Each and Every Step

"Hah!" Taylor laughed. "You retard. Panera bread sucks. If you want something healthy, we're not getting fast food, or whatever you want to call it." She put a finger to her lips and a hand on her hip while she thought about where to go to get food. "That's probably one of the best things about Japan. In almost three years, I haven't had one person say to me 'hey, let's go to McDonalds'. Ick."

She decided on a place and started walking. She laughed a little to herself at the absurdity of it all. A moment ago they were brawling on the sidewalk. After that, they got personal. Now they were just going to eat like everything was perfectly normal. Whatever, Taylor wasn't going to argue.

"Okay, I know the place. Plenty of raw, dark green vegetables and oily fish and vegetable juice and stuff. Lots of protein, and lots and lots of good stuff. You'll feel great. But if I'm buying, you have to finish it. No picking around the kelp or whatever. Healthy food doesn't work if it doesn't go in your face, and I figure maybe if we put some good stuff in there maybe less bullshit will come out."

After only a moment, as if it were the same conversation, she added "Hey, do you ever think about that match? The bad one, I mean. Forget all the bullshit and the passing out and you being a pussy and everything, just the fight itself. Do you ever think about that?"

"Panera, Panama. Whatever, I know it sucks, but still, at least it kind of looked healthy at the time when McDonalds was the only other option." Adrian rambled for a bit as they walked along "And you promised Pizza! Not that I won't eat the healthy stuff, but still, that's like promising to take a kid to toys-r-us and instead taking them to the dentists. It's better for them but yeah, dick move."

"All the time." she said, unable to keep the same carefree tone she had when she was just talking about random crap that didn't matter. "One move. I got ONE freaking decent move in, a 10 minute match and I only got one fucking shot in it. And it didn't do shit. I put up a better fight against you." She growled. Her ability to analyse matches didn't just apply to other people's. She often turned that cold criticism against herself, only magnified because it was her own insecurities talking. She made countless mistakes in the first match, trying to just list them out would take forever, it was a much shorter list to say what went well instead. Which was pretty much fuck-all. "Sorry," she quickly backtracked, trying not to bring the mood down to rock bottom again.

"Hey, I was all set for pizza. You suggested something healthy."

Taylor listened quietly to Adrian, and carefully hid her disappointment. That wasn't the match she meant. She couldn't help but feel just a little bit slighted by it. After everything, Chigusa didn't rank her very highly, and Adrian had bigger fish to fry. She was just old news, and everyone had moved on to other things and other people.

It wasn't that she wanted everyone to talk about her all the time, but she always wanted to think she'd left an impression on Friction before leaving. As time went on, she became more convinced that she did not.

"No problem," she said. "Well, at least you got your ass kicked for that long without curling up into a ball or fainting or whatever. I always thought that if you're gonna go down, go down in flames. Natasha's a bitch, man. She's all about number one. She's got an ego even bigger than the balloons in her giant, fake boobs. If you want an edge, use that. Find a way to get under her skin and take away her focus, keep yours while you do it. Watch for the signs, and know when to pull the trigger." She looked up at the sky. "I'm not gonna tell you to fight like me, but you have to use everything you've got, right? Excluding the fireballs and shit. You want to make that prissy bitch whine to everyone she sees about the shit you said to her in that match for months afterward, and hopefully about how bad you beat her too."

"Well yeah... since when did my suggestions ever mean anything though?" Adrian protested, lightheartedly cursing herself for potentially denying herself pizza before trying to think of how to best use Taylor's advice.

"Well... she kinda doesn't like it when people say she doesn't know what hard work is because she's rich? But if I say that but still take a bad shot, it's just gonna come off as jealousy... but if I say it when I have the upper hand, that might be enough to get her off her game and allow me to snowball the advantage. She beat me so easily because I went into that match pissed off at everything, and I got chumped... I haven't got enough time to do that so she's pissed at the start, considering how much she loves to seem all calm and collected and shit. But if I can get her off guard... she's probably not giving this match that much thought considering how easy she beat me, so if I play into that for a bit, maybe bait her in with a few obvious 'counter this' attacks which are actually trying to set up a counter to her counter then I can..." she mumbled on, trying to plan the whole thing out in her head. If she just looked like she was just mad and hadn't done that much hard work to prepare, that might get Natasha to lower her guard. She was still human, she still had to make assumptions of how Adrian dealt with being injured, and with how emotional Adrian's outursts had been, it would make sense to think that the cosplayer was the one who was entering the match in the wrong state of mind, when in fact the French woman would be. How to make sure she still wouldn't think much of Adrian though...

But then a sudden thought struck her, what Taylor had said in the first place. Did she really mean the Natasha match? After all, it was kind of a random topic to put in right now, when they had talked about more personal issues. It was the more recent event that she would associating with passing out, but being a pussy about it? She wasn't a pussy then, she had just sucked. So why did Taylor want to know about that match and not... "Oh..." she eventually realized. "Did you... you didn't mean the latest one where I passed out and was a pussy... did you." She said, trying not to sound to scared. "I don't like thinking about that... other match."

Taylor nodded blankly. Adrian was way over thinking it. If you knew how to get under someone's skin, do it, and if you're paying attention you can take advantage of it. You didn't need to draw flow charts and venn diagrams about it.

Then Adrian took the conversation back a few steps. Taylor breathed an ironic laugh and look down at the ground, and then over at Adrian. She measured each step and avoided the cracks in the sidewalk while they walked.

"Yeah, that one," she said. "I don't think about it much either." That wasn't entirely true. She had long since avoided thinking about her grief with Adrian that led to that match, but she had run through the steps of the fight in her mind. And the outcome kept her up at night. She was racked with self doubt for months and months afterward.

"I should've won," she said finally, like it was something she had been meaning to say. "I shouldn't have done what I did. It was the right thing at the time, because I didn't want Lukretia to turn me into someone I wasn't, but... I think we would've both been better off if I had just sat on your chest and let you wake up and pounded you until you said the words. Because... I kept it alive. The match didn't really end, so nothing ended, and... I didn't have the heart to do it, because you were done, the fight was over, and man, I don't get off on hurting people or anything like that. But I should've won."

She hadn't said the words out loud before, not even to Johnny, and she wondered what Adrian would think.

What was there to say to that, really? That Taylor should have won all the way back then. What could Adrian really say. "...Yeah, maybe." She muttered. Would it have really ended if Taylor had just piled on her? "But... what else was there to do?" she asked, "I was out cold, most of my palm had been ripped off. I had to take like 15 different injections to wake up, so that just... wouldn't happen unless you carted a hundred doctors and asked me in the hospital. So yeah, no need to really think about it."

"Besides, what makes you think that you winning would have just ended it all? I just lost another match that put me in the hospital and it's sure as hell not over in my head, or I wouldn't have gotten goaded into a rematch, would I? Instead it'd be you I'd be trying to get revenge on, and that was when I was still so freaking crazy I was taking barbed wire to shit. And what if I'd won? If I woke up and still fought back, do... something I dunno and you quit. You'd be extra pissed off because you lost a match you thought you had won due to bullshit! There was no good way to come out of that thing so just... drop it. Okay?" She ranted, her hands balling into fists again as she tried her best not to get angry again, still shaking she just continued walking on, trying to avoid eye contact. "There's never any freaking closure anyway."

Taylor didn't know what sort of response she was hoping for, but that wasn't it. Her face fell, and she kept her eyes down on the sidewalk and her feet.

How long had it been since that stupid day that Taylor first met Adrian? She still couldn't find any peace about it. As far as she could tell, she was stuck with that guilt forever, and Adrian was always going to be a pissy, crazy little bitch. She wanted to roll her eyes and rip into her about how much of a pussy she had to be to get that much medical attention after just getting beat up a little bit, tell her that if she had the chance she'd beat her down twice as hard, shove her, start a fight.

She couldn't do any of that, though, and honestly it was the opposite of what she really wanted. She breathed a heavy sigh and put her hands in her pockets.

"Yeah... Maybe you're right," she said. "But we do have some closure, because I quit. That part is done for good."

She reminded herself that all that was behind her. She didn't do that anymore. She didn't have to fight anyway if she didn't want to. So even though she felt trapped by the guilt from what happened with Adrian, she knew that she was at least free from some of it. She was free to be honest about it, free to forget about it, and for once, free to cry about it without feeling weak and vulnerable. Silent tears welled up in her eyes, and she kept her mouth shut in case her voice came out all weepy.

Adrian didn't know what else she could say, getting the feeling that just brushing it off like that had upset Taylor. "Well if it's any concelation... everyone counts it as your win anyway?" She suggested looking straight down "you gave a crazy bitch who just wanted to kill you a taste of her own medicine which she couldn't take. You shouldn't feel bad or that it left some stuff over by taking the moral high ground. It just meant I didn't take the um... who's that crazy chick in the mask who hates you and all your friends? Talia? Well I didn't go looking for direct revenge until you kinda called me out... when I proved that I wasn't anything but a worthless psycho..." She pretty much cursed out at the end "Someone who couldn't win fairly so just tried to kill people for being better than them. Someone who couldn't even face up to what they did that they just ran and hid under a mask for 5 months..."

"I fucked up so much. If I didn't snap, and just accepted I got my ass kicked by someone way better than me, if I didn't get so focused on just tring to hurt someone..." She started to sob, she couldn't help it. It was one of the reasons she hated trying to think about the matches the two had, not just the random brawls, but the actual matches. Both ended with her freaking out, a side of herself that she was ashamed that existed, not only the ability to hate someone enough that they just wanted whoever had offended them to suffer, but also the will to act on it. It brought out the blatant chokes and the barbed wire in the I quit match, the chair in the Triple threat where she was actually doing relatively okay in. She hated that every time things got a bit heated, she didn't have any answer but to go crazy... or just run away. "...sorry..."

Taylor cleared her throat. "What? No. Dark Angel. Talia was the one that fucked me over in my match against Chigusa." Taylor said. "Twice. Man, I might not have done hentai, but I definitely got fucked plenty."

She drew a deep breath and glanced over at Adrian. It was hard to see her like that. She wanted to think that her enemies, the people she worked so hard to fight, weren't that human or weak or weren't afflicted by the same doubt or self loathing that she was. It made it that much harder to hold a grudge, but luckily she was trying to get rid of the grudge.

With a moment's hesitation, she reached out and put her arm around Adrian's shoulders. "You're pretty fucked up," she said. "That's okay. Me too." After a few more steps she let her arm drop back to her side. "I just don't want to feel bad about all this stuff anymore, ya know? As long as everyone holds everything against everyone, no one will ever be able to let anything drop. But... I'm letting this stuff drop with or without you, so... if you still hold a grudge somewhere, or whatever, that's fine. But you're not that person to me anymore. Call it a fresh start."

She couldn't think of anything to else say. Well, she thought of mentioning that they had just passed the street the restaurant was on, but it didn't seem like the right time to bring that up.

"Sorry, got confused a bit..." Adrian mumbled out. Talia, Dark Angel... too many nemisises... nemisi? ... people who really didn't like Taylor or her friends. Got confusing. But as Taylor wrapped her arm around her, the cosplayer breathed a sigh of relief. "Yeah..? Me neither..." This whole grudge thing had been eating away at the both of them for too long and while they were doing okay just trying to ignore it, maybe getting everything in the open like this, about how much it sucked to have a rivalry that should have died a year ago still eating away at them. "Fresh start sounds good, so what do we do for it?"