steady heartbeat, controlled breathing. Pocket is indeed a marvel for her class. Tachyon may tease her, but strictly scientifically she knows — this is who she has to chase to get back in shape by senior year.
-
Maybe it's the experience. Maybe it's her keen, honed senses. Maybe it's the fact that her eyes are glued to Pocket for far longer than necessary, taking in every move, every stride, every twitch.
But Tachyon sees it before it happens. Before the beep of a sharp pulse spike blares as a warning from her laptop.
Pocket's eyes go wide, she trips over nothing and comes crashing down on the turf.
Some distant, curious part of Tachyon that never goes to sleep notes, almost habitually, that Pocket tucks in mid-air, shielding her head and preventing further injuries to her limbs. That she flips and rolls over the ground, dampening the inertia of her fall, with a practiced expertise of someone used to landing at velocity, perhaps on surfaces much harder than the racing track turf. Like asphalt.
All of that gets noted and immediately shelved away for later.
Because Tachyon is up on her feet before she even knows or feels it, like some kind of force has thrown her up by the collar, scattering the laptop and everything else on the ground. She barely registers herself vaulting over the fence. She frankly blanks out until she's suddenly on the whole other side of the track and Dantsu and Cafe are jumping away in surprise as she lands on her knees directly between them. Pocket, fully uncurled but still laying down on the ground, also startles, looking up at her.
"Tach--?!"
"Don't move."
Words come out cold, sharp and cutting, losing all buffer of her usual mirth. Her eyes scan Pocket's body quickly — she's covered in grass and dirt, but there are no weird angles or signs of bleeding through her clothes.
"Are you in pain anywhere? Can you move?"
"Last time I checked-- H-hey?!"
Tachyon lightly presses fingers to her neck, feeling out its integrity, then grabs her head, tilts it, firmly, not harshly, to get sunlight in her golden eyes.
"Light reactivity is within normal," she mutters to herself, then asks louder: "She didn't lose consciousness, did she? Even for a second?"
"She didn't," and thank the Goddesses for Cafe who doesn't ask stupid questions before answering.
"I could tell you that myself?!" Pocket complains, but Tachyon cuts her off:
"You could've been unaware of it."
Her hands shift to Pocket's shoulders, carefully but firmly pushing them to roll, thumbs press to collarbones, checking their whole length, stopping at the manubrium part right above the shirt's collar.
Pocket's throat bobs at the periphery of her vision. The skin under her cold fingers is scalding.
"T-Tachyon, it's..."
"Shut up."
It's so sharp, sudden and perhaps uncharacteristic of her that Pocket does indeed clamp her mouth shut with a clack of teeth instead of blowing up and yelling as would be more expected of her.
Good.
Tachyon's palms land on Pocket's sides under the unzipped jersey, go up, feeling for her ribcage.
"Ribs seem to be intact," she mutters under breath, quickly counting and tracing each one of them down, carefully pressing fingers into the soft skin. "Danger of a fracture and lung damage negligible... Full-body movement with no pain suggests no apparent damage to vertebrae either..." She puts her palm flat on Pocket's sternum and applies slight pressure. "Does this hurt?"
"Nope." Pocket's voice sounds strained. Tachyon's ears stand up straight and her frown goes deeper as she glances up.
"I need you to be honest."
"Swear. Doesn't hurt. Not playing tough."
Her voice still sounds choked up and her face is unusually red, although that could be from previous physical activity. The former part is more concerning.
"Take a deep breath." Tachyon commands, leaning down and pressing an ear right above her hand. Pocket makes an almost gurgling sound that is hard to identify, but then obliges, making a deep inhale.
"Airway’s not obstructed, lungs sound clear," Tachyon mutters, slightly confused, but convinced for now, lifting her head. "Other anomalies can be observed later."
When she grabs Pocket's hips, rotating them slightly to double check for the lower back movement, Pokke jolts, but eagerly assures her that it doesn't hurt either, and after burning into her weirdly shifty eyes with her own sceptical stare Tachyon moves on to her legs.
She starts with one she knows isn't at fault in the fall. Finds no signs of trauma on the femur, pushes for Pokke to slowly bend her leg at the knee, probes at the hip and the knee joint.
"No damage to tibia or fibula either," another note filed away. "Ankle movement within parameters. In the upper register, actually. Expected."
She repeats the process with the other leg, slowing down a bit as her hands reach the other ankle. She doesn't see but hears Pocket wince as her fingers press into the joint. Focused, mechanical, emotionless like a sterile scalpel, Tachyon removes her shoe and feels around the ankle.
"Slight swelling, definitely," she notes, almost robotically. "Movement..." Pocket hisses. "Causes discomfort, but no severe pain to cause heightened response. Bone seems to be intact, I can’t hear any crepitus or feel any sharp ends." Her fingers stop.
"Mild sprain."
She goes quiet, as if reaching the end of a tape.
A hand presses down on her shoulder and Tachyon jolts, lifting her head up and seeing that Pocket sat up and is looking at her with a weird, borderline unfamiliar expression. It's very, very soft and almost... apologetic? Careful? One someone would put on not to scare off a child or perhaps an animal?
"Tachyon," she says slowly, firmly, looking her right in the eyes. "I am fine."
Tachyon blinks.
Her focus, having served its purpose, slips, and all the sounds and sensations of the world come crashing back on her, overwhelmingly so.
She's suddenly incredibly aware of everything and everyone. The slight coldness of wind on her suspiciously sweaty skin, the fact that she's on her knees in the dirty grass, Dantsu's awkward shuffling in place, Cafe's stare drilling into her cranium from above.
Pocket's clothes being all skewed from her examination.
Her hands still holding Pocket's ankle.
Her hands shaking.
Tachyon sharply inhales, as if realizing her own lack of oxygen, her furrowed brows fly up and her smile snaps back onto her face with the speed of a stretched rubber band that was finally released. It honestly almost hurts her facial muscles to switch that fast.
"Affirmative!" she exclaims with her usual flippancy, dropping Pocket's leg, then gets up and cleans grass off of herself. "You are indeed fine, I’d even suggest that a visit to the infirmary and some rest from training for a few days is all that you need! You can handle it from here, yes? I need to go back to my research." The latter part is aimed somewhere in Cafe and Dantsu's general direction.
"Oi!" Pocket splutters, clearly suffering some kind of whiplash from the abrupt attitude change, but Tachyon swerves around on her heels and marches back to the bleachers, performatively waving back with her sleeve.
"Don't forget to drop the monitors off at the lab later!"
She speaks in a merry sing-song, but underneath it all her brain feels scrambled. It's normal for her to go into a narrow focus when she works sometimes, yes, but it's usually a part of a steady process. A sudden switch so violently out of her own control is something she's not quite used to and didn’t particularly enjoy. What's worse, she doesn't really understand it. What was the trigger? Was it Pocket falling? Would it be the same for anyone else? Was it the scare of a leg injury, a topic so painfully relevant to herself? Was it the scare of Pocket's leg injury in particular? Why? Because it would hinder her research? Because it would screw with her long-time goals? None of these sound right. It makes her feel slightly nauseous.
Her hands feel cold and numb, still trembling, so Tachyon shakes them, trying to get some blood circulation back into her fingers. Collar of her uniform shirt feels sticky with sweat and so does hair on her temples. Her heart rate is weirdly fast and heavy, reaching all the way up to her ears. All of it is unpleasant. It's making her wince.
And only then, walking across the field, it occurs to her just how far the bleachers are. On the whole other side of the stadium, across multiple smaller training tracks and a considerable amount of ground between.
Tachyon stops. Then looks down.
Right there, in the grass in between the track, there are fresh divots ripped out of the ground by strong legs of an umamusume running full speed.
Tachyon knows her own stride. The power of her own step.
Her school shoes are looking dirty, now that she looks at them.
She looks at the far away bleachers again. Then back down.
At the dawning evidence of herself sprinting in a mad full-speed dash to the other side of the field.
She can't remember it, yet it's staring her in the face.
Well. That explains the sweat and her pulse, she supposes.
So much for being scared to run.
She quietly rolls one leg. Then another. They don't hurt.
That is. A result.
Her head feels even more jumbled now. It almost hurts.
In a silent daze she slowly walks all the way back. Finds her scattered equipment, glad for the fact that she damage-proofed it all like ten explosions ago. Gathers it all and skulks back to her lab.
To her quiet, dim lab where she can sit and stare at the ceiling until her brain gets less overwhelmed and starts working straight again.
About an hour later, with somewhat fresh eyes and a mug of tea in hand, Tachyon opens her laptop back up to muse at the gathered data.
Only to be met with another curious conundrum.
Which is Pocket's vitals data.
Tachyon can see very well the moment the sprain happened — a sharp spike of adrenaline the second Pocket felt the pang and realized she's falling. Cafe and Dantsu have matching ones from running behind her and being startled by the fall. It’s curious that Cafe’s is just as strong as Dantsu. She’s very good at looking like nothing startles her.
Then Pocket's readings start slowly going down as she realizes she's okay and begins to wind down.
Except everything abruptly goes haywire immediately afterwards.
Her pulse speeds up to unexpected levels, her breathing becomes erratic, her body temperature rockets up, all her readings go wild, some even beating her record peaks during physical training. And they don't go down at all for a notable amount of minutes.
Tachyon stares at the screen, stumped. By all accounts, after the fall had passed, Pocket was laying down and not moving much, out of any danger. She should've been calming down, and yet it seems it was the opposite. Could her monitor have gotten damaged in the fall? Unlikely, Tachyon tested her equipment for such environments.
Could she have been in pain after all? But no, certainly the amount of pain to cause such reaction would've been impossible to hide. Although Pocket's strained speech and flushed face definitely fit into the picture...
Tachyon's hands freeze above the keyboard as she considers a variable she forgot to include.
Was this... because of her?
The short amount of time between the spike of the fall and the start of the abnormal readings definitely fits the time frame it would've taken Tachyon to cross the field.
She leans back on the chair, frowning again.
Could Pocket’ve been... scared? No, not that. In all their interactions Pocket always bore the brunt of Tachyon's intensity with her head held high. Remarkable, honestly.
Granted, she never saw Tachyon unmasked like that, but she doesn't seem the type to get this spooked by something of that nature.
Not pain either, as established.
Ah. Perhaps embarrassment.
Tachyon leans her cheek on her palm, reminiscing on their first meeting way back when. Come to think of it, back then Pocket also seemed ready to crawl out of her skin when Tachyon grabbed her leg in curiosity.
Had that also caused this strong of a reaction? Or was this time somehow stronger?
If the latter, is it because this time Tachyon admittedly grabbed more than just her leg? Or was there another variable she is failing to consider yet again?
All those questions on top of the glaring problem of Tachyon herself and her apparent lapses in judgement growing in their severity when it came to Jungle Pocket.
Horrible amount of distractions when she should be working on the renewed Plan A. Not sit here confused with a whole separate area of study that rapidly proved to not be her strong suit.
...somewhere in the Tracen Academy, in the blessedly empty classroom-turned-hideout-turned-lab, Agnes Tachyon buries her face in the heap of her sleeves with a frustrated, but not yet defeated groan.