🦅🥋🏆Mostly inspired by Tumblr prompts featuring Eli 'Hawk' Moskowitz, Demetri Alexopoulos, Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence, to name a few.
Or, the AU KK/CK (and Jacob Bertrand) ficlet and non-fanfic collection I decided to write even though...
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Everything came crashing down on Hawk at once.
Johnny saying he made Hawk what he was and not Kreese.
Miguel's speech, saying Kreese was manipulating him and didn't care about him.
Kreese cherry-picking what did and didn't count as vengeance — hurting Demetri, someone who had nothing to do with Miguel's fall, did, but teaming up with Robby Keene, the kid responsible for said fall, apparently didn't.
Bert and Mitch kicked out of Cobra Kai just for not being strong enough (having a love of animals when it came to Clarence the hamster in Bert's case) or Cobra Kai material (in Mitch's case), and being replaced by Kyler and Brucks (although thankfully for Hawk, the latter was denied a spot in Cobra Kai as a result of having lost his sparring match with Hawk).
The sound of Demetri's screams and sobs in a dark, abandoned laser tag room at Golf N' Stuff.
Sensei Lawrence had been right; Kreese never really cared about me. And besides being right about Kreese in his own way like Johnny was, Miguel also hit the nail on the head about the other Cobras being false friends to me, too.
With that, Hawk finally saw he'd been the bully he strongly disliked fighting alongside, ironically, the same bullies who'd made him miserable, much to his shock, regret and anger. Plus, Kyler's attempt at dapping him up during the LaRusso house fight caused him to realize he'd become too much like Kyler for his liking — which, in turn, then led to his Heel Realization.
Besides that, there was the Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal on Kreese's part; Hawk had basically realized Kreese never seemed to think he was "true" Cobra Kai leader material, and instead chose to pass him over for Tory and eventually for Robby.
Hawk knew what he secretly suspected all along: Cobra Kai wasn't for him at all. It was time for him to break away from Cobra Kai and enter a healthier mindset in the martial arts.
And that's exactly what I will do. Miguel was right to leave Cobra Kai for Eagle Fang when he had the chance.
Now, it's time for me to prove I never truly belonged in the Cobra Kai dojo. And I choose to do so by not only saving Demetri from getting his arm re-broken — I will also turn on the other Cobras by fighting against them alongside Demetri. I now realize I've been on the wrong side; now, I will fight by the side of those who are my real friends.
After all, Demetri and Miguel showed they were my real friends when they knew me as Eli and still liked and appreciated me anyway; the Cobras, however, only saw me as Hawk, and never took the chance to see who I really was deep down. Their loss is Demetri's and Miguel's gain.
With a final mental nod of his head, Hawk made a solemn vow. Well, it's time for me to become what I now realize I should've chosen to be when I had the chance: the epitome of the "crouching nerd, hidden fighter" Demetri had become over time.
