CHAPTER 46

"We're here." Sam announced as she brought her Mercedes to a halt at their first spot. Almost immediately, Tory opened her car and jumped out of the car. The pair had not spoken a single word to one another on their way to their first checkpoint on their list, the skate park that Robby frequented whenever he wanted to clear his mind about something. They figured that they would almost definitely find him here. It made perfect sense if he was here to clear his mind after what had happened the day before. However, they quickly found that the skatepark was mostly empty, apart from a few people, none of whom had even heard of Robby, let alone seen him, when Tory and Sam asked them about him.

"Damn it." Tory spat angrily, kicking one of the half-pipes in the park to vent some of her frustration and mounting fear about the situation.

"We're going to find him, Tory." Sam said, in a genuinely sincere voice. She couldn't help but empathize with Tory, on top of the concern she already had as a friend of Robby's. She remembered how helpless she had felt when Miguel left to Mexico and went radio silent. How every waking moment, at the back of her mind, she couldn't help but think about the possibility of something bad happening to him at any moment. She knew that Tory had to be feeling similarly, so Sam forced herself to put aside her issues with Tory for now and focus on finding Robby.

Unfortunately, Tory misinterpreted Sam's sincerity as pity and patronisation, and so she scowled deeply at her.

"I know that." Tory snapped. "What are you even doing here, Larusso?"

"Well, besides the fact that it is my car that we're using… I want Robby to be found as much as you do. We all do."

That didn't lessen Tory's hatred of the brunette at all. If anything, it made it increase in that moment, as Tory's emotions were in overdrive due to concern about Robby's whereabouts.

"Yeah, well you shouldn't be here." Tory shot back. Sam bit her lip for a moment, trying desperately to keep the anger out of her voice. Not today. Not today.

"Look, I'm sorry if my being here offends you." Sam grumbled. "But Robby's my friend. I want to make sure he's okay."

Tory chuckled mirthlessly.

"Friend." Tory allowed the word to roll around her tongue, almost disgustedly, as she spat it out. "He hated you, you know? Back when he was in Cobra Kai."

Sam sighed and nodded.

"Yeah, sure, back when he was in Cobra Kai. But we're good now."

"Ha. You sure about that, Larusso?" Tory remarked. "No. Robby just didn't want to cause unnecessary shit with the dojo when he only just got back. But that doesn't change the fact that he hated you. Doesn't change the fact that he still had massive issues with you."

"Like what?" Sam asked. Tory couldn't help but laugh in disbelief, and allow a wry smile to take over her face. She was going to enjoy this.

"Ooh. Where to start? I guess it's only fitting to begin with when you and Miguel cheated on Robby and me." Tory remarked, unable to hide her joy as she got the opportunity to get back at Sam Larusso for all of the shit she had done to them in the recent past.

"That was over a year ago." Sam said. Tory raised an eyebrow.

"Did you apologize?" Tory responded, knowing very well the answer to that question. "Don't feel too bad. Miguel hasn't apologized either. But then Robby went to juvie, and as his girlfriend, did you even visit him? Or did you leave him to rot in there, very much alone and abandoned by everyone he cared about in the world?"

"I wrote to him quite a bit for the first little while. He didn't respond to any of my emails. I figured he just didn't want to see me." Sam murmured.

"So then you didn't even try." Tory replied. "You used that as an excuse to dump him without a breakup, and get back together with Miguel. You broke his heart without him even knowing."

"That's not what happened." Sam demanded, forcing certainty to her words, though internally she was in turmoil.

"Right. That's good. After all, it would've been really awkward if Robby got out of juvie, had no idea that you were done with him and were back with Miguel, and he walked in on the two of you, huh?"

Sam couldn't formulate a response to this, and it gave Tory the opportunity to keep speaking.

"All of this shit wrecked him. And the fact that you cared so little about all of it that you never apologized for anything, even after he returned to Miyagi-Do… that shows what kind of person you are. You're…"

However, Tory's voice trailed off as she noticed the facial expression on Sam Larusso's face. All of the anger had drained from Sam's face, leaving her pale as a sheet. As Tory watched in shock as a few tears even trickled from Sam's ocean-blue eyes, she felt something that in over a year of rivalry with Sam Larusso she hadn't felt before: remorse.

While Tory did regret some of her past decisions such as starting the school fight and breaking into the Larusso mansion, it had always been regret about the action, not about the damage she had caused to her rival. If anything, whenever Tory contemplated her past actions, she almost completely forgot about Sam's existence in the entire thing. She de-humanized her rival, as a way of allowing her hate to live on.

However, Tory couldn't do that now. She was standing face to face with Sam, seeing the emotion in her enemy's face, so it was impossible to dehumanize her any longer. Sam Larusso was a human being, no different to her. She had feelings, no different to her. She made mistakes, no different to her. Robby had told her exactly this plenty of times, but Tory had always made a point to ignore him. Her stubbornness had outweighed everything else, but it was unable to do anything now.

For possibly the first time, Tory felt guilt, not about everything she had done, but about everything she had done to Sam. She thought about the school fight, about the house fight, when she had gone in with the intent to seriously harm Sam. Tory couldn't even imagine what it had been like for the year that she forced Sam to live in fear of assault at any moment.

Little did Tory realize that Sam was going through the exact same thing as she was. Both girls had been opened up to just how much their past mistakes had affected others, how it affected their rival and how it affected people they cared about. Sam couldn't believe just how much Robby had held in about the things she had done to him, things she figured she could forget about as Robby hid his feelings so well with a smile on his face.

This was it. For the first time ever, Tory and Sam had inadvertently found a shred of common ground, and neither would've predicted that the common ground would be the crushing guilt both were feeling about their past actions. Robby's disappearance had distracted both Sam and Tory from their fighting for long enough to feel remorse for the amount of damage they had caused.

They were both feeling it now, so it was now about which one of them spoke up first, as they had both gone dead silent for what felt like an eternity. It was Sam who decided to break the silence, wiping away her stray tears and taking a deep breath as she said quite possibly the hardest thing she had ever said in her life. It took every ounce of courage inside her to say, especially to the person who had traumatized her so intensely for over a year.

"Tory… I'm so sorry." Sam said, in a voice not much louder than a whisper. "For everything. I had no idea the amount of pain I caused you and him. I… I pushed aside all of the mistakes I made because I thought the things I did could be justified after the school fight, but they can't. And now he hates me because of it."

Tory sighed.

"He doesn't hate you, Larusso. These things might have annoyed him, but I don't think he hated anyone at the end of the day. Not you. Not Miguel. Not anyone." Tory admitted quietly.

Tory had exaggerated the extent of how much Robby had 'hated' Sam as a way of trying to verbally stab at her nemesis, and she relayed that to Sam, before taking a deep breath. It was her turn now. She had heard Sam apologize for her part in the rivalry but that didn't make this any easier. Her entire essence was hard-wired to believe that she shouldn't apologize. Apologies were for the weak. They didn't portray toughness; they portrayed the exact opposite. Tory's gut instinct wanted nothing more than to turn around and run the other way, but her mind forced herself to remain still and go against the rest of her body.

"Sam, I'm sorry too. For the shit I did. I might've hated you for what you and Miguel did, and everything that happened before then, but I should've never… done what I did. Same with when I broke into your house with Cobra Kai. I let my anger take over, did horrible things, and it took your mom forcing me to get help to see that. I honestly wish there was a way I could turn around and take back all of it."

Over a year it had taken them. Over a year of fighting tooth and nail, going to war against one another and leaving a trail of carnage in their wake, and the girls had finally given each other a long overdue apology. It had taken them a long time, much longer than the rest of Miyagi-Do would have wanted, but that was expected. The scars that both of them had run much deeper than any of the other rivalries within the dojo. Johnny and Daniel had taken nearly 40 years to solve their issues, so it was a minor miracle that it hadn't taken the girls a century to arrive at a place of remorse and apology.

This wasn't going to be a time of automatic forgiveness, hugs and friendship. This wasn't it. Apologies did little to patch over the deep wounds that both of them bore. However, what the apologies did do was put both of their minds at ease about the looming threat of the other. Neither were actively after the other any longer, which meant that they could afford to turn their attention away from each other and allow all of the anger and hatred that had previously been flowing through their veins to slowly drain away, opening a new path in the future. A path of forgiveness and alliance. Which is desperately what they needed right now, as it was closing in on 10 am, meaning that Robby had been missing for around 16 hours. Not long enough to be able to call the police and file a missing person report, but definitely long enough to have everyone's worry level sky-high…