CHAPTER 45

"Fuck it's cold." Marcos remarked as he and Robby stepped out of the diner that night. Not only was it seriously cold, but it was also close to pitch-black, as functioning streetlights were few and far between in Panorama City where they were. He wasn't used to the winters here in Los Angeles yet. It was around 10 degrees, almost half of the normal winter temperature back home in Rio, and even dressed in a thick flannel hooded jacket, he could still feel himself begin to shiver.

"That's what happens when you want to meet in the middle of the night, close to the beginning of November." Robby replied, equally cold as he shoved his hands in his pockets to keep warm. Marcos nodded.

"Yeah, sorry about that. I needed to make dinner for my dad and clear up everything afterwards. Then I picked the diner closest to where I live."

Robby internally noted this little tidbit of information. Marcos cooked dinner for his dad. Not his mom and dad. Just his dad.

"Oh, you live around here?" Robby asked. Marcos nodded.

"Yeah, we moved into one of the apartment complexes down the street." Marcos told him.

Robby knew his way around this area very well from his days scamming people and hanging out with Trey and Cruz. Panorama City was one of the cheapest neighborhoods in the city, which meant that many of its residents were the likes of Trey and Cruz, delinquents and other types of society's rejects that had found cheap homes there. The fact that Marcos and his father were now included amongst them spoke volumes of the tough life that they were forced to life, and put more emphasis on Marcos' words from earlier. 'Fighting was his lifeline to making something of his life,' Robby remembered Marcos having said. Well that made sense now.

"So where are you going to go now?" Marcos asked him. Robby shrugged.

"I have a friend that lives around here. I'll crash with him for tonight." Robby told him. Even without Trey and Cruz, Robby still knew one or two people he could call upon around here. All that time he had spent in this shithole at least had one advantage in this regard. Marcos shook his head.

"No. I mean what are you going to do now with Miyagi-Do? Is it back to the dojo?" Marcos asked. Robby sighed.

"No. At least, not yet." Robby replied. "I'm not really sure what's next to be honest."

Before either of them could say anything else, all of a sudden, their view of the road ahead of them was blocked by a wall of 5 men, all of them very large and wearing hooded sweatshirts and long pants. Robby and Marcos internally groaned. They knew exactly what this was. Both, having lived in rough areas, had been through this before, and they were really too tired for this right now.

"Wallets. Phones. Now." One of the large thugs said. Robby and Marcos looked at each other, both thinking the same thing, both knowing exactly what was about to happen. Marcos decided to take half a step before the group of men.

"Okay, assholes, you listen carefully because I'm only going to say this once. For your own safety, I'm going to give you 5 seconds to turn your asses around and walk away." Marcos snarled. As he spoke, his tone imitated the harshness of his father's.

This had been something his father had taught him, giving criminals a time limit to get out of his sight. It made the threat seem more genuine, his father had told him. However, Marcos knew that there was only so much to a threat when it was a 2 on 5, 2 teenagers against 5 grown adults, and the men knew that too. They chuckled as they raised an eyebrow at him.

"Do you hear that? He thinks he has a choice in the matter." One of them remarked to their friend, both guffawing and chuckling wildly. Marcos felt his hands ball into snow-white fists and rage boiled up inside him. He knew that these men weren't going to back down in a hurry, and he knew that a fight was inevitable. A fight for survival. At this moment, Kreese's words from back in the dojo came rushing back to him.

"If you show mercy, even to people that today you consider to be allies, you risk putting yourself in harm's way. No mercy might not be the nicest way. But it's the only way, the only way to always keep you safe and alive."

Robby could already sense what Marcos was about to do before he even did it, so he began to prepare himself for an inevitable fight too. Channeling his sensei's words, Marcos suddenly pounced, sending a ferocious side kick at the front man's abdomen, followed by a crushing axe kick when the man keeled over in pain, causing him to go crashing head-first onto the side of the street. A sickening CRACK filled the air as skull connected with asphalt and the man went down like a stone. At that moment, a mere few seconds lasted an eternity as the men's jaws dropped at Marcos' sudden attack, but their surprised looks were quickly replied with hungry, angry ones.

"Oh, we're going to enjoy this now." They growled, preparing to lunge at Marcos. However, before they could reach him, someone else met them in the air. Robby intercepted the men's incoming assault. Expecting to see a Miyagi-Do counter to the men's strikes, Marcos was surprised to see Robby striking first, a one-two combination with his hands that knocked one guy out, and then a takedown that dropped the third of the 5 guys. 3 thugs down, two to go. After Robby had taken them down, he turned to Marcos and smirked faintly at him.

"Did you see that one coming?" He joked, referring to Marcos' predicting his Miyagi-Do arsenal. Marcos laughed as the pair of teenagers watched the last two thugs begin to approach them.

"Maybe." He joked back in reply. It didn't take too long for them to dispatch the thugs, at least temporarily. A few well-placed punches, kicks and takedowns dropped the men to the floor and once they were down, the teenagers stepped back. Well, Robby did. Marcos, however, went over to the biggest of the thugs, by the looks of things their leaders, and he crouched down so the two were face to face as the man lay on the ground, still extremely dazed.

"Now… let me repeat what I said earlier. Get out of here. Now." Marcos growled at him. The man knew better than to argue now. All 5 of them stumbling to their feet, they quickly scampered away from Robby and Marcos, leaving the two teenagers on an empty street, a silence taking over the air. Robby and Marcos said their goodbyes, shaking hands and exchanging another brief moment of respect, before going their separate ways for the night…

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Tory walked into the Miyagi-Do dojo the next morning, alone. She hadn't seen Robby since he had stormed out of the dojo the day before, hadn't even heard from him via text or call, and that was starting to worry her a little. She had stayed quiet during the entire confrontation, a purposeful decision, one that she had planned to from before…

"God, I hate her!" Tory muttered as she practically kicked open the door to her house, and her and Robby walked inside. It was two weeks earlier, and there was no debate who she was talking about. Not for the first time, Tory and Sam had butted heads about yet another trivial issue, in what was beginning to seem like a pattern in the Miyagi-Do dojo. This time, the issue had been mostly instigated by Sam, though Tory was more than eager to meet her in an equally aggressive state. The third confrontation the two had had in the past week - a record by even their standards - and everyone was getting a bit tired of it. It was beginning to distract them from time they could be spending, and that was a horrible thing, especially with Cobra Kai's looming threat on the horizon.

As Robby followed Tory into her apartment and shut the door behind him, he sighed as he looked at her.

"Look, she might have been wrong here, but did you really have to start insulting her and get so personal with it?" He asked. Tory glared at him as she tossed her jacket at the wall in the entranceway of the apartment.

"Why do you always do this?" She muttered, and Robby looked at her, confused.

"Do what?" He asked.

"You just bend over and take all of her shit, all of everyone's shit, without retaliating." Tory remarked in an almost insulting way.

"Yeah, it's called being the bigger person, Tory. We all want the same thing here. We don't need to be getting in each other's way." He told her.

"Actually, no. It's called being everyone's bitch." Tory responded harshly. Robby scowled slightly and shook his head. Tory could be frustratingly stubborn sometimes.

"It's not called that." Robby murmured.

"Oh yeah? Then when's the last time you actually called Sam out on her shit? Or anyone else in Miyagi-Do for that matter?"

Robby hesitated for a moment as he thought about this, and it really had been a while.

"Exactly." Tory replied, seeing her boyfriend's facial expression and nodding triumphantly. "Your way isn't going to work long-term, Robby. At some point, you're going to snap and you're going to explode. And when that happens, just know that I'm not going to stop you, because you really need to do this."

Fast forward two weeks and after whatever had happened at Coyote Creek, Robby really had snapped. Hawk's insinuation about him being untrustworthy was the straw that broke the camel's back, but Robby ended up storming out before he could really say anything to the Miyagi-Dos, much to Tory's disappointment. He instead left and went off the grid for the night. Tory wasn't too worried though. Although it was strange for him to go radio silent like this, she assumed he was staying with either his dad or his mom.

She figured this, at least until she saw Johnny hurrying into the Miyagi-Do dojo, practically running over to her.

"Sensei." She mumbled in greeting as she put down her back.

"Was Robby staying with you last night?" was the first thing Johnny said to Tory, concern etched on his weary face. This expression was quickly matched by Tory as she shook her head.

"No… why? Was he not with you?"

"No. And I went by his mom's place too this morning and he wasn't there either." Johnny replied. "I tried calling him, texting him too… nothing."

That wasn't good. That wasn't good at all. Even though Robby was arguably the most resourceful and street-smart of all of the Miyagi-Dos, so could most likely find his way around whatever situation had occurred last night, the fact that he hadn't even messaged any of them was increasingly worrying. Going off the grid completely like this was very much unlike Robby, so they couldn't help but think that something bad had happened to him.

This fear only increased as the rest of Miyagi-Do arrived for training that day, and Robby was the only one not amongst them. Despite the standoff that had happened the day before, now that shock about it had worn off about it all, they realized how stupid what Hawk was suggesting was. Robby bled Miyagi-Do. He had been around for longer than the vast majority of them, and the loyalty he had for the dojo emanated from him. He wasn't a spy. It would go against everything he was as a person. He was stand-up, up-front. Not a weasel. Not a spy. They needed to find him to tell him that.

So they came up with a plan. Daniel canceled training that day and sent home all of the people who didn't really know Robby very well. The rest of them - Daniel, Sam, Johnny, Miguel, Anthony (who had spent an entire summer with Robby living with them) and Tory - were split up into groups of 2, and in those groups, they'd be scouring all of Robby's favorite spots and hang out spots in the city. Daniel went with his son. Johnny went with Miguel. Which left only one more pairing, one that both participants were equally livid about, but one that Daniel and Johnny enforced. Hopefully this shared goal could breed some common ground between Sam and Tory, and maybe make them ease up the arguing and bickering just a little. It was either that, or it was sending the two girls hurtling towards another brawl. They prayed it was the former…