【 west valley, 2017 】
━━ tw mention of sexual assault

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━━ When Stevie enrolled into West Valley High School, the captain of the varsity wrestling team was a junior named Titan Barclay. He was the type of guy that people like Kyler aspired to be. He wore his name well: he was burly, he was handsome, and he was important. He was the king of the school, and his parents had the money to back it. No one tried to mess with him, and no one could say no to him.

Stevie's first day was the day after winter break. She managed to keep herself out of sight for the first couple of days. However, the Monday after they came back, teachers started to realize that they had a new student, and everybody had their eye on the new girl who showed up halfway through the year. 

It was easy to be extremely assuming about her. She was short, she was a freshman, and she lacked presence. It would have been easy to write her off as a wallflower or a total pushover. 

Titan, however, noticed something else. Of course, he noticed how lonely she appeared to be, but he also noticed how pretty she was. Someone as popular as him had a hard time understanding that some people preferred the lack of company. He saw it as a young, impressionable fifteen year old, who would be grateful for attention.

Enough to spread her legs for him. 

So every day that week during their remedial algebra class, he sat next to her. Unsurprisingly, she was in the back, all by herself. It started off with smiles of the panty-dropping variety.

Stevie did not bite.

So the next day, he scoot his chair a little closer. He started by asking for help on the assignment. He sat so close, the pair were bumping shoulders. Titan took that as a win. He, of course, didn't notice her set jaw as she shoved her tongue against the back of her teeth.

The day after that, he did the same thing. This time, Titan started flirting with her. He was smart with his words, she could give him that. He didn't lay on the charm overly thick like other guys she's had to deal with. He was sly: complimented things about her that would make any normal girl swoon ( because who noticed the way someone curled their letters? )

Still, Stevie didn't give in. 

It was after that class, where he tried to pin her between his arms and she ducked out of them that he realized how much he enjoyed the chase. Titan has never had to work for his hookups, and this girl didn't even seem a little bit fazed by him. That, alone, made him more interested in her than any other girl he's gotten with. 

Titan never seemed to catch her after their single shared class together until that Friday. His best friend, Royce, pointed her out as she walked down a hallway, leaving through the back doors to go outside during lunch.

As someone who had achieved an almost god-like status among the boys with his body count, it was a place he knew all too well. 

There was a spot behind the gymnasium that had no cameras, and people did all sorts of shit there: they dealt drugs, they bought drugs, they smoked, they fucked. It was a place of pure debauchery, and Stevie went there. 

Titan wore a wolfish grin as Royce wrapped an arm around his neck and patted his chest. The pair followed her out, and they saw her with a blunt hanging out of her mouth. She was leaning her head against the wall with her legs stretched out in front of her, and smoke billowed around her. 

It was the hottest thing Titan had ever seen a high school girl do.

Him and Royce called out to her with smiles on their faces that hid their predatory intentions. They sat on either side of her, and Titan pulled the blunt from her lips and took a drag before passing it to Royce.

Neither of them cared enough to notice the glare she had on her face, especially Titan, who it was aimed at. The pair started talking, and Stevie went to stand, but the captain whipped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her down. As he did so, his hand slipped lower until he grabbed her boob. 

By the time the lunch period was over, Royce was unconscious and Titan ... Titan was beaten so badly that he had facial reconstruction surgery and six different casts on his body. Even now, almost a year later, he was still in physical therapy. And to this day, neither he nor Royce said a word about what happened. 

It was the first smart thing they did since Stevie started at the school. 

Flash forward to present day, October 30th, 2017. 

Stevie was standing at the same corner, where gossip had fueled the beginnings of her reputation. Titan's blood was still spattered on the ground, despite janitors scrubbing the life out of the concrete. Where it once scarred the members of the wrestling team, it was now a thing of the past. They walked right over the bloodstains like they never even existed.

One by one, they walked out until it was the four Neanderthals left. Kyler and Brucks were recounting their time in the library with Lip and Rhea and Dickmetri rather than the brutal beat-down they only gave Rhea two days earlier. 

Guilt was a feeling she had made a talent of shoving down. However, the feeling had been weighing heavier on her every day since her last conversation with Miguel.

He did avoid her. He could not shake the instinct to defend his sensei, no matter how poorly he is treated. Despite that, Miguel was still trying to help her out. She would've been blind to not notice it.

When Stevie came back from one of her many job interviews ( that went terribly ), she was greeted with a door, free of blood. Throughout the week, she got containers of homemade food, a few packages of sewing needles and gauze, and an apology letter from ❛ Johnny ❜—despite the s' and t's being more reminiscent of Miguel's.

His actions made Stevie feel even worse. She reached a point where she would glance up at him during classes, debating whether she should apologize; she would search up the website he made for the dojo during lunch. It made her feel like a guilty little kid again.

Guilt was a familiar feeling. She ignored it, but it never disappeared. She rationalized it: the things she did were to bad people ( albeit for the wrong reasons ), because of bad people ( though the lives she took in place of them were innocent ), or on the order of bad people ( the worst of whom had suffered just like her ). 

Miguel was not a bad person.

Annoying and stubborn? Yes, but not a bad person.

Not to the point of being beaten nearly unconscious.

Stevie shook the memories of Saturday night from her head. The broken cries of ❝ Cobra Kai never dies ❞ being drowned out by his mom screaming at Johnny. The way their neighbor looked as wrought with guilt as she felt.

She wasn't good enough to offer a real apology. The words, ❝ I'm sorry ❞, haven't left her mouth since she was single digits, and were now foreign.

But this?

This, she could do.

So just as they turned the corner, Stevie came out swinging. It was a sense of deja vu: a group of friends led by a Park, suffering an embarrassing loss by her hand.

Stevie landed punch after punch and kick after kick on them. Even as all four of them had managed to come together and pin her down, they couldn't even land any type of hit on her. 

She started out with the pothead, Fisher. He was clearly high, which made her job that much easier, and twisted her leg out of his grip before breaking his nose. She shifted and hooked her free leg around Phoenix's neck, slamming his head onto the ground. 

She put two down, she had two to go.

Stevie rolled her body backwards, and wrapped both of her legs around the Brucks' neck. She straightened out, throwing him over her body. She didn't watch as he rolled, wanting to get a real grip on Kyler, who looked equal parts angry and nervous.

Now that three of her four limbs were free, she grabbed onto Kyler's arm with her hands, and performed the last combination she ever practiced in the Academy.

She rolled from hip to knee; then knee to foot. 

Once Stevie's feet were flat on the ground, she spun her body once again and threw Kyler against the wall. He stayed down in pain, and Stevie crouched down to thread her fingers through his hair. She pulled his face up, so he would be able to hear her clearly.

"Do you remember Titan?" Stevie asked him, treating this less like an installation of sheer terror and more like a trip down memory lane with an old friend.

Kyler opened his mouth, and her grip on his hair tightened as she lifted his head higher from the ground. He nodded as quickly as he could.

It didn't surprise her. He completely admired the дерьмо́ ( piece of shit ).

Stevie hummed quietly to herself before she continued, "Good. Then you remember what happened to him?"

Kyler's eyes widened dramatically. See, no one outside of Titan, Royce, and Stevie knows exactly what happened to him. The aftermath, however, was seen by plenty. He knew it was ugly, he knew the damage was long lasting, and he was a part of the majority who believed her to be the cause of it. 

In a moment of either bravery ( or stupidity ), he tried to spit an insult out at her. 

Stevie did not even flinch.

Instead, she brought his face right in front of her, nearly nose to nose. 

Kyler had never felt quite as much of a victim as he did in that moment. Her eyes were hooded, filled with a lethal energy that he was once sure he had during his matches. ( Now that he was back in reality, he realized that he could never bring himself to look as soulless as she did, looking at him. ) Her nonchalance evaporated, and left a deep chill in its wake.

"If I ever catch you pulling the same shit you did at the dance, you'll end up just like him."

Her voice was nothing short of pure venom.

"Who? Rhea?" Kyler was now losing hair to Stevie's tight grip. He lost the fight to hold his tears back, and felt like a scared little kid again.

"No," Stevie answered, "Like Titan."

As she said ... brutal. 

"Do you understand?"

He ignored her; she doesn't do well with repeating herself. 

Rather than pulling Kyler's head up, Stevie shoved it back against the ground. She threw her knee over his back, and pushed her foot against his wrist. 

It had done the trick. He screamed that he understood. That he wouldn't mess with Diaz. That he wouldn't tell his dad. That him or his friends wouldn't say anything to the cops. 

"We won't say anything to anyone! I swear on my life!"

His life?

That left Stevie feeling far more satisfied than she should have. His words of desperation had been the right thing to say to her. She stepped off of Kyler's arm, watching as he curled his body into a ball of pain.

She took in the scene for a moment before she left the quartet on the ground.

As uncomfortable as it would be for her, Stevie knew she had one more stop to make.

▄ ▄ ▄

Stevie was rubbing the ache out of her hand with her thumb, debating whether this was a smart idea or not. But in the end, her hand moved faster than her feet and she knocked on the door.

"Fleetwood? The hell are you doing here?"

She stared at Johnny: her pride was stopping her from letting the words come out. Every cell in her body was telling her that this was a terrible idea and she should just go back into the apartment she was staying in.

"Alright, you know what—" He started shutting the door on her before adrenaline overrode her sense.

"Is your offer still on the table?"

His eyebrows furrowed, "What offer?"

No turning back now, Novak.

"Your offer to join Cobra Kai?"

▄ ▄ ▄

Miguel wished he had taken a page of out Stevie's book.

The Halloween dance was nothing short of awful. He's been pushed around and hit a couple of times, but nothing like this. He didn't know how he got home until he saw his mom screaming her lungs out at Johnny. Then, he was banned from taking karate. 

He could barely look at Demetri and Eli after they left him alone in the bathroom when they were in the library. And still, Miguel tried defending them from Kyler and Brucks.

And what did that get him?

Jackshit.

( Scratch that, he did get to run out the library with his tail between his legs after getting shoved around. )

In all honesty, he could pinpoint the start of his downward spiral, where ten days earlier, Stevie pretty much told him to stay away from her. When Miguel put his own feelings for Sensei Lawrence aside, he could see how antagonistic he could be towards her.

She had been putting up with him for a year longer than he has, and it made him feel guilty that he refused to validate her feelings. So he still tried to help her out, in more anonymous ways. He would bring servings of their dinner, and he bought extra gauze since she hadn't been replacing it as much as she should.

All week, before the dance, he had been pushing his sensei to apologize to her with all of her reasons as evidence. 

He's been an ass to her since day one. ( "She's a bitch." ) 

She brought him in when he fell asleep outside ... apparently. ( "I fixed the locks for her paranoid ass." ) 

He got her fired. ( "... She's twelve, she didn't need a job where she was dressed like a slut." )

Miguel gave up and just wrote a letter from Johnny himself.

It changed nothing.

Everything he did changed nothing.

He was on edge the entire day at school, especially after the library incident from the day earlier. He did his best to stay out of sight the entire day: sitting in the furthest corner of the classroom, walking on the outskirts of the hallways, and keeping his head down during lunch.

Miguel switched seats at the table to keep an eye on the entrance, in case he needed to make a quick getaway from Kyler or his friends. His hood was up and his face was hidden beneath his arms, bar his eyes when they walked in.

He had pushed his seat back, and crouched onto his knees, ready to make a run for it, but then ... the weirdest thing happened. 

They completely ignored them.

Demetri and Eli were just relieved to not be forced to put up with their usual torment, but alarm bells were ringing in Miguel's head. 

Why would they ignore them?

It wasn't until their own heads were looking up, did he understand why.

They were just as bruised as he was after the dance.

Just like every other student at West Valley, there was only one person who held no semblance of fear for those boys. And where they refused to look even remotely in her direction, Miguel did.

And there she was, at her usual table, wrapping a roll of fresh gauze around her bright purple knuckles while staring right at ... him.

Stevie very rarely had kind eyes ( at least that he knew of ), but this must have been the closest he had ever seen. She gave him a subtle nod before throwing her bag over her shoulder and leaving the cafeteria.

Not a single word was spoken, but it told him enough. He was caught with the realization that he was wrong.

Those things that he did during the week ... they changed everything.

━━ i love stevie in her menace era

━━ ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh i love them <3