Fall Into Me

~..I..~

The New Year - or Hogmanay - celebrations lasted until the second of January, and after that there was only a few more relaxation days before Minerva got back into work. Having spoken to her mother during the holiday, she'd come to a decision about the castle husbandry. There was no feasible way for Minerva to run both that and her PI business, and though she might love what she'd created herself, she wanted desperately to have a bigger part in the management of her castle.

All those years she'd spent shunting the castle were wasted, even if Moira allowed her the space to come to terms with what their family had done. What happened was long, long in the past and couldn't be changed no matter how angry it made Minerva. What she could do, was rewrite this little section of the present. Rewrite her own rule of the castle and turn it into something greater, something better than the Stewart's could've ever imagined.

Minerva wasn't going to announce her step down just yet; she didn't have a suitable replacement for her company and wasn't going to let it be fought over by her competitors, neither was she going to merge it with someone else. There was someone in mind, but she had a lot of training to do. All of that was at the back of her mind, however.

There was a meeting she had to attend in New York, with Fiona and Alcina. Minerva had tried to push to have the meeting done in Scotland or Wales, or even Italy, where Alcina lived, but Fiona had other meetings she had to have, and so it was just easier for them all to meet there.

Knowing Mona's fear of flying, Minerva had told her she didn't have to go, which Mona was not impressed about. Minerva pointed out that she wasn't going to be there long, two days at most. She would be on the ground for no more than maybe ten hours. There was no point in Mona freaking herself out over the flight when Minerva would be back in a couple of days.

Of course, Minerva leaving created challenges, centred entirely around Mona's eating disorder, which had been going so well for the past week. Mona promised her everything would be okay, and even if it wasn't, she wasn't going away for a week - it was a maximum of two days. Mona would be fine.

As they'd discussed in the van, Minerva was helping Mona to work out, and had gotten a workout plan from her personal trainer to give Mona something to do whilst she was away. However, they had a few days before then, and so to help Mona become more comfortable with the exercises, Minerva had agreed to workout alongside Mona.

During a rest before her next exercise, Mona watched Minerva hop up onto a bench to then jump up and grab the bar above her. With controlled movements, Minerva began her pull up set. On her seventh one, their eyes met and she raised a brow.

"Something wrong?" She asked.

"Can you teach me to do that?" Mona asked her, despite knowing she had no upper body strength and would most likely fail miserably. Minerva glanced down at the bench and easily dropped down to it and then to the floor in a swift movement.

"Up you go," Minerva nodded to the bench. Getting up, Mona copied Minerva's first movements, hopping on the bench and then jumping to the bar.

"That wasn't hard," she said. Minerva's expression remained neutral.

"Change to an under grip," Minerva told her, nodding towards her hands, "an over grip will be too challenging."

"But you did an over grip," Mona said, shuffling and changing her hands over with clumsy movements. That was not as easy as getting up there was.

"Because it's back day," Minerva explained, "if it was arm day, I would do an under grip. Hands closer together," she gestured to Mona's spread out grip. Adjusting herself to instruction, Mona hung in the space, already feeling a strain on her hands. "Brace your abs, keep your body as stable as you can, then pull up. Whilst you do, keep your head forward and your neck neutral. Once your chin is above the bar, it counts as a rep."