The Hardest Part of Breaking Up

Flowers. Flowers would help.

After the match with Akino, Carmen decided to go find some. It wasn’t all that hard, obviously, what the spring festival going on and the numerous vendors all over the place. She managed to get herself a decent boquet, filled with red and greens and whites, varieties that she honestly didn’t recognize.

But Akino would, and it was the thought that counted.

She made her way down the halls of the arena, heading to the area that the AFW had set up for the event. In all likelihood, Akino would be somewhere around there, still recovering from the match. She’d taken a nasty spill, they both had, the way Carmen winced with every step was an indicator of that. But regardless, it had just been competition. They were professionals. No matter what, they could come out of this with mature respect for one another. Everything that happened in the ring would stay in the ring.

She was sure of it.

Carmen asked around and found out where they were taking care of Akino easily enough. Flowers held behind her back, she gave the door a quick knock, then opened it and stuck her head inside.

”Querida?” She opened the door further and started to slide inside, checking to see if they were alone. Privacy would be best.

When Akino had finally regained consciousness after her losing effort in the 24/7 Championship bout, she was laid out over a table in a room she didn’t recognize, with what appeared to be a doctor looming over her to the side.

“Ah, you’re finally awake! That’s good,” the man said with a friendly smile. “Sorry you didn’t win your match, but I do have some good news for you. You don’t seem to have any serious injuries. Or, no broken bones, at least. You’ll be sore for a while, and you’ve got some bruises that’ll take some time to heal, but some of those hits you took could’ve ended much worse than they did.” Akino didn’t give any sign that she was as relieved as the doctor seemed to be. Her expression showed no emotion in response to his words, nor did she say anything.

But when Akino sat herself up on the table more quickly than she should’ve, an intense pain surged through the back of her head. She hissed and immediately moved a hand over her skull. “Try not to move too much or too quickly. We still need to test you for a concussion,” he said, and Akino nodded in response. The next several minutes consisted of the doctor conducting a series of memory quizzes and vision tests, a few of which she didn’t even remember by the end. “Well, I think you do have a mild concussion, but it doesn’t seem to be serious. Just take it easy for a week or so and you’ll be fine, alright?”

As if she’d ignored every word he said, Akino glanced away, and saw a small mirror sitting on a counter across the room. “Hand me that, please,” she said while pointing to the mirror, and the doctor immediately complied. The one-eyed maiden held it and looked at her reflection. Her hair was a mess, and her cheek a little swollen thanks to Carmen’s right fist. But that didn’t matter nearly as much as her dry and reddened eye, and the brown and blue smudges all around it. Her eye closed and her grip tightened on the mirror to the point that it almost cracked in her hands.

And that was when Akino heard the door open and Carmen’s familiar voice in the room. The doctor glanced at her, then at Akino, who nodded to confirm she no longer needed him and that he could go. The man smiled and nodded to Carmen on his way out, closing the door behind him to give the two women some privacy. Akino then set the mirror down beside her. She didn’t say a single word to the boxer. But she did slowly turn her gaze toward Carmen. Not at the flowers, but at the latina herself, making immediate and direct eye contact with her.

Carmen couldn’t guess exactly how this was going to go down, but she did have some ideas. Best-case scenarios. She figured that, when she came into the room, things would be a little tense, still carrying some energy from the match. Carmen would defuse the tension with the flowers, which Akino would either like or pretend she liked. They’d share some laughs. Things would calm. They’d reset.

Bare minimum, she expected a ‘hello’.

She got none of that. Just silence. Silence wasn’t good. Silence was never good.

”Hi. Hola.” Carmen stepped in as the doctor made an exit, wisely leaving the two powerful, dangerous and extremely tense women and wisely not getting in between their unresolved issues.

Carmen withered under Akino’s gaze for a moment, before she coughed and dared to move a little closer, holding out the flowers for her to take. ”I got these for you.”

Akino was well aware that her gaze was making Carmen uncomfortable, and for good reason. But she wondered if the latina really understood just why she was getting such a cold shoulder as she entered. The flowers seemed to indicate she might. But “maybe” wasn’t what Akino was looking for.

When Carmen held the flowers out, Akino held her stare a moment longer, then finally lifted a hand to take the gift. Her eye left the 24/7 Champion and moved to look at the flowers, briefly, before she set them down beside her without a word and went back to looking at the boxer.

Then, finally, Akino spoke.

“What are your thoughts on what happened in our match?” she asked, her question carrying an odd sense of both vagueness and bluntness simultaneously. Akino hadn’t specified any particular aspect of the match, but she was cutting right to the chase to see if Carmen really understood what about it had bothered the maid so much.

Akino didn’t throw the roses away. She didn’t do much more than look at them, but really, Carmen was prepared to take her acknowledgement as a point in her favor. She had the feeling that such comforts would be hard to come by from this point.

The icy chill in the room didn’t change over the next few moments, but at least Akino was talking now, even if her question felt like a bit of a trick. What was Carmen supposed to say?

They’d fought. It had been a rough, dirty match, but 24/7 matches were designed to be. She’d done everything she could do to win without breaking the rules, just like she’d done with every match in her entire fighting career. The venues and competition had changed, but the philosophy remained the same.

”We had a good match.” She shrugged. ”It got a little rough, but it’s a 24/7 match, that’s the style. We both went hard, one of us came out on top.” Carmen tapped her chest. ”It was a good match for the title. What else is there to say?”

So Carmen really didn’t know...

Akino took a moment to digest the latina’s answer, though a raised eyebrow was probably already enough to show that she wasn’t a fan at all of the response. She looked away for a moment, and her hand reached toward the roses...only to pass by them and pick up the mirror laying right beside them.

She held it just over her lap, and looked down at her reflection. “‘The style...’” she repeated. “So when you smeared my eye against the dirt... When you shoved sand into it... was that all just ‘the style’ of a 24/7 match too? Was that your style?”

As she spoke, and those dreaded moments from their match were relived in her mind again, her voice gradually became rougher, to the point that she was almost growling the words by the end. Her previously blank and neutral expression was now starting to much more clearly show her anger and frustration as she turned to look at Carmen again and waited to hear what she had to say.

Confusion came over Carmen’s face. Partly because of the look in Akino’s eyes, the tone she was taking, thing she didn’t even know the bluenette was capable of. But a lot of it had to do with the reasons behind this mood.

She faltered a bit at first, her eyebrows furrowing with hurt, before she tightened up and solidified her stance. Some things clearly needed explaining, here.

”The match is anything goes, so yeah,  that is my style. In a 24/7 match, anyway.” She crossed her arms and put some extra weight on the right leg, letting her shoulder bounce along the way.

”Are you seriously getting mad at me for fighting within the rules of a match?” Carmen let her head sway to the side. ”Because that would really, really be immature of you, and nothing like the woman I thought I knew.”

You could now add shock to the things clearly present in Akino’s expression. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing, and she wasn’t about to take that sitting down. The bluenette pushed herself off the table to stand beside it, probably a bit quicker than she should’ve, as the movement made her briefly wince and lightly groan in discomfort. But when she addressed Carmen again the fire in her eyes burned even brighter, and the venom in her voice even stronger.

“You took the words right out of my mouth!” she growled. “The Carmen Rodriguez I thought I knew was a woman capable of fighting with class and honor even if she didn’t have to. I may not have the most extensive experience, but I’ve been in hardcore matches... TLC matches... I get what ‘anything goes’ entails. But this isn’t about the fucking rules!” The maid felt her hands clenching into fists and start to shake as she spoke.

“You could’ve fought me any number of ways. You’re one of the best boxers on the planet. And you’re a veteran wrestler. You could’ve tried outmatching me with your boxing. You could’ve driven me through every table in that cafeteria or slammed me against every last tree in that park! Anything! So why did you choose to stoop so fucking low?!” By now she was practically screaming as she vented every ounce of the anger and disappointment contained within her.

“There’s people I’ve seen in this company who I’d expect that sort of thing from. Ami Takeuchi. Reira Kirishima. Killer King. But I thought you could be above that! That we could actually have a respectable fight, even in the circumstances we faced! How could you...you of all people, use my blindness as a weapon against me, then have the audacity to look me in the eye and say that’s 'just your style' as if it’s something to be proud of?!” Akino shook her head, and her breathing was rapidly quickening.

“But you’re right about one thing. It was immature of me to think as highly of you as I did,” she said, pointing a finger at Carmen while her voice finally came back down to a normal volume.

“You are nothing like the woman I thought I knew.”

Shock was a new expression, one that Carmen had yet to see Akino take on in such a pronounced manner. Not to mention unbridled fury - if she’d been simmering before, she was boiling now, heated up all the way. Carmen looked on as she spoke, as if the bluenette was speaking a foreign language. She might as well have been, really.

When she was done, when the long, searing tirade was over, Carmen could only stand there in stunned silence, eyes wide and blinking, not sure how to process what she was hearing.

For a moment.

When that moment passed, her arms came up and folded tight over her chest, glaring back at Akino. ”You’re seriously, seriously, going to compare me with Killer King? Him?” She muttered off some obscenities under her breath, miraculously keeping them at low volume. ”Listen. In boxing, eye injuries happen. They happen a lot. In the ring, my eye’s got swollen up. Got blood in it. Makes it hard to see. And you know what happens?”

Carmen pointed to her right eye, the spot where she’d taken a particularly nasty blow about five years ago, one so bad the fight nearly had to stop. ”My opponent went for it. And I didn’t blame her, not one bit, because that’s how it works in boxing. That’s how it works in any combat sport. If your opponent’s got a weak arm, you take advantage. If she has a limp, you take advantage. You don’t get extra points for playing nice or ignoring blatant opportunities.”

She brought that same finger down and pointed it at Akino’s eye, now, getting some extra base and Latin flavor into her voice along with it. ”I respect that you fight with your handicap, I really do, but you can’t expect people to just ignore it. It’s like running a race with a missing leg, then getting mad when everyone doesn’t hop on one foot to make it even.” She threw her hands up. “It’s ridiculous.”

Carmen’s argument wasn’t doing anything to bring down Akino’s temper or ease her mind. Quite the opposite, in fact.

“Do I look like I need a lecture about what can happen when you’re in the middle of a fight with a bad eye?! And no, that’s not how it works in every combat sport! There’s plenty where you lose points or can even get the fight thrown out for things like poking eyes or hitting below the belt. And there’s a reason for-- AGH!!” Before she could even finish her point, all the shouting sent a fresh wave of excruciating pain through Akino’s concussed head, which she briefly brought a hand over while cringing.

After a moment the pain subsided a bit, and she looked at Carmen again and continued, but now at a much more level tone. “Like I said, I expect that shit most people around here. I don’t expect people to bend over backward for me in a fight. But I thought you were a respectable fighter... that you wouldn’t have to resort to such pathetic, cowardly tactics. Don’t even try to pretend you’ve ever had an ounce of respect for me after that...”

Then something else Carmen said suddenly rang in Akino’s head like a bell.

“Blatant opportunity...” she muttered. “You wanted this match from the day we met... All this time, have you just been looking at my blindness as something you could take advantage of whenever we eventually fought?! Is that all I was to you, just someone you could easily take advantage of in a fucking match?!” The thought alone was utterly heartbreaking, and something she would’ve dismissed as nonsense not even an hour ago. But now? Her trust in Carmen had been shattered, and she simply didn’t know what to believe anymore.

Before Akino even knew it was coming, a tear rolled from her eye and down her cheek. Wiping it away with the back of her wrist the moment she noticed it, the maid went right for the door as fast as her battered, bruised and aching body could carry her. “Just stay away from me,” she growled at Carmen as she tried to move past her while reaching to open the door, just wanting to limp her way to the locker room so she could get her things and go home.