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They get a motel room just north of the border, threadbare sheets and no AC and that shitty sweat-and-smoke smell a film over everything. Sensei picks an aimless fight with the check-in guy over the state of the bathroom; it earns them an armful of fraying towels, stinking of bleach.
It was Robby’s idea to stop for the night. The first thing he’d said since sliding into the backseat, a quiet deference of the passenger’s side to Miguel—ninety minutes of silence swallowed up by the car radio static and Sensei’s half-hearted attempts at conversation. Miguel didn’t sleep, just watched the rearview, the roads sprawling out, the city disappearing until it was just a blot against the horizon. Mexico had nothing for him.
In the dingy little California room, there’s two twin beds and a striped pullout. The wallpaper’s peeling at the corners. It’s late already, long past midnight, the clock on the nightstand blaring neon numbers at them.
“We’ll be out of this shithole by morning,” Sensei says, forcibly upbeat. There’s exhaustion worked into all the lines of his face, but he’s still playing coach and mediator. “You guys want something to eat?”
Robby just shrugs; he’s already tossed his backpack onto the couch without any room for argument, and now he’s holding his phone up in search of service and not looking at them. Miguel’s starving but he’s not going to be the one to say it.
Sensei cracks his knuckles one by one and sighs. “Burgers sound good?”
“Sure,” Miguel says, at the same time as Robby’s distracted, “Just no pickles.”
“Okay.” Sensei exhales through his teeth. “Good. No pickles.”
He’s halfway to the door already. If Miguel didn’t know any better he’d think that Sensei just wanted to get out of this, the heavy silence, the cramped heat-sink of a room, too small for the three of them and whatever is prickling in the air. But Sensei doesn’t run from things the way he used to. Doesn’t leave without a fight. He drove to Mexico for Miguel, anyway, and that has to count for something.
Sensei scoops his keys off the bed and hovers in the doorway for a moment, framed by the bitter ambient light of the hall. He looks between Robby and Miguel, eyes careful and wary, like he’s afraid they’ll kill each other the moment he leaves. Miguel isn’t entirely sure they won’t.
“I’ll be back soon,” he says finally, knuckles blanched on the handle. “Don’t—do anything stupid.”
The door clicks shut behind him.
Robby Keene’s shadow looms over everything. The dojo, the tournament, Sam. The twinges in his spine. Sensei. Even here, miles and miles away, it’s inescapable; Miguel watches it move in the low, yellowed lamplight, the pulling wires, the hard lines of his shifting hands.
“You need something?” Robby doesn’t look over his shoulder, must feel his eyes. He’s rummaging in his backpack for something. There’s no harshness in his voice but it still twists, the tension in the room an alive thing.
“No,” Miguel says hastily, lamely. He hates the way he sounds. All the Miyagi-Do balance training goes out the window when it comes to Robby fucking Keene. He wants to slip back into snakeskin, wants to draw blood.
For a moment, Robby is still, shoulders wired like the air before an oncoming storm. Then he pulls a ziploc from the front pocket of his backpack and pauses, like he’s deliberating something. Turns back to Miguel.
“Do you smoke?”
Miguel blinks. “What?”
“Do you smoke weed?” Off Miguel’s expression, Robby shakes the bag languidly. “Y’know, marijuana? Drugs?”
“I know what weed is, Keene.” Miguel wants to kick him in his perfect face. “ Jesus . What are you even doing here?”
He turns it over in his head: the image of Robby standing by the car in the back alleyway, privy to yet another one of the worst moments of his life. Bright-eyed white trash saves the skinny brown kid from his own brown people. It’s such a damn good story. The shame ripples, smarts like an open wound.
“My dad,” Robby drags the word out, cuts his teeth on it, “roped me into it. I didn’t know what we were really doing. If he’d said we were going to Mexico I’d have told him that leaving the country’s a parole violation.”
Miguel snorts. “So are the drugs, probably.”
Robby gives him a half-grin, like a challenge, like, your move, Diaz. “Sure, but you’re no narc, right?”
Okay, fine. His fucking move.
Robby rolls a damn good joint. Not that Miguel has much frame of reference, but there’s an ease to it—the twisting of his slender, practiced fingers, the quick swipe of his tongue to seal it.
“Wait ‘til my dad sees this,” Robby says, eyes flickering, the joint balanced on his lip as he cups his hand around the lighter flame, “he’d totally freak if he knew I was corrupting you.”
“Do you like, get off on making his life harder?”
Robby huffs a mirthless laugh and smoke curls from his nose. “Wouldn’t you like to know what I get off on.”
They’re sitting on the curb behind the motel, bleached light spilling out over the vacant parking lot. It’s hot but regular, California-in-the-summer hot, not suffocating the way it is in the room. Miguel is kind of worried they’re going to get caught, but he’s not gonna be a pussy about it.
“Here,” Robby exhales through another hit and hands the joint to him. “You ever done this before?”
“Sure,” Miguel lies. He’s still trying to wrap his head around this: smoking on the sidewalk with Robby Keene, their knees just a few inches from brushing—intensity between them like a static charge. This might be the closest they’ve ever been without there being a fight. But who knows; the night is still young.
The inhale burns in his throat, and he tries and fails miserably not to cough. Smoke peters out in the night air. Robby laughs and Miguel bristles, but it’s not a mean sound. “Take it in your mouth first,” Robby tells him, “Then inhale through your nose and breathe it in.”
He sounds like a fucking stoner-Sensei. Miguel does as he says anyway. The heat of it blooms in his chest, and Robby takes the joint back and blows a perfect O of a smoke ring, the show off.
“I hear Hawk kicked your ass at the tournament,” Miguel says, vindictively, and half because he doesn’t know what else to say. There’s really only one thing at the center of their mutual orbit. Well. One thing that has all the other things tangled up in it.
Robby squares his shoulders and cracks a smile, all teeth. “Straight to business, huh?” he says wryly. “At least he didn’t cheat this time.”
He’s such a dick. Miguel gives himself a second to imagine a perfect roundhouse to Robby’s face, and it makes him feel a little better. “I don’t think you’ve got the grounds for moral superiority,” he says then, voice rising, “seeing as you’re with Cobra Kai—”
“Not anymore.”
“What?”
There’s a long beat. Robby breathes his way through the smoke, then offers the joint to Miguel, who—who doesn’t know what to think right now. He looks from Robby’s outstretched hand to his impassive expression.
“Silver wasn’t…happy with me for losing,” he says at last, shrugs. His eyes are trained on something far away. Miguel can see him pause, grapple, like he’s trying to pull out the words. “And I didn’t like what it was making out of me, or anyone else.”
Miguel lets this land, a hit in slow-motion: one, two. He takes the joint from Robby and puffs on it. It’s fucking gross; he doesn’t know how Robby does it so easily. There’s a gnawing pit in his stomach. “What about Tory?” He won’t pretend like he doesn’t worry about her. She might be a Cobra through-and-through, but only because she’s always had to be.
“I’m not gonna leave her there,” Robby snaps, abruptly defensive. “I just…need to figure out how to convince her.”
“Kreese and Silver are gonna be pissed.”
Robby huffs a raw laugh. “No fucking shit, Diaz.”
Miguel tries to put the pieces together. The end of the tournament, Sam’s loss and Tory’s win, and Robby just—what? Walking away? Ending up here? Nothing he knows about Robby aligns with it. But then again, he thinks, he doesn’t know Robby very well at all.
“So, what, you and Sensei are just cool now?” he says, tries and fails to keep the edge out of his voice. “Was this, like, a father-son road trip for you or something?”
Robby’s expression twists for just a moment. “Or something. He told me he was trying to make amends. And it’s the first time he’s ever really tried in his whole sorry life, so.”
Miguel knows fragments of the tangle of their history. Sensei, over burgers, telling him how he’d missed Robby’s birth; Sensei drunk off his ass and nursing another beer, saying he’d thrown his kid into a row of lockers. There’s a thin white line of a scar on Robby’s forehead, just barely visible in the low light.
It used to be: Miguel would think of Robby and Sensei, and get a twinge of ugly, misplaced pride. That’s long gone, has been since prom night, or maybe before that. There’s no triumph in being the kid Sensei took in just ‘cause he’d fucked up the first time.
Miguel says: “My dad was an asshole.” It trips out of him before he can stop himself. “I thought meeting him would be like—like some kind of revelation about who I was and where I’d come from, but it was nothing. He just sucked.”
He probably shouldn’t be saying this. He definitely shouldn’t be saying this to Robby Keene , his, like, literal mortal enemy. Whatever happened to not showing weakness?
“I’m sorry your trip was a bust.” Robby’s mouth: the corner ticked upward, a sympathetic smile, a we’re-both-fucked smile. Not the snake-charmer grin Miguel remembers. He doesn’t know who this kid is.
“Yeah, well,” he says, “sorry you got dragged along.”
Robby just shrugs. “It’s like my, uh, my penance or something, right?” He twists one of his stupid rings around his finger. “And fuck if I don’t have a lot to make up for.”
Miguel’s whole body aches. “You think this makes up for anything?”
Robby looks up at him then—a startle of bright green eyes, a flicker behind them, impossible to read. It makes Miguel think abruptly of Tory: she’d get that same look sometimes, hidden behind something hard and impenetrable. Not a flinch. But not nothing.
Robby takes a breath. A Miyagi-Do move. He says, “Do you want to hit me?”
“What?”
“Like, would it make you feel better?” Miguel doesn’t know if he’s being condescending on purpose or if he’s just like that . “To, y’know, just,” Robby gestures vaguely to his face.
“No. I mean, fuck. Maybe. No .” Miguel doesn’t do unguarded hits, not anymore. No matter how much someone deserves it. He shakes his head. “Me hitting you isn’t gonna solve our shit, I’m not your fucking dad.”
Which is maybe the most obviously fucked up thing to say in the world; Robby does flinch, then, and glances away. “Okay,” he says, a huffed almost-laugh. The blunt hangs loosely from his fingertips, smoldering. “Okay. So how do I—I mean, if there’s something I can—”
The anticipation crackles; it’s a hit about to land, the waiting contact of a blow. Say it, Keene, Miguel thinks. Phantom pain twists at the base of his spine.
“I just—“ Robby stumbles for the words; Miguel has never once heard him sound like this, wavering and unsure. He’s always been—stoic. Snarling. Untouchable. “It was fucked up. I know that. And I’m—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—but that doesn’t make it less fucked up, and I never wanted it to go that far.”
“You didn’t seem fucking sorry , though,” Miguel says, and doesn’t bother to pull the bite from it. “What changed? Your dad put you up to this?” He thinks of the cold, even fury in the way that Robby had looked at him the first time they’d met after, and every time until now. Remorseless. Like he would’ve done it again, and not even blinked.
Robby takes the hit for what it is. Moves with the momentum of it, the way Daniel’s been teaching them. He’s good at that; Miguel remembers it from the ring.
“When I got out of juvie,” he says, slow, deliberate, “it was—I had more anger than I knew what to do with. And I then saw you, and you looked—jesus, I know it’s fucked, okay? I’m not trying to justify it.” He turns his cheek, throat working. “But you looked fine, and you were—you had won . You got my dad, and Sam, and the fucking high ground, and the worst part was that you deserved it. And I just—“
The blood in Miguel’s ears is roaring. “ Fuck you,” he says, with feeling. He’s on his feet now. “You—I wasn’t fucking fine . I was paralyzed . They didn’t know if I’d ever walk again—“
Robby flinches. “I know.”
“I had to relearn everything. All of it, from scratch. My fucking mom , Keene—you have no idea—”
“I know.”
“Maybe I should hit you.”
Robby rises to meet him, telegraphing the whole way up. It’s not the sure storm of a fight; his stance is open, his eyes huge and liquid; he looks—he looks small, and guilty, and wounded . Which is fucking unfair, because he’s not the one who—
“Miguel.” Robby’s voice is soft. He holds the name in his mouth like it’s something fragile, like he means it. “If I could take it all back, I would. In a second.”
“You can’t, though.” The energy under Miguel’s skin thrums, white-hot and heavy. An old familiar rage, rising.
“I know,” Robby says again; Miguel wants to knock his goddamn teeth out. He’d deserve it. He’d deserve worse.
He says, “I showed you mercy.”
Only a fraction of a second: Robby’s expression, crumpled in on itself. Then it’s gone. In its place is something steady, something sure—the way he’d looked at the All Valley, the first one, when Miguel had gone for his shoulder and just kept going. Not anger. But the determination to bear it.
“I don’t expect you to forgive me,” Robby says, quiet. “That’s not—I know this doesn’t fix anything. I just needed you to know. That I didn’t want to do it. That it was the worst thing I’d ever—that it was like, once it happened there was no going back.”
Miguel shakes his head. “So Cobra Kai?”
“You were there, weren’t you?” Robby shifts and the shadows move just enough for Miguel to see the yellowing bruises on his throat, a hand-shaped ring. “You know what it’s like.”
Miguel wasn’t a violent kid, before. He’d never so much as thrown a punch. But he thinks of the canyon, the tournament. How his whole body had wanted Robby’s blood. How Robby had offered him a hand, and he’d struck right for the weak spot instead, felt the shoulder crack and give, felt proud of it . Felt strong. No fucking mercy.
Yeah. He knows.
The anger fizzles out. Miguel drops back onto the curb, feeling raw, defenseless; he’s learning how to fight without it, sure, but the old habits die hard. His heart thuds.
He takes a breath. Tries the Miyagi-Do bullshit, the stupid tree, Daniel’s voice in his ear. Find your center.
“For a long time,” he starts, his voice heavy in his throat, “I wanted you dead.”
Robby sits down, leans back on his hands, and blows a lock of hair out of his face. “That’s fair.”
It startles a laugh out of him. “Jesus, Keene,” he says sharply, skin still prickling with the admission. “I wanted someone to like, shank you in juvie. I don’t think that’s fair .”
“I almost killed you. You said it yourself, you couldn’t walk .”
“Yeah, but that was—“ Sometimes when Miguel closes his eyes, he’s still falling. “I wanted you dead, dead. Six feet under. I fucking daydreamed about it—that’s not normal .”
The first few weeks in the hospital were the worst. There had been so much idle time for his rage to brew into something unrecognizable; it was the only thing that kept the fear at bay—to imagine himself stronger and faster and killing Robby Keene with his own hands. A fucked-up little coping mechanism. By the time he realized what he was doing it had already taken root in him, festering like a rot. It hasn’t gone away completely, even now.
“Diaz.” Robby’s voice is suddenly soft. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about. You’re the one who stopped, remember?”
“Yeah, and look where that got us.”
Robby closes his eyes. The summer heat sits heavy around them, rippling like water; the air reeks of weed. In the darkness the southwest skyline makes a horizon of blurred, formless shapes, mountain peaks just undulating lines in the distance. They could be anybody, anywhere. Not the Valley. Not a fight.
The fragility of the moment hits him all at once, like if he closes his fist it’ll shatter. “I don’t want to feel like that ever again,” Miguel says. He pins Robby with a stare and Robby gives in to it too easily, matching him, meeting him halfway. The way he always has, when things come to blows. “Do you get that?”
Robby swallows, the sharp curve of his throat moving with it. “Yeah. I do.”
It’s not a lie, Miguel knows. With the way they fight, they’ve only ever been honest. Maybe they understand each other. Maybe they’re the only two people in the world who do. They’ve spent their lives looking for the same things, trying to love the same people, filling the holes up with the same shit. Different, but—not that different.
Across the lot, a car rumbles into park, headlamps throwing beams of yellowish light over them both. Half lit-up in the night, Robby looks more like a high-school kid than the monster from Miguel’s dreams. He doesn’t know what to do with that.
“I’m thinking about quitting,” Robby says then, sudden and quiet. Earnest, like he needs Miguel to know. “Not just Cobra Kai, I mean. All of it.”
It sinks in all at once. The shock—that there could ever be a way out, that Robby would take it. Just like that. “For real?”
He nods and stretches his legs out with the easy, loping grace that makes him a good fighter. “After I figure out what to do about Tory and Kenny. But then, I think, yeah. At least for a while.” Robby stamps the blunt out against the concrete and ash blooms forth like a flower. “It helped when I needed it, but now…” He shakes his head. “I don’t know if I can go back to my dad, or Miyagi-Do. I need to—do my own thing.”
“Your own thing,” Miguel echoes, trying out the words. He tries to picture it: Robby, shedding the cobra skin. “What does that involve?”
“Maybe I’ll pick up bass again. Or some country-club shit, like volleyball—that’s no-contact, right?” He shrugs, and his mouth twitches up at the corners. “I’m trying to keep my options open. I’ll have so much time on my hands if we’re not trying to kill each other anymore.”
Miguel laughs and surprises himself with it. “Too fucking soon, Keene.”
“Yeah? I wasn’t sure.”
“You gonna miss it?”
“Nah.” It’s not exactly a lie, but Miguel still doesn’t know if he believes it. Robby tips his chin up to the sky. “I’ve had enough fighting for a lifetime. I need to learn how to like, be a person again.”
Miguel gets that. Karate had saved his life, given him purpose, but it had also—
Well. He’s not the person he was before Cobra Kai, before Sensei. He’s got the twisting scars on his back to prove it.
Miguel exhales through his teeth. How had things gotten so fucked up? When this had all started it was just karate. “You think your dad would pay for our therapy bills?”
“Give him your fucking puppy eyes, Diaz,” Robby snorts, a smile not reaching his eyes. “He’d do just about anything.”
There’s a familiar edge to his voice, bitter envy masked cleanly under callousness. A bit of the old Robby bleeding through the cracks. He and Sensei don’t look much alike, but sometimes their eyes will betray them.
Miguel shouldn’t say it but he does: “You were right, you know. At prom. About—he called me by your name.”
He regrets it the second it leaves his mouth. It lands like a hook kick, drawing blood, the follow-through irrevocable.
Robby blinks at him. “What?”
“He was drunk off his ass.” The words drag themselves out through his teeth. He’s never told anyone else this, not even Hawk, not even Sam. The memory rankled with too much hurt and shame. “He wouldn’t remember it. But.” But Miguel does. Miguel thinks of it every time they see each other, now.
“ Jesus .” Robby presses the heels of his palms against his eyes. He takes a slow, shuddering breath. “Johnny fucking Lawrence, everyone. I thought maybe he only ever let me down.”
Miguel tries for something like a laugh, but it tangles in his throat. A part of him had thought Robby would be happy about this, or at the very least vindicated—that he was right, that Miguel was his replacement, that now he could take back his spot as Sensei’s son without a fight. But maybe it’s just as shit for both of them. Maybe there was never gonna be a winner here.
“So I guess this is his penance, too,” Miguel says, gesturing to the empty lot, the shitty motel. “To both of us.”
“What an asshole,” Robby scoffs. The old instinct to defend his Sensei rises, halfheartedly, in Miguel, but he can’t bring himself to give it purchase. He’s tired. He just wants to go home.
“He came here,” Miguel says, feeling suddenly small and stupid. “He had you, but he still came to get me.”
He’s not naïve. He knows that, for all his trying, Johnny Lawrence is still a monumental screw-up. But he’s always been there. He’s still trying . Miguel wants so badly for that to be enough.
“Does that mean you forgive him?” Robby says. He’s flipping his lighter open and closed in his hands, not looking at Miguel. The flame clicks to life and sputters. The soft slants of Robby’s expression are indecipherable.
Miguel thinks of all Daniel’s talk of trees. How they’re nothing without their roots. What does that make the two of them?
“Do you?”
There’s a long stretch of silence. Robby sets his jaw, his eyes going blank, resigned. “If it had been me who came out here,” he says at last, “he wouldn’t have come.”
There’s no spite behind it. He says it with certainty, like truth. Maybe it is. Miguel doesn’t know.
He knows—Sensei wouldn’t have left Miguel at Cobra Kai with Kreese and Silver, would’ve torn the place apart before he let them take him, no matter what Miguel told him to do. Robby was there for nearly a year. Clawed his own way out, with no one swooping in to save him.
Sensei left him. Sensei left him.
“But, he’s still my fucking dad, though,” Robby huffs then, the attempt at flippancy belied by the raw, irrepressible hurt behind his voice. “So I have to—I mean, I’m trying to get better. Not for him. For me.”
Miguel puts his chin on his knees and breathes. “This shit sucks.”
Robby laughs, the sound more surprise than anything else. “Yeah,” he agrees wryly, “It does.”
“I mean, aren’t they supposed to be the adults here? And instead of looking out for us, they made us proxies in their stupid karate war. It’s so fucked.”
“Grown ass men and their dick measuring contests, huh?” Robby passes a hand over his face and peers at Miguel through half-lidded eyes. “What d’ya say we work our shit out now so we don’t end up like them in thirty years?”
Miguel scoffs, feels the corners of his mouth twitch. “Baby steps, Keene.”
“Sure.” Robby grins, an easy, honest thing. “Baby steps.”
Then he pushes himself to his feet, and Miguel watches him, the way the shadows slough off his shoulders, the way the cast of the parking lot light makes him look like a teen-movie-heartthrob. Miguel’s seen photos of Sensei in the 80s, and for a moment, it’s—the same tilt of their jaws, the same defiance to the world. He offers a hand. Miguel takes it.
Robby pulls him up, and then they’re staring at each other, close enough for Miguel to make out the freckles scattered over Robby’s nose, the curl of his dark lashes, the purple shadow of the bruise under his eye. He doesn’t know if two hits is enough to get high off of, but there’s something sitting in his chest, heavy, humming. He closes his eyes. Feels the follow-through.
“This isn’t—I still need time, yeah?” Miguel says, and shifts, the weight of Robby’s gaze just shy of overwhelming. “It’s not—it’s not you. I mean, it is, but it’s also—“
“Miguel.” That softness again. The consonants, cradled. “It’s okay. I get it.”
“Okay.” A beat. “Thanks. For the weed.”
“Thanks for not punching me.”
Miguel grins a little. “There’s still time for that.”
“Ha-ha.” Robby hovers, uncertain, for just a moment, then jerks his head to the door. “We should probably—my dad’ll get back soon.” He tugs a hand through his flop of hair. “Um. Do you mind not telling him about the drugs?”
Miguel holds his hands up. “Not a narc, remember?”
“Yeah,” Robby smiles, and his dimples shine, “I remember.”
“Well,” Sensei leans against the doorframe, paper takeout bags in his hands as he sizes up the room, “glad you two didn’t destroy the place.”
They just beat him back. Robby’s sitting criss-cross on the pullout, looking innocent behind a battered copy of Catcher in the Rye, of all things. Miguel’s been unsuccessfully trying to get the weed smell off of himself. They haven’t said much since returning to the room, but the silence has lost its stilted edge.
Miguel tries for a winning smile. “Yup,” he says, “No fighting. Not even a little.”
Sensei squints dubiously at him, then at Robby. Robby catches his expression and shrugs. “We talked about our feelings like big boys, Dad,” he says from over the top of his book, all snark but no real heat, “You and Mr. Larusso should try it sometime.”
Miguel swallows a laugh. Sensei lifts an eyebrow but doesn’t rise to the bait, instead opting to toss the paper bags at Robby and Miguel. “Smartass,” he mutters, but it’s half-fond.
Miguel’s already tearing into his In-and-Out cheeseburger, which may very well be the best thing he’s ever tasted. Why did he ever want to leave California?
“It’s about three hours back tomorrow,” Sensei says, munching a handful of fries, “we’ll be back before lunchtime. I get any complaints about the music, I’m dumping your asses back over the border, got it?”
“Sure, Dad.”
“You guys smell that?”
It’s probably the weed. It’s definitely the weed. “I don’t smell anything,” Miguel says. Robby just pulls a pickle out of his burger, and smiles.