Chapter Text
If there was one thing a hungover Johnny Lawrence had expected when he stumbled into the Miyagi-Fang dojo that morning, it was having to deal with mindless teenage bullshit.
And that was exactly what he got.
First of all, Penis Breath #2 was being a whinier bitch than usual.
Oh my God, Johnny, you need to stop calling Demetri that, Johnny could almost hear Daniel LaRusso hissing at him like an angry goose.
Johnny couldn’t give two shits what imaginary LaRusso said (who looked pretty scandalised by this considering he wasn’t even real). The fact of the matter was that ‘Demetri’ Penis Breath the second was a royal pain in his ass.
When the kid wasn’t having a nerdgasm about some doctor on his Netbox (which Johnny didn’t get because medical dramas were lame), he was falling over his own feet and then screaming about it like he had lost both his matchstick legs in Vietnam.
Then there was Miguel and baby-LaRusso to deal with, who threw so many hormones at each other that Johnny had threatened to get one of Daniel’s giant bamboo sticks and beat them apart before one of them got knocked up.
And lastly, there was Johnny’s main man and ultimate horndog Bert, who kept peeking at the porn stash in his backpack while everyone was distracted by Demetri’s wailing and Sam and Miguel trying not to stick their tongues down each other’s throats.
So, with all that mindless teenage bullshit to deal with, Johnny genuinely thought that was his drama quota done for the day. He thought that he could go home, crack open an ice-cold Coors Banquet and watch something rad and manly, like the MacGyver TV movie marathon, until he passed out in a heap on the floor.
Unfortunately, all those sweet plans died when Daniel LaRusso literally came out to Johnny after class had finished and then casually said,
“You don’t have a problem with that, do ya?”
Like he hadn’t just rocked Johnny’s entire world with a few sentences.
Johnny had stared at him blankly.
He really was way too sober for reality to be screwing with him this hard.
Maybe that kick in the head in ‘84 had permanently given Johnny brain damage. Maybe he still had a groove the shape of Daniel LaRusso’s foot embedded in his skull. Maybe Johnny was high as shit and had hallucinated the last year.
Because Daniel — LaRusso — couldn’t be saying what Johnny thought he had just said.
Sure, Johnny and the people around him had made jokes about the guy being soft but those had always been... well, jokes.
And a Shirley Temple for the lady.
Relax, Danielle.
Where are you going, sweetheart?
No one touches the prima donna until the tournament.
But this... Johnny definitely didn’t see this coming. This was out of left field. Hell, it was a totally different ballgame altogether.
Ha, ballgame, Johnny’s mind supplied unhelpfully. It weakly managed to snigger at its own joke like a preschooler before it spluttered like a dying engine and fizzled offline.
All higher mental faculties seemed to have leaked out through Johnny’s ears and onto the floor around his feet. Which was probably why his mouth flapped open without thought and he ended up saying out loud,
“So you like riding dick, huh.”
Daniel pressed his fingers into his temples like a man who was trying to lobotomise himself with his own fingernails to avoid this conversation.
“Jesus, Johnny,” LaRusso groaned, briefly looking up at the ceiling as though he was calling on Mr Miyagi himself to come down and save him from this situation. When the spirit of Miyagi didn’t show, Daniel heaved another put-upon sigh, like some sort of tiny karate martyr, and turned to his mentor’s portrait on the wall instead. “Seriously, it’s like talking to a caveman in a headband,” he said mournfully to the frame.
Even without changing his expression, the portrait of Miyagi seemed to commiserate.
Johnny didn’t appreciate people ganging up on him, especially when one of them was an inanimate object and already long dead. He got enough shit from the living as it was. It would be just his luck if Miyagi’s ghost came back from the dead just to kick him in the nads.
“But you were married to a total babe,” Johnny reminded Daniel just in case he had hit his head and forgotten. “You know, with…” Johnny then hovered his hands over his own chest, shaping them over his pecs like two large watermelons. Daniel stared at him like he had lost his mind. “I mean, you still like boobs, right?” Johnny confirmed, just to make sure LaRusso hadn’t gone completely batshit crazy.
“Whaddya, twelve?” Daniel asked in that wise-guy tone that always made Johnny want to kick his ass in school. It kind of made Johnny want to give him a swirly now. Hands still cradling his non-existent double-Gs in mid-air, Johnny spitefully tweaked at an invisible nipple in response. “And yeah, I still like-“
“Jugs? Hooters? Tits?” Johnny added hopefully, trying to grasp onto the last threads of LaRusso’s heterosexuality. “Come on, man, you can’t tell me melons don’t make your dong extra long.”
Daniel's face did a thing where it couldn’t decide whether to look disturbed or confused by Johnny's extensive anatomical vocabulary. It managed to settle somewhere in the middle, with his mouth frowning and his eyes looking at Johnny like he was an alien.
“Wow, Johnny,” he said, words failing him, like he couldn’t believe Johnny was a real person who actually existed. Johnny just bowed his head and took this as a compliment. “And to answer your question - yes, I still like women. The term is ‘bisexual’.”
Johnny stopped fondling his imaginary breasts and dropped his arms by his sides.
“Bio what?” he asked, managing to feel even more lost. He had always sucked at chemistry.
For someone who preached restraint, LaRusso looked a second away from smashing him over the head with the nearest bonsai tree.
“Bisexual, Johnny,” Daniel said in a slow sort of voice, enunciating the word like a human trying to explain math to a chimpanzee. “It means I like both men and women.”
Johnny just stared at him again, not looking any more enlightened. He had a feeling his brain had flipped over a ‘closed’ sign and gone home for the night.
Still in his white gi, Daniel had clearly been trying to channel Miyagi by talking to Johnny in a patient tone. However, being the loud-mouthed punk he still was at heart, he kept the zen yoga-instructor composure for about three more seconds before he threw up his arms with pure Italian drama and yapped out like a chihuahua, “You know, I just knew you’d have a problem with this!”
“Hey, I don’t have a problem if you take it up the ass!” Johnny shot back, annoyed that his sensitivity was being questioned here. LaRusso had some nerve. Johnny had stopped calling Miguel a Mexican and everything. “Just didn't know that you liked gargling meatcicles, that’s all. Never figured you for a-”
“For a what, Lawrence?” Hands on his hips, Daniel narrowed his eyes. His tone was as dangerous as a crane kick to the head.
Johnny could see both Miguel and Aisha in his head, collectively shaking their heads and waving their arms frantically, pleading for him to shut up before he said something horribly offensive.
Johnny, being Johnny, ignored the sensible voices in his brain. ‘Horribly offensive’ was pretty much his factory setting.
“Do you really like sucking schlong? Choking on the salami? Chugging the chowder?” he asked, genuinely wanting to know. LaRusso’s smart mouth sure was big enough for the job and… yeah, Johnny really needed to stop fixating on this because it was beginning to get weird.
Daniel, proving he had infinitely more tolerance than Johnny usually gave him credit for, pinched the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and thumb, breathed out through his nose and mumbled under his breath. It was either a mantra to calm himself down or a step-by-step on how he was going to drown Johnny in the balance pool outside and feed his dead body to his koi fish.
Which was pretty rude, if you asked Johnny. He was trying to be all tolerant about LaRusso’s fudge-packing here.
“Look,” Daniel said, his tone somehow making him sound both measured and also a hair-trigger away from crawling up Johnny like a spider monkey and putting him in a headlock. “I’m only telling you this because we’re co-senseis and I thought I owed you the heads up. Especially now because I’m kind of seeing someone. So if you’re gonna be a jerk about it-”
“Wait, you’re banging someone?” Johnny cut in. Daniel hadn’t told him he was seeing anyone. Johnny suddenly felt a feeling in his stomach he didn’t understand. He didn’t like it. He generally didn’t like feelings, especially the ones he didn’t understand, so he simply decided this one was caused by that week-old taco he ate for breakfast.
The thing was, as obtuse as Johnny was about any emotion that accidentally got near him, he understood the disappointment of being lied to. Because he always told Daniel about his love life, even the gross kinky shit the other man hollered at him to stop oversharing (LaRusso really was such an overdramatic priss sometimes).
Johnny had even told Daniel about his disastrous last date with Carmen, when he threw up all over her shoes after showing up drunk. Carmen, being an angel, had simply kicked off her sandals, guided him home and had gently suggested they stay friends until Johnny sorted himself out. Johnny thought that was more than fair since he had turned her new strappy shoes into one of Sid’s Jackson Pollocks.
It had been pretty humiliating but Johnny had still stumbled over to Daniel’s at one in the morning to tell him about it. Daniel had just given him a look, poured about a gallon of water down his throat and talked to him with the unflagging confidence of a much taller man about how they would get Robby back from Kreese. The fact he knew the problem immediately had made Johnny feel like he was exposed to the bone. It was freaky sometimes how well LaRusso could see through his crap. When Johnny broke down into alcohol-fuelled tears by the end of the night, Daniel didn’t even call Johnny a pussy, which had been pretty solid of him. He had just pushed another glass of water in front of him and told him not to accidentally spill any of it on his fancy Japanese coffee table (which Johnny obviously did).
So Johnny felt understandably pissy that he was only just hearing about Daniel clapping cheeks with some random-ass dude. They usually always shared that stuff.
“How long’s this been going on?” Johnny demanded, suddenly channeling LaRusso’s overbearing mother like he was possessed by her sassy Italian spirit. He felt like he was a hair away from getting an 80’s perm and checking if LaRusso’s guy had a good job and all his own teeth. “And how is it you get railed on the regular but still manage to be such a moody little bitch all the time?”
“Jeez, would you quit talking about it like that?” LaRusso hissed, his cheeks a little pink. Even when he was getting laid, he was still the biggest prude in town. “It’s a relationship, alright? Not some random hookup. We’re dating and it’s been a month.”
Johnny suddenly felt like he had been punched in the nuts. For one of the very few times in his degenerate life, he actually felt offended.
He couldn’t pull off self-righteous outrage as well as LaRusso but Johnny could still shout really loudly. So he did just that.
“A month?!” he bellowed out, spitefully enjoying the way it made LaRusso wince. “And you never spilled? What gives? I thought we were bros, man!”
“Yeah, well forgive me for not being sure how you’d feel about me being in a relationship with a guy!” Daniel said hotly, arms gesticulating madly. He looked less annoyed than before, however, even with his limbs windmilling about like he was in a field in Holland. As crass as Johnny’s reaction had been, Daniel had obviously been mollified by it for some reason. Maybe he had expected a punch in the face. Johnny knew he could be an abrasive ass but he wasn’t a bigot. Well, not intentionally. Miguel had labelled him ‘empathically challenged’, which Johnny thought was probably fair if he knew what it meant.
“So wait… is this serious or something?” Johnny continued, suddenly wanting to punch something and feeling irritable that Kyler and his dumb face were all the way across town. “Like… holding hands, dates… all that flowery crap?”
“Why, you got a problem with that?” Daniel shot back, his spindly arms crossed and his uppity little chin up in defiance, like it was begging for someone to smack it. Johnny couldn’t help but respect a man whose face literally tried to pick a fight with him.
“A relationship. With a guy,” Johnny said out loud because it didn’t seem to be permeating into his skull. Maybe his headband was on too tight and was cutting off the circulation to his brain.
Daniel let out another long-suffering breath.
“Yes, Johnny, a relationship with a guy,” he repeated, like he was talking to someone with a brain deficiency. Johnny would have been bothered by the tone but LaRusso had a point, especially when Johnny heard himself say,
“Like... a guy with a wang and everything?”
Daniel looked back at the portrait of Miyagi. If Johnny didn’t know better, he could swear the old man was laughing at him.
“Last I checked,” LaRusso said dryly.
Johnny paused at that. Then he said, with no shame at all,
“How much do you check?”
Daniel looked slightly less homicidal now and markedly more suspicious. Johnny hated it when LaRusso went full-on Columbo.
“You know,” said Daniel slowly, looking ready to pull out a raincoat and arrest Johnny for being a dumbass, “for someone in the middle of having a massive freak out about this…”
“I’m not freaking out, asshole! You’re freaking out!” Johnny said, freaking out.
“… you sure are interested in my wild gay sex life.”
“Wild bisexual sex life,” Johnny corrected, even as his mind internally collapsed in on itself at the thought.
Daniel LaRusso — his Daniel LaRusso — had been playing hide the pickle with some guy for a whole freaking month and Johnny had had no idea.
Johnny felt his stomach turn. He really shouldn’t have had that taco, even if it had only grown mouldy on one side.
“What’s his name?” Johnny asked before consulting with his brain. That old taco was clearly fucking with his mouth as well.
Daniel, who had been mid-grumble and questioning why he ever thought it was wise to go into business with such a meathead, snapped his mouth shut at the question. He then looked cautiously at Johnny, those big eyes of his as annoyingly shrewd as ever.
“Riley,” he said slowly, eyeing Johnny's fists warily, just in case they were mortally offended by Rileys and decided to smack anyone associated with them. “He’s a fitness instructor.”
Johnny mulled this over for a hot second.
“He sounds like a prick,” he said with confidence.
“Hey!” LaRusso said, insulted, which was highly unfair. People always called Johnny a prick and LaRusso just nodded, happily agreed with them and then proceeded to list out ten more of his faults. “He happens to be a really nice guy.”
“Nice?” Johnny snorted so loudly he almost choked on it. “That’s code for pussy. Ten bucks says he cries after sex.”
Daniel pressed his lips together, looking annoyed but not denying it.
Johnny felt a vicious but angry sense of satisfaction.
Point, Lawrence.
So why did hearing about Daniel’s sex life make him feel like he had lost the whole damn tournament?
“You’re a real asshole, you know that?” LaRusso said with irritation, his accent so Jersey that Johnny was sure it ran its own crime family on the side. “For your information, Riley’s got a lot going for him. He’s a black belt.”
“A black belt?” If Johnny could have sounded any more unimpressed, his own vocal cords would have stormed out of his throat and left the conversation. “In what, that fruity yoga crap?”
“He does karate, actually,” LaRusso snapped back, the ‘so there’ so evident in his voice Johnny almost stuck out his own tongue in childish retaliation.
“He knows karate?” Johnny heard a voice he didn’t recognise say, until he realised it was his own. He didn’t know he could sound so high in pitch without being previously kicked in the cojones. “How much karate?”
LaRusso looked like he was genuinely thinking about it.
“Enough,” he admitted truthfully. “He’s not quite sensei-level-“
“So he’s shit,” Johnny crowed smugly.
LaRusso did what he always did when Johnny talked trash and acted like he hadn’t spoken at all.
“-but he’s still decent. We’ve sparred.”
“You’ve what?” Johnny stared at Daniel like this was the ultimate betrayal. LaRusso really was such a disloyal little bitch. That was supposed to be their thing. “So you’re what, sparring with other people now? That’s real nice. Gonna open a dojo with him, too?”
“Okay, now you’re just sounding irrational.” Daniel sniffed like the pompous little shrimp he was, straightening the cuffs of a gi so perfectly pressed he probably ironed it between kata moves.
“I’m irrational? You’re the chump who eats fish without cooking it,” Johnny retorted bluntly because sashimi still made no fucking sense to him. And although this really wasn’t the time for a cookery lesson... “I keep telling you, man, you just need to deep-fry that crap.”
Daniel looked at the wall next to him, as though contemplating the best angle to brain himself on it. He clearly didn’t want to live in a world where Johnny Lawrence non-ironically tried to offer him culinary advice.
“You know, if you had just tried the LaRusso Ponzu Toro instead of spitting it out into my begonias...” Daniel said for the hundredth time, his hackles rising up like they always did whenever they talked about that time Johnny upchucked eighty dollars of salmon out of the LaRussos’ open window. Daniel then waved a dismissive hand in the air. “You know what? Forget about it. At least Riley appreciates good food.”
That felt like an inadvertent cheap shot to Johnny. It hit him right in the sternum and he didn’t know why.
“If he’s got such good taste, why’s he dating a dweeb like you?” Johnny shot back, even if he knew (deep, deep down) that LaRusso was an annoyingly good catch.
The fact that the twerp from high school grew up to be rich and successful really chafed his balls.
Even before his divorce, all the Country Club housewives were gagging to get into Daniel LaRusso’s middle-aged pants. Now, they pawed at him like his junk tasted like chocolate and all but pinched his butt as he walked by (“Although some of those harpies certainly have tried,” Amanda had shared with Johnny, a conspiratorial smile on her face as she chugged down a beer better than all five ex-Cobras combined).
Which reminded Johnny of something.
“Does your wife know about you screwing some himbo?” Johnny asked, sounding betrayed on her behalf. Amanda LaRusso was a goddamn firecracker who could step on Johnny’s face and he would thank her for it.
“Actually, my ex-wife introduced us,” Daniel said, rolling his eyes at Johnny like he was a long-suffering wife himself. “Amanda thought he was my type. Thanks for caring so much about my long-dead marriage. Look,” here LaRusso paused to throw Johnny the saddest-looking puppy eyes on earth. It was a dirty tactic and he knew it. How a fifty-plus suburban pipsqueak could pull that off without looking like a moron was one of the great mysteries of the universe. Johnny couldn't even look at him straight on without wincing at the sheer amount of emotion he was throwing at him. “I just want to invite Riley to our next lesson. He wants to see how we run our dojo, get some ideas. Promise you’re not going to be a dick to him when you meet him, okay?”
“I thought you said you liked dick,” Johnny retorted pettily. The look Daniel gave him shaved his life by at least ten years. Even his teeth hurt. Johnny stepped back, lifting up his hands in defeat. For a man who was so anti-Cobra Kai, LaRusso really had ‘no mercy’ nailed down to an art. Even now, he really channelled the energy of a tiny, mouthy hellcat.
“Okay, okay, Danielle, I’ll behave,” Johnny conceded reluctantly, his hands still up because LaRusso was a brat who could paralyse a person’s limbs whenever he felt like, apparently. Even with all his big talk, John Kreese still couldn’t quite look at Daniel without a hint of fear.
It was almost unfair. Johnny was the better fighter, had trained longer and knew more moves than Daniel had ever learned.
So why did Johnny always lose to him anyway?
The big-toothed smile that lit up Daniel’s ridiculously youthful face a second later seemed to answer that question. The fact he could go from lethal warrior to ageing schmuck in seconds was almost impressive.
Johnny usually always hated the taste of defeat but he found himself grinning back at LaRusso despite himself. Christ, he was getting soft in his old age.
“Nerd,” he said because God, was this guy the biggest dork in the world.
Daniel cheerfully flipped him off in response, which promptly made Johnny forget what they were even talking about to try and put LaRusso into a headlock instead.
See, nothing needs to change, Johnny told himself moments later as his face hit the mat, like it always did whenever they scrapped.
He was sure if he ignored all the queer stuff and they carried on like everything was the same as before, the gayness would magically go away and he wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore.
So, nodding his head, he did just that.
Unfortunately for Johnny, one week later, he would meet Daniel’s new boyfriend in the flesh.
And, without him knowing it, this would change everything.