Disclaimer: Victorious and all of its associated copyrights are not my property and I stake no claim to them.
A/N: Hard drive died. Had to rewrite everything and lost the majority of my notes. Regardless, here's chapter 43.
A little warning, this one gets heavy in the first part
The dreams didn't matter. The hallucinations didn't matter. The anxiety didn't matter. None of it mattered. I was back, and as I felt the roar of the crowd and the rhythmic thump of the music, I'd never felt more alive.
Home.
Fifth place, they said. Twenty-two, one, and four, they said. What an amazing fight to come back to, they said.
It didn't matter.
My emotions were always left outside the cage. A hindrance, he'd tell me. A useless part of your brain in those few minutes.
It didn't matter.
She was a close friend, someone I'd trained with for hundreds of hours. I'd met her family, her husband, her daughters. They came to watch her.
It didn't matter.
I felt no pain in my leg. No fire in my chest. I only saw her face.
It didn't matter.
What a spectacle it was. What a story. Two friends, training partners, meeting in the cage for the first time.
What a long and grueling fight it would be, they'd say. It'd go through all three rounds, they'd say. It'd have to be decided through unanimous decision, they'd say.
I believed them, too. Hell, I was the conductor of that hype train. Too bad I let that train derail, crash into a wall, then sink to the bottom of the ocean.
I was so sure I could do it. I trained so hard, I was better than ever. I didn't know for sure if I could beat her, but I knew I'd put up one hell of a fight. I fully intended on doing so, too.
Two rounds.
It took only eight minutes for everything to fall right back down on top of me. Everything was going perfectly. I was winning.
And then I saw him. One punch destroyed everything. I felt an impossible weight across my throat and it was over.
The pain in my chest was crippling. My vision began to blur. I had to leave.
The second they took their eyes off me, I was gone.
Look at that truck, you see it? You see it. Go. Drive in front of it. It'll be over quick.
They haven't repaired that guardrail in years. It's crumbling. One hit and it'll fall. That river below will kill you.
That accident was only last week. They haven't replaced those sand barrels. At the speed you're going, you'll die instantly.
I let out an ear-piercing scream and drove faster. My own tears blinding me were bad enough without the voices in my head. I wiped at my eyes and saw him standing in the middle of the street. I swerved and nearly slammed right into another car.
Useless. You can't even die right.
I lost myself in my own thoughts. I felt numb. I wasn't sure I was the one controlling my own body anymore.
I couldn't say when exactly it happened, but I soon found myself walking down a dark and seemingly desolate street. I didn't know why, and I didn't really care.
Maybe you'll get mugged.
You're barely dressed, they'll probably just have their way with you.
Hopefully they'll kill you at the end too.
I collapsed against the wall of some sort of building, my knees tight against my chest.
No one's POV
"Yo, get a load'a that."
The guy pointed toward the abandoned convenience store, where a lone figure sat curled up near the wall. His friends noticed as well and began laughing.
"Rough night, eh?" One called out.
No response.
Another began walking closer, his friends just behind him. "Hey," he shouted at her.
Nothing.
"Think she's dead?"
"Nah, man, she's breathin'."
The one who originally spotted her knelt down next to her and nudged her, "Ay, you dead?"
"Check out her get-up, man."
It was then he noticed the logos all over her shorts and sports bra.
"She ain't even wearin' shoes."
"Derek, you think…?"
Derek, who was still knelt down next to her immediately jumped up, "Shit, dude, there's no way."
"Wasn't she fighting tonight?" The other asked when it clicked for him as well.
Just then, Derek's phone began to ring. He stepped away a bit to answer it. When he came back, he looked nervous. "Aight, so...apparently Charlie just got a call from Tor sayin' Jade had bolted after her fight."
The other two looked back at the unmoving form of the woman. Derek continued, "That was Paul, he told us to keep a look out for her and call Charlie if we find anything.
One of the guys pointed toward the woman, "Ay, I think we found somethin'."
The other nudged her again, "Jade? Come on, man, stand up."
"Don't touch her, man. Just don't let her out of your sight, I'ma call Charlie."
"Good on you for bringin' her here, Der," Charlie shook the mans hand while simultaneously handing him a small baggie. "Go on, I've got it now."
Derek gave him a two-finger salute and left with his friends. He looked back to Jade, covered in mud and scratches and tried to think of what to do. He crouched down next to the couch she lay on.
"What's the matter with you, kid? Everybody's worried about you."
She finally dared to look at him, then scanned the room for anyone else, finding it empty.
"You were right," she mumbled.
"I could've guessed that. I'm not wrong very often." He sighed, "I watched your fight. What happened to you?"
There was a thundering pounding on the front door just then, and Charlie groaned, knowing it could've only been one person. "Your girlfriend is here, and I'd reckon she's none too happy."
She suddenly, forcefully, grabbed the front of his shirt and begged, "You said you had a way to help me. I don't want to try anything, I want your last-ditch effort. Make it go away, please. I can't live with this."
"Charlie I'm going to break down this fucking door if you don't let me in!" Tori screamed.
"Jade you don't understand what you're asking for. This isn't what you want, I promise you."
Tori began to get impatient, "One!"
Jade began to cry, "I know that I'm going to die if I keep having to suffer through this."
"Two!"
"Quit with your fucking theatrics and give me a goddamn minute!" Charlie shouted back at her.
"Please, I don't know what else to do."
Charlie put his hand on her arm and stood up, "I know, but I just think there's a better way."
He went over to unlock the door, and was nearly steamrolled by a nearly unhinged Tori. "I knew she'd be here," she snarled at him.
"Relax, tiger, she literally got here less than five minutes ago. She wouldn't be here at all if not for me, so just chill out a second and quit shouting like a goddamn maniac."
She turned away from him and looked at Jade, covered in scratches, dried blood, and mud. "Thank you," she said quietly. She was furious for reasons she didn't entirely understand, but he was right.
Charlie grabbed a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from the table. "Call if you need me," he said as he lit the cigarette and left the room.
Tori knelt down next to the couch and ran her fingers through Jade's hair. "You saw him, didn't you?"
Jade nodded numbly.
"You've been lying to me for months." It wasn't a question, and Jade knew it, but she also knew she had nothing to say that would make it better. She rested her forehead against Jade's, "I just don't understand why. I never hid anything from you."
She closed her eyes, "I wasn't trying to lie to you...just to myself."
Tori sighed, "I think this has dragged on long enough. I'm not the only one in this relationship who needs help. You can't keep hiding from this."
"I failed."
"Yeah, that usually happens to people once or twice in their life."
She turned over and stared at the ceiling. Tori knew she was done. It'd be useless trying to get her to say anything else.
"Charlie, can you help me a second?" She called out to him.
With his help, they quickly got her into the car and Tori took her home. Once back, she did her best to avoid and hold off everyone else. At her request, she left Jade by herself in the bathroom to shower. She settled down on the bed with a book and an anxious pit bull.
Thirty minutes of silence passed before she felt the need to check on Jade. There she sat on the floor of the shower in the fetal position, completely naked, but had seemingly forgotten to actually turn the shower on. Tori stripped as well and joined her in the shower, turning on the water before kneeling down next to her.
"It's okay to ask for help."
"I didn't think I needed it," Jade mumbled.
Tori spent the next twenty minutes washing all of the blood and dirt off of her body and hair, and the next fifteen tending to anything severe, all the while talking to her about the most mundane and trivial things she could think of. Once finally in bed, she made sure there was enough room for Cujo to curl up on the other side of Jade, hoping it would make her feel a little better.
She wasn't sure she wanted to know where Jade had gone or what exactly happened to her. She wasn't sure Jade even knew.
Jade's POV
My body ached. Everything hurt and I wasn't sure why. It felt like my mind was in a fog and I couldn't really focus on any one particular thought. I got dressed and quietly left the house, Cujo by my side. I didn't know where I was going, but it felt normal.
The air was hot and sticky, the ground beneath me dry and unstable. Branches kept whipping at my arms and legs, but I kept going. All the way to the top. As the sun was once more able to reach my skin, I stepped further out onto the cliff.
Cujo begin to whine.
Jump.
Below me, a rocky canyon, over a hundred feet down. Behind me, the forest I'd come from. Above, a few sparse clouds and the scorching sun.
I took a few steps closer.
Jump!
A rock I'd accidentally kicked tumbled over the edge. I watched it fall until it hit the ground and shattered into pieces.
That could be you if you'd just take a few more steps.
I took two more steps, my toes just barely hanging over the edge.
One more.
Cujo barked loudly and I felt him tug on the back of my shirt. All of a sudden the fog in my mind dissipated and I realized exactly where I was.
Useless.
I took several careful steps backward, then turned and ran as fast as I could back down the mountain.
Tori was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. She smiled at me as I came in, and I smiled back. I didn't tell her.
I continued training as normal. Randy never asked questions. Tori had said something to him.
Days went by as I pretended I was okay. Tori never asked. She already knew. One more meal I couldn't taste and a piece of paper was laid out in front of me.
"We're going on holiday," Randy announced. "Just you and me."
Retraining, he said. An old master who'd once taught me to conquer my own emotions was going to be my master one more time. I wondered if my demons would accompany me into his gardens of zen and homes of Feng Shui.
I cried in Tori's arms that night as we both came to terms with the fact we'd be an ocean apart for several weeks. She told me it'd be okay. Maybe she didn't notice that she was crying too.
She told me about her new job as I packed. A bookstore, she said. She'd be happy there.
I wanted her with me.
I was angry with him when he told me. Calm as ever, he claimed even his presence was only a formality. It would be me and this master, alone, for weeks. No phones. No internet. No contact.
I was terrified.
She tried to stay strong at the airport. She told me she'd be okay. She kept telling herself not to cry, but she still did. I refused to be away from her as we waited.
Randy couldn't hide his pain and guilt as he had to pull me away from her. He didn't try to talk to me during the ride. I was angry with him, but still grateful for what he'd done for me. I tried to force myself to think of it all as a good thing, but the first night I spent sleeping alone convinced me it wasn't.
I wouldn't see Randy again for over two weeks. I felt alone and scared, like a child. The Master was quiet man, preferring the solitude of meditation over idle conversation. He never asked about my situation, how my training has progressed, or even how I was doing. I was certain that while I'd never seen Randy, he had.
I was never told the point of the constant meditation, the mystery teas I was given, or the fact that not a single person had spoken to me in ten days. Master Ishihara was a man of few words. Anything he wanted from me would be communicated in gestures or pointed looks. I had started to think that rather than nobody speaking to me, I'd just gone deaf.
Yet the birds still sang, the wind still rustled the leaves, and the waves still crashed against the sandy beach.
It took two weeks for a single word to be spoken.
No one's POV
The man stood in front of her, his feet precisely shoulder-width apart, his hands clasped behind his back. "Who are you?"
His voice nearly made her jump out of her skin. After so long, she was certain everyone on the island was simply a mute. Despite her heart rate reaching near fatal levels, Jade remembered the same question Randy asked her so many years ago. "I'm a professional martial artist. A champion."
"No." He replied immediately, his voice as assertive and unwavering as his posture. He spoke as if the silent two weeks had never happened, and this was their first time meeting after so long. "That is what you did. That is who you were. In essence, perhaps you still are that person, deep down. On the surface, you are barely more than a stumbling child learning her first sets."
Jade began to stumble on her words, "But I've learned so much, I've mastered-"
"Precisely!" He stopped her. "Mastered. Six months ago, yes, you were a master of your art. Now, you haven't any right to call yourself a master. You've fallen from a great height, and if you keep denying that to yourself, you will never climb back up to where you were before. You must release yourself from your own expectations. You will never be the woman you were before. That is not how evolution operates. Maybe one day you will be stronger than you were before, or maybe you will never quite reach the pinnacle of the expertise you had before, but you will never be the same. Tell me again – who are you?"
Jade stared at the intricate mosaic below her feet and her shoulders slumped. "I don't know."
He seemed to expect the answer. In fact, her newest theory is that the past fourteen days had been nothing more than observation for him. He probably knew her whole life story by that point just by watching her.
"You are Jade West." He straightened her shoulders. "You are a daughter." She pictured her smiling parents at her high school graduation. He tilted her chin up. "A sister." She saw Mikey at his first Taekwondo lesson, an ecstatic smile on his face. He adjusted each of her feet. "A friend." The faces of her closest friends and trainers flashed through her mind. He placed each arm behind her back. "You are a dedicated practitioner with a pure heart."
Jade's shoulders instantly slumped and she opened her mouth to respond, though she no more than exhaled ever so slightly before the Master raised his hand, "It was not a question, Jade. Nothing said is up for debate. These statements define who you are. Your most basic self. That is the person you must focus on, the one you must strive to keep alive." Jade took a deep breath and straightened her stance. The master turned his back to her, looking out on the garden just beyond the courtyard they stood in. "Do not speak again until you are ready to let go of what was, and accept what is."
She stood silently for nearly five minutes before attempting to speak, "I thi-"
"Quiet." He replied without hesitation. "You're not ready. I can hear it in your voice. Gather your thoughts, Jade. Understand what you feel, and why. Then, let them go."
"I can't just suddenly let it all go, I'm not some divine being."
He turned to face her. "I understand that perhaps it may seem difficult to do – maybe even impossible, but bear in mind what it is that you do, what you've trained for since you were a little girl. So often anymore, the martial arts have been taught as a method of fighting, and only as such. What so many people fail to grasp is the mental side of this art. A true master of his art has complete and total control of his mind and body. He understands all of that which is his to control, and he exercises that control. Your thoughts and emotions, while a wild beast, are not uncontrollable. What I'm asking of you now, is to begin the taming process of these expectations you have for yourself. Let go of who you think you are, and remind yourself of who you really are."
Jade closed her eyes for a few seconds and took several deep breaths. Once she opened them again, she fixed the slack in her posture and focused on the smallest of details in the gardens. Her mind felt like a typhoon. So many thoughts thundered and rampaged through her mind. She replayed his words over and over, her lips moving along with the unspoken mantra. The ghost of the weight on her throat slowly lightened. The white-hot burning in her chest started to cool. The face of the man who caused her so much grief lay at the forefront of her mind; a static image obscured only by the endless thoughts flitting about around it. Suddenly, one thought slammed into her like a freight train, obliterating everything else that plagued her only seconds before.
Jade spoke for the first time in nearly an hour. "I'm a killer."
"Why would you say something like that?" The master asked, his voice just as steady and calm as it was before.
"I killed him. I...I-" she paused to take a deep breath. "I beat him to death."
Not a single unnecessary muscle moved, "Why?"
"He...he shot me. He shot me and he stabbed Tori. He tried to kill us both."
The master hummed quietly, "I see. So in your efforts, you saved more lives than you took."
Jade said nothing. She stared forward at the horizon and its criss-crossing colors of yellow, orange, and pink.
"Another man's actions are not yours to control. Perhaps there could have been another outcome, if you had more control over your emotions. Regardless, what has been done, cannot be undone. It is time to let go of your fear and guilt."
"I don't think I can."
He sat down nearby, his legs crossed, his hands resting in his lap. "No matter. You stand there until you accept that you can."
"But I-"
"Silently," he added sternly.
"My husband is a mess."
Tori glanced over at her boss, who was busy fiddling with her phone. She set down the crate of books she was putting away and walked over to lean on the counter, "What now?"
She finished tapping away then tossed it down on the counter, "It's like he's forgotten how to change a diaper again. I swear, sometimes it's like raising four kids."
"You'd think after becoming a father three times he'd learn."
"Wouldn't that be nice," she grumbled.
The store was empty, as it usually was around that particular time. Tori had mostly busied herself with restocking and rearranging their collection, but welcomed the break in monotony.
Her boss, a woman who couldn't have possibly been more than 35, was always someone Tori loved to talk to. She had such a maternal aura around her that made it impossible to be uncomfortable, and left her feeling like she wasn't about to come apart at the seams.
"You never talk about your life," Michelle swatted her playfully on the shoulder, "You know all about me with my jabber-mouth by this point, but I don't know anything about you."
Tori laughed humorlessly, "Mostly because my life is like a bad sitcom at the moment."
Michelle leaned her elbows on the counter, "I'm a sucker for bad sitcoms. Tell me all about it. Are you married? Siblings, kids, sworn enemies?"
"Not married. One sister, no kids. Too many enemies to count."
"I had noticed on your background check that you have a bit of..." she paused, "history."
"Nothing I really like to think about anymore, though it kind of plagues me anyway. I've made a lot of mistakes in my life."
"Look around you," she gestured to the shelves upon shelves of books, "No good story comes without hardship. How do you learn if you don't make mistakes?"
Tori found herself speaking before she really had a chance to think about what it was she said, "I almost got the love of my life killed."
The older woman tilted her head, "Can I ask how? Morbid curiosity, you know how it is."
"My abusive ex-boyfriend, underboss of a gang, sort of lost his shit when I left him and made it his life goal to kill me and the woman I left him for."
Despite the dark nature of the story I was telling her, there was a glint in her eye and a smile on her face, "Plot twist! Who's the woman? A charming bar-goer, a tinder match, oh! Was she an old schoolmate you never could get along with until you realized your feelings for each other?"
I wasn't sure at that point if I should answer, given she'd already made up an entire story in her own mind. I had to laugh, "The last one is probably the closest. We met in sixth grade, friends until eighth, dated until tenth. Then things kind of fell apart, and we both paddled up shit-creak until a random stroke of luck and a mutual friend brought us back together."
Michelle clasped her hands together, "Beautiful! You really should publish this."
"Things haven't been very beautiful lately," I sighed. "I actually haven't seen her in over a month."
"What? Why?"
"When I said I almost got her killed, I wasn't kidding. I mean, he nearly killed me about half a dozen times, but that I could live with. He shot her twice and she's been on a downward spiral since then. She's a professional athlete and you could probably imagine how much a couple bullets fucked that up."
She rested her chin on her palm, "So where's she gone?"
"Japan," I laid my head down on the counter, "So in the past few months, my life has gone from a crime drama, to a rom-com, to some kind of fucking anime, I guess."
"Japan doesn't always entail anime. What if she's gone to join the Yakuza?"
She was definitely having way too much fun with this. I welcomed the change of pace from the usual pity-party.
"That'd be pretty bad-ass."
The little bell above the door jingled, and we both looked over to see an elderly couple walk in. We both smiled at them.
"You'll tell me more about this later, and I'll probably fire you if you never let me meet her."
I laughed, "Okay, that's fair."
I'd tried to take Cujo out on walks every day, but somehow he always seemed to have way more energy than I could handle. He'd tug relentlessly on the leash, both expecting to be going faster and having the freedom to roam on his own. Every single time we got back, he'd run around the entire house to sniff everything he could, then lope up the stairs and to Jade's bedroom to curl up on her bed. If dogs experienced depression, that's definitely what it was.
Every night he'd curl up next to me in the same spot Jade used to sleep, and I'd talk to him for a while. I told him about work, the people I'd met, the conversations I had. I'd tell him how I was feeling and I'd cry into his fur. He never understood anything more than the fact I was upset, and did what he could to comfort me. Even though the only one who seemed to understand my suffering was a dog, it felt nice to know I wasn't alone.
I had no idea when she would be coming home, but we both held out hope everyday that she'd be there once we got home from our walk.
A/N: The first half of the story was mainly written with the goal of showing a glimpse of what it's like to be in Jade's mind through the things that have been happening. Rather than a typical point-of-view, I tried to show exactly what her thoughts would be.
Name of the chapter is a reference to the song Strike Back by We As Human. The line being "The bigger they are, the harder they fall." It felt fitting. Hope you guys enjoyed.
