Chapter Text
Los Angeles keeps on snubbing him and Daniel keeps taking it, like a schmuck, but what can he do? Daniel is still a stranger here. The city spread out around him is and always has been gossamer, make-believe, a fairy tale it writes about itself. Maybe Daniel just isn’t ethereal enough. He feels like a stone falling through water whenever he tries to slip between the lights and into the pink haze that envelopes L.A like poisoned cotton candy. He still sticks out like a sore thumb, even when you consider that most of the city’s populace isn’t blond, isn’t white. Is as dark haired and velvet-eyed and as dark-skinned or darker than Daniel. It’s been comforting how often he’s been mistaken for Hispanic. It makes him feel like he belongs to people who fit here. No one really knows what or who he is for certain. He doesn’t know those things himself. His roots cling precariously to bedrock not his own. He’s tenacious, sure—but tenuous, too. Temporary with nowhere else to grow
He doesn’t miss Jersey. He could’ve gone back with his ma when she finally admitted the California dream didn’t have her name on it after all, not even in half burnt-out lights. He misses her, but he really never liked winter, despite his protestations to the contrary so many years back. He’s made for heat. Maybe of a different kind, but any kind of heat is better than bone-gnawing February in Newark that seems to last longer than the rest of the winter months combined. LA is dirty, sure. But it’s a filth that sparkles. It’s a clean kind of corruption, like bones long picked dry. Or old toys abandoned on the side of the Pacific Coast Highway for the sun to slowly degrade over time. Newark is no cleaner, and it’s a hell of a lot darker, even in summer.
In Southern California, winter is like a slightly longer held breath and then a warm exhale, benevolent and mischievous, an annual playfight that never varies its moves and telegraphs itself wildly before pulling back from the gentlest tap. Daniel never has the chance to get truly cold, cold down to his marrow, even out in the desert. Not that he ever goes to the desert. But he thinks about it. He thinks about how he might like to see the stars sometime. Real ones. Not just the ones memorializing human gods living and dead, pressed into concrete. Stars he can gaze up at without being able to reach out and touch, rather than ones he can walk right over, completely oblivious, the names scraping the soles of his shoes without leaving any kind of trace on him.
He doesn’t know what brings him to North Hollywood tonight. It’s not exactly his stomping ground. Not that the places he knows best are really too expansive. He spends most of his life, as he has done since high school, at Mr. Miyagi’s little jade green house tucked away across the tracks in Reseda. He pretty much spends the rest of it at Mr. Miyagi’s Little Trees, which after a couple of iffy years has started to really flourish. Daniel realizes he doesn’t really have any places all his own. He’s been living his life with and through and beside his beloved old sensei for so long that he doesn’t know who he is outside of that. Some nights he gets restless. He drives around in the banana yellow De Luxe until dawn, hunting for something he never really finds.
Tonight, he decides to park. Get out. Walk. Push through the spill of lights with the sharp edge of his shadow and try to make room for himself. He melts into the golden throng of sleek Californian bodies that swallow him up like a scanty glass of water. Daniel hasn’t grown much since high school. He sometimes still wears the same shoes he did in senior year when he was getting his ass handed to him on the regular. He should really just throw them out, but he keeps thinking They have one more season in them. One more good set of months before kaput. His ma never liked him to throw anything away that had any life left in it. Daniel is still her son from nearly 3000 miles away. He feels like she can see him all the way from Newark. He likes the feeling and doesn’t. He doesn’t want her to see how he’s only half-living here while insisting it’s where he wants to be. It got harder to justify after the earthquake hit Reseda back in January. Lucille LaRusso had begged her boy to come home. But he’d clung to California, shaken but still stubborn. A suckering vine still dreaming of flowering one day.
Daniel hasn’t been on Lankershim Boulevard for months. It’s a name that means nothing to him, for a place that’s so significant to his life. The last time he drove through here on his way to make a delivery, the old dojo was still vacant. It’d been empty for years, windows dark like something eyeless. Same mural with the giant snake and stylized graffiti lettering faded into a kind of toothless malevolence. It scrapes at him in old tender places, but it can’t sink a fang in. Not deep, anyway.
Tonight, the lights are on. A surreal prismatic seepage crawls over the pavement. At first Daniel thinks he’s seeing things. It wouldn’t be the first time. The light spills through the grubby frosted windows painted with the stylized silhouettes of fighters. Colours faze in and out, moving over the sidewalk like the reflection of pool water. Blue and green. Purple and yellow. The sparkle of smashed glass gleams like spilled diamonds in the gutter. It’s mesmerizing. Before Daniel can ask himself what the hell he thinks he’s doing, he’s moving through that light and toward the door he hasn’t pushed open in ten years. He doesn’t realize until he opens the door and the drone spills out with the light that he can hear music. It hits him like a wall of sound. He can feel it from the roots of his teeth all the way to his pelvis. His toes curl in his shoes and his hair stands on end. He holds his breath because he can’t help it. The sound pulls him in like arms around him he isn’t expecting, isn’t sure whose they are, but decides to go with it.
The old dojo is the same even though it isn’t. Like someone wearing a new style of clothes but you know they are the same old asshole you want nothing to do with. All the posters and framed photos are gone. The red perimeter is presumably still there. Someone has painted the walls and ceiling a sloppily-applied black that makes the space feel both claustrophobic and infinite, like a laser show when you aren’t high but will be soon. The floor beneath Daniel’s feet is sticky with God knows what, but that’s nothing too new for a dojo that hasn’t been properly cleaned in a long time. The mats are still springy, dragged out of alignment. It helps to deaden the sound. It cushions the people who are bouncing up and down counter-rhythmically, even though it doesn’t quite seem like the right kind of music for pogoing and pushing each other into a frenzy like he’s seen on MTV in the windows of electronics stores. Mr. Miyagi still doesn’t own a TV. Hell, he still doesn’t see the need for electricity. Sometimes the lights of the city are shocking to Daniel’s system when he hasn’t been away from the little paper-windowed house in Reseda for awhile.
The melodic drone of the singer’s voice is like an umbilical cord connected to something Daniel can’t place, but it tugs on him. He presses through the moving bodies, compelled by the way she moves like water. She is looking up through the thick strands of her long curly hair at the undulating lights rather than at the people watching her. They all sway along in sympathetic counterrhythm to her sensual sashay. It’s her eyes that arrest Daniel. It’s like looking in the mirror. She’s a beautiful girl, so there’s no contest. Her face is the shape of a compressed heart and her upturned breasts wobble enticingly as she shifts her weight from one hip to the other. Daniel is just a coltish boy turned into a lanky man, no less awkward than he was at 17, but her skin is warm and deep like his. Her plush lips chewed almost to the blood. Her hair that same dark shining brown that trips everyone up about him, like they’ve never seen a third generation Sicilian before. She’s not Italian. She really is Hispanic, he’s pretty sure. He appreciates her without desire. It’s all animal recognition, like to like, even though he’s never held a microphone in his life and isn’t likely to for any reason like this one. She's taller than he is, too. But then, who isn't.
The flash and flip of the drummer through the haze of the smoke machine catches his peripheral, but Daniel doesn’t really look any closer until the song comes to a nearly imperceptible end, the singer mumbling something unintelligibly into the mic, dark eyes gleaming, lashes dropped. But then she leans to speak to the blur of blond hair and compact muscle behind the drum set crammed against the back edge of the tiny makeshift stage. The guy turns towards her with a flash of smiling teeth and gleaming eyes, and Daniel sees blue. He sees that colour like some people see red, and rage has only ever been the half of it. He is confronted by eyes the shade of the most dangerous depth of ocean. To the untrained eye it looks calm, that blue. Pacific. But even at his most still, Johnny Lawrence has never been calm. Or safe. Or in any way tame. Daniel freezes, a too small threatened animal again. His eyes feel like they take up so much space on his face the rest of him disappears. He knows the feeling of this expression even if he doesn’t, thank God, know how stupid it looks. He sends up another thanks that those eyes don’t land on him.
For a second or three, Daniel allows himself the merciful delusion that it’s not what it looks like. That mop of moonlight-coloured hair and miles of glistening muscle is a common enough combination in Los Angeles. Eyes that colour are as familiar as graffiti on pastel-painted brickwork. But he’s fooling himself. No one looks like that but one person. No one does this to Daniel LaRusso but Johnny Lawrence. King Karate of the Valley. Pushing up on ten years changes nothing. The way Daniel’s insides twist and liquefy, it’s like that night on the beach in Topanga all over again. Only Johnny doesn’t need to lay a finger on him to gut-punch Daniel like he’s fifteen and weightless again. Who punched who first back then doesn’t matter. All that matters is that Johnny is incandescent under pink light now and Daniel can’t move. He can’t breathe. A man who can’t breathe can’t fight, and he doesn’t. He’s paralyzed, praying not to be seen. Some part of him wants just that, to be scrutinized again. He’s remained unseen in certain indescribable ways all these years. Has he been waiting all this time for a moment like this? Is that why he stayed in California when he doesn’t and never will belong here? Daniel doesn’t know. He doesn’t think he wants to know.
After a lull in which there was never a moment of quiet between the dull roar of the chattering crowd and the spasmic feedback of the monitors and mics, the next song begins. Daniel watches Johnny move. If he reads a restrained fury in the seemingly relaxed control the impossible blond has over his body, Daniel can’t be blamed. He has past experience with all that controlled power no one else on earth will ever have. Johnny Lawrence’s body is still a coiled warning. As usual, Daniel doesn’t heed it. He could slip away before he’s noticed but stays where he is. He has never known when to leave well enough alone.
The concept of Johnny as a drummer blows Daniel’s mind and is oddly fitting at the same time. He always knew Johnny loved music. It was kind of obvious, the way he was never parted from his Walkman unless he was dressed in his gi or burning around on his motorbike. Daniel used to wonder what he was listening to all the time, but he could never quite hazard a guess. He loved to pretend Johnny was bopping along to The Bangles, crying alone to Eternal Flame. Which wasn’t as humorous a thought as he’d intended after he'd actually seen Johnny cry. That image is burned forever on the backs of Daniel's eyelids and it haunts him even now, with the terrifying blond in front of him again. He’s not sure he’s ever seen that much emotion on the face of anyone not actively at a graveside. It isn’t there now. Johnny’s face is awash in another expression, one that Daniel has never in his wildest dreams associated with his high school rival.
Bliss.
There is no other word for it.
Johnny closes his eyes when he drums, and he looks utterly transported. Unbothered by the world around him. Certainly uninterested in the attention being paid to him by 200 sweaty social rejects with pierced faces and thrift store couture flapping as they alternadance out of time to the impossible-to-anticipate hazy half-tones of the beautiful dark-eyed girl’s vocals. But Johnny keeps the heartbeat going, strong and relentless. Daniel can feel it changing his pulse. Forcing it to move in time. It hurts in an old way Daniel missed. It hurts like a fist to his heart. People move around him, shove into him and call it dancing. He stands still. He stands alone, staring at a boy. He feels like he has always been staring at this boy, even when he couldn’t. Even when he hadn’t seen Johnny in years, Daniel was just standing around somewhere waiting.
Clearly Johnny has never forgotten how to move. What his body is for. He is the most physical person Daniel has ever seen, and he’s bigger now. Stronger. Taller. Just. More. While Daniel stands there with his mouth open wearing his tenth grade jeans and his dead father’s too-big shirt. He remembers that first moment in this dojo. He was fifteen. He slipped in to watch what strong boys do. All of them in perfect sync but not the same. There was one taller than the rest. Better made. Hell, more beautiful, with his dangerous grace and perfect face. That feathered swoop of hair. Tensile neck elongating as Johnny raised his head to watch Daniel daring to infiltrate his space. Plush lips smirking in a way that was so confusingly fond. The expression of someone excited to see someone else in the place where they are most powerful, most themselves. Most able to make good on macho Look What I Can Do posturing. As if he had been waiting for Daniel. Hoping. Maybe even knowing he’d turn up eventually, like there’d never been a doubt or a choice. Daniel had turned away then but he keeps watching now.
The memory is so strong Daniel doesn’t realize at first that Johnny has spotted him. Is looking at him just that way now while his arms continue to flex and fly. He tosses his hair out of his eyes in that old way and Daniel is lost in a smile so affectionate and somehow slightly pained and self-conscious this time, for just the splittest of seconds before it’s gone. Daniel wants it back. That smile has always been his and he just about missed it. He won’t look away. It might come back and he needs to be ready.