The Things I Can Do Without [Karate Kid Fanfic]

I'm a Little Unsteady

Terry sat behind the door, facing the inside of his home as he listened to John and Danielle whisper on the other side, sitting on the front steps in the middle of the night and weathering the cold. He didn't need to be in the cold anyway.

Apparently he was a cold-hearted bastard after all.

Looking back now, what he'd done to her was shittier than at first look. It was bad enough planning on and succeeding in taking her dependence and hoping to make her fail in the tournament, but he'd realized sometime in the midst of it all that he'd taken her trust and managed to become someone she trusted as a mentor and friend, and thought it would be a bonus in the end when he broke the truth to her. He hadn't realized exactly how bad it would be until that night and she'd given him that look.

But now it was even worse. Because he'd been given more insight to her side and how she felt about it, and hadn't thought to think of how much she cared for him. And worse, that she'd even loved him then.

For a moment, he felt a little resentment for John and wished for a moment that he had left Terry to die in Vietnam.

He drunkenly stumbled onto his feet, intending to hide away in either his room or his office, and had made it a few steps before he tripped and landed on his hands and knees, dropping his almost empty bottle of whiskey and vaguely noting it smashing onto the ground. He blearily looked at the mess, blinking a few times.

He felt familiar slender hands grip onto his arms and tug him up, and he lifted his head and looked at a weary Danielle.

"What're you doing?" his words slurred.

"Getting your drunk ass up," she muttered.

He weakly (fuck, he was messed up when he was drunk) tugged himself away from her, but she had an iron grip on him and he wasn't really pulling himself away.

"You don't owe me anything!" he yelled at her, finally mustering up some strength to yank himself away, only to land backwards on his ass on the unforgiving marble floor.

"You're right," she straightened up, face still blank. "I don't."

And then she was walking away from him and he was reaching out and wanting to call her back.

"Don't leave me again," he heard himself blurt out quietly, but she was too far away and he was too hesitant to say it any louder. He was surprised he had even said it at all.

A shadow stood over him and he looked to see John. His old friend looked worn out, and at this point Terry was sure the three of them were so tired they were going to call it quits on each other and themselves.

"You're a mess," John commented blithely.

"Fuck you," Terry muttered, letting himself flop back onto his back. He glanced in the direction of where she'd gone. "Since when were you two close?"

"We aren't."

Terry gave him a bitter look. "She doesn't look and act the same way towards you, the way she does me."

"I hurt her too," John acknowledged. "But she didn't care about me the way she did you. I was never close enough to her to make it really hurt."

And fuck, that was the difference between his and John's situations, wasn't it? John had always been Danielle's antagonist. She hadn't known him as anything different until now. All the times he'd hurt her, he'd always been "the enemy."

Then there was Terry, who had charmed her, buttered her up, acted like a friend and tried to be a mentor, and in the end had made her hate him at the same time she had made him love her.