Hawk grabbed his bag after practice and saw Kenny practicing with the punching bag. He supposed now was as good a time as any to give this a shot."I'm trying to talk to Kenny but he's avoiding me. I think you might be able to get through to him in a way that I can't."
Robby asked him to do this earlier during practice when they were on their water break. After a few minutes of thinking it over, it was easy to guess why he thought Hawk could get through to Kenny. It sounded like the kid really got a taste for bullying once he got a taste of power. Not unlike the way Hawk did.
"Alright man. I'll do my best."
Hawk walked up to Kenny. "You punch fast, kid."
Kenny quickly turned to look at Hawk before just going back to punching the bag. Ever since the kid had shown up to Miyagi-Fang, he'd had such a guarded expression. He barely spoke to anyone.
Even the cobras during his time hadn't been able to get much of a conversation out of him. He never even said anything to Anthony. He especially seemed determined to stay away from Robby.
Even when the senseis tried talking to him, Kenny kept a distance. Although, now that Hawk thought about it, he and the cobras that showed to the flagship dojo or the ones that were opened up since, had never actually interacted with the Miyagi-Fang senseis, apart from Devon. So maybe that was part of the reason he kept a distance from the senseis.
Well he couldn't keep a distance for the rest of his life.
"You got a minute to talk?" Hawk asked him.
Kenny just sighed. "Will you just leave me alone?"
"You know, Robby really wants to talk to you."
Kenny looked Hawk directly in the eye for the first time. "Well what's it to you? Did Robby ask you to talk to me?"
"He's worried about you." Hawk said, preferring not to answer that question. "But he can hardly talk to you about it when you avoid him and everyone else."
Kenny looked a little and muttered "whatever" before turning away, apparently done with this conversation.
Hawk wasn't going to give up so easily however. Maybe he should extend the olive branch.p
"I know you did some pretty shitty things in Cobra Kai. I did too for that matter. Maybe it would help to talk about it."
Hawk had never really been the mentoring type since he started learning karate, but maybe the kid needed someone who understood what he was going through to help him through this. After all, Robby was right that day of the Sekai Taikai qualifier. He certainly remembered what it was like to be in Cobra Kai.
Kenny turned back around to look at Hawk and narrowed his eyes. "You don't know shit about what it was like for me!"
Hawk walked closer to him. "I do actually. I used to get bullied a lot. Sometimes people would push me, call me names, or cyberbully me. It was happening everyday."p
Kenny's eyes widened. "Is that true!?"
Hawk nodded. "Yeah. I wanted it to stop but I didn't think it ever would. But I joined Cobra Kai one day. This was back when it was Sensei Lawrence's dojo. The bullying stopped after I took the lessons without me having to even fight them, but it didn't stop there."
"What do you mean!?" Kenny asked. He sounded really curious now.
"I started feeling angry at things. At the kind of things that could make me feel like I lost my strength. I did some things I thought I had to do to protect them, like fight the guys in Miyagi-Do."
Kenny's jaw dropped. "You fought your friends?"
"Apart from Demetri, they'd never been my friends back then, but yeah even him. I might have even seen him as the biggest threat to my strength. Things were so bad between us and they only continued to get worse until I had gotten to a point where I broke his arm."
Hawk remembered that night so well, even now. He could still hear Demetri begging him to let him go right before he heard the sound of a bone snapping.
Kenny's jaw dropped even further. "You really did that? You broke someone's arm? Your best friend's arm?"
"Yeah I really did. I attacked all the Miyagi-Do's at one point. I turned into a real asshole."
"So you… so you never got back at your bully but you attacked your friend and some other guys?" Kenny asked. "Did that feel… weird?"
Hawk remembered the day Kreese recruited some new students to Cobra Kai. He remembered his reaction to seeing Kyler and Brucks, his anger as Kyler took Mitch's place, his anger as he attacked Brucks.
"Actually at one point I did get back at my bully. My anger had been really building up and… I lost it on him. It was like I didn't even realise I was attacking him."
Hawk thought revenge would feel better than it ended up feeling. He thought he'd enjoy the feeling of breaking Demetri's arm and wrecking Brucks' face but more than anything, Hawk spent a lot of time trying to figure out why he didn't feel pleasure of breaking Demetri's arm. It was the very thing Kreese had trained him for.
After messing up Brucks' face, he felt more like he understood that he could hurt someone and not even realise it and that did not fill him with pride.
"Did that feel good…?" Kenny asked uncertain.
"I thought it would feel better than it did to be honest. I left Cobra Kai because I realised I didn't want to be an asshole anymore. I'd burned every bridge I ever made by doing the shit I did and I wanted to make things right."
Kenny looked deep in thought after hearing all of this. "What about Sensei Kreese? Did he make you feel like he had the kind of faith in you that he didn't have in anyone else?"
Maybe they were more alike than they thought they were. "Yeah he really did. I thought he wanted me to be his champion. But he didn't." Hawk said before smirking. "But the joke is on him. I am the champ despite his bullshit."
Kenny snorted a little before he frowned. "Sensei Silver said he believed I had more potential than anyone. I thought he believed in me. He picked me along with Tory to fight for Cobra Kai's Sekai Taikai qualifier. But after I saw the video of him admitting that he paid off the All-Valley ref during Tory's match… maybe he did the same during our match. I felt so ashamed and betrayed and… so useless. Everything I did this summer was because of a scam. Even the stuff I did to Lapu… to Anthony. I did it while training for Silver. After that video, I didn't get what the whole point was of all the karate training if I was just gonna be manipulated by a fraud."
Hawk's expression softened when he heard that, because he too had once wondered what was the point of all his karate training if it couldn't help him. After Kyler and those other guys held him down and Robby cut off his mohawk, he'd felt so… stripped of his identity. It was the worst feeling he'd ever gone through. He wasn't helpless but he hadn't been able to do anything to stop it and that made him question the whole point of learning to fight if he couldn't even defend himself.
"Now I just… I guess I just don't know what I'm supposed to do." Kenny muttered./p
Hawk also felt that way after losing his mohawk. He hadn't been able to bear facing Eagle Fang or Miyagi-Do so he just stayed at home.
"I felt that way too. Something happened to me and I felt so ashamed and guilty about the stuff I did that I couldn't even leave home. I hid from the world, but I've learned from that. Hiding from your problems, hating yourself and the whole world doesn't change or fix anything."
Kenny looked Hawk in the eye again. "What should I do now then?"
"You gotta make it up to the people you hurt. I'm not gonna tell you how to do that, but I do think that when you do make it up to them, you'll be glad you did." Hawk promised.
Kenny seemed to be thinking about it and nodded his head. "Ok I'll give this some time to figure out what I'll do and then I'll talk to Robby and… I'll talk to Anthony. Thanks Hawk."
Hawk nodded. "Anytime kid."