Chapter Text
The mood at the Xiaolin Temple of Dengfeng, China had never been gloomier. In fact, saying that the temple had seen worse days might have been an understatement.
For one thing, it seemed like it had been days since anyone laughed and Dojo’s radio in the kitchen only seemed to play funeral dirges. Despite it being the height of July, the sun simply chose not to show up too.
Adding to the general gloomy mood, of course, were Kimiko and Raimundo and their tense conversation in a secluded area in the rock garden. Because of their elements—and the nature of their talk—the weather hadn’t been exactly pleasant.
The winds picked up and died down erratically, matching the way the Wind Dragon tapped his legs. Occasionally, there were little sparks of flame that came out of the Fire Dragon’s gesturing hands.
Despite the relationship between both Dragon warriors being one of the temple’s worst-kept secrets, no one dared to eavesdrop. Mostly because of the likelihood of getting caught in a storm or a potential fire.
If anyone had eavesdropped, though, they would have known things weren’t going great.
“Look, I love you”, Kimiko said, trying to begin again. “And that’s why—”
Raimundo wasn’t having it. “It doesn’t mean anything to you, right? What we have—you’ll just throw it away like it’s nothing.”
“This is why we have to end it before it’s too late”, she continued, firmly committed to finishing her sentence. “So you won’t say shit like that because you can’t hear what’s actually being said to you.”
A pause. “I don’t want to not be able to be in the same room as you just because some resentment changed everything. You mean more to me than that.”
Not responding right away, Raimundo made sure to look her in the eye. “So do you…which is why I wouldn’t be doing what you’re doing. If I were in your shoes, I’d respect you enough to explain.”
“Oh”, Kimiko said, feigning surprise. “So, now you want to listen? Now you finally acknowledge that there was a problem?”
“...I’m not saying there is a problem, I’m saying—”
“It’s that by the way”, she interjected, gesturing to him. “That’s our problem. You’re not happy, I’m not happy, and you never want to talk about it.”
That was enough to send him over the edge. “Why do you keep doing that? Stop trying to tell me if I am happy or not! Goddammit, Kimiko, I’m an adult. I can tell if I’m happy or not, and I’m fucking chipper when I’m with you.”
“Fine, you’re happy…but I’m not.”
“But you never…”, he began, shaking his head slightly. “You never gave me any signs.”
“I never gave any signs, or did you miss them all while you were pulling away from me?” Seeing how he avoided her eyes, Kimiko sucked a breath in. “We barely talk and we can’t last two seconds without fighting. It’s getting to a point where being around each other is difficult, Rai.”
A pause. “That’s not who we are. We’re not the couple that stays together out of spite; we’re better than that.”
“Exactly, we’re better than that”, Raimundo said, finally finding a word to latch on to. All he had to do was make her see his point. “We’re better than this , girl. You know this!”
“Do I? Because, in case you didn’t notice, the distance changed us”, she said, narrowing her eyes. “You’re in Rio and I’m in Tokyo and it’s turning us into different peo—”
He tried to grab her hand. “No, no, fuck distance. That doesn’t apply to us, Kim. We’re motherfucking Dragons ; we have Wu, we can go through continents in hours—that changes things!”
She yanked her hand back. “Not enough!”
“Come on, girl. Can’t you just…can’t you just try to listen?”
When she pursed her lips to listen, Raimundo opened his mouth again, then quickly forced his eyes shut for a moment, willing the tears to go back in. No words came out.
After all, what else was there to say? He’d already told her everything he could. He’d said that they were getting better, that they could talk about anything. That things didn’t change unless they wanted them to.
Pathetically, he kept repeating one thing. But I love you .
What he didn’t know was that Kimiko knew all of his arguments by heart and anticipated every one of them. She wished that she could accept his rhetoric and move on, but she couldn’t. They wasted too much time pretending things were working out, and it was bound to hurt them both. And Kimiko wanted nothing less than to see him hurt. Even if it meant not being together.
Still, any words she said fell on deaf ears. To Raimundo, everything she said was gibberish. He couldn’t connect anything she said to her red-rimmed, puffy eyes. And he definitely couldn’t understand her next words.
“You’re going to thank me for this later”, Kimiko said, after a moment of silence. “Because what if we stay together and you meet someone you really like? What if I do? Are we supposed to—”
“What if I don’t”, Raimundo said, looking extremely insulted. “What if I don’t meet anyone else because I just want you?”
A pause. “I want you .”
Hearing that, Kimiko turned around and blinked back the sting in her eyes. She wasn’t going to let him see her cry and think he was getting somewhere.
“You need to understand”, she said, aware of how thick and distant her voice sounded. “That we need this time apart. We need to figure out who we are without each other. If we don’t take this opportunity, you’ll hate me and I’ll hate you.”
Raimundo’s stomach dropped. Instead of asking her what she meant, he awkwardly laughed. “You don’t, you don’t mean that.” A pause. “What, you think you could hate me?”
Maybe it was because of the awkward laugh that she misunderstood as arrogant. Or, maybe because she just wanted it to be over with, but Kimiko huffed. “Sometimes. And, sometimes, it feels like I already do.”
Although her tone wasn’t malicious or at all insulting, Raimundo felt like he’d been knifed in the gut.
Then, his mind chose to torment him, bringing to the forefront a face he didn’t want to remember. A face that was as pretentious as it was punch-able. When he cleared his throat, Raimundo’s voice was barely audible.
“Are you doing this because of Shota?”
At that, Kimiko turned around to face him. He could see the tears she hastily wiped, but her shocked glare was much more prominent. “ What ?”
“You’re doing this because of him, right?”, he repeated, feeling sucker-punched. How could he have missed it? “Because of Shota. You want to fuck him? That’s it? That’s wh—”
The slap rang in his ears before he knew it. Alright , so he deserved that. Raimundo pressed the palm of his hand to his cheek, still feeling the sting from Kimiko’s hand.
“How fucking dare you?”, she asked, more insulted than shocked. “You really think I’d do that to you?”
Shaking a little, Kimiko took a second to calm down. “The only reason I’m doing this is that I’d rather lose you as a boyfriend than as a friend, Raimundo. Because I actually care about you.”
A pause. “Tell me you’ll think about it. Okay?”
For all intents and purposes, Raimundo did think about it.
Because he did, he found himself thinking about how it was always Kimiko. It was her decisions that they had to follow. She was the one who kissed him all those years ago, so they got together. Now, she wanted them broken up, so they were ending things.
If he didn’t know any better—or because he did—Raimundo would have thought that nothing he had to say mattered. It wasn’t like she’d ever taken him as seriously as he'd taken her. His pride had taken too many hits and he couldn’t just keep her forever if she didn’t want to be with him.
So, he did the only thing he could have done. He met her by the koi pond a couple of hours later and told her what she wanted to hear.
“You’re right”, he said. “We had a good run. Let’s end it.”
A few seconds later, Raimundo left without another word or a look, not knowing that Kimiko pretty much felt like she looked. Exhausted and heartbroken.
She didn’t just tell him she loved him to hurt him. No, she did that to tell him she wanted them to end things before those feelings evaporated. Because resentment was already starting to pour into every memory.
Still, that didn’t mean she saw this coming. This was the last thing she could have predicted. Kimiko never thought that Raimundo would ever accept the break up this silently. This easily .
For the very first time, she couldn’t count on him to talk his way out of it. It only confirmed her worst suspicions—he gave up. He’d talked a big game about commitment and when she bought it, he pulled away. Then, to add insult to injury, he easily gave up.
But he still let me try , she thought. He still let me fight and compromise and try on my own .
Still staring into the koi pond, Kimiko got off the ground and closed her eyes. If she could concentrate enough, she could smell his cologne in the air, right where he stood a couple of minutes ago.
She was the one who got him that cologne, Kimiko remembered. It wasn’t a birthday or a holiday or anything. Raimundo had been a little insulted and pretended to be annoyed. My girlfriend thinks I smell; my own girlfriend!
Feeling like her gut was sinking, Kimiko took a deep breath and decided that maybe a midnight swim wouldn’t hurt. She still had a few hours to kill before she had to go back to Tokyo.
Despite the fact that no one had died, the gloomy weather continued to haunt the temple. So when the Dragons—save for the already present Omi—returned to the temple the following week for training, the dullness wasn’t surprising.
What was surprising was how Kimiko decided they should spend their time.
Erratically tapping his leg under the table, Raimundo thought he could have actually gotten a stroke from all the pent-up laughter. On any other regular day, he actually would have laughed out loud, but Kimiko was trying to talk. As seriously as she was taking this, she would not find it funny. Not like that’s new . Kimiko found nothing funny these days, especially if it came out of Raimundo’s mouth.
He snuck a look at her out of the corner of his eye and couldn’t help but smile. Half a second later, he really saw her. Every muscle tense like she was being quizzed on a subject she didn’t know. Jittery and ill-humored even when Clay tried to diffuse the tension. Her eyes were worried and as beautiful as ever.
It was too much, so Raimundo moved his gaze back to the cowboy and his smile returned again. When he looked at Omi, the danger of accidentally laughing came back too. He couldn’t help it, though. Their faces were that funny.
Looking both constipated and morose, Clay threw Raimundo sympathetic looks that made the latter wish he’d been bludgeoned with the Fist of Tebigong instead. And Omi, well, Omi was a statue that barely moved his comically wide eyes from Raimundo to Kimiko.
Speaking of Kimiko, she was still talking. Fifteen minutes later, she hadn’t taken a single break and it didn’t look like she was stopping anytime soon.
“—anyway”, she said. “It’s over between us but that won’t change anything. We just thought we—”
Tuning her out, Raimundo took one more look at the other two and almost giggled. They looked more confused as time went on. And—oh, great , now Omi was asking questions.
“Did you fight?”, the youngest warrior said. “Because people do argue. It’s not the end of the world.”
“We didn’t fight, Omi. There’s no bad blood and we’re ok—”
Nope . Raimundo really couldn’t do this anymore. Pushing the laughs down, he got up with all eyes on him.
Clay reacted first. “Where are ya going, partner?”
“Yeah”, Kimiko said, glaring at him in an effort to order him to sit down. “We’re not done here.”
Raimundo shook his head. “Maybe you’re not but I am. Your faces are hilarious and all but I won’t listen to this shit again.”
True to his word, he didn’t. What he did next was just go to what used to be his—well, everyone’s room, and slide the door shut behind him. Once he did that, Raimundo laughed.
He laughed so hard that soon enough he felt bone-crushing pain in his sides. It was the kind of laughter that brought tears, the kind that would have been infectious if anyone was around to hear it. But no one was.
Those drama queens were still at it in the kitchen and for what? Clay never looked so uncomfortable and Omi had never been shocked to speechlessness before. They were doing all of this for absolutely nothing.
Raimundo only agreed to it because that was the first time Kimiko had looked him in the eye in a while. Ten minutes , she’d said. We have to tell Clay and Omi, but don’t worry it won’t take more than that .
Alone in their shared room, Raimundo realized that it had definitely been a lot more than ten minutes.
Nearly thirty actually, but that didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because no amount of minutes passing would undo that night. He doubted that even the Sands of Time would be useful if he had them.
Even if they worked, he would have never understood what happened. No matter how many times, he thought it over. For the first two days after she left him, all he could do was analyze the situation. Trying as hard as he could to find an opening for a solution. To see if maybe he could fix it.
Sadly, he couldn’t.
Just remembering that made him finally realize that he wouldn’t get to do any of it anymore. He wouldn’t get super-early morning texts from her so she could be the first person he talked to. Wouldn’t get to kiss her anymore. He wouldn’t share a bed with her and he definitely wouldn’t hug her, not like he used to. And if he could, he wouldn’t do it anytime soon.
They probably wouldn’t talk for some time too, Raimundo realized. When they did, who knew if they could ever get back to being friends like they used to be?
Kimiko said she didn’t want to lose him as a friend, but it looked like she already did. Now, here he was. Alone with a situation that wasn’t half as funny as he’d first thought.
It was actually painful—so painful Raimundo could have sworn he was dying if he hadn’t almost kicked the bucket two times before. That hollow feeling in his chest wasn’t something he’d wish on anyone.
All of a sudden he couldn’t believe that he’d had siblings and cousins and friends who went through this over and over again like it was some sort of competitive sport with no medals or rewards.
“There is one, actually”, Jacinto, his second oldest sibling, once told him as he threw his wife a smile. “All that love you have inside gets to go to someone who will know just what to do with it.”
Like fuck if that happened , Raimundo couldn’t help but think, rolling his eyes.
If that had happened, he wouldn’t be in his room with all the love he’d ever given hurled back in his face by his best friend, the one who’d broken his heart.
But wasn’t that just hilarious?