If You're Afraid, it's Okay. Everyone's Scared

[Fenrir]

ES10: AKENO KUDO CONTINUED FROM The Waiting Game

Akeno rushed down the stairs, jumping the last three or four steps and bending her knees to avoid a painful landing and not even affording Sofia’s body a quick glance as she rushed past it. She spared a fleeting look over her shoulder as she headed back towards the maze and it’s comfortingly disorienting twists and turns, stopping at the first corner to look back up the stairs towards the portal that led back into the corridors; no signs of Sergio.

She kept moving regardless; left, right, forward. Three times she’d walked these passages and she couldn’t say she found them any less confusing; right, left, right, forward. But her pursuer, if she had one, would be just as confused as she was. If she heard footsteps chasing her then she could evade them here, so long as she avoided making the same mistakes Sofia had made when she was the one pursuing. Right, forwards, left, right.

Corpse.

There was a body in front of her. A girl’s body. Hailey, if Akeno remembered correctly; she’d seen her during the chase but had ignored it when running by this spot. It hadn’t been important then, but she was glad to have found it again now without having to wander the maze for too long; this wasn’t exactly what Akeno was looking for but it meant she was close to her second reason for wanting to come back here. Leaving Hailey behind Akeno took another few twists and turns before seeing what she was really here for; Sofia’s bag. There had been a bag by Hailey as well that she could have taken, plus Mateo’s that was probably still around her somewhere, but neither of them had what she needed right now. She didn’t know if Sofia’s did either, but as Akeno walked over to it and crouched down to open it up she was hopeful.

Her hand dug around inside, rummaging past someone else’s unworn clothing and uneaten food until she found what she wanted. Akeno heaved out a sigh of relief and pulled the spare harpoons for her new gun out of the bag. When she’d taken the weapon from Sofia’s body it had never occurred to her to look for more spears and she had left the bowels with just the one that she had plucked from Mateo’s chest and later Sofia’s back. Not once had she stopped to think that the backpack Sofia threw in her face might have had more, until she’d taken a shot at Sergio and missed and had to deal with the fact that her weapon was now useless.

Here they were though. No one had come along to take them before she could find them again and the relief Akeno felt at that was palpable. Her mistake hadn’t cost her a valuable tool, her only decent weapon in a game that was becoming increasingly stacked with heavily armed contestants. She still had a gun. She still had a chance. She was fine.

She was fine.

Akeno stood up, took two steps back and felt her shoulders collide with the wooden crate behind her. Her knees gave way and she slid to the floor, legs splaying out in front of her before she drew her knees up and placed her arms on top of them. She closed her eyes and let her head droop down until her face couldn’t be seen any more.

She was fine.

Things were going okay.

She was fine.

Alone in the maze, with no other sounds but her own, her breathing sounded unnaturally loud to her ears. It only grew louder as time went on and it took Akeno a few moments to realise that she was breathing heavily, that no matter how much air she pulled in she still felt like it wasn’t enough. A feeling of panic began to spread in her chest and she raised her head up in the hopes that not having her arms and legs closed around her would make catching her breath easier.

“It’s okay.” Deep breathes. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

In her chest her heart was pounding a mile a minute. It had been ever since she’d encountered Sergio in the corridors above; actually, probably ever since Sofia attacked her, but what before could have been explained away as the result of adrenaline and physical exertion now seemed to be something else. Her escape through the maze hadn’t let her calm down at all, she needed to stay alert in case she heard footsteps following her down the stairs; but even when it was clear no one was going to chase her, even when she found the extra harpoons she needed in Sofia’s bag she couldn’t calm down. What should have been a weight off her mind was instead a reminder of how stupid she was and how… how she… shit.

“It’s okay.”

She’d almost died.

It couldn’t have been more than a few inches from hitting her. If that harpoon was a few inches to the left she would have died.

No chance to fight, no last words; she wouldn’t even have seen it coming. Just… dead.

Breathe.

“It’s okay. You’re still alive.”

Sofia hadn’t killed her, the harpoon missed, but it almost didn’t and Akeno was not… was really, really not okay with that.

It scared her. Not just the thought of dying, but the idea that it might happen in a way so sudden, so unexpected that she wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it; that lack of control over what happened to her was the worst part of it. All because she wasn’t careful enough and didn’t think to watch her back as she scavenged for supplies; because she was so caught up in her musings about dead bodies and dead friends that she wasn’t paying attention to her surroundings. It was a slip-up, not the first one she’d made and definitely not the last, but it was the first time that she’d almost died because of it. And then, rather than learn from it, Akeno had left behind the bag with all the things that made her weapon usable in it and then tried to shoot someone with an empty gun in a fight.

Stupid. Stupid mistakes.

She was making a lot of those kinds of mistakes and that also scared the hell out of her.

Akeno needed to stop. Stop messing up for one thing but also just… stop, slow down. The guy that had filled in for Emmy for a while had said as much and while she agreed with him in spirit she hadn’t done a very good job of following his advice since then; pump the breaks, before she ran herself into the ground. It felt like she needed to remind herself of that, to stop and deal with what almost happened instead of just trying to push forward like she wasn’t rattled by it. Before she made any more rash mistakes that got her killed.

“It’s… fine. It’s fine.”

As long as she was still alive she would have that opportunity; to stop, to reconsider and try again. None of the mistakes she had made so far were final; she could come back from them, learn from them, like she always tried to do in the past. The only thing that would make recovering from this impossible was giving up or dying; Akeno definitely wasn’t ready to give up yet and she wasn’t dead, despite some people’s best efforts. She was fine.

“It’s fine, you can do this.”

The important thing was to adapt, learn from her mistakes then change her approach so that she didn’t repeat them in the future. It was about making progress. Overcoming her shortcomings and being better than her past self; making improvements, being stronger than she was yesterday, stronger than her last fight.

It sounded silly putting it like that, idealistic, and that’s because it was. It fit the philosophy she was taught when learning karate, but this wasn’t martial arts. It wasn’t a tournament that she came fifth in and felt down about, it was life and death, but the same principles she applied after a loss then could be applied now. Don’t dwell on her failures, on what she did wrong, dwell on what she could do differently next time instead; what went wrong, what went right, what would she do differently if she could replay everything? Break down the events that had happened in her head, piece by piece, to find an answer.

She could do this.

Already her breathing felt more under control now; not back to normal, but it was getting there. The pounding in her chest had subsided a little too. Having something to direct her mental energy towards always calmed her down, or maybe it was having a plan to fix things that did it; either way, the process was almost meditative for her.

In her fight with Sergio, she shouldn’t have gone for his gun; Akeno had the advantage after she threw him to the ground and should have used that time to finish the fight in a way she was comfortable and familiar with instead of going for something uncertain. After killing Sofia she should have stopped to think about her new weapon, what it needed and what resources Sofia might have had; instead she was in such a hurry to leave the bowels behind she didn’t think of anything else. She was trying not to think of anything else.

She’d let Mateo’s corpse distract her. Or rather, Akeno had wanted to distract herself from what she was doing so she’d let herself be swept away thinking about other things instead; the morbidity of the situation had naturally pushed her thoughts towards the other bodies she had seen or had a hand in creating during the game so far. Maxine, Jasper, Lucille.

Those were all mistakes too.

Lucille. Her mistake there was in leaving her friend alone to die. It was hard to say whether or not things would have worked out differently had they stayed together, but if they had or if they’d run when Vasily gave them the chance… if Akeno hadn’t chased after Verity or if she did but brought Lucille with her… if she’d paid attention to the whispering doubts in the back of her mind that something was wrong with her friend instead of pushing it aside because she didn’t want to deal with it and assuming everything would work out the way she wanted it to; that Lucille would be able, be willing, to protect herself… if Akeno had done anything differently, would she have been able to save her?

Would she have been able to save Jasper? That was the other question she kept coming back to, even more than Lucille; if she’d acted, if she’d fought, if she hadn’t put the rules of this show above their friendship, would it have saved him? Would that, in turn, have saved Lucille? If she’d helped Jasper kill Fisk and the others on the clipper ship then the fight on the ferry wouldn’t have happened. Or if it did, they wouldn’t have been nearly as outnumbered and they would have stood a chance of winning, right? Especially if Jasper survived and they all teamed up together; a lot of things would be different if that was the case. If she’d acted.

If only…

Akeno’s head slammed back against the wooden crate behind her. Tears pooled in the corners of her eyes, only partly because of the stinging pain now at the base of her skull.

No.

Don’t. Focus. On your failures.

Don’t think about what you could have done. Don’t waste time wondering about things that you can no longer change. Focus instead on what you can do now, on things you still have control over. Anything less than that was just wallowing in regrets and that was a habit she’d forced herself to break out of years ago.

Her head drooped down again and she squeezed her eyes shut, feeling the tears in her eyes run down the ridge of her nose.

She hadn’t felt this powerless in years.

Not since the long car rides home after a tournament, her father sitting silently in the driver seat next to her as she clutched her consolation prize in her lap and ran through all of her fights in her head. She would always get the consolation prize, or third, or second; she’d never come home with first place, not once. It bothered her a lot; never winning. She used to kick herself for every misstep she’d made; blame herself, judge herself, hate herself, worry about what others thought of her, worry if she’d be allowed to keep trying. Soon enough it would pass, because she loved karate and she loved the competitions themselves, even if the aftermath was always a little… messy for her emotionally. She used to hate those car rides; just sitting there with nothing to do but feel bad about herself.

It wasn’t until she had a frank conversation with one of the senseis at the dojo when she was fourteen, maybe fifteen, that she learned how to properly cope with those feelings of disappointment. Instead of thinking about the loss and letting it drag her down into dark places she would tell herself to think about how she’d improved instead; things like how she’d made it further in the bracket than ever before, how she’d used something new that she’d learned in a real fight for the first time, how she’d managed to beat someone that she’d lost against previously. It was easier to focus on all of that than how she kept fucking up at the one thing that was supposed to be hers; all hers and no one else’s.

No one cared how she performed in those tournaments except her anyway, so her opinion was really the only one that matter. If she was happy with the result then that was enough.

Or something like that. It made the car rides less painful at least.

That mentality didn’t work here of course; second place would be as dead as anyone else. Akeno had to win, which meant no more mistakes, no more…

Were those gunshots?

Akeno turned her head towards the noise before deciding that, gunshots or not, she didn’t want to be anywhere near unknown people right now. Pushing herself off the ground she walked on hands and knees over to Sofia’s bag, threw the harpoons back inside and zipped it up. Standing with the backpack in hand, she swung it over one shoulder and began to walk back the way she had just come.

ES10: AKENO KUDO CONTINUED IN Selkies