Dreary eyes opened, a groaning sound escaping your lips. You wanted to stretch and wake yourself properly from this horrible nightmare.
But when you discovered your hands were restricted, you knew it wasn't a dream at all.
You were sitting in an old wooden chair, your hands tied behind the rickety, back supporting piece. In front of you, your ankles were tied down to the rusting legs of the chair. You pulled your head upward slowly, the lights making you wince. You temporarily forgot your situation, and realized you couldn't reach up and massage the back of your now aching head.
"Well, well, well... what do we have here?"
Your eyes snapped up to John Kreese, who stood before you with his arms crossed.
"You so easily fell into my trap." He grinned.
You jerked in the seat, threatening to break free and lunge. He laughed at this, making your blood boil.
"Nice try, sweetheart, but those are bowline knots. You're not getting out of those. I learned how to master them when I was at war."
Your lips curled and you tilted your head. "Don't you have a bunch of teenage boys to be manipulating right about now?"
"I do," he smirked and leaned down, "but first, I have to take care of you."
He began to pace in front of you, and you followed him with your eyes. Your gaze was strong enough to kill.
"I knew you would show up here tonight... you're my niece. I would've done the same thing."
"But was knocking me unconscious really necessary? Or did you do that for fun?"
"A little bit of both."
Your eyes rolled majorly, getting a rise out of your uncle.
"You see," he gestured to the establishment around you with his hands, "I know you think, you had everything under control. But believe me when I say that every strategic thought going through your head was already planned by me. I've seen you walking these streets, skating around when your head is foggy with so many thoughts. I've memorized your route patterns. I knew you would end up here. And I knew when you saw the lights on in the dojo during the tournament, that you would grow suspicious. And how you believed it to be fate when they turned on right as you happened to be walking past. And the car in the parking lot? That was just the final piece of this little project of mine."
"You're sick." You seethed.
"So I've heard."
As his manic laughter filled the dojo, your fists clenched in the ropes behind your back. "You tried to kill me."
"You knew too much."
"Aw," you challenged, mockingly pouting in his direction, "you were afraid I would prevent you from winning your plastic trophy?"
He held a finger in the air. "Not afraid. Annoyed. I hoped you would simply take the car as a warning threat, but I knew you would be too stubborn to give up this little act of yours. And now... here we are."
Being ruthless with him clearly wasn't getting you anywhere. And for a moment, your heart hurt for him. The fact that he was willing to go great lengths such as these for a trophy, showed that he had nothing else. The win was all he had.
Your voice grew soft. "I know why you are the way you are. I know that you think showing no mercy to this world, will help you gain back everything you lost to it."
"Yeah," Kreese scoffed, "Mr. Miyagi may have told you the truth... but he didn't tell you everything."
Your face melted and contorted into a form of pain and confusion. Kreese looked as though he were reflecting on moments long ago.
"Just like you, I let love blind me at one point in my life. I was being trained under Mr. Miyagi, who never let me release my aggression properly. And when I needed to explode, it came out in a much more damaging manner. As you may know, I was over seas when my lovely Betsy passed away..."
You nodded your head slowly.
"Well... my sergeant tried to shield it from me for a very long time. He told me the truth eventually, and that was the moment I snapped. There was no Mr. Miyagi there telling me to remain calm. I lashed out. Let my anger take over. And because of it... I survived. If I hadn't, I would've died out there in the war. But I used that anger to propel me forward. Surviving was all I had left. I needed to survive for her."
"And your child..." You whispered with harsh realization.
Kreese laughed. "The child that I didn't even know about at the time."
Your brow furrowed in confusion. "Wait... if you didn't know she was pregnant... how did you know about the child?"
"Because Betsy wasn't dead either."
You inhaled sharply. You gulped, not knowing what to expect next. Everything you thought you knew about Kreese was completely wrong.
"My sergeant fed me lies, telling me she was dead so that I wouldn't want to leave and go home. Little did he know that his secret keeping would lead me down a path of vengeance until I dropped him over a pit of snakes. When I came back home after the war... it took a few years before I actually saw her with my own two eyes. She was alive. She was real... and she still loved me."
"Why are you telling me this?" You whispered.
"Because I want you to understand that life shows no mercy. Even when you think everything is going your way, the world comes in and rips everything from you. I don't want you to suffer the same fate I did."
"But your Betsy is alive," you shook your head, "what really happened that made you this bitter?"
"You see," he began to pace with his hands behind his back, "love is a very blinding thing. And sometimes, you let it blind you to the point of no return. When I began seeing Betsy again, I thought life was rewarding me. I believed that everything was good. But it was all a facade. Because she never told me she had been seeing someone else... and after sometime, they got married. And what hurt even worse was when she told me they had been raising a son...our son. She hadn't meant to let the truth slip, but once she did, it was too late to take it back. The truth was revealed to me, and just like anyone else would, I wanted to meet my child. But she said no... can you guess what happened next?"
Silently, you shook your head.
Kreese grew a mischievous smile. He leaned in, making sure that what he was about to say, would penetrate your mind and keep you thinking.
"I snapped."
He began circling the chair, leaving you no choice but to watch his actions in the mirror in front of you. Your heart began to race. "What did you do?"
"Well, I found out she had help in keeping this a secret from me. Apparently I seemed to be the only one who didn't know we had a child together. She tried keeping it a secret from me because she didn't know how I would take it. And if anything, I took it much worse than I would have if she just told me the truth."
"But..." you pieced the information together slowly, "Mr. Miyagi knew about the child. He told me how you lost Betsy and the kid."
"Correct," his eyes narrowed, "he knew because your father knew."
Your breathing became shaky. Was he going to say what you thought he was going to say?
"Betsy grew really close with your parents while I was off at war. They were there when my son was born, and she instructed them to keep quiet about it. Around that time, my brother found out they were expecting as well. The timing was perfect... my actions however, had consequences."
"What did you do?"
"Well I did what any mad man would do. In my anger, I threatened your parents. Had I meant it? To an extent. But I was so in love with Betsy that I let the obvious factors slip under the rug. I let her distract me so much, that I hadn't noticed your parents keeping this secret from me. So... when it came time for your mother to give birth, I told them that I would take you from them... to make up for the child they kept a secret from me."
You suddenly began to shake. You lunged forward out of instinct, forgetting your restrictions. The chair fell on its side, the pain of impact from the floor shot up your arm that had just healed from the car accident not too long ago. You winced in pain as Kreese laughed. He was not phased by your actions at all as he grabbed the chair and effortlessly pulled it back up onto all fours. You felt weak as your head rolled from his force.
His movements must have rattled a memory deep inside your brain, unlocking a moment that once made no sense, but made perfect sense now. Mr. Miyagi had been trying to tell you this all along...
"Your father learned Miyagi pressure point in time of need. I planned to keep secret, keep him safe, but was inevitable. Uncle insist on war, your father came to me. Uncle need stopped, so father learned to stop. He never once wanted to use skill, but had to anyway. It was only way to keep safe. Keep you safe too."
"But I don't understand, Mr. Miyagi. Why did Kreese want to hurt me so badly?"
"Never said he wanted to hurt."
"You threatened to kidnap me... so that you could have a child of your own." You hissed as his words replayed in your head over and over again.
"I did." He admitted. "And that's when your parents decided to move across the country. After a bloodbath of a fight between your father and I, of course. Shortly after you were born, they packed up their things and fled. Your father was smart for that. You definitely got your brains from him."
You were left speechless, running out of insults to hurl at him. "You're psychotic!"
He disregarded your venomous words with a laugh. "You clearly get your ferocity from me."
"Shut up!"
He laughed once more, throwing his head back. When his eyes shot back to yours, his smile somehow grew more dangerous. Over his shoulder, you caught a glimpse of the clock hanging on the wall. Your heart dropped when you read the time.
8:01.
You were supposed to be meeting with Doc and Marty at 8:00 sharp.
"When your parents moved away," Kreese continued, "I spent so long trying to meet my son. Betsy was only seeing me out of pity at this point, and used it as a compromise to keep me out of her son's life. If she continued seeing me, she made me promise that I would stop trying to meet our son. I was fine with it for awhile, but a few years later, I had a little run in with Betsy's husband. Out of spite, I told him that we had been seeing each other. She was fearful of Neil, that's one thing she told me, so when things got bad... she left. With our son. She moved away to a disclosed location and I never saw her again."
"And that's why you show no mercy."
"I'm not quite finished," he looked to the clock, "and I have to make this quick. I have a tournament to get back to."
Your muscles in your neck tensed. Kreese saw your anger, and continued to ignore it. But you assumed that letting him finish his story would be the best. You needed to get out of here yourself, there was a timeline that needed to be fixed, and you couldn't do that while being tied to an old, creaky chair, in a karate dojo.
"I thought that was it," he reminisced, "I thought it was over... but very recently did I discover that was not the case. There was a student of mine... an astounding, wonderful, fighter. I should've known he belonged to me from the moment he stepped in the door. But I was under the impression that Betsy took our son with her when she left. I should've known she was lying to protect him. She left me under the assumption that if she left, the child did too, meaning he was out of my reach."
"He was a student here?"
"That he was. One of my best."
You saw the pain of the memories etched on his face. He looked around the room before letting his eyes trail back to you.
"I thought he was just an astounding student. It wasn't until his younger step sister came in the door years down the line on her skateboard, that I learned the truth. She came in shouting at me, telling me that she wanted to join Cobra Kai. Something about her tone indicated a much deeper connection. She talked as if she knew who I was and what I was up to. She assumed I was trying to take her brother back, so she tried being brave. I didn't understand what was happening until I saw Neil walk through the door. He demanded she get in the car, but when he saw it was me who was his son's sensei, he quickly grabbed them both and pushed them out the door. I was in so much shock, I didn't know what else to do except follow them out into the parking lot. We exchanged a few words... a few punches. But in the end, I still couldn't have my son. They moved away... dubbing our little interaction as an incident."
Your breath hitched. Why did this story seem so... familiar?
It hit you quickly, the shock of it all settling in over you. It seemed familiar because you had heard this story before. You thought back to lunch period not too long ago, where Johnny and his friends sat around the table, doubling over with laughter. When you asked what they were talking about, Johnny filled in the blanks.
"Billy Hargrove was an old friend of ours. He used to do karate with us but moved away about a month or so ago. Anyway, his little step sister came skating in during practice one day and started telling Kreese that she wanted to join Cobra Kai. She was really demanding and Billy got so embarrassed, which made it ten times much funnier! She just walked in and started calling the shots. Then, his dad came in a few minutes later and started yelling at Maxine, Billy's sister, to get back in the car. To top it all off, Kreese was frozen, man. Like a deer in a headlights. As soon as the dad started to leave, he bolted out the doors after them. Plus, this was right before they moved away, so it's the last memory we have to connect to Billy."
His name rolled off your tongue in a whisper.
"Billy Hargrove."
"Ah," Kreese grinned, "so the boys told you about him, huh? It's a shame they didn't know the full truth. And now they never will, because Neil moved them away shortly after. And as much as I wanted to chase after them, I found a better opportunity to take back what was mine. That's where you come in."
You shook your head in dismay.
"I knew it was a matter of time before you and your mother moved back here to take over that filthy record shop. Your mother was smart to keep you hidden from me for a long time, but in the end she knew it was smart to let us meet. She knew I was a man of my word and that if I promised to follow her rules, meeting you wouldn't be such a bad idea. And for the most part, it was manageable... but once you started seeing my top student, distracting him, things became different. I saw myself in Johnny's eyes, back when I was foolish and in blinding love. I didn't want him to fail the way I did. So I decided to finish what I started. Getting you out of the picture was the only way."
"So you decided to try and kill me for the sake of a trophy."
He shrugged. "I wasn't going to show you mercy."
"For a trophy." You repeated.
He shook his head. "For revenge. As a way to redeem my past so that Johnny doesn't suffer the same fate as me."
You had no words. There was nothing you could do, his mind was made up. What you had learned about your uncle, was that he was beyond ruthless. In the silence of the now still room, you let your inner anger lash out as you launched spit directly toward his face.
He pressed his lips into a thin line as he cleared his throat and wiped it from his face. "Very smart. Spitting on the man who has you tied to a chair. You're lucky I have places to be."
He took a few steps back, and the door to his office opened slowly. A tall man stepped out from the shadows and onto the mat. Kreese crossed his arms, never once taking his eyes off of you.
The mysterious man stepped up to his side, and angled his head toward Kreese. You saw that his black hair was slicked back into a small ponytail at the back of his head. His smile was mischievous, as if he craved violence.
"You," you hissed with realization, your eyes narrowing into slits. "You're the one who tried to run me over." You smiled out of spite.
"She's smart," he said to Kreese, "but I can take it from here."
"Good," Kreese looked back toward you, the man next to him doing the same. Their smiles were laced with poison. "I'd like for you to meet Terry Silver," Kreese smirked, "he's going to be babysitting you until the tournament concludes. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a trophy to win."