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Chapter Text

The last free day of Johnny’s life starts in lockup, on four hours of sleep with a sore neck, and somehow only just gets worse. He had thought the previous day had been shit, between the losing his job and getting arrested thing, but a visit from Sid will do that to a day.

He stares at the torn pieces of the check in his trash, haphazardly fallen across his old empties, and reaches in the fridge for a few to go on top. He can smell the nurse’s perfume when he slumps down to sit, and wonders why she bothers, but it does do to lighten the mood as he mindlessly flicks on the television. He bets it’s to get rid of the smell of all the shit Sid spreads around.

He does his best to lose himself in the flashes between movies, but the trouble with having seen the same thing over and over again is he’s memorized it, leaving the thoughts he’s avoiding to fill the spaces. He doesn’t want to think about the last time he didn’t feel like a loser; he didn’t hear the word in a particular voice.

He eventually manages to get near passing out, dark closing in on the room and screen swimming, only for the goddamn LaRusso Auto Group commercial come on, jerking him back into reality, and then his wrist starts going off, too, and –  Oh fucking yeah, he’s supposed to meet his damned soulmate today.

Great.

Fucking awesome.

The bullshit just keeps piling up around him like his life is some trash fire of a rodeo, so why not drag another person in to witness it? He can really start filling the fucking seats.

He needs more fucking booze.

Okay.

The soulmate’ll have to deal with the nosebleeds, though, since the first row is filled by the children who totaled his car. What is with him and damned teenagers this week? He’s over them – if he never sees another kid, it’s too fucking soon.

He rubs hard at his brow, as he watches his car get towed away, then his eyes blearily focus on the zeroed TiMER. He forcibly looks away, only to stare at the sign on the building in front of him.

Right. He’s at West Valley High; what the fuck is up with him and teenagers?

Johnny covers up his wrist with a sleeve and his face with a pair of sunglasses and a hood, feeling like he’s ducking into Daniel LaRusso’s territory without a single defense. A bunch of shiny, high-end cars greet him, a few smarmy damned salesman, and a single receptionist who gratingly tries to convince him LaRusso Auto isn’t the last place he wants his car.

The lady gets her way in the end, though, when he hears LaRusso’s name behind him and decides to hightail it. He doesn’t think he’ll get recognized, or that LaRusso could give a shit, but he’s not eager to find out. He ducks his head a little further, feeling LaRusso getting nearer, and crumples the paper hastily into a ball. He’s only got a few more feet before –

“Johnny?”

Shit. He has turn around now or he’ll look like a total pussy. Johnny Lawrence doesn’t run from anyone or anything – at least, not while they’re watching him.

Johnny takes a breath and reluctantly looks over his shoulder, only for his wrist to start singing, and LaRusso’s wrist to start singing and LaRusso’s jaw drops, big eyes getting even bigger, and –

And suddenly the ritzy showroom is filled with gawkers, every single one of them staring up and down Johnny with that particular brand of judgment against real ripped jeans and faded hoodie, none seeming particularly startled by the TiMER, so much as the him. He sees a woman in a pretty red dress peek around from the hall, a phone pressed to her ear, eyes darting back and forth between Johnny and LaRusso.

“Fuck no, nope,” Johnny stammers, immediately mortified, then pissed about being mortified, then throwing the sheet for his car blindly before turning hastily on his heel. “Keep the damned car.”

He’s definitely running, now, but there is a goddamn limit and LaRusso just hit it like a freight train. He can get another car – or a motorcycle, which’ll never, ever be towed to damned LaRusso Auto. He might even dig that check out of the trash and get way out of LA, though he’ll have to get back to his place first and – and shit, he didn’t tell the cab to stay.

“Johnny, wait!” LaRusso calls out from the doors, followed by a smack of flat soles on concrete.

“No,” Johnny repeats, standing on the curb feeling like a rube. He can suddenly hear Bobby at the back of his head, over and over: you’re obsessed with that kid, Johnny; you got to let him go.

Ha ha. It’d probably be shitty to tell Bobby that this is his God literally giving him a big fuck you, but hell if Johnny won’t go ahead with it. He tries to take a deep breath, step off the curb and go, but the world has gotten a little shaky on him, no longer letting air into his lungs; his attempted step only goes inches, scuffing against the concrete.

LaRusso stops next to him with an uneasy laugh. “Hey, come on, we should really talk about this.”

Johnny’s not going to talk.

He needs to go. He needs to get out of this zip code. He can’t stay here. He can’t stay or something even worse will happen, his luck, then what’ll he do? Just fucking take it like everything else?

“Wait, don’t – don’t do that,” LaRusso says, voice getting a bit harried and pitchy, hovering close but not quite touching him. “You need to breath, Johnny, I think you’re having an anxiety attack.”

“I’m not,” Johnny manages, pressing the heels of his trembling hands hard into his eyes, refusing to look up and confirm any of this is happening to him. He’s definitely just passed out at home; he thinks he’s probably even on the floor. “Only chicks have anxiety.”

LaRusso is quiet a few beats, then sighs loudly through his nose. “You need anything for your… manxiety attack, then – water?”

Johnny hates this guy so much, he hates him so fucking much that it’s starting to feel a little bit like after Applebee’s, when he threw up and started stripping down in public at the hearing. “Music,” he admits with a croak, breath still stuck deep in his chest. “I just listen to music.”

And drink. God, he really needs a drink.

Instead, he grudgingly lets LaRusso take him by the elbow and tug him into an office with a stiff couch and an oversized pair of headphones. He taps something on his fancy phone that has Journey bursting through the speakers, then pushes the phone into Johnny’s hands, gesturing for him to stay; he’s clearly talking, but Johnny can’t hear even a hint of his voice under music, which is… Shit, he really could’ve used these thirty years ago.

He closes his eyes, stretching out on the sofa and letting riffs flow over him while determinedly shoving back the thought that LaRusso either knows what he listens to, or listens to the same stuff. It’d just put him back at square one.

Johnny hears a strange voice in the pause after the end of At War With The World, breaking through the music zen, and peeks open an eye to see the woman from the hall at LaRusso’s desk. He watches for a beat, then closes his eyes again while randomly hitting buttons on the phone until it gets quieter, letting him hear LaRusso and the woman talk, if somewhat muffled.

“– not the epic love you imagined?”

“Hey, come on,” LaRusso says, not exactly disagreeing with her, though Johnny more than gets the feeling. “He’s right there.”

The woman scoffs, plainly unconcerned. “I’ve scared you like thirty times when you’ve got those on.”

“Amanda.”

“He’s your age, at least…” Amanda trails off for a beat, then abruptly exhales a bright laugh, “And not bad looking.”

LaRusso doesn’t say anything to that, either, and you know: fuck him.

“It’s not that, it’s…” LaRusso starts to mutter, then clears his throat, “You remember the guy in high school – the first karate tournament guy?”

…First?

“Everyone knows about –” Amanda pauses, then hums in a pitch so high it’s almost inhuman. “Oh god, this is that Johnny? Him?”

LaRusso doesn’t say anything, but he must’ve responded somehow, judging by the lengthy groan from Amanda. Great, LaRusso’s told this lady all about him.

“Oh, hon,” Amanda says, her tone suddenly more subdued. “I’m so sorry.”

“Hah, yeah,” LaRusso says, chuckling in a way that holds no humor. “I definitely didn’t –”

Johnny hastily turns the music back up, glad he’s still breathing like he took a run. He can’t believe the universe is fucking him over by making this dick his soulmate; he must have got stuck with the opposite kind – the hate kind. It’s just his luck. He keeps this piece of junk in his arm thirty-five years only to get hosed.

He frowns when the opening chord to Nothing Else Matters comes on, lifting the phone to squint at the screen – where is the fucking skip? He’s not listening to this shit now, fuck off Metallica.

“Johnny?”

Goddamn it.

He looks up with a tight swallow, tugging the headphones from his ears. He tightens his jaw as Amanda turns and steps over, and glancing quickly at LaRusso before pulling himself up on the couch.

“Amanda LaRusso,” Amanda says, holding out her hand to Johnny, a smile easy on her face in a marked turn from the conversation; well, she is a car salesman.

“John Lawrence,” Johnny says, hesitantly taking her hand with another glance at LaRusso the First. “LaRusso?”

“Daniel’s ex-wife,” Amanda says, inexplicably offering him a wink. “Don’t worry, divorce went through months ago.”

“What?” Johnny says dumbly, halfway tempted to lift the headphones back over his ears and just stay that way. He does not give a shit about Daniel LaRusso’s marriage status, no matter what his wrist might imply.

“I’ve got three months left on mine,” Amanda says, lifting her own wrist to show off the TiMER, still counting down across the screen. “Here’s hoping we both luck out.”

“Amanda,” LaRusso says, sounding tired, a hand lifting to press across his face at where he sits at his desk.

“I’ll just be on my way,” Amanda says, straightening back up with a wider version of that smile. “Let you two catch up.”

LaRusso seems just as awkward as Johnny, now, sitting there fidgeting, though it’s a step up from insisting they talk. “You want to go over your car?” He says, reaching out across his desk, grabbing what turns out to be the crumpled form from the tow guy. “It’ll be just out back, looks like.”

Johnny clenches his jaw, running a hand through his hair with a glance toward the door.

“Man, just…” LaRusso sighs, eyes dropping to his desk and mouth making that stupid pout.

“Fine,” Johnny mutters, pushing up from the couch while biting back a snarl about LaRusso’s girly feelings.

He regrets it almost immediately when the gawking starts the instant he trails LaRusso out the office. He shifts his jaw, looking over LaRusso’s shoulder at the seam while pretending he’s looking above it, and counts his steps while reminding himself he really does need his damned car back.

The intake lot is like a graveyard of luxury eurotrash and family-friendly budget crap, and the Firebird sticks out like a bright red sore thumb next to an aging caravan that looks like its been here since 2007. He runs a hand through his hair at the sight of the passenger side in broad daylight – buckled door panel, tweaked tire, broken mirror.

“Firebird, huh?” LaRusso says, bafflingly cheery, all of a sudden, peering over the car with hums and haws, rounding it from crumpled corner to corner. “What happened to the Avanti?”

“Got sold after you kicked me in the face,” Johnny says, affecting a sneering tone with a quick upward glance.

LaRusso blinks back rapidly, then makes a show of looking down and smoothing out the form. “Oh. Because you –”

“Because I lost,” Johnny interrupts, before LaRusso can imply Sid’s ever given any shits about the wellbeing of another human being.

“Right,” LaRusso says, expression twisting with something easily recognized as discomfort, flicking at his business card, as if he’s really looking at himself that close. “That sucks. It was something special.”

Johnny shrugs half-heartedly and furrows his brow, looking away from the damage on the Firebird and staring firmly across the lot of other torn up cars. He’s kept this thing in shape for thirty years – took apart the window motors in the rain; listened to landlords bitch about doing oil changes; replaced the damned belt, twice, in a Shell station – only for it to get wiped out when he wasn’t even in it?

“You ever try to find it?”

Johnny glances over to LaRusso, frowning in bemusement. “What?”

LaRusso huffs and leans up against the hood. “Never mind, I guess it was a while ago.”

“Yeah,” Johnny says, flatly, exhaling through his nose and rolling his eyes back across the lot.

“You know,” LaRusso says, clicking his tongue and setting his hand on the top of the Firebird with a dull thunk. “The week before I moved out here, my aunt offered to pay for it? A TiMER, I mean.”

Johnny flexes his hand and refuses to look down at his TiMER. He’s going to need to get it fucking removed.

“You already have yours?”

“Ali didn’t tell you?” Johnny says, lowly, inhaling a breath and exhaling a bitter scoff. “Both got blanks. Obviously.”

LaRusso goes quiet a few seconds, then hums high, then low, clearly only now realizing the significance: he’d been the new kid on the block without a TiMER.

“Yeah,” Johnny mutters, scraping his teeth against the inside of his lip.

LaRusso clears his throat, a few beats later, “I thought you forgot her birthday.”

“Might’ve done both,” Johnny admits, glancing over his shoulder just to watch LaRusso roll his eyes at him. “TiMER was after that, though.”

“She dumped me at Prom,” LaRusso says, not sounding all that dejected, then huffing a bit while offering a rueful sort of grin. “No TiMER test for me.”

“I heard,” Johnny says, and knows that well enough now, since his TiMER had definitely gone off later in that year, closer to Christmas like a crappy present – here, dumbshit, in thirty years you’ll meet your soulmate. “Tommy told me you wore blue, like it was fucking 1975?”

“I looked good,” LaRusso says, sticking his nose up a little, a turn at the corner of his mouth that Johnny is surprised to recognize as a smile.

Johnny grunts dubiously, looking away before he can do anything stupid, like think about how LaRusso still looks good, maybe even pretty. He’s old as Johnny, and old men aren’t fucking pretty.

“Just saying, anyway,” LaRusso says, clearing his throat with another few taps against the roof; if he keeps hitting the Firebird, then Johnny’s going to show him exactly what to reminisce. “That could’ve been a real different year.”

Johnny clenches his jaw, staring firmly across intake and out into the main lot at an idiot fumbling over a key fob out in the distance. He bets they’re buying something stupid expensive and European, funneling a few thousand dollars into goddamn Daniel LaRusso’s pockets.

“You still want to take it someplace else?” LaRusso asks, a few seconds later, a resigned note to the question.

Johnny looks over with a start, brows going up.

“Can’t think of any other reason you’d come by morning after we got it,” LaRusso says, gesturing around them with a thumb at the surrounding lot. “I promise my people can clean it up real nice – make her look like when you first drove off the lot.”

Johnny shifts his jaw, glancing down at the Firebird and then back to LaRusso’s deceptively considerate face. “I guess… it’s already here.”

LaRusso grins wide, kicking off the hood and suddenly waving the papers back at the dealership. “Hey, I bet you need something else to drive, right?”

“Uh,” Johnny intones, glancing back one last time at his car before following LaRusso through the garage at a less than earnest pace. “Yeah.”

LaRusso leads back inside and to an office at the corner, tapping his hands on a desk to get the attention of the guy behind it. “Hey, Louie,” he says, then points at a locked cabinet on the wall. “Can you reach over there and get me the key to the RS 5 – the red one.”

Louie looks like a tool and the way he stares at LaRusso like he just spoke in tongues pretty much confirms it. He looks at Johnny, eyes tracing him over, then looks dumbly back to LaRusso. “Huh?”

“Give me the damned key, Louie,” LaRusso snaps, gesturing with a tetchy jerk of his hand that is nothing but comical.

Louie rolls his eyes then turns around, digging into some kind of cabinet and tugging out a keyfob inlaid with an Audi logo. He turns slow and holds out the fob with a visible reluctance. “You sure?”

“Let me know if anyone asked you,” LaRusso says, snatching the key with a continuing total lack of respect for the dude.

Johnny snorts under his breath, as they exit out into the main lot. “You talk to everyone on payroll like that?”

“He’s my cousin,” LaRusso grumbles, flicking the key open and closed with a short shake of his head. “My mom made me hire him. He’s a total tool.”

“Damn,” Johnny says, dry, refusing to laugh at the echoed thought, “I guess there’s something to be said for not having much family.”

LaRusso takes them back out into the lot, winding between cars with little factoids about revisions and add-ons – anyone who spends $1500 on a decal is a moron, in Johnny’s opinion, but evidently there are a lot of morons patronizing LaRusso Luxury Auto. LaRusso keeps going and going, only to suddenly actually stop at the back near a shiny red sports car, clicking the fob in his hands and causing the lights to blink.

What? LaRusso cannot seriously be trying to loan out this car – it has to cost more than Johnny makes in like… five years.

“It’s a 2017 model,” LaRusso says, holding up a staying hand, as if Johnny’s really about to bitch about the damned year. He holds out the key with the other, clearly expecting Johnny to take it. “Had a lot of tire kickers, but no contract – certain kind of buyer, I guess.”

Johnny stares at the keyfob, then back at the car, wondering if LaRusso is really trying to get his ass kicked. “You’re loaning out this?”

LaRusso just shrugs, turning the fob around and beeping the lock, then the unlock. “Honestly, I figure you’re the only owner of your car, right?”

Johnny scoffs hard, “And?”

“So I think you’re responsible enough to take care of this one for a couple weeks,” LaRusso says, bizarrely easygoing, which is sign enough that the tightly wound little punk faking it, unless he’s become a totally different person in the last thirty years. “Just don’t get used to it.”

Johnny fucks up almost right away when he gets in the car and can’t find the ignition, but LaRusso is weirdly not a dick about showing him it doesn’t… use one.

He doesn’t like it. Keys aren’t supposed to go in the goddamned cup holder.

Chapter Text

Johnny ends up digging the check out of the trash, anyway, trying not to think about LaRusso while he spends it all to start on the karate school thing. He’s doing it for the kid and his bully problem – for himself and his job problem – it doesn’t have anything to do with the guy who he watched beat out round after round of opponents twice his size for the privilege of kicking Johnny in the face. He thinks that guy is just a douchebag with an insane pain tolerance, which is probably some kind of cheating to begin with, not addressing why he’d know about it in the first place.

He doesn’t expect the call from Robby’s school; these days, he expects pretty much nothing from that direction. It comes with the same washed over sensation of dread that the visit from Sid gave him, days ago, except from some nebulous opposite direction – his own unpleasant breath blowing back into his face.

He really doesn’t expect being told Robby’s been carrying around drugs; at least, not the kind with a girl’s name that isn’t Mary Jane.

“You trying to flush your life down the toilet?” Johnny demands, pretty sure he stole that from a DARE speech he heard in high school, but it’s the damned sentiment that counts.

“Like you’re one to talk,” Robby counters, scornful, turning this right back at Johnny without even a pause to think. “You’re a pathetic loser.”

The Jenkins lady takes an audible breath, when she takes the phone back after Robby’s sneering insult, plainly uncomfortable, “…I think maybe I should keep trying his mother.”

Johnny clenches his jaw and glances out toward the frosted glass, inadvertently catching on the fuzzy shape of the loan car in the lot. It sits out there like a bright red beacon of douchebaggery, but also: fuck you too amounts of money. “You know what? I’ll be right there.”

“Oh,” Jenkins says, voice brightening, relief plain in her tone. “Alright. We’ll be waiting.”

Johnny hangs up the phone, cutting off Robby’s scoffing ‘what?’ in the background. “Hey, Diaz, break time. I got to go pick up my son.”

Miguel stares for a few seconds, then blinks and drops away from his frankly terrible stance. “You have a son?”

Johnny lifts his chin with a short nod and feels suddenly a little defensive about it. “Uh, yeah.”

Miguel glances back and forth toward the car, then raises his brows. “Can I come?”

Johnny holds the look for a beat, then turns to head toward the office for the keys. “Sure, why not.”

Miguel seems oddly cheerful just being included in what seems like a good idea, but will probably be a really bad decision; granted, he was who gave Johnny the idea for this whole dojo enterprise, so maybe he considers it a hobby.

Johnny locks the dojo up with a nod toward Lynn, who rolls her eyes with a snarl. “Hey, what’s molly?” He asks, as he gets in the car, not even trying to grab for the key this time, which is an improvement from even this morning.

“Molly?” Miguel repeats, clicking his tongue a little and exhaling a bemused hum. “Do you mean… who – ? Oh, wait, like the drug? Like ecstasy?”

“Ecstasy?” Johnny repeats, scoffing under his breath. He peels out of the lot, across the street, and flips off some dick in a Crown Vic who honks at him. “Who takes E at school?”

Miguel shakes his head and shrugs with both hands twisting out in front of him.

Robby and the vice principal both seem surprised to see Johnny, when he steps in the door, and probably not just because he almost got lost in the maze of halls to the office. He waves a hand, glancing around, and scoffs a little at the cramped room that seems mostly to be filing cabinets. “Principal’s office didn’t suck this bad when I was a kid – they paying you, at least?”

“Some would think so,” Jenkins says, flatly, clearly not the sort of teacher with a sense of humor.

“Huh,” Johnny says, gesturing for Robby to stand up, and a little surprised when he actually follows along, but this place would be miserable even if he weren’t in trouble. He looks over to Jenkins, the multiple little packages of colorful pills on the desk –  Christ, was Robby dealing? “So you take one?”

“Excuse me?” Jenkins says, expression pinching in plain confusion.

“Did. You. Take. One?” Johnny repeats, gesturing at the pills on her desk with a pointing spin of his finger. “Like. How can you even prove it’s molly and not just some sugar pill, unless you took one?”

Jenkins blinks so slowly it looks like she’s closing her eyes, then drops her head. “No, Mr Lawrence, I did not. But I know what it looks like.”

“Uh huh, sure,” Johnny says, shoving a thumb over his shoulder and thankful that Robby slips behind him without question. “How about I just take my kid and his bag; you keep the pills. We let this go.”

Jenkins slowly looks between him and Robby, a bizarre look crossing her unhappy face, then she tips her head in tired agreement. Nope, she definitely doesn’t get paid. She doesn’t seem to even know how to get paid, either – he knows for a fact if this had been West Valley when he went to school, she’d have hinted at some kind of bribe before she let Robby out the door.

“Mr Lawrence, a moment,” Jenkins says, slow to handing over Robby’s bag and the god-awful skateboard strapped to it. “I did notice your address is in the West Valley district.”

Johnny raises an eyebrow. “Yeah, and?”

“Well, it’s simply…” Jenkins says, a stiff, plastic smile breaking out across her face. “If you’d ever like to transfer, we can send the records right over,” she says, all but begging him to take his kid away from her school. “No problem at all.”

Bitch.

“Yeah, sure,” Johnny says, shoving the bag at Robby while turning him by the shoulder to the door. “I’ll look into that.”

He doesn’t miss the way Robby rolls his eyes and – and know what? Fuck it, maybe he will.

“Did your TiMER go off?” Robby asks, halfway down one of the fifty halls it takes to get out of this glorified prison block.

Johnny clenches his fist on his TiMER arm; he still needs to get it removed. “You know it did.”

“Who is it?” Robby asks, peeking over and back, head pointedly dropping near Johnny’s hands, as if the device itself might tell him.

Johnny twists his head a little to crack his neck. “It doesn’t matter,” he says, tucking his arm in close to his thigh and wishing he’d changed just for a damned pocket. “It’s bullshit.”

Robby is quiet a few seconds, then his next words are more familiarly snide, “What the hell are you wearing?”

“A gi,” Johnny says, rolling his eyes while they turn the corner out off the school property and onto the street; he’s learned his lesson about getting any car too close to a school. “I know you know what it is.”

“Yeah, but – ” Robby’s eyes go satisfyingly wide the minute Johnny rounds to get in the driver side of the Audi. He pauses a few steps from it, feet sticking fast to the sidewalk, as if he’s only allowed to get so close. “This is yours?”

“No,” Johnny admits, grudgingly, then gestures with a swing of his hand at the passenger side door. “But I’m driving it. Get in.”

Robby hesitantly takes a step forward, pulling his bag off his shoulder, still glancing back and forth over the car with wide eyes.

Johnny leans in the driver window, gesturing with his thumb for Miguel to move it. “Get in the back – he can sit up front on the way to his place.”

“Okay,” Miguel agrees, easy, hopping out and turning to start fiddling with levers; every one of them jumps a little when the seat pops forward with a quiet tink.

Robby stares with slowly widening eyes as Miguel squeezes himself into the narrow back seat. “Is he your –?”

“No,” Johnny cuts him off, shuddering a little – ugh, gross. “Just get in the car.”

Robby looks dubious, briefly hugging his bag and actually looking around before he makes a move to actually get into the passenger side. He sets the bag down between his feet, reaching for the belt, and stares at the little logo on the clip as he shoves it in.

“Robby, meet Miguel Diaz,” Johnny says, once he’s briefly looking over his shoulder to pull away from the curb; the over-priced thing has a camera, but he does not trust it. “A kid from my complex who slept through every lesson about not talking to strangers.”

“Hi,” Miguel says, reaching up from the back to enthusiastically shake Robby’s hand. “It’s so cool Sensei Lawrence is your dad.”

Robby slowly shakes back while looking typically doubtful. “Sensei?”

“Yeah!” Miguel says, probably all grins in the back seat, judging by the chirpy tone. “He’s teaching me karate.”

Robby snorts derisively, “Sure.”

Johnny looks over at him when he pauses at the stop sign, tugging pointedly at the front lapel of his gi. It doesn’t get much more than a glance and a low mutter, but that’s acknowledgement in Robby’s language.

“So, hey, Miguel Diaz?” Robby asks, suddenly sly, turning at the corner of Johnny’s eye to look at the backseat. “Do you know who my dad’s soulmate is?”

Johnny exhales a harsh breath before Miguel can answer, tapping his thumb against the wheel. “No.”

Robby is quiet a few seconds, eyes flicking back and forth from him to the windshield. He glances toward the backseat with a click of his tongue. “Is it isn’t his –”

Johnny clicks his tongue. “Nope.”

“Dad.”

Johnny knows he’s being played, keeping his eyes firmly forward, and consequently his focus lurches sideways as the car stops at a light, a familiar ad staring back at him. “You want to know who it is?” He points hard at LaRusso’s dumb face at the side of the building. “There you go.”

Robby is quiet a beat, then exhales a tetchy scoff.

Johnny points harder, feeling his other hand creaking the leather on the wheel.

“Wait, you actually – ” Robby cuts himself off, then coughs slightly, way too close to a laugh. “The guy who owns LaRusso Auto? Don’t you hate him?”

“Yes,” Johnny says firmly, ignoring Miguel’s conspicuous, insubordinate mutter in the back. He had not told him about the TiMER, but he had maybe mentioned LaRusso once or twice, just off-hand; just to do with karate, like say, the benefits one can find in training intensely over even a month or two. It hadn’t been anything significant.

“Wait,” Robby says, low, then turns to round on Johnny wide eyes. “Did he give you this car?”

“No, he…” Johnny scowls, because yes, but also fat fucking chance – he doesn’t even want this car. “It’s a loaner, alright? From the dealership. I met him again because some cheerleaders took out the Firebird.”

Robby hesitates a few seconds. “…Are you okay?” He asks, stiff like the question physically pains him.

“I wasn’t even in it,” Johnny says, looking over and gesturing with a wide sweep across the windshield at a lot into a Food Mart. “The damned thing was parked when she hit it!”

“So lame,” Miguel chimes in from the back, because he’s turned himself into some kind of cheerleader.

Johnny parks warily in front of Shannon’s building, grimacing at the beat-up Focus in the space next to him. He glances both ways, and doesn’t see anyone hanging around, but he’s not sure he’d even park the Firebird in this lot, and she doesn’t have a nice radio to steal, let alone seventy grand of useless buttons.

“Can I come?” Miguel asks, again, only to Robby this time on the other side of the car.

Robby looks over the roof at Johnny, quirking a brow, then looks down at Miguel. “Like, I guess? Why?”

“Honestly, this back seat is really uncomfortable,” Miguel climbing out of it with a weedy groan. “And your dad is making me do a lot of leg exercises.”

Robby scoffs under his breath, glancing up at Johnny again with a flat stare, then turning around toward the building while tugging keys out of his bag. He keeps sending odd little glances back over his shoulder, as they make their way up, shoulders visibly winding up tight, until he’s practically hunching while he suspiciously doesn’t turn the key in the door before opening it.

“Is your mom – no, course she’s fucking not,” Johnny says, looking around the darkened apartment, then his eyes catch on… huh. He doesn’t see much of any girly, hippie art, or half-empties of that gross-ass Malibu shit, just a lot of… to-go boxes and trash. “When was the last time Shan was home?”

Robby shrugs his bag onto a chair, markedly not looking up. “Her and Brad just stay at his place mostly.”

“…Stay.” Johnny repeats, tilting his head, managing to ignore the immediate reflex to mock Shannon’s dick soulmate. “They just stay – ” He rolls his lips together, then exhales through his nose. “Are you saying you live here alone?”

“I’m sixteen,” Robby says, dismissive, finally looking back at Johnny, clearly trying to express that he’s saying is just some kind of normal circumstance, but the sentiment doesn’t quite make it to his eyes. “And I didn’t like when they come back late from the club, anyway. Woke me up.”

Johnny just catches a glance of Miguel’s pity before he covers his own face with both palms. “Alright,” he says, scrubbing at his eyes for an angry beat, barely managing to rein an urge to punch at the wall. “Alright. Fuck that.”

Robby frowns and some of that apathetic mask starts to crack, a pinch of unease and hurt at the corner of his eyes.

“You’re coming back with me,” Johnny says, gesturing back over his shoulder at the door. He doesn’t really know what he’s even saying, heart thudding hard beneath his chest, but some awful, sober-ass part of his mind is suddenly crashing with shame. “I don’t give a shit if she calls the cops; I don’t give a shit if you do. Go get your crap.”

Robby laughs, and it only narrowly misses the mark on contempt. “Oh, suddenly you care?”

“Suddenly? I –” Johnny sputters, glancing away because he really can’t look in Robby’s face at the moment. He’s only got about twenty percent of him wanting to do this, mostly because of Miguel standing there watching and fucking Daniel LaRusso telling him he’s responsible echoing between his ears, but it’s stronger somehow than the eighty percent that wants to walk out the door and let Robby do what he wants just because it’d be easy. “I’ve cared the whole damned time!”

“Yeah, right,” Robby sneers, taking a step that’s practically a stomp. “If you cared so much you’d already have known Mom wasn’t here, either.”

“You know what? I know now because your school called me about you dealing E!” Johnny says, voice raising, “Yeah, I looked it up! So I’m handling it my way. And what the hell? That’s a party drug, kid. At least target the right people.”

Robby blinks back rapidly, anger briefly ceding to bewilderment.

Johnny looks over to Miguel next to the window. “Back me up, Diaz.”

Miguel glances to Robby, who’s turned to glare at him. “…No?”

“Right, I forgot you’re a loser, but trust me, no one's doing ‘molly’ in between classes.”

Robby tightens his jaw again, a look in his face that is uncomfortably like Shannon when she’s about to cry.

“Go get some clothes, whatever else,” Johnny says, hastily, turning toward the kitchen and gesturing vaguely at the appliances. “I’ll see if there’s anything worth taking in the kitchen.”

Johnny spares a quick glance sideways when Robby stomps down the hall, exhaling a sharp clear of his throat. He turns and opens the fridge, only to stop short when all he sees a jug of orange juice and an Oscar Mayer container, a ketchup pushed way in the back, and immediately closes it.

“Diaz,” he says tightly, keeping his eyes on the curved fridge handle. “Go make sure he doesn’t take off out a window.”

“Would he do that?” Miguel asks, glancing toward the living room window that makes clear they’re three floors up.

Johnny points hard to emphasize the order. “Maybe. I would.”

Miguel only lingers another beat, then his footsteps quickly trail Robby’s down the hall.

Johnny slowly leans into the fridge, metal cool against his forehead. Shit. Robby’s been living like him.

Johnny ends up taking the kids back to the dojo, rather than back to the apartment complex. He’s got paperwork to do, sort of, and he left Miguel in the middle of a lesson, though he doesn’t seem to care, but mostly his place is a mess. He hadn’t planned on anyone coming by, let alone moving in, but like he never plans on anyone coming by, except now sometimes Miguel, but he’s inexplicably immune to Johnny’s particular brand of shit. It’s reminds him of Bobby in the worst way, though he hopes Miguel never gets to the point he feels comfortable throwing him into an elbow lock.

Robby is more like whoever the opposite of that is; he’s more like La – no one in particular. Johnny knows he has to take Robby back there, suffer the remarks about the lumps in the sofa or whatever, beer stains on the carpet, cheap erotic art, but he’s allowed to psych himself up for a couple hours.

The universe confirms it fully hates Johnny though, because he quickly regrets taking this time for himself when, while Miguel is cleaning already an spotless toilet and Robby is supposedly doing homework but is definitely only listening to music, a stuck up jerk-off just waltzes into his dojo. Robby doesn’t actually drop his headphones, but Johnny knows enough about them now to know he can probably hear through them, and he puts a hand up in his direction, silently urging him not to say a word, then catches Miguel just out of LaRusso’s vision in the darkened hall to the bathroom.

Great, what the shit is LaRusso even doing here?

“Johnny,” LaRusso greets, lifting his chin, then glances around, eyes mostly on the logos on the wall, somehow seeming to skip over Robby in the corner.

“You come to check on the car?”

LaRusso huffs and shoves his hands in his pockets, shaking his head while looking back to Johnny. “Nope. It looks fine.”

Johnny shifts his jaw at the attention, refusing to feel unsettled by LaRusso doing nothing more than standing in his dojo. He finds himself glancing like a reflex up LaRusso, from his shiny shoes to his off-rack jacket, ill-fitted on his narrow shoulders, like he can somehow hide them. “So?”

LaRusso sighs heavily, shoulders shrugging up near his ears. “Did you… beat up some teenagers here a few weeks ago? Like the day before the TiMER?”

Robby doesn’t make a noise, but he does lift his hands broadly with a comically bewildered look on his face. It’s the same question that LaRusso just asked, but with less expectation of a denial, more of a why the fuck?

“Maybe a couple,” Johnny says, playing at easy going, finding himself rubbing at the TiMER on his wrist and immediately stopping himself. “Yeah.”

LaRusso puts a hand on his brow for a beat, then shakes his head while drawing the hand over his hair. “Alright. Can I ask why you kicked Kyler?”

“He was a dick,” Johnny says, succinctly, feeling a snarl curl across his mouth at the memory. “He was beating up the kid. Chased him out of the minimart with his buddies, then threw a drink all over him and shoved him into my car.”

LaRusso quirks an eyebrow, clearly catching on that last bit – of course, he fucking does – then looks shrewdly over at Robby. “Is that true?”

“No, not that kid,” Johnny says, ignoring Robby’s typical sneering eye roll, “Diaz!”

“Hey,” Miguel says, poking his head out the bathroom door with an awkward grin and a wave with a gloved hand. “Hi, Mr LaRusso. It was actually Pepto Bismol.”

LaRusso looks flabbergasted, eyes darting back and forth between Robby and Miguel, then back to Johnny. “You’ve got kids?”

“Yeah, one,” Johnny says, lifting his hand to raise a single finger at Robby, who predictably looks like he’d rather not be counted, then swings it backward to Miguel. “But Diaz, here, is a student who I am teaching karate. Because, you know, the dickwads with the – the Pepto.”

“Right,” LaRusso says, then turns and looks at Robby, assessing him with a lifted nod. “You?”

“No,” Robby says, flatly, demonstratively glancing across the dojo with a sneer.

“Good,” LaRusso says, with an odd twitch to his shoulders, then sending a searing look at back in Johnny’s direction. “You don’t want to be Cobra Kai.”

“Uncalled for,” Johnny snaps, somehow stunned, despite himself probably being the reason why LaRusso would be such a dick about it. “What the fuck, man?”

“Oh, sorry,” LaRusso says, exaggeratedly putting his hands up, and somehow the sight of his TiMER is a shock, even if it doesn’t say Johnny’s name on it, or anything, but there’s still that knowing it. “I guess I don’t have many good associations with the particular dojo. And by many, I mean… any.”

Johnny grits his teeth, glancing behind LaRusso with a slow exhale. He will not blow up at or kick LaRusso’s ass… until he gets his car back, which seems to be taking for fucking ever.

“I’m a little surprised you do,” LaRusso says, mercifully dropping his hands, both tightening at his sides to fists while his expression becomes mostly a deep frown “Why would you want to bring this back, Johnny? After what happened – what he did to you? You think that’s a good way of thinking to teach more kids?”

“You don’t know how or what I’m teaching,” Johnny snaps, lifting a hand to point hard and wag his finger to signal LaRusso to get out of here before he gets a rematch. “I’m not him. It’s not the same dojo.”

LaRusso scoffs under his breath, cutting, then looks around again at the No Mercy signage and the cobra bearing over them on the walls. “It looks like it is from here.”

“Bullshit,” Johnny says, lifting his chin and his brows, breathing for a few beats, then gesturing with a shift of his hand to sweep toward the door. “That one had an entry hallway full of Kreese’s trophies – this you just walk in.”

LaRusso stares for a tense beat, then abruptly he rolls his lips over his teeth and closes his eyes, shaking his head while turning around toward the door. “Okay, sure. Whatever. Thanks for beating up my daughter’s boyfriend, I guess.”

“Your daughter’s what?” Johnny calls after, then glances awkwardly at Miguel, then Robby, before grumbling to himself and making to catch LaRusso out the door. He doesn’t quite grab him in the lot, but it’s a close thing, and he’s surprised a bit at his own urgency. “LaRusso, wait.”

LaRusso looks backward and exhales a weird croak, then that quickly, shockingly turns into a laugh. He covers his mouth almost immediately, visibly sheepish in the aftermath.

Johnny cracks his own grin. “You did get it.”

“I didn’t want to give you the satisfaction,” LaRusso mutters, keeping his face covered with a palm for a few seconds longer, then dropping his hand back to his side. “What do you want?”

“Serious about that kid – Kyler, you said?” Johnny says, looking LaRusso right in the eyes, raising his brows and setting his jaw – it gets difficult, for some reason, after a few beats of holding it, heat flaring under his jaw. “He’s a real asshole. He was trying to buy liquor when Diaz accidentally… I’m not sure how, but he signaled he went to school with him, and the kid and a bunch of cronies jumped him. Hard.”

LaRusso is quiet a few beats, then glances pointedly across the front window of the dojo. “Sounds like someone I used to know.”

Johnny exhales a hard scoff through his nose, rolling his eyes and allowing LaRusso a small, grudging shrug.

LaRusso huffs out his own unintelligible mutter, shifting backward off the sidewalk, then suddenly stepping back up and way into Johnny’s space. “I didn’t actually come here just for that,” he says, abruptly and maybe even nervous, and Johnny suddenly remembers the way he used to chew on his nails. “It was mostly supposed to be an opener; I wasn’t expecting the kids, then you to – ”

“What?” Johnny interrupts, flatly, wondering what else he’s managed to do.

“It’s been like two weeks,” LaRusso bursts out, throwing his arms wide at his sides, a tight expression screwing up his face until it’s almost ugly. “And you – I don’t know. I expected something. I tried to find you on Facebook? Or Twitter? LinkedIn? But you’re like nowhere, man. And your car’s registration and insurance is way out of date, because that address is some kind of gym and the phone number is disconnected.”

“Shit’s expensive,” Johnny mutters, shifting his jaw, not quite understanding the cause of LaRusso’s frustration. “What were you expecting? We don’t need to be friends, LaRusso. We’re not lo- normal-soulmates, we’re hate-soulmates.”

“…Hate-soulmates,” LaRusso repeats, blinking rapidly and still looking vaguely pinched, then a small, peculiar smile peeks across his face. “Oh. Okay.”

“Hate,” Johnny nods, decisive, twisting one of his hands into itself at his side, wishing again that gis had pockets.

“Not even platonic?”

“No,” Johnny snaps, feeling his face twist and heat flush his neck up to his cheeks, a low clench in his gut, but not because – He doesn’t care if LaRusso goes off and gets remarried, or whatever, obviously, but he’s not going to be his super best friend. “Not that you’re hot shit, or anything – but the – the hate thing. Includes that.”

“Right,” LaRusso says, then tilts his head, a pouty distracting thing suddenly happening with his mouth. “So I guess you find me totally repulsive?”

Johnny swallows shallowly and realizes suddenly that… he doesn’t like how neon reflects off LaRusso’s self-assured face. He finds his eyes darting up from LaRusso’s mouth, to his eyes, then out across the parking lot without dignifying that question with a response.

“Because, you know, Johnny,” LaRusso continues, voice lower, but not irritably, not like Johnny has ever heard from him. “I don’t find you totally repulsive.”

Johnny looks back with a start. “What?”

“Just, you know,” LaRusso says, while that smile curls into something that isn’t quite friendly, but some kind of easy. “You’re still that golden-locked pretty boy to me.”

Johnny blinks rapidly, staring back startled while heat sears across the back of his neck. “You can’t say that. After I like – ” He scoffs, gesturing at the cobra that LaRusso was just glaring at behind him.

LaRusso takes a step back toward his car, clicking his tongue and offering an open shrug. “I’m a complicated guy?”

Johnny glowers after the tail lights of the car, watching it get further from the mall, and refuses to let himself try to wrap his head around that. No. Nope. He doesn’t need to try and figure out what LaRusso means about anything – the guy is just an unpredictable nut, always has been, and half the shit out of his mouth is bull.

“So Cobra Kai was where you learned karate, too?” Miguel says, looking up when Johnny steps back into the dojo, all wide eyes and that fluid nod when he thinks something is exciting. “Is that where you got the name? That’s a cool callback.”

Robby strangely offers a more dubious side-eye. “Did you get the name?”

“What?” Johnny looks pointedly at the wall, lifting a hand to wave. “Obviously.”

“Like with a lawyer. Did you get the name taken away from your karate teacher? Or at least make sure it wasn’t copyrighted by him?”

“Copyright?” Johnny repeats, blinking back and letting his hand fall. Isn’t that just for like books and shit?

“Oh no,” Miguel says, eyes going wide, looking at Robby and back to Johnny, officially ganging up on him.

Robby rolls his eyes to the ceiling, “Dad.”

“Who cares,” Johnny says, shoving his hands under his arms and glancing with a twitch at the logo. “He’s uh… probably dead.”

“Probably?” Miguel repeats, voice pitching, reaching up and nearly making dirty rubber glove contact to his face in his dismay. “Sensei, you can’t use it, if it’s a probably.”

“What if he comes back and sues you? Or if he is dead, whoever inherited it – like, you’ll have to change it anyway then, obviously,” Robby says, blinking blandly and staring straight into Johnny with a short lift of his chin. “And you hate court.”

Johnny tries to stare Robby down, but he loses like he always does, because the kid’s got that unrelenting, dead-eyed stare like a fucking general. “Fine!” He throws his hands up, admitting defeat and ignoring Miguel’s wide-eyed look at Robby like he just performed a magic trick. “You have any brilliant ideas for a name?”

“Deadbeat Karate,” Robby suggests, immediately, a sneer harsh across his face.

“Okay, you keep going,” Johnny says, unfolding his arms and pointing down at him on the floor. “You’re on a quick trip to sleeping on the floor.”

Robby raises his brows back, gesturing out across the mats. “Where else would I sleep?”

Johnny stares for a few beats, his arm falling slowly, then scoffs in offense. “I have an apartment!”

Miguel snorts out an ungainly laugh.

“Quiet!” Johnny says, swinging around to instead point at him. “What’s your suggestion?”

“Me?” Miguel stares for a beat, then his eyes dart around while his mouth twists in discomfort, probably at being put on the spot. “Uh, I – I dunno? There’s other kinds of snakes? Viper? Rattle… r? Or, uh, I don’t know if there’s a Spanish word for cobra except cobra, but serpiente?”

“None of those sound badass,” Johnny says, looking over and catching the cobra logo, a chill washing over him at the idea of Sensei Kreese actually popping up – shit, they should probably come up with something sooner than later. He didn’t know someone could own like pictures and shit, but the kids didn’t sound like they were making it up.

“Why don’t you ask your soulmate,” Robby says, brows quirking and a smirk curling across his mouth, as he leans forward to set his elbows on his knees. “Since he’s why you’re doing all this?”

“Not true,” Johnny says, dismissing the insult with a jerk of a flat hand. “And his thing was a tree. Totally lame.”

Miguel raises his brows, then lowers them with a significant glance toward the parking lot. “Oh.”

“Do not say it like that,” Johnny snaps, catching the sappy tone a mile off in just that single syllable. “You for sure know I didn’t do this until you gave me the idea.”

“You didn’t until after you met him, though?” Miguel says, dropping his chin little, then tipping his head while his mouth presses into a line. “…Because you blew me off like really mean. But then you got the car. Then you said you were opening this place.”

Robby looks too satisfied, a crooked almost-smile growing across his face.

“LaRusso is not why I started Cobra Kai!” Johnny says, looking back and forth between the kids while crossing his arms in a sweep. “Discussion over.”

Robby makes a show of leaning toward Miguel, who’s still across the room from him, dropping his voice to a harsh, sarcastic whisper. “He kicked Dad’s ass in high school and he’s been totally obsessed with him since.”

“Sensei.” Miguel tuts, sounding bizarrely like his grandmother when she’s passes Johnny in the hall. “This is so sad.”

Johnny straightens with a jerky shake of his head. “What?”

“That you didn’t know sooner,” Miguel says, an expression on his face like he’s watching the sad part of some chick flick. “You’ve really been missing your soulmate for like over half your life.”

Robby leans into the wall behind him and snorts into the back of his hand.

Johnny rolls his eyes, then points behind Miguel back at the bathroom. “Alright, go finish the toilet, Diaz.”

Miguel looks behind himself with a barely muted whine. “But I –”

“You just called me old and a sap,” Johnny says, jerking his hand forward a few more times with a firmer motion. He also made Johnny think about LaRusso’s weirdness in the parking lot, but he is not telling him that part. “You’re lucky it’s not 60 push ups on your knuckles.”

Miguel makes a face and slumps backward, dragging his feet along the ground.

“Dad,” a voice says, hazy, then something hits at his shoulder, undeniably solid. “Dad!”

Johnny opens his eyes with a start, stiffening up and then grimacing at a muscle spasm in his shoulder. It takes him a few seconds to remember why Robby is standing above him, in his apartment, and why he’s sleeping on the couch. Oh god, he made some decisions yesterday… Today? Shit, it’s still dark.

“Jesus,” Johnny mutters, then peers blearily at the clock on the VCR, green numbers blinking back at him with the impossible time of 2:15PM, so that’s not much help. “Why?”

Robby exhales a harried breath, panicky at something, which isn’t totally fantastic for the nebulous hour. “Trey and Cruz are coming.”

Johnny groans and covers his face. “Who?”

“These guys I – I’m sort of friends with,” Robby grimaces, eyes glancing toward the floor with an awkward sort of shame, entirely unfamiliar. “They’re who I got the drugs from. And they were staying at Mom’s, too, I was helping them out with food and stuff, but I locked the deadbolt and… and they’re kind of really pissed.”

Johnny is barely awake enough to understand all that, yet somehow he’s still angry about it. He glances to the clock again, then gestures at it. “When – now?”

“Now,” Robby says, glancing hastily toward the front door, then the window, hunching a little like somehow they’re about to peek in. “Trey says if I help strip the car, everything is cool between us. But I don’t want to – it’s not even yours.”

Johnny groans and pulls himself up, reaches for the table on reflex, then is pretty sure he covers it with a stretch of his arm. “It’s not mine? Thanks.”

“And Miguel and your LaRusso said that you beat up those guys,” Robby says, “So – ” he raises his eyebrows, an actual smile crossing his face, even if it’s the kind that’s just to get sympathy. “Yeah?”

Johnny stands up from the sofa, waving wide with both arms and setting his voice firm. “Fine, but I – ” He blinks down at his shorts, wondering if he should put on pants, then decides it’s too much work. “I uh, I’m transferring you or whatever tomorrow.”

“What?” Robby says, following behind close, practically on his heels, which is a bit much considering the size of the place. “What does that mean?”

“To West Valley, like that lady said,” Johnny says, slumping down on the ground and thoughtlessly tugging on a shoes, fingers fumbling on the laces; god, man was not supposed to get up at this hour. “Now go down there and steal LaRusso’s car.”

Robby’s eyes get big, darting down toward the lot. “What?”

“Go pretend to, then I’ll come down and act all hardass,” Johnny says, reaching for his other sneaker and staring at the folded heel on it with a scowl. “If I have to kick their asses, I will. If I don’t, I don’t.”

“You just said you would,” Robby says, expression hardening with the beginnings of a scowl.

Johnny shakes his head, squeezing his eyes shut before reopening them, and still trying to wake up. “Christ, sorry if I don’t want to get shoved in lockup again.”

“…Lockup?”

“Yeah, I got fucking arrested last time,” Johnny says, glaring as he stands back up from the ground with a groan, then gestures with a tap at his own head. “Funny how how everyone forgot that.”

Robby visibly wilts, eyes dropping down at the realization.

“I don’t think LaRusso knows, or he’d’ve mentioned it,” Johnny allows, reaching out and opening the door, then nodding for Robby go first, so he can lure his dealer or whatever to the Audi. “Diaz was there, though.”

Johnny trails Robby down to the parking spaces, then waits on the other side of the pillar until he hears Robby’s half-hearted greeting. He hears the guys a few seconds later, laughing along with a skid of skateboard wheels against concrete, and lopes a few steps out before they can get clever and go for the car. He turns the corner, catching the guys in the building lights, and that anger from earlier, when Robby was talking about them taking advantage, fully resurfaces when the friends don’t look like they’re even his age.

“Hey, the fuck you doing?” Johnny barks, setting his shoulders back and stepping out into the light himself.

The two guys startle at the sight of Johnny, glancing between Robby and him, then each other with some kind of signal. The one with a slim jim swings it in a way that is probably supposed to be hostile, but edge of the bar gets way too close to the shiny paint of the car for Johnny to even register the threat.

“Hey, watch it!” Johnny snaps, rushing forward a few yards further and jerking it out of the guy’s weak grip,

“Trey?!” The other guy says, who must be Cruz, glares back forth between Johnny and his buddy. “You just let him have it?”

“He took it,” Trey says, then dives forward, clearly trying to grab it, so Johnny throws it behind him into the dark of the main entrance. It sounds like it lands somewhere near the gate, and Cruz looks around Johnny’s shoulder with a step like he might make a go for it, but thinks better of it.

“You better back off!” Cruz says, throwing hands at Johnny like he’s got some kind of invisible leverage now they’ve lost their weapon. “We’re just here for the car, man, then we’ll let you go!”

“What does that even mean?” Johnny says, taking a step forward and pointing to himself with a tap at his own chest. “I’m stopping you – and I’m not letting you go.”

Cruz seems at a loss, looking over at Trey, and that’s when Johnny realizes they’re probably zeroed out. Ugh, assholes meet their fucking soulmates before fifty and this is what they do with their lives? If he’d met… No. He has no idea; he’d maybe still be getting in fights in the middle of the night with disrespectful punks in Reseda, but it’d be in a totally different way.

“What are a couple grown losers like you doing with my kid, anyway – you know he’s like sixteen!”

Cruz glances at Robby with a slow blink. “Huh?”

“Age is like, just a number,” Trey says, in a vaguely uncertain voice that probably means he’s unaware how creepy that makes him sound. “Right?”

“Yeah, old man,” Robby says, getting a little too into the role play with a glint in his eyes.

“Kid,” Johnny counters, jerking his head back and gesturing for Robby to get behind him with his chin. “Fucks sake.”

Trey lurches hesitantly forward, watching Robby as he moves, then looks back to Johnny with a bizarre sort of defiance. “Hey, he doesn’t have to listen to – ”

“He does, actually, and he’s not hanging out with you dipshits anymore, got it!” Johnny steps between Robby and the chucklefucks, and gestures toward the street. “Get out of here.”

Robby mutters something low, as his eyes slide toward that direction.

Cruz and Trey glance at each other again, broadcasting like klaxons, then Trey dives forward, hands swiping out in what might be some attempt at a punch. He’s got almost no technique, slapping out like some kind of wimp, and nearly unbalances himself with a few more weak attempts, his friend whooping in the back like anything at all is actually happening here.

“Okay, don’t – ” Johnny says, stepping back and putting up a hand to deflect an attempt to grab him that actually gets a little close. “Don’t start shit you can’t finish.”

The idiot makes another attempt to gain ground, loose fist swinging, so Johnny jerks him by the wrist and uses the momentum to hit the kid in the face with his elbow, hearing something crunch – shit, he didn’t mean to do it that hard. He swings around and kicks Trey back when he sees movement at the corner of his eye, hitting him high in the torso and forcing him back, obviously winding him by the subsequent wheezes. The guy moves again, as Johnny turns in his direction, like he’s going to try to tackle, and earns a shove and another thrust kick the chest for wasted effort.

“What the fuck?” Cruz cries through his newly broken nose as he looks over at Robby, stumbling back with blood dribbling through his fingers down his chin. “Is your dad Ch-Ch-Chuck Norris?”

“Fuck no,” Johnny spits, glancing between both of them while loosening his shoulders with a stretch backward. “That guy’s a jackass.”

“Jet Li?” Trey tries through heaving breaths; he appropriately seems to be mostly air neck-up. “Bruce Lee?”

“If I see you guys around again, I’m calling the cops about the drugs,” Johnny says, ignoring the commentary, mostly because if he thinks too hard about the Bruce Lee thing, he’ll hate the dumbass a little less. “The attempted carjacking – ” He points backward at the dark wall behind them. “All on camera, shitdicks.”

The idiots glance back and forth at each other, then Robby, then make a smart retreat out of the parking lot. He doesn’t really get why Robby would hang out with these guys – they’re jackasses, and he gets jackasses, but these two together don’t even equal like half a Dutch.

“Do I really have to go to your old school?” Robby asks, shifting loud on his feet, a look on his face while he peers at the wall behind them like he knows just as well as Johnny there’s no camera.

“Yeah,” Johnny says, stretching his back a little before gesture for Robby to proceed him back into the complex. “And I might tell Miguel to spy on you and that it’s some kind of karate lesson; he eats that shit up.”

Robby exhales a grumble, mostly unintelligible, so it doesn’t sound like much of a real argument.

Chapter Text

Johnny refuses to think too hard about LaRusso over the next couple weeks, or why he hasn’t popped back up, at least to talk about his car, but it gives him time to focus on the dojo.

And rebranding the dojo, and renaming the dojo, and spending the rest of his dwindling check from Sid on more paperwork, and the worst part is the damned internet lawyer doesn’t even seem surprised at the mistake when Miguel shoves him in her office. It almost makes him want to punch the lady, but she seems a little dingy already, wearing bangles and scarves, telling him with sad eyes that Cobra Kai is still in the name of some guy called Silver who definitely isn’t dead, judging by a spread in some rich guy magazine she pulls up, so he made the right move.

He starts getting Miguel trained up on kicks, too, even with Robby scowling over his shoulder the whole time. But Johnny thinks it says more about Robby than anything that he doesn’t actually try to stop anything happening until Miguel’s already in the water.

“You should call the cops,” Robby says, after, to a damp Miguel, somehow crowding him from the other side of a booth. “That was child endangerment.”

“It was scary, at first, but then it was fun,” Miguel says, shaking his head a little and smiling when Johnny drops their food on the table in front of them. “And I did a lot of kicks.”

Robby stares hard at Miguel in plain disbelief, then reaches out and grabs a fry to shove in his own face, looking back to Johnny with a shake of his head. He should just be happy that he’s getting food, too – it’s not like he needs to fuel up after a night of being a cranky shit.  

“Why’re you trying to get me arrested?” Johnny demands, pointing while he drops into the booth beside him, then picking up his own burger. “You make me change all that at the dojo just so you could take it over?”

“Yeah,” Robby says, dry, offering a weak sneer. “I’ve always dreamed of a snake-themed pilates studio.”

Johnny blinks hard, shaking his head. “The fuck is pilates?”

“You’re joking, but I can see someone doing that,” Miguel interjects, leaning eagerly across the table with a pair of raised brows. “They do yoga with goats and cats, you know? Hey, what if we did karate with like dogs, or something – no, I guess they might get kicked.”

Robby looks confused now, too, which is a little comforting. “What?”

“Yeah, like – ” Miguel drops his basket and starts pulling out his phone, swiping across the screen with an eager pair of nods. “It’s totally a thing.”

Johnny grumbles as the phone is shoved across the table, then watches, slowly becoming more and more appalled, as a bunch of stretching morons lay on the floor with actual goats jumping on their backs, all while some newscaster without eyes insists it’s relaxing activity. He looks over the phone screen to Miguel, then sideways to Robby, who seems about as excited about it as Johnny, and shakes his head. “Something is wrong with these people.”

“I dunno, it looks fun,” Miguel says, turning the phone to look back at it with a troublingly considering look. “I like goats, I think.”

“Sure,” Johnny says with a snort, grabbing a handful of fries. “Maybe you should go as a farmer for Halloween.”

“No, I’m going as like Deadpool?” Miguel says, nodding a little, then tilting his head, looking less certain about it. “Or maybe Spiderman or something? My Yaya is putting it together, but it’s kind of a mess – I don’t think she knows who they are?”

“I only know who Spider-Man is,” Johnny says, looking down while dumping an extra container of ketchup between his double patty.

“Aren’t we kind of old to dress up?” Robby asks, but it’s not as biting as he probably means it to be, glancing between Miguel and Johnny, as he slowly takes his burger off the basket.

“No, like there’s the dance, right? And everyone’s going. I heard a bunch of popular girls talking about going as Laker Girls,” Miguel says, then sighs, dreamily, “Sam LaRusso, too. She’s so cool.”

Robby immediately starts laughing into his burger, almost choking on it.

“No,” Johnny says, straightening in his seat and setting his elbow hard on the table, tilting his hand to point. “Absolutely not. LaRussos are off limits.”

Miguel narrows his eyes, glancing down at Johnny’s wrist. 

“No, we’re hate-soulmates,” Johnny says, flicking his hand out across the table, trying to emphasize the word. “I keep telling you. Not – not the other kind.”

“That’s only in movies,” Robby says, flat, taking another bite into his burger with an inexplicable judgment.

“Nope,” Johnny disagrees, turning his wrist to better point awkward at the TiMER, having to force himself to keep it showing the zeroes face up. “Genuine case.”

Miguel glances over at Robby, who’s staring sideways hard at Johnny, unconvinced, then looks back to Johnny, emulating the expression. Oh great, he’s imprinting on Robby now; he’ll hate Johnny in no time.

It is kind of weird, but not a bad weird, having Robby around all the time after so long with that squeezing guilt at the back of his head every time he even so much as thought of him. The feeling is still there, for sure, especially when Robby mentions something that Johnny should definitely already know about, but it’s not quite so outright painful; it doesn’t immediately lead to the bottom of a bottle. It now just makes him recoil, let Robby sneer and explain, then they move on to whatever shit they’re experiencing at the same time that day.

He thinks he’s doing an okay job now, better than he would have four years ago, or eight, or twelve, which doesn’t make up for it, but it’s trying, and he hasn’t felt like he could even try in maybe ever. It’s also a lot easier to keep an eye on him, after the attempted robbery bullshit, than he thought it would be, because Robby is weirdly okay just following him around from home, to the dojo, to the minimart, repeat. He’s been to the skatepark a few times, supposedly, but he’s always come home.

It is starting to make Johnny worried the kid can’t actually make friends. He’s been at West Valley for weeks and he still comes home every day right after school, like he really has nothing else to do but be judgmental.

“Hey, could you, I dunno…” Robby takes a breath, knocking his fist twice against the flat deck of his skateboard. “Not try to kill Miguel? He’s your only student, even if he’s not paying.”

“I’m not trying to kill him – I’m trying to toughen him up,” Johnny says, briefly glaring at Robby in the reflection of the window while he finishes scraping off the glue from the old cobra logo. “Get him used to taking punches, to dealing with shit the real world’ll throw at him, without his mom and his yaya. My sensei did the same thing.”

Robby scoffs lowly, just his eyes following Johnny from where he sits on the parking block. “The sensei who Daniel LaRusso implied did something bad to both of you?”

Johnny shifts his jaw, unfolding the ladder in front of the window and refusing to give that any sort of a response. He doesn’t have any reason to dredge all that up, let alone by talking to his own kid about it.

“Have you talked to him?”

Johnny looks over his shoulder with a brief start, half-worried that Robby might actually mean Kreese. “Who?”

Robby gives him a flat, annoyed look, so probably not Kreese.

“No,” Johnny says, throwing the scraper down onto the sidewalk with a brief clench of his jaw. “The fuck would I?”

Robby is quiet a few beats longer, then pushes his hair out of his face with a sigh. “He’s had your car. For like… a while, right?”

“I have his, too,” Johnny says, awkwardly picking up and balancing the bottle of cleaner while trying to unwrap the plastic off the squeegee. “I think. Do dealerships own the cars?”

Robby makes an uncertain noise, then pulls out his phone, because kids these days can’t just let questions go unanswered. He’s quiet while Johnny gets the glass squeaky, shiny clean, then hums while looking back up with a shrug. “Sorta? I guess they’re financed and they start losing money on interest if they don’t sell them in like a month?”

“LaRusso’s had that one a year, apparently,” Johnny says, clicking his tongue, climbing up the ladder to get to the rest of the gunk. “Sucks for him, huh?”

Robby exhales a pitchy sort of hum, then snaps his fingers up near his head. “Maybe he’s making you drive it as advertisement? It’s basically a billboard with the plates on it.”

Johnny frowns a little and turns around, staring at the dealer plates, then offers a low grunt. “He’s not that smart.”

"Though..." Robby stands with an awkward crane of his head, peering at something at the back of the car. “He did give it to you without one of those temp tags, maybe he just wants you to get pulled over.”

Johnny frowns harder and glances to Robby, then back to the car, opening his mouth – because LaRusso totally might – only to get distracted when a vaguely familiar, boring sedan pulls up in front of him. He raises his brows, startled, and watches as Bobby fucking Brown waves through the windshield. “Shit, look who it is.”

“Huh?” Robby intones, briefly looking over while Bobby starts to get out of the car. He glances back and forth from Johnny to Bobby, looking uncertain, then drops back to curl over the parking block. “Is that… Tommy?”

“Bobby,” Johnny corrects, climbing off the ladder and stepping forward to draw Bobby into a one-armed hug once he’s cleared the hood of his car.

“Hey, Johnny, I saw you – Robby?” Bobby says, staring with a wide blink at Robby when he catches sight of him on the block. “Haven’t seen you in a while… What’s up?”

Robby stares back at Bobby for a beat, then shrugs, nodding up at the dojo with a marked hunch into the skateboard in his lap. He hasn’t seen Bobby since he was about eight, at a frankly terrible diner that Johnny can’t remember the name of – it wasn’t a Denny’s, though, because they got really pissed about him calling it one.

“What are you doing here?” Johnny asks, dropping the squeegee and bottle of cleaner, then leaning against the pillar. “It’s been a while.”

“Well.” Bobby takes a breath, eyes drifting across the front of the dojo with a tight pinch drawing at his brows. “To begin with, I had to learn from Dutch your soulmate was Daniel LaRusso.”

Johnny stares for a long few seconds, desperately hoping Bobby’ll take that back. “Jesus,” he swears, then makes an angry gesture vaguely to the north. “How the fuck does he even know?”

“I guess a friend of a friend of his works in one of the dealerships as a mechanic,” Bobby says, nodding his head with one of those placid smiles that hides a world of mocking laughter. “Boss’ soulmate is big talk, I guess.”

Johnny can imagine Dutch laughed himself sick, too. “Great.”

Bobby offers a short shake of his head. “If it makes you feel better, whoever it was just said it was some old blond guy that flipped out and listened to music for twenty minutes in his office, but we both agreed it did sound like you.”

Robby laughs quietly, as if he and the episode he had three days ago about some jerk at the skatepark has any room to judge.

“Also, said that he gave you a sports car,” Bobby pointedly tips his head toward the RS5, brows going high up his endless forehead. “Which we both thought was just crazy…”

Johnny rolls his eyes, wishing he had his car just so people would shut up about this one.  “It’s a loaner – Firebird’s in the shop.”

Bobby nods a few times, staring long enough at the car that Johnny about asks if he wants to drive it, then suddenly looks back with a glower at Johnny. “You get in a fight with him yet?”

“No,” Johnny says, injecting a little disbelief into the word.

“Yes,” Robby disagrees, with a quiet mutter into his skateboard.

Johnny lifts a hand against Bobby’s immediate judgmental look. “Not a physical one.”

“Is that what this is about?” Bobby asks, gesturing at the dojo sign; Cobra Kai staring back down at them with fangs. “The new dojo? I wasn’t even going to stop you know, I was just going to call you, right? But then I saw this, and you, and the car. It felt like a sign.”

“Your signs can eat shit,” Johnny says, voice raising a little, because nothing he does is ever because of goddamn Daniel LaRusso, no matter what half the people he knows seem to be implying – this is his shit, okay, and he’s doing it for himself. And Miguel, a little. “Kid in my complex gave me the idea.”

Bobby rolls his lips together, rocking his head back and forth, then exhales a lengthy breath. “You’re not doing this with Kreese, are you, if you’re really bringing back Cobra Kai? Not letting him around…” He glances at Robby, who looks suddenly way too interested. “Your kids?”

“No, jeez, you sound like one of the damned kids.” Johnny runs a hand through his hair, scrubbing against his scalp. “The sign guy is going to be here tomorrow.” He picks up and then waves the new cobra logo still rolled up in a rubber band. “I’m changing it. No one told me I’d get sued by him before I put it up, alright?”

Bobby hums lowly, but looks satisfied, then just as quickly skeptical. “Did you ask anyone?”

Johnny sighs hard, rolling his eyes and refusing to give that an answer.

“What’d you go with?”

“Cobra Dō,” Johnny says, trying not to watch too close if Bobby is disappointed, but the most he gets is a considering nod, which is just worse – is that even good or bad? He shrugs out the urge to demand some kind of actual judgment. “Lawyer said the Silver guy didn’t have rights over cobra.”

“…Silver?” Bobby repeats, slowly, mouth twisting down at the corner.

“Some guy who actually owns Cobra Kai,” Johnny says, gesturing backward with a half-hearted twist of his thumb. “I guess it wasn’t Kreese – you ever hear of him?”

Bobby shakes his head slowly, then clicks his tongue. “Huh. But I guess we never knew his soulmate.”

Johnny grimaces trying to imagine Kreese with any kind of soulmate; though… he had been wearing a zeroed TiMER, hadn’t he? It was the one thing he didn’t call pussy shit.

“Show him the logo,” Robby says, standing up from the parking block, losing some of that diffidence he’s had since Bobby got out of the car.

Johnny sighs and pulls off the rubber band, unrolling the logo to show the new snake that Miguel and Robby had gotten real worked up over.

“Oh, it’s red,” Bobby says, after a few seconds, shooting Johnny a knowing look, then he hums and tilts his head a bit looking down at it. “Not much of a – a neck, though? Collar?”

“King cobras aren’t real cobras,” Robby says, painfully serious and clearly taking Bobby by surprise with the tone. “They’re more like mambas.”

“Oh,” Bobby says, politely nodding at Robby, then lifting his eyes to glare at the remaining sign. “Huh. Even that was bull.”

“So. You guys really don’t like him?” Robby asks, an eye narrowing, head tilting with a now-familiar calculating look. “Your old sensei?”

Bobby falls right into the trap with a pressed frown. “He was a bad man.”

Robby sends a look at Johnny, chin lifting, and it’s not hard to guess what he’s about to say. “Does that mean my dad shouldn’t be teaching like him?”

“What?” Bobby says, eyes shifting over to Johnny and narrowing into a scolding glare. “What?”

Johnny clears his throat, setting the logo back down before he can ruin it by wringing it in his hands. “Come on, some of what he – ”

Robby speaks over him like a total squealer. “He threw my friend in a pool with his hands tied behind his back.”

“Johnny!” Bobby snaps, looking apoplectic, as his voice echoes in a rare shout loud across the parking lot. “You cannot be doing that to kids!”

“He’s fine!” Johnny argues, as he realizes way too late Robby does have at least one friend, which he might think bucks being Johnny’s only student, so that’s probably why he’s all pissy. “He had fun, he said.”

Bobby lowers his voice, no longer yelling, but layering deep disappointment onto the anger. “So he’s dumb as you – that does not make it okay.”

“Okay, shit,” Johnny mutters, as shamed heat flares at the back of his neck, rubbing at it for a beat. “I get it.”

“Does Daniel know about that?” Bobby asks, bafflingly, with an expression like he thinks is any kind of a real question. “I can’t imagine he’d like knowing you did that too much.”

Johnny shrugs tightly, “Why would he know? It’s not like we talk.”

Bobby blinks a few times to many, shoulders slowly drooping with bemusement. “Excuse me?”

“He thinks they’re the ‘hate’ kind of soulmates,” Robby says, before Johnny can even try to explain, but at least he’s clearly getting real comfortable around his namesake in record time. “Like in movies. So he avoids him.”

Bobby turns to blink slowly at Robby, then just as slowly slides his gaze back up to Johnny, before he ultimately digs the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Jesus Mary and Joseph – you’re still like this?”

Johnny scowls and reaches out to backhand Bobby at the shoulder with a hard swipe. “What does that mean?”

The worst part is Johnny knows where Bobby might be coming from – he can remember in high school Bobby just not getting so much why LaRusso was the worst, while the other Cobras, at least, pretended. He can also remember Bobby making a big deal about apologizing, like he also couldn’t get why Johnny couldn’t even look in LaRusso’s direction while he was on those fucking crutches.

But turns out that Bobby was totally wrong all around, because like that was the universe telling Johnny how he was meant to feel about LaRusso. It all made sense.

“Dad!” Robby says, not quite yelling, but interrupting whatever mostly-muffled school crap that Miguel and he have been going over after the lesson. “Come tell Miguel he looks dumb!”

Johnny pauses with one hand in the fridge, rolling his eyes and glancing out the door of the office. “Pretty sure I got ganged up on by a couple dicks called Robert telling me not to do that, anymore?”

Robby is quiet for a few beats, then there’s a conspicuous snort from the mats. “One more time?”

Johnny rolls his eyes and pops the top on his last Coors, making his way back out to the main dojo. He pauses in the doorway, taking in the sewn mess of second-hand fabrics that looks nothing like Spider-Man or whoever that other guy was, probably, and muffles a laugh with a sip of beer and takes a few seconds to pretend to think.

Robby raises his eyebrows, glancing between Johnny and Miguel with that particular straight-faced look.

Johnny gestures with a pointed finger around his can. “That looks like shit, Diaz. Who you going as, again, Poor-Man?”

Miguel drops his sheet-covered head in deserved indignity, while Robby makes his own embarrassed face at the joke; whatever, Johnny stands by it.

The kids are ripping apart costume bags in the other room when Johnny’s phone starts going crazy. He pulls it out sluggishly, expecting some unknown number that is definitely a debt collector, only to find a worse, more familiar number flashing across the little screen.

Johnny stares at it a beat, then flips it open while setting his jaw. “Shan.”

“Do you know where Robby is?” Shannon asks, panicked, “Our place is – It’s dark. The neighbors haven’t seen him in weeks!”

Johnny furrows his brow, wondering if this is really the first time in those weeks that she’s bothered to check up on Robby. “…Yeah. He’s with me.”

Shannon doesn’t answer for a few beats, then exhales a short, disbelieving huff. “What?”

“I have him, he’s fine,” Johnny says, biting out the words; he had kind of assumed that she knew and didn’t care, not that she… Shit, this is way worse than he thought. “Did you even try to get ahold of him?”

“I – yes,” Shannon says, tutting in a familiar defensive embarrassment. “Yes, and he said the same thing… I thought he was lying.”

Johnny quietly rolls his lips together, glancing at the closed door to Robby’s room, and is glad for Black Flag blaring between the call and the kids. “Yeah, well. He isn’t.”

“You know you – ” Shannon sputters a little, then takes a loud breath in the receiver. “So he’s living with you, then? You know can’t just suddenly decide you’re his dad.”

“I saw your fucking place, Shan,” Johnny says, quickly agitated at the know-it-all tone. It’s her usual go-to, which she passed to their kid, but he’s really not in the mood to just take it this time. “Or should I call it his? Maybe, I should be telling you that you can’t suddenly decide you’re not his mom!”

Shannon goes satisfyingly silent, breathing into the speaker for a few seconds, then: “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t? He’s been at mine for weeks, remember?”

“I’ll call a lawyer,” Shannon says, voice raising and quickly becoming shrill, then a lower, masculine voice is briefly in the background, thankfully unintelligible. “Oh yeah, or I’ll call the cops.”

“Go ahead,” Johnny dares, feeling his anger beating somehow even harder at his temples, his other hand curling into a fist over the arm of his sofa while he leans forward with a snarl, as if she’s really in front of him. “I’ll take them to the apartment. I’ll get that principal at his old school to tell them how you screen his calls. I’ll have him tell them about you partying with Brad being worth more than your kid.”

Shannon takes a sharp breath, then suddenly the receiver clicks out, beeping quietly from the disconnected call a second later.

“Yeah, fuck you, too!” Johnny snarls down at the noisy speaker while he slams the clamshell shut.

The thing is… Johnny knows he’s toeing the line of every godawful joke about cigarettes, or milk, or whatever, just like his own dad. It’s not a damned secret that he’s treated Robby like shit – missing weekends, when he had them, getting drunk at too many kids’ parties, missing too many games, letting too many calls go to voicemail – but he never thought leaving Robby with Shannon was one of the ways he might fuck up. He’d always depended on that thought Robby still had some kind of family; that being as out of his life as possible was better for Shannon to raise him, especially after she zeroed out with Brad.

But Johnny was wrong, as usual, and Shannon left Robby alone just the same as him.

“Sensei!” Miguel says, popping his head out of the door, the rest of him soon following with Robby just behind him. “You said you could do the makeup, right?”

“Face paint, Diaz,” Johnny says, hastily throwing the phone to the sofa and running a hand through his hair.

The kids look pretty badass, at the end of it all, which Johnny is proud to admit, though Robby is about blind with the red lenses that Johnny is 90% sure he pocketed, because he does not remember anything like contacts in the bag. He can’t imagine wearing them himself, sticking crap into his eyes, no matter how cool it maybe does look, so backs Miguel up fully when Robby tries to shove a pair of black ones at him.

“How do you know how to do face paint anyway?” Miguel asks, after he’s gotten the requisite oohs from his Yaya and has followed Johnny and Robby to the car. He climbs in carefully, though the idea of LaRusso asking what the hell the grease paint is on the seats is almost a funny enough idea that Johnny wishes he wasn’t doing so good training the clumsiness out of the kid. 

“I just copied a picture,” Johnny says, rolling his eyes while he pulls out of his spot; he glances to Robby, looking for some kind of support, only suddenly he’s looking curious, too. “You guys literally watched me do it.”

Miguel is quiet for a few beats, then thumps the back of the seat. “I guess skeleton face is easier than the logos.”

Johnny nods back at him through the mirror. “Exactly.”

“Wait,” Robby interjects, crooking his head with a disbelieving twist at the edge of his mouth. “You drew the logos?”

“Copied,” Johnny corrects, again, then taps at the blank denim on his chest while glancing over at Robby. “I got it off my jacket – the first one anyway, then I had to figure something else out when you jackasses got all legal changing it.”

Robby is quiet for a few seconds, then hunches a little while running a hand through the hair he refused to cover. “Weird.”

“How the hell’s it weird?” Johnny says, looking over while turning the car out up to the road to the school.

“That you can draw?” Robby says, waving a hand, then looking back at Miguel, who exhales a windy, thoughtful hum. “Because you never do and have never mentioned it?”

“I can’t draw, I can copy,” Johnny says, trying to be chill but still annoyed, because Robby’s probably always going to have this shitty issue listening to him. “Everyone can copy. I only did half the work, anyway – Kinko’s did most of it.”

“Sure,” Robby mutters, dubious, glancing away to look out the window.

It’s a response that makes no sense, so Johnny decides to ignore it. He half-seriously offers to buy the kids liquor or weed with a point off the steering wheel at a strip mall, only for them to refuse, and pulls up to the dusky street next to the school with a low shake of his head.

“Alright, if some jackass decides to turn a hose out on you in the damned bathroom, you got to just let it go,” Johnny says, stepping out of the car and away, holding onto the door while he lets Miguel out of the backseat. “Because, apparently, that’s the kind of pussy world we live in.”

Miguel straightens out his bodysuit with a bemused frown. “Why would the bathroom have a hose?”

“Exactly,” Johnny says, kneeling into the the backseat to grab the flyers and tape.

Robby takes a sharp, startles breath as the door closes behind Johnny, eyes flicking up and down from the flyers to Johnny’s face, then to the school, expression going a little horrified. He’s got his skateboard, because god forbid he walk more than a hundred feet, and he looks about ready to use it.

“I’m not keeping an eye on you, jeez,” Johnny says, then widens his eyes a little mockingly, waving the flyers in his hands. “I’m putting these up.”

“I hate that your actual face is on those,” Robby mutters, expression twisting, as they start to walk across the street to the school.

“Look, no one’s going to know I’m your dad, unless you tell them,” Johnny says, ignoring the throb of that little ache at the center of his chest, covering it with a shift of his attention and a point at Miguel. “Diaz, you do have to tell them I’m your sensei.”

“Okay!” Miguel chirps, readily, briefly pausing at a window to straighten his hood over his hair.

“Now get in there,” Johnny says, gesturing toward the vague thump of noise trying to pass itself off as music and the drift of haze off a smoke machine. “And don’t hit on the LaRusso girl.””

Miguel slumps with a heavy sigh, turning to follow Robby, who’s already halfway down the hall on his wheels. “I don’t even know how to talk to her.”

“Good,” Johnny says, turning to walk down the other way – toward the back with the offices. It’s a little dumb, but he’s got a impulse to put ten of these up near Harris’ office, even though the guy has got to be taking a dirt nap by now.

Hopefully, anyway, considering the worst jackoffs always seem to live the longest.

Johnny wanders around the half-lit halls of the school, feeling a little like he’s about to get in trouble, but caring as much as he ever did about it. The place is bigger, a couple additions that he almost gets lost in, and the lockers seem to all be cut in half, but it’s still the same old place. He slaps some flyers on walls between classrooms, over lockers, scoffing at some of the posters and events that’re lined up – did this place have golf when he went here? He doesn’t think so, and smacks a flyer over it. Golf sucks. He can’t even imagine LaRusso doing golf, and he’s always wearing the daily monkey suit of a guy who lives and breathes it.

He turns a corner, laughing to himself at the mental image of LaRusso in one of those outfits with the sweater and the dumb hat, driving a little cart, and consequently nearly runs into the fucking guy. He stares at LaRusso, blinking a few times, but if he wasn’t real, he would probably be wearing the little outfit.

“Johnny?”

Johnny rolls his head a bit against his neck. “LaRusso.”

“What’re you doing here?” LaRusso says, glancing back and forth down the hall, like he’s expecting the explanation to jump out at him. “You can’t be here.”

“Says who?” Johnny says, then gestures down toward the other end of the school. “My kid’s at the dance. Maybe I’m keeping an eye on him.”

LaRusso blinks slowly, then inhales a loud, blatantly exaggerated gasp and lifts a hand to put on his chest. “Are you chaperoning, Johnny?”

“As if,” Johnny says, realizing that must be why LaRusso is here, though he’s being pretty shitty at it, since they’re nowhere near the gym. “Do I look like a nerd?”

LaRusso huffs quietly, then a furrow builds between his brows. “Have our kids gone to school together this whole time?”

“No, he – ” Johnny shakes his head, feeling awkward, and a decades old impulse, probably brought on by the halls around him, nearly makes him reach for headphones that aren’t around his neck. “He lived with his mom until a couple weeks ago. But they had, uh… problems.”

LaRusso nods with a low grunt, arms crossing, only to seem to suddenly notice the flyer on the wall. His eyes go wide, then look back to Johnny while his shoulders fall in evident shock. “Wait, you changed the name?” He says, while he yanks a flyer from the top of the stack under Johnny’s thumb. “No more Cobra Kai?”

Johnny stretches with a dismissive flap of his hand. “I guess I can’t have the name because I’d get sued by Kreese or whoever? What Robby and Diaz said, anyway. And the lawyer.”

“Kreese, right,” LaRusso says, oddly soft, then snorts out a laugh as he glances up from the flyer. He seems palpably relieved, a grin growing wide and pleased across his lips. “Sound like smart kids.”

Johnny manages to bury a self-conscious reflex to remind LaRusso that he didn’t do it for him, since the guy is sort of acting like he did. “Uh, yeah.”

“You sure the one that’s yours is really yours?” LaRusso asks, humming pitchy with a little raise of his brows.

“Robby, yeah, and fuck you, too.” Johnny drawing his own brows with some show at anger that he doesn’t really feel; LaRusso’s probably the first person to say that only as a joke. “He and his mom both wish he weren’t too much for him not to be.”

LaRusso tilts his head to smirk back at Johnny, giving that smug look through his lashes that always made him seem especially like he was asking for a fight. It still does that, and the other thing, too: make him insufferably pretty.

Fuck. He is not supposed to be thinking shit like that – and he definitely wasn’t, ever, before now.

Mostly.

“So,” LaRusso says, turning the flyer over like it’s going to have anything on the back. “Cobra Dō? Where’d you get that?”

“Kids looked that up on some encyclopedia,” Johnny says, tugging the flyer out of LaRusso’s hand, then taking a few steps sideways to sticking it on some kid’s locker, hopefully not a nerd. “I guess it means way of the cobra, or whatever.”

“Right,” LaRusso says, nodding while gradually following Johnny down the hall. “Yeah.”

“It’s not on here, but the snake is red now and a little different because Robby, who refuses to be in it, got real dickish about changing the head after he and Diaz watched a bunch of videos about red cobras,” Johnny continues, quickly realizing he might be talking too much, but his mouth refuses to turn the fuck off – is this how LaRusso feels like all the time? “He said they spit in peoples faces and make them go blind? It still looks badass, but I couldn’t afford the color printing after all the other shit.”

LaRusso huffs quietly, an odd look crossing in his face while he looks up at the flyer. “You’ve been busy.”

“You done anything about that Kyler kid?” Johnny says, taping up another flyer, ignoring LaRusso’s look – not his problem.

“It’s kind of why I’m here,” LaRusso says, exhaling a weedy sigh, knocking his shoulder into the wall and getting a little too close for Johnny’s comfort. His hand spins between them, “He sent her a message that he had something big to give her tonight.”

“His dick,” Johnny says, flatly and without thought, and probably should’ve expected the just as quick backhand to his shoulder.

“That’s my daughter,” LaRusso snaps, expression twisting up now with simpler irritation.

Johnny rolls his eyes, smacking another flyer onto the wall. “You just said –”

“I don’t want to think about it!” LaRusso says, crossing his hands in front of Johnny’s face and physically cutting him off. “What if someone said that about your kid?”

“The big thing or the dick thing?” Johnny snorts, shaking his head and just imagining Robby making that pinched confused face in both cases. “Either way, he’s not that popular.”

“Yeah, well. You still shouldn’t talk about her like that,” LaRusso says, quiet for a few beats, then raises his chin and a single eyebrow. “She’s your soulmate’s kid.”

“Christ,” Johnny mutters, feeling heat in his ears, looking away from LaRusso and feeling clumsy while unevenly pulling a tape strip off the roll. “I already kicked the jackhole’s ass — maybe pick up the slack.”

LaRusso is silent for a pair of beats, then huffs out a laugh. “I’m trying!”

“Sure,” Johnny says, shoving another flyer up, then moving a down the hall while tugging at tape.

“Wouldn’t picking up the slack in this case be doing something for you – your Robby?” LaRusso says, trailing after with a thoughtful tone. “Like equal opposite – ”

“No,” Johnny says, cutting off the nonsense, not looking up, but pretty sure his voice sounds bullshit – not that the tone’s ever worked on this asshole, but that’s kind of the point. “We’re hate-soulmates; we don’t do shit for each other.”

“Right, right,” LaRusso says, snorting like Johnny is joking, feet dragging in a particular deliberate way across the linoleum with a click of his tongue. “So he doesn’t need like a job or anything?”

“What? No,” Johnny scoffs, looking up and a bit startled to find LaRusso right there only a few inches away. “What?”

“Spit-balling,” LaRusso says, annoying smirk firm across his face.

Johnny eyes the smirk for a beat, then narrows his eyes. “No.”

LaRusso hums and leans against the wall again, regarding Johnny for a beat, then one arm crosses at his middle, the other raising, and shit: he’s doing the biting at his thumb thing. “Right, but… wouldn’t it be a ‘hate’ soulmate thing to do the opposite of what you wanted?”

Johnny blinks and frowns, focusing back down at his flyers and ripping the corner on the next one while he pulls it from the stack. “No.”

LaRusso just hums again, teeth catching on his thumbnail.

Johnny narrows an eye, irked at the total non-answer; the worst part is he can easily imagine Robby agreeing to a job for LaRusso doing like… anything, and just because it’d annoy him. “Christ. You must really miss getting your ass kicked in this place, LaRusso.”

“Oh, you just try,” LaRusso says, smirk getting wider, eyes lighting up, and somehow looking ever younger by the second. “I could take you easy, Johnny Lawrence.”

“Bullshit,” Johnny says, waving the tape up and down LaRusso’s rumpled front. “When was the last time you even did karate, princess; I bet it was before you started wearing chinos.”

“Oh, you really throwing those stones?” LaRusso says, mouth curling upward and briefly breaking into a chuckle. “I feel like you wore nothing but chinos.”

Johnny sputters a bit, feeling heat in his face, “My mom bought them.”

LaRusso starts laughing outright, bending forward at the middle in his mirth. “Johnny.”

“Why is that funny?!” Johnny snaps, mouth pinching while his shoulders hunch up near his ears. “You’re just –”

“Shit, there they are,” LaRusso interrupts, expression dropping and abruptly leaning into Johnny with a sharp breath, a hand squeezing on his risen shoulder and warmth seeping through the fabric of his shirt. “Come on!”

“What?” Johnny says, blinking a little when LaRusso brushes past him with a clear expectation for him to follow along; he waves his flyers, “I’m doing – ” He watches LaRusso march down the hall. “Fuck.”

It is admittedly more interesting watching LaRusso stalk halls like a livid terrier than putting up flyers, though Johnny’s not really sure if anything is expected from him. He did fight the kid, so maybe LaRusso finds some intimidation from that, but Kyler had also laughed while he got arrested, so it’s up in the air if that’ll matter any.

LaRusso slows abruptly, holding a hand up, and Johnny starts to hear giggling from one of the classrooms.

“Oh my god, it’s so hard!”

LaRusso looks furious and a little baffled, probably because they’re outside some kind of science classroom. He peeks in, then his eyes go wide, angry at the sight behind the window, which Johnny can sort of see around his hair is a Laker Girl and a pirate.

A lower voice laughs, “Almost, right? Almost; you almost got it.”

“Wow.” Johnny snorts and grabs the handle, shoving the door open to make room for LaRusso’s huffy anger. He stops a little short in the doorway, as he really hadn’t expected to come face to face with one of the girls who ran into his Firebird. She stares at him, he stares at her, and her dickhead boyfriend and LaRusso get into it between them because they have no clue about any of that shit.

He realizes, a pair of long beats later, that there’s some kind of crazy excuse going on for the shenanigans with the face to crotch, as Kyler pulls out some kind of cheap charm thing from a pouch. He takes a step forward, deciding to let the Firebird thing with the daughter go, or at least simmer until he can use it for something, maybe getting said car back, and is satisfied by the way Kyler starts to falter when he notices him halfway through the lie about heirlooms or whatever.

Kyler gawks at Johnny for a few seconds, then his eyes flick back to LaRusso, then down to Sam. He looks less sure of himself without his dickhead friends to back him up, hand curling uncertainly around the bracelet.

LaRusso seems to accept the bullshit grandma excuse, at least a bit, which shows how disgustingly good of a guy he is, then looks down to Sam with a grimace. “Sam…”

“Don’t talk to me,” Sam growls, glancing uncertainly at Johnny before offering a LaRusso-like snarl to the man himself, then turning on her heels and marching out of the room.

LaRusso is quick on her heels, out before the door can close behind her, and calling her name with an exasperated shout.

“What the hell even is that?” Johnny gestures between Kyler’s weird little belt thing and the bracelet still in his hand. “You shouldn’t be tricking anyone into going for your dick, numbnuts – fucking be up front, like a real man.”

Kyler blinks rapidly, swallowing visibly and lifting his chin while his eyes dart around for exits. He clearly feels trapped with door behind Johnny’s back; good.

LaRusso abruptly pops back through the door, taking a half step in and boldly grabbing Johnny around the wrist with a hard tug and nearly upending all the flyers. “No rematches, Lawrence.”

Johnny briefly fights the grip, though LaRusso must be holding some kind of stance, because he doesn’t gain so much as an inch while he points at Kyler’s face. “Oh, yeah. You’re lucky I don’t kick your ass again.”

"Johnny!” LaRusso snaps, jerking him again, until they’re both out of the classroom door and Kyler is hopefully thinking twice behind it.

Johnny peeks down at LaRusso’s hand around his wrist, clenching his jaw, and wonders a little desperately if LaRusso is ever going to let him go, because they’re about two hundred feet from the classroom and LaRusso is still touching him. “Let me go,” he says, tightly, after another few steps down the hall, managing this time to pull his arm away and trying not to think too much about the heat lingering across it. “You could’ve let me at him.”

“He technically didn’t do anything,” LaRusso reasons, but his mouth is pinched and he looks sullen about it.

Johnny side-eyes for a few beats, shifting the flyers to his other arm. “Come on.”

LaRusso throws his hands up with a growl, finally breaking out of that bogus show of restraint. “I know!”

Johnny narrowly curbs a laugh out loud with a snort. He realizes belatedly they’re already crossing the foyer, so hastily drops the flyers out onto the top of one of the entry tables, inciting a surprised squawk from a school council nerd, and swipes a baggie of candy off it.

“Excuse me, if you’re chaperones – ”

“Not interested,” Johnny says, continuing to follow LaRusso out the door, who seems to be on some kind of mindless path.

LaRusso is hunched just outside the double doors, face pinched up ugly.

“What’re you – Oh,” Johnny says, catching a Laker Girl out in front of them way down the sidewalk to the parking lot. “Surprised she didn’t just go back to the party,”

“Almost, but I think she saw me following her,” LaRusso says, tightening his arms over his chest, starting to pace slightly back and forth with a glance toward Sam hunched over and tapping on her phone at the sidewalk. “Probably didn’t want me in the gym. Or you.”

“She’ll calm down,” Johnny says, angling toward the light to see the inside of the candy bag. “Probably. I don’t know her. Actually, knowing you, she won’t.”

LaRusso rolls his eyes up to Johnny with a glare and a tight frown.

Johnny clicks his tongue, unwrapping a Jolly Rancher with a twist of his fingers. “She didn’t run off off, at least.”

“Yeah,” LaRusso says, brows going up, a thoughtful look on his face while his mouth gets a little less pouty. “That’s true.”

“I can’t believe that kid,” Johnny continues, offering LaRusso the little box of raisins in a downturned hand, then smirking at the resulting brief excitement then immediate disappointment. “A bracelet? Who brings props for their bullshit?”

LaRusso cracks a laugh and shakes his head, brows cocking to recognize the point. He then actually opens the raisins, dumping them into his mouth with a placated hum.

Johnny lets himself think it’s a little cute, but only for a few seconds. It’s all he gets, anyway, since then the inner doors to the school behind them crash open, a pair of familiar skeletons rushing out, and Johnny briefly catches on LaRusso’s visible bewildered alarm while the kids slam out the outer set.

Miguel turns as he goes, narrowly avoiding a collision with LaRusso under the eave. “We got to go!”

“Huh?” Johnny turns, reaching out to catch Robby’s arm, stopping him before he can get out into the quad and into the lot. “Hey!”

“Miguel got in a fight and I, uh,” Robby waves his skateboard in on his arm with a vague panic in his expression, though that’s contrasted almost hysterically by the aggressive face paint and the red contacts. “I hit Brucks in the head with my skateboard.”

“Oh wow,” LaRusso says, lifting his chin, eyes sweeping up the kids, then his chin drops to stare under his brows at Johnny. “Look at these apples.”

“What does that even mean?” Johnny snaps, glancing toward the door, but no one seems to be following them.

LaRusso lifts nose and tuts, haughty. “They don’t fall far from the tree.”

“They started a losing fight and ran,” Johnny says, gesturing with a swing of his arm up the sidewalk to the door next to them. “If anyone is a tree, it’s you.”

LaRusso narrows his eyes with a tight pinch at his mouth.

“I didn’t start it,” Miguel whines, throwing his arms up and audibly frustrated, though thankfully not full-on whiny about it. “Mostly. And – and I tried to fight them myself, but there was like four of them, sensei. I’m sorry.”

Johnny puts up a hand to keep Miguel from apologizing, more, and is surprised at himself for how glad he is that the kid is just okay, after the way those jackasses were at the strip mall. It’s only been a month at the dojo, and his punches are getting good, but only the one, and he started kicks like yesterday – not everyone can be a quick learning freak like the guy next to him.

“Yeah, ‘cause you – ” Robby abruptly seems to catch on LaRusso’s daughter in her glaring purple uniform down the sidewalk, then looks to LaRusso, mouth pinching awkward around whatever he was about to say. “Yeah.”

“Wait, hey!” Johnny demands, lifting a hand and leaning a bit to point hard at Miguel. “What’d I say about that?”

Miguel makes a face, brows raising and peeking a little too insinuating at LaRusso. “What about you?”

“I’m not doing anything,” Johnny says, dropping his hand and straightening, setting his jaw a bit. “I’m just standing here.”

“Oh, yeah?” Miguel says, chin raising to match the gesture. “Me, too.”

Robby mutters something low, grabbing enough attention that Johnny catches his red eyes as they roll across the sky. A bang sounds at the doors, making them all look back, and it’s just a couple of kids dressed as what Johnny assumes are cartoon characters, but it seems enough for Robby to resume his mission to get to the car with a drop of his board to the sidewalk.

LaRusso makes a face, as he tips his head, “You know, I never rode a skateboard.”

“Me neither, but the kid loves the thing,” Johnny says, watching Robby pause only briefly next to LaRusso’s daughter, looking at her for a beat while he turns to move around onto the street. “He keeps trying to steal my only student, but Diaz is being sort of a pussy about it.”

“I scraped my arm really bad a few years ago,” Miguel says, which is a little funny considering how many times he’s gamely taken getting shoved on the ground these days.

“Johnny?” LaRusso says, brow furrowing as he tilts his head while looking around Johnny’s shoulder, down the hill beside them toward the street.

“What?” Johnny turns around and feels his heart jump up against his throat, catching a familiar lurching figure making his way toward Robby. He lopes down the walkway, ignoring LaRusso’s startled questions, and catches up just in time to hear Brad’s low call of Robby’s name just before he reaches out for him.

“Hey!” Johnny snaps, stepping hurriedly in between them, shaking away Brad’s attempt to take Robby’s shoulder and turn him. He looks past Brad and catches Shannon walking out from beside her little shitbox of a Prius, lifting his hand to point between them. “The fuck do you two think you’re doing?”

Shannon steps forward with her hands in fists at her sides. “I’m taking my son home, obviously.”

Robby stiffens at Johnny’s side, breath gradually tightening so that it sounds like it’s coming in short, discomfited bursts. Shit, his kid should not be having to deal with this crap.

“Oh yeah?” Johnny says, hands balling into fists at his sides, tightness building up at the back of his throat; he knew he shouldn’t have answered that fucking call. “You’re a little late picking him up.”

Shannon immediately exhales a pair of offended scoffs, throwing her hands out. “I thought he’d come back on his own!”

“Oh yeah, sure,” Johnny says, exhaling a bitter laugh, then briefly turning his head to raise his brows at Brad, who’s shifted to the side of him. “I bet you totally noticed, too?”

Brad just lifts his chin, mouth set in an unamused line behind his dork glasses.

Daniel clears his throat, having made his way over to meddle with Miguel on his heels. “Hey, guys, maybe you could just talk – ”

“Who are you?” Shannon demands, turning on Daniel, then seeming to come up short. She glances him up and down, frowns with a tilt of her head toward a shrugging Brad, then back to Daniel. “He looks familiar, right? Why do you look familiar?”

“Daniel LaRusso,” LaRusso says, smile sharp at the edges and not exactly friendly, looking at her, then to Brad, while his hands hang a little too loose at his sides. “Johnny’s soulmate.”

Shannon outright laughs, then covers her face, looking sheepish, which is worse – that means it wasn’t even mean, it was honest to god because she thought it was funny.

“Look, Shan,” Johnny says, doing his best and succeeding pretty well at getting Robby further behind him, closer to Miguel, who takes the hint and sort of tugs him back to the curb; his face is now officially doing that particular staring into space blank thing, which is well-known as the phase right before going full meltdown, or at least it was when he was six. “I think grabbing a kid outside his school is technically kidnapping.”

“Oh yeah?” Shannon says, head cocking while her brows climb up her forehead. “What about taking him from his home?”

Brad grunts like a fucking caveman from the other side of Johnny. “Listen to her, John.”

“Listen to wh–?”

Johnny turns around to finish only to get a damned sucker punch to the face. Holy shit, he always forgets how big Brad is – it’s like he got hit by truck. It’s not exactly the first time he’s gotten punched by the guy, either, but it is the first time sober and… It’s worse.

It’s a lot worse.

“Okay, that’s enough,” LaRusso says, getting in the middle of it, because he’s still just that kind of guy with absolutely no instincts. “Maybe pick on someone your own size.”

Johnny scoffs a wheezy, painful breath. “LaRusso – ”

“Like who?” Brad says, lifting his chin while he reaches out to shove at LaRusso. “You?”

Samantha takes a sharp breath, rising up from the sidewalk. “Dad!”

“Yep,” LaRusso says, as he slips to the side and grabs Brad’s wrist, so smooth that it’s almost dull, and unbalances him just before he kicks out in a sweep.

Brad hits the pavement like the box of rocks he is with a pained groan. He quickly rolls over and stumbles back up, to his credit, immediately attempting a real punch with some force, but it doesn’t have much focus, and LaRusso is clearly just showing off when he uses the momentum to overextend Brad’s arm with a spin and then put him back on the ground.

“Oh shit,” Miguel yelps, one hand going up and then back down behind his head. He looks over to Robby, who’s painfully still locked up tight in his head, then to Sam, who does glance back with a similar surprise.

LaRusso, though, gives a smug, know-it-all glance over his shoulder in a way that’s clearly supposed to be referring to their conversation in the hallway. He’s such a little freak.

Johnny’s in a lot of pain right now, maybe even delirious, which is his excuse for finding LaRusso in this moment so hot. It’s not his fault; it’s the fact got like a pint of blood on his shirt.

“I can’t believe you,” Shannon hisses, at Johnny, like he’s got any control over LaRusso, as she helps Brad up and holds him back from getting his ass kicked worse with a hand hovering in front of him. “Just give him back – you can’t force him to stay with you forever.”

“You serious with that? Forcing him? He barely had any fucking food two weeks ago,” Johnny snarls, taking a few steps forward and pointing a finger hard in her face awkwardly while he still holds his nose. “He was selling drugs and boosting shit with a couple of dickheads ten years older than him! He was in over his head!”

Shannon takes a sharp breath and glances over at Robby, lips trembling while they open in some wordless question.

“I haven’t been forcing him to stay here with me, Shan,” Johnny continues, wishing his nose wasn’t fucked up, because he doesn’t sound serious so much as whiny, as his voice trembles and goes nasally through the pain. “He’s not locked in a backroom. He’s at a school dance hanging out with the neighbor – he’s doing kid shit. Maybe he just likes being a kid.”

“You still shouldn’t have taken him,” Shannon says, voice getting shrill, and Brad looks over to her, shuffling sideways in some apparent half-hearted attempt to console her. “I have custody – you don’t even have visitation!”

“If he wants to go back with you, he can, alright?” Johnny says, and looks anxiously over to Robby, forcing himself to continue, despite tight hurt winding up under his sternum. “I don’t want you to, but…You’re old enough to decide, when we’re both kind of shitty options.” He swallows hard when Robby’s placid face cracks, just a little, and forces his focus back to Shannon before he can do anything dumb like reach out and just get blood all over the costume. “If you want to go to fucking court about it, Shan, we can – he can do that whole choose the parent shit. But he needs to be with a family, even if it’s crappy.”

Shannon looks to Robby, face crumpling in that almost-cry way. It makes Brad get tense again, glowering and clearly ready to go for another punch, but the stupid fuck is in front of him and Johnny almost hopes he moves.

Instead, it’s Robby who slowly steps past Johnny toward Shannon, looking at her a few seconds, then wraps his arms around her while whispering something low and unintelligible in her ear. She hugs him back tightly, a brief, wrenching sob breaking the tense quiet of the street.   

Johnny is glad he got the punch in the nose, so if he does anything dumb if Robby gets in the Prius, then it’s just the pain. He forces himself to keep looking forward, though his eyes drift a little down the street away from the direct line of Robby and Shannon.

“Okay, baby,” Shannon says, wetly, as Robby slowly steps back and away, reaching out to rub up and down his arms. “You can always come back, okay?”

Johnny feels tension bleed out of his shoulders, dropping them with a slow, silent exhale. He’s probably more relieved than he should feel, but even though Robby hadn’t tried going back or running away over the last couple weeks, Johnny hasn’t really been sure it wasn’t just because he didn’t have anywhere else. If Johnny’s mom were here, telling him he could come home with her, even if she’d left him alone to get wasted for a couple weeks with Sid, he’d have agreed in a hot second.

“Make sure to eat better than processed meat,” Shannon says, leaning in for another kiss of Robby’s cheek, then letting go of his hands with a wan smile. “I know your dad.”

LaRusso mutters something disparaging under his breath, but only barely, just low enough to be unintelligible.

“Hey,” Johnny croaks, then regrets it when the taste of iron floods across onto his tongue. “’s good protein.”

LaRusso rolls his eyes, eyeing Johnny while he gestures for all the kids to get back, as Shannon and Brad get into their car. “I think it has less protein than peanut butter.”

“That’s good too,” Johnny says, groaning a bit and leaning against the Audi; he pulls his hand back, grimacing at the mess across his front and tilting his head down to let the trickling blood just go. “Both together.”

LaRusso makes a choking noise, expression twisting in disgust when Johnny peeks up to catch it.

Johnny snorts a laugh before he really thinks about it, wincing at the spiking pain. “Ow, shit.”

“Wow,” Miguel says, inhaling a deep breath, stretching with his hands on his hips and looking from Robby to Sam, who’s been silently gawking, then turns with a squeak of his sneakers to Johnny. “I can’t believe he punched you, Sensei.”

“I can,” Robby mutters, picking up his skateboard from the ground and hugging it to his chest with a set of his forehead against the deck. He takes a deep, telling breath, then leans against the car, conspicuously close to Johnny.

LaRusso grunts quietly and turns toward Johnny, touching him, a little startlingly, on the jaw to get him to lift his chin. He hisses under his breath at whatever he sees, which is probably just a lot of blood and swelling in Johnny’s experience.

“Crap,” Miguel says, laughing again, more nervous, and looking across the street to the milling crowd of students pretending not to have been watching them for the last excruciating ten minutes. “It’s probably on TikTok.”

Robby grumbles low under his breath, knocking his head against the deck a few times.

“Do you need to go to the Urgent Care?” LaRusso asks, turning Johnny’s head the other way, eyes narrowing a little and thumb distracting while it strokes across the length of his jaw. “I don’t think it’s broken.”

Johnny shakes his head slightly. “I’m good, man, it’s not the first time – obviously.”

LaRusso huffs and drops his hand. “Hey, I think I’ve got an icepack,” he says, clapping Johnny on the shoulder, then bouncing up and trotting off, presumably to his car.

“I’ve never seen my dad fight like that,” Sam says, wandering over to look at Johnny with a vaguely judgmental tilt of her head.

“You’ve seen him fight people?” Johnny asks, wondering if LaRusso’s gotten into it at the country club; he seems like the type to get upset about an out-of-place olive.

“Well,” Sam pauses, lips pressing flat together, then she glances down toward where LaRusso had run off. “No.”

Johnny rolls his eyes, exhaling a deep breath out his mouth rather than risking another painful laugh.

“I didn’t recognize you, at first,” Sam asks, brow furrowing a little while her mouth pinches in thought, clearly studying his face a little closer; it’s unclear if she’s referring to in the classroom or after the Firebird. “He couldn’t find a picture that wasn’t from the Eighties.”

“Oh yeah, Sensei doesn’t have any social media,” Miguel interjects, sensing some kind of opportunity, shuffling closer as he exhales the tense laugh of a nerd barely managing to talk to the girl he likes for the first time. “Or like, Internet. He had to tell us about your dad with a billboard.”

Sam blinks at Miguel a pair of seconds, then an awkward smile crawls across her face and she ducks her head with a huff. “Sorry.”

“No, no,” Miguel says, in a rush, then gestures out toward the school building. “Like, Sensei just put a bunch of flyers with him all over the school, you know? I get it.”

Sam cracks a laugh. “What?”

Johnny narrows an eye, then grudgingly decides to leave them to it, shifting his focus toward Robby. He’s unsure if he should try to touch him, so shuffles a little closer and knocks his knuckles on the body panel next to Robby’s hip. “You good?”

Robby takes a deep, slightly shaky breath and shrugs, continuing to stare at the pavement. He doesn’t flinch when Johnny hesitantly grasps him around the shoulder, just leans a little into it, and Johnny has to swallow hard at the sharp rise of grateful emotion in his chest.

“Hey, here.” LaRusso quietly interjects, with a fancy damned ice pack in his hands with little frozen gel beads. “Are you sure it’s not broken?”

“Yeah,” Johnny says, wincing as LaRusso presses it up to the side of his nose – shit, he’s going to have a real pair of black eyes the next couple days.

LaRusso holds the pack in place even when Johnny tries to take it, staring hard at something in Johnny’s face, though it doesn’t seem to be his nose.

“LaRusso?” Johnny says, carefully, glancing in and out of LaRusso’s eyes and trying hard not to get caught at it.

“Sorry, hah,” LaRusso says, letting go of the pack, taking a half-step back and rubbing at the back of his neck. “That was… really fun, actually. I haven’t fought someone in forever.”

Robby looks up and stares hard at Johnny over LaRusso’s shoulder, slightly menacing with his red eyes and clearly trying to say something with them, but Johnny is not hearing it. It’s good he’s feeling better, but he can keep that crap to himself.

“We should do that, again,” LaRusso says, laughing a little and head tipping against the hand he’s got on his neck. “Maybe just in your dojo, though. Not an actual fight.”

Johnny blinks and feels his face flush; no, absolutely not. “Yeah, sure.”

Fuck.

Hate. It’s hate.

If it’s not hate, then Daniel LaRusso’s soulmate beat on him and destroyed his knee for no fucking reason. It wasn’t just some bully, it wasn’t just Johnny, it was the guy who who was supposed to… to care about Daniel hurting him over his ego and a girl he didn’t even want anymore.

He thinks about what LaRusso had said: how the year would’ve been that much different. He’s not so sure — he might’ve even been worse. He can’t think about their TiMERs going off on the beach in fucking firelight, LaRusso lit up from the back and vengeful just because Johnny threw a radio. It’s just too fucking much. He’s pretty sure LaRusso would still have punched him, so he’d probably still have… slugged him, kicked him in the sand.

He’d probably be in just the same place he is now, anyway, laying on the floor because it’s cooler and mostly even sober, hating the dumbass, if needful budgetary choice the last couple weeks to ration his beer to a case a week. It’s so expensive getting real food.

He winces at a sharp tap at his ribs, opening his eyes with a squint.

Robby stands over him, a plastic tupperware in one hand. “Miguel’s Yaya made empanadas.”

Johnny blinks, bleary, and glances over to the VCR – 7:14AM, which he figures must be way after school. “You been over there?”

Robby sighs heavy and pointedly waves the container.

Johnny hears his phone buzz, a few inches from his head. He doesn’t try to grab it; he’s been ignoring it as much as anything else today.

Robby rolls his eyes, then sinks to the floor next to Johnny to settle against the couch. He reaches out and picks up the phone, flipping it open. “An unknown number says: halloween was fun should try it again with less – oh, this is Daniel?” He taps the arrows to scroll, leaning in with a squint at the screen. “‘The body panels finally came in. We tried to color match but I think we’ll need to repaint the whole thing’ then there’s this… oh, it’s an emoji box? ‘I was thinking powder blue’ then another box ‘maybe the interior’ okay, another two boxes ‘I think black and red leather would look – ’ and… another box. You need a new phone. You’re missing half of what he says.”

“Yeah, no,” Johnny says, turning his head and staring at the crack in the ceiling next to the fan. He regrets giving his number, at all; he’d been duped by smiles and the punch to the face currently making him look like a raccoon. “I’m not getting spied on so Daniel LaRusso can send me smile faces.”

“He uses more emoji than Miguel,” Robby mutters, tapping the scroll again with a twisting frown. “And I think he’s trying to sugar you.”

“Do I even want to know what that means?”

Robby rolls his eyes, throwing the phone back at Johnny. “He wants to be a sugar daddy. Like your stepdad?”

“Ugh,” Johnny sighs, tempted to roll over and suffocate himself in his gross-ass carpet.

“Maybe think about it,” Robby says, clicking his tongue a few times and making a show of looking around the apartment. “This place sucks.”

Johnny clenches his jaw. “Yeah, well. That dick was my mom’s soulmate, too,” he says, quietly, taking a deep breath, then exhaling slow through his mouth. “Maybe she should’ve got a choice.”

Robby shrugs and pops open the empanada container. “How do you even know she wouldn’t have married him, anyway, if they’d met?”

Johnny has to admit he doesn’t – that sometimes he’s not sure she was even telling the truth about Sid being her soulmate and how he thinks the money was just as much a motivator, in the end. He just wishes she would’ve made a different one.

“He wouldn’t have…” Johnny starts, after a few seconds of silence, thinking about LaRusso’s hot wife and how well they get along; their two kids, big-ass company, and how they did that all knowing they’d split up. It doesn’t make any fucking sense. “He wouldn’t have got a divorce.”

Robby shoves an empanada in his face that was definitely for Johnny. “You sure?”

Johnny scoffs and closes his eyes against ceiling, again, trying hard to control the twitch of feeling in his face. “Uh, yeah. I don’t know if I told you this, but I was… I wasn’t great in high school. I was kind of a shithead – a degenerate.”

“Like how?”

Johnny thinks about LaRusso glaring up at the Cobra Kai logo before he’d changed the name, anger about it drawing-out lines in his face. “Worse to him than Kyler is with Miguel. And he didn’t have anyone to hit me in the face with a skateboard for him.”

Robby is quiet for a beat. “Oh.”

“You get it, then?” Johnny says, and opens his eyes, peeking over at Robby, “Why it’s got to be hate?”

Robby takes a breath through his nose, lips rolling together into a tight, pale line. “He doesn’t act like he hates you.”

“No, that’s just what he’s like,” Johnny says, looking away from Robby to the crack in the ceiling, then back with a pointed, open-mouthed grit of his teeth. “He’s one of those jackasses that smile when they’re mad.”

“Whatever.” Robby offers a slightly too careless shrug. “So maybe I want a loaded stepdad, too – stop being a selfish loser.”

Johnny rolls his eyes, marveling a bit at how the more often Robby calls him that, the less meaningful it sounds – is that some kind of therapy thing? “Brad not enough?”

Robby is quiet a few beats. “Brad’s not rich, just a dick.”

“Yeah, well,” Johnny says, flapping a hand out toward the ceiling, then letting it fall back to his chest. “So is LaRusso.”

“Not the same,” Robby argues, quick and a bit severe.

“Yeah, alright,” Johnny allows, because LaRusso does have a freakish way of charming anyone who isn’t destined to hate him. “He’s a dick to me.”

Robby shakes his head and silently, slowly finishes off Johnny’s dinner while staring across the room. “You know... Sam was telling me he’s been different the last few weeks – talking about karate and stuff, again, and some old car. Like because of you, she thinks? He really doesn’t hate you.”

Johnny lowers his voice trying to sound scornful. “Jesus, are you making friends with his kid?”

Robby sneers back, unaffected by Johnny’s attempt to scold.

“How’s that going, anyway,” Johnny asks, dropping the pretense in favor of an attempt to get totally away from the subject. “School. You get in trouble for Halloween?”

Robby rolls his eyes, gesturing around himself with the tupperware, which is… Okay, a point. “Kyler didn’t tell anyone important, I guess,” he says, running a hand through his hair, then just shaking it back into his face. “So the highlight of today was watching Miguel psych himself at lunch and do shit all, then freeze up when Sam came over to us.”

“Fucking LaRussos,” Johnny says, rolling his eyes, then glancing up with a furrowed brow. “Why she do that, anyway?”

Robby tilts his head with a significant glance down. “Because I’m like her stepbrother, she said, we should be friends.”

“Oh, Christ,” Johnny groans, covering his face with his arms, blocking out the blatant suggestion in Robby’s expression. “Remind her that your dad beat up her boyfriend.”

“She’s thinking about dumping him, apparently,” Robby says, blithely, “We told her why you beat him up.”

“Fucking LaRussos.”

“Hey, sensei!” Miguel says, slipping in the front door, then coming to a stop at the sofa. “Are you okay?”

“Peachy,” Johnny grumbles, peeking through his arms with a scowl. “Robby was telling me about school.”

“Oh, everyone is talking about what happened,” Miguel says, wincing with a long, extended glance toward the window, like the paps are going to be out there for Lawrence/Keene family bullshit.

Johnny grimaces with a brief clench of his teeth. “Still?”

“It was like two days ago, Sensei,” Miguel says, regretful, as if he’d had anything to do with it. He holds out another Tupperware, as if it’s consolation. “Chocoflan?”

“Shit, yeah,” Johnny says, exhaling hard and sitting up, leaning against the back of the couch next to Robby. He takes the container, eager, and is not disappointed by what he finds inside. “This is the best thing ever invented.” He tips the cake toward Robby, who peers into the container. “Worked with a guy called Jorge for a year or two in the nineties and his mom made me one every week.”

Robby looks bewildered, glancing to an equally bemused Miguel. “Why?”

“Hell if I know,” Johnny says, choosing to spare his kid and his student the gritty tales of lonely widows and bored young men with decades left on their TiMERs. “Nice lady.”

Chapter Text

The shitty argument with Shannon in front of the school has the unintended effect of making Johnny a little famous at WVHS for the second time in his life. He doesn’t really get it, or actually see the phone videos, but knows they had to have made him look like some pussy with feelings, though Miguel insists somehow that’s a good thing. He, repeat, doesn’t fucking get it, and Robby seems to hate it, but somehow it results in a couple kids actually showing up at his dojo.

Including a girl.

Johnny doesn’t really get the girl, either, but apparently saying so is bad and he gets a bunch of ugly faces from Miguel and videos shoved in his face by Robby of tiny chicks flipping dudes like they weigh nothing. He’s in no way reminded of another petite jerk-off who this girl could probably actually squish like a damned bug, but he lets her in, lets her try out against Miguel. She does better than the guys, at that; especially, the one who’s built more like an inflatable tube-man than an actual human being, who just sorta… shrieks.

Honestly, at the end of the day, Johnny wishes a little that it’d just been Aisha who showed up; she’s definitely some kind of a ringer. He assumes it must be because of her defensive lineman physicality finally syncing up to that unpredictable rage of a chick. If American Gladiators comes around again, which it fucking better, she’ll be some kind of shoo-in. The other friends… They all look like they’re from Revenge of the Nerds, whiny as shit, although the quieter one attached to the tube-man… is starting to get a little weird. It’s a weird that involves speaking up and punching shit really hard, so Johnny figures it’ll work itself out at the end.

He barks insults at them a little, or maybe it’s a lot; he knows it’s not enough that Robby tattles to Bobby, anyway, so he’s probably found some kind of drawn line. A couple of the wimpier ones drop out the first week, he gets called a loser by Robby twice, a sad face from Miguel, but most of the kids seem to get used to it, like Miguel did, so he figures he must be doing pretty okay.

He does wish the super tiny one, who is about 25% of an Aisha, would stop talking to Robby about getting some kind of a python. He does not want an actual snake anywhere near his person.

LaRusso thinks that part is the most funny, which he tells Johnny over the hood of the disconcertingly restored Firebird.

Johnny hadn’t even been planning on telling LaRusso anything, it’s none of his fucking business, but he saw the car, and he saw the classic Firebird embroidered into new black leather seats, and the shiny red paint sparkling across every dingless panel, and –

He just needs to talk about anything at all, except how he’s not going to be able to pay for his own damned car.

“Maybe you should,” LaRusso says, about the snake, a taunting, if friendly-enough grin across his face. “A little mascot. I’m pretty sure corn snakes are red; my great aunt in Florida used to talk about them.”

Johnny curls his nose in distaste, recalling a fuzzy memory of a yard, something slinking though rocks, and his mom flipping out while repeating some rhyme about black and yellow. She didn’t flip out often, so it had been pretty memorable.

LaRusso snorts quietly, leaning a little to the side and nudging his hip into the Firebird.

“So,” Johnny takes a forceful breath, reaching back, like he’s going for his wallet, as if the few dollars in cash and four maxed out cards are going to make a difference. “How you want me to pay for this – you take credit?”

“Uh,” LaRusso intones, looking down at the car, then back up, staring for a solid pair of beats at Johnny’s face. “Oh. You know, you don’t actually –” His expression curls a little, then he exhales a weedy huff. “An invoice will come in the mail. You can choose how to pay, then.”

“Is there a payment thing?” Johnny asks, forcing his voice a little gruff, refusing to acknowledge the humiliated heat crawling up across his neck. “Like a – a new car?”

“Oh, yeah,” LaRusso says, tugging a familiar key out of his pocket and holding it out, and somehow the shadowed ridge of the TiMER in his sleeve is still a shock. “When you get the invoice. It’ll uh, have it all on there.”

Johnny takes the key and pulls the rest of his ring from his jeans, carefully winding the Firebird key back where it belongs. His eyes briefly catch on his own aging, zeroed TiMER, and he clears his throat, dropping his hand and looking back to LaRusso’s face. “Man, she looks great.”

“Yeah,” LaRusso says, taking a step back while sliding the tips of his fingers across the hood before pulling his hand back to slip in his pocket. “Yeah. Amazing car.”

Johnny wets and presses his lips together, turning his keys in his hand, and catches LaRusso’s eye. “So what if we – ”  He catches the receptionist from the dealership, walking up behind LaRusso. “Uh.”

“Daniel,” the receptionist says, shooting Johnny a bright smile, like she recognizes him, then turning back to Daniel with a gesture toward the building. “Excuse me, Mr Lemieux from yesterday is back?”

“Oh,” Daniel says, glancing to the main building then, teeth dragging across his lip, then looks back to Johnny with a bizarre sort of reluctance. “Shit, Johnny, I –”

“Go ahead, I got the key,” Johnny says, offering a weak shrug and leaning back to settle on his heels.

LaRusso reaches out before he turns around, unexpectedly grabbing at Johnny’s arm seemingly just to squeeze. “Thanks.” He grins again, letting go and speaking over his shoulder. “I didn’t even get you your bonsai.”

“Yeah? Good,” Johnny says, pointedly turning away with a scoff to get into the car. He pulls the handle through the open window and slips into the seat, stiff and unfamiliar, and realizes he’s not going to have to deal with that hard edge from the worn out cushion digging in his thigh anymore, which is pretty nice. He reaches out to the radio to find it’s… not his? It’s definitely not new new, the cassette player is right there, but it is some kind of new.

He grunts and turns the key, brows raising and a smirk growing across his face when the engine roars to life without so much as a hitch. He wonders what all was done to it, the way it looks and sounds, but –

He glances to the passenger seat, then shifts the car into gear while shaking off the thought. It doesn’t matter as long as it runs, right?

Johnny stares up at the next red light, exhaling hard, and lets himself rub at the edge of the TiMER with the opposite hand he holds the wheel. He realizes, belatedly, he kind of has no more reason to talk to LaRusso, not any that’s not out of his control. He’s got his car back, LaRusso has his, and… That’s the end of it.

He glances to his phone, back in its usual place in the open ash tray, and forces himself to stop worrying at the TiMER. It’s not like it matters; LaRusso’s not that kind of soulmate.

He parks the Firebird in front of the dojo, and growls a little to himself for almost forgetting to turn the key. He’s got decades of using a damned key, in this very car, yet barely over a month of having to press a button is all it takes to throw him off his actual normal.

“He take it back, then?” Lynn cackles, mocking from her cardboard throne, now set up right in front of him at the plastic cigarette store. “Never trust a man, karate boy.”

“Fuck off!” Johnny snarls, surprising himself and her, too, judging by the way she actually shuts up with a nervy hand twitching near her mouth. He grits his teeth for a beat, then rubs a hand across the back of his neck, shamed by the distress plain in her face; he mutters a weak: “Sorry, Lynn.”

Lynn is quiet, eyes tracking him careful, until the door is already closing at his back. “It’s okay.”

Johnny throws his phone and his keys on his desk, glancing to the clock, and realizes he probably has an hour or so before the kids get out. He could probably clear out some of that paperwork he needs for the new students, though… he has been meaning to crack open the new Black Belt magazine still wrapped up.

The magazine ends up taking a while longer than expected to catch up on, and before he knows it the bell up front is going off. He frowns at the clock, then looks down at the phone at the edge of the desk; LaRusso’s usually bugging him about something, around now, mostly about the car but sometimes just a random complaint, but he’s got nothing since he left the dealership.

It’s like Johnny thought, then: no more reason for them to talk. He should be… relieved.

Yeah.

“Your car’s back!” Miguel greets brightly, throwing open the door to the office with a big smile. “It looks totally brand new – I didn’t know he was going to do seats and stuff on the whole thing.”

Johnny looks up and then back down to the magazine, turning to the next page, seeing a cheeky-looking white brunet in a polo ad, so turning it again, for no particular reason. “It’s not like he did any of it himself.”

“Oh true, yeah,” Miguel says, mood dimming, and he falls awkwardly quiet, tapping his hand in an uneven pattern against his leg.

Johnny exhales a slow breath, pretending to read a blurb on the controversy of colored gis.

“You know,” Miguel says, coughing and taking a step closer to the desk. “I’ve been reading a lot with the TiMERs, because my mom’s going to get me one, and nothing is saying the hate thing is real, but some do say it could be you’re meant to just be really important to each other for a brief time? And maybe it’s just that already happened.”

Johnny feels a swoop in his gut, looking from the magazine down at his silent phone with a shift of his jaw.

Miguel clicks his tongue, vacillating closer and then further away from the desk on the balls of his feet.

“Do you think it’s that?” Johnny asks, looking up, glossy pages crumpling in his hands.

“No. Honestly, Sensei,” Miguel says, eyes rolling, then he gestures behind him out of the office at the main dojo. “But Aisha is here? She said you said something about strength training?”

Johnny slaps the magazine closed with a harsh exhale. “Where’s Robby?”

“He’s out there, too. They’re complaining about how Yasmine makes fun of everyone.”

“The Internet sucks,” Johnny says, shaking his head, then catches late on the insinuation and feels a snarl pull at his face. “Wait, is she making fun of Robby?”

“Uhhh,” Miguel intones, mouth pressing into a flat, uncertain line, eyes sweeping to the side to drop toward the door.

Johnny takes a sharp breath, opening and closing a hand in front of him. “How.” 

“Uh…” Miguel trails off, crossing his arms and twisting back and forth with an awkward sigh. “It’s mostly just calling him like white trash, or like a lot of stuff about you and his mom… and how he hit Brucks in the face, so he’s crazy. But I think what started it was uh, Moon called him pretty?”

Johnny blinks slowly, then raises his brows and lifts a hand against the desktop in question. “So?”

“Well, he’s… You know,” Miguel pauses, shoulders hunching forward with a particular awkwardness to the curve of his back. “He’s too poor to be pretty, supposedly? And Moon is her soulmate? It’s just the friend kind, I guess, but – ”

“Jesus Christ,” Johnny interrupts, lifting a hand to press to his forehead for a brief moment, inhaling slowly, “If she’s that pissed, it’s probably not the friend kind.”

“Well, maybe not, but – ” Miguel goes quiet, then tilts his head while he raises an eyebrow.

“No,” Johnny snaps, standing up and swiping up his phone from the desk while the pointing at hard. “Shut your brain off, you don’t need it.”

Miguel raises his other eyebrow. “Didn’t you meet Mr LaRusso fighting about a girl?”

“Just get out there,” Johnny snaps, pointing, quashing an impulse to force Miguel to sit down so he can explain that: no, it was way more than just Ali and is a good chunk of why LaRusso hates him, actually, so Johnny knows what he’s talking about and doesn’t need the shitty commentary. “Get the pads. I’m going to get them to do hits.”

Miguel is thankfully easily distracted, looking over his shoulder, then back to Johnny with a distinctly earnest slant. “Them? Did Robby say he’ll start doing karate?”

“No,” Johnny says bluntly, straightening his gi with a short shake of his head; he can’t believe some rich bitch is making fun of his kid. “But sounds like he needs to hit something.”

The most annoying part of Robby not doing karate is that Johnny’s pretty sure he’s picking stuff up, or Miguel’s using him to practice, or something. He can’t prove it, but Robby’s form is way to comfortable and aligned punching the dummy after the fifteen minutes Johnny takes convincing him to imagine that it’s a blonde; he’s pretty sure Robby’s imagining the bully chick, but he doesn’t exactly ask.

The momentum that might get Robby to actually admit he likes it is ruined, though, when some kind of scream sounding suspiciously like Ozzie comes out of Aisha’s bag. She dives for it, everyone staring, and looks properly shamed when Johnny points hard at her.

“What’d we say about phones, Ms Robinson?”

“But it’s Mr LaRusso,” Aisha says, staring at the screen, still buzzing in her hand, and she slides her thumb across the screen while putting it to her ear. “Hello?”

LaRusso’s rasp is distinct on the other end in the quiet dojo, though it’s not quite comprehensible.

“I’m, um…” Aisha looks awkwardly up at Johnny, plainly bemused, then ducks her head with a small frown. “In a karate class right now?”

LaRusso says something, sounding distinctly pleased with a brief crack of a laugh that makes it across the room.

“Uh, yeah,” Aisha says, looking bemused while she walks back over the mats. She stands in front of Johnny and holds out what is supposedly some kind of phone. “…It’s for you, Sensei.”

Johnny clears his throat awkwardly, lifting the brick to his ear. “Hello?”

He notices the kids have gone almost dead silent now, collectively shuffled closer, all definitely eagerly listening for LaRusso’s tiny voice.

“Hey, Johnny,” LaRusso says, his voice a little droll, a little something else, unreadable through the tinny speaker. “Did you run out of minutes, or something?”

…Oh.

“Yeah, maybe,” Johnny says, feeling a little stupid, then clearing his throat and asking more pressing question: “How’d you get Robinson’s number?”

“Aisha’s actually Sam’s friend,” LaRusso says, clicking his tongue a few times and now definitely smug. “Took a guess the student you mentioned was her.”

Aisha slides her eyes sideways with a face like that maybe isn’t so true; huh.

Johnny affects his own haughty tone. “Whatever. You must really be impatient to get a hold of me, huh?”

LaRusso just scoffs, the sound both exaggerated and expected. “Look, I was wondering if you were open to paying me back early? A little unconventionally.”

Johnny takes a step back just as the kids all move forward, swiping out with his other hand for them to back off.

“I’ve got a country club thing to go to tonight and Amanda’s busy with – ” LaRusso pauses, as a pitchy voice pops up in the background, clearly disagreeing with him. “Okay, she says she doesn’t have to go anymore. And I know you’re good at playing nice –”

Johnny hasn’t played nice at almost anything in thirty years; especially, not for country club people.

“That’s bullshit, actually,” LaRusso amends, echoing Johnny’s thoughts with a brief huff of what could be a laugh. “The only time I saw you there, you apparently got smacked.”

Johnny catches the raised eyebrows of Miguel, the bemused frown with Aisha, but rolls his eyes practically in tandem with Robby.  “What’re you getting at?”

“Fine.” LaRusso exhales a bitchy scoff, making it easy to imagine his expression on the other end of the phone. “So maybe I just… I uh, I want to be able to leave early and blame you?”

Johnny raises his brows a little, staring at the mats, then rolls his eyes while dropping the phone his chest. He leans over toward Robby, lowering his voice, “You good to go to Diaz’ place?”

“Uh.” Robby blinks back, for some reason startled. “Yeah?”

Johnny pulls the phone back up to his ear. “Sure,” he says, reaching up and scratching at that patch of stubble he can never seem to get. “Guess I’m free.”

“Oh, and we need to take your car,” LaRusso says, firmly, weirdly insistent, then exhaling a deep breath into the speaker. “You can pick me up at the dealership, if you want – I should be done about 7.”

“Uh,” Johnny intones, disliking the way Miguel’s face is lighting up like a goddamn Christmas tree.

“Wait! One more thing,” LaRusso says, voice raising, then falling, as clicking goes on in the background. “What do you use… Tracfone?”

“Yes,” Miguel says, leans forward quick into the phone, before Johnny has a chance to back off. “Thank you, Mr LaRusso!”

“Quiet!” Johnny snarls, turning to shoulder Miguel away while taking another step away.

“Alright, see you in a bit,” LaRusso says, brightly, clearly not taking a hint, but he never could. “Bye, Johnny.”

“Wait, don’t get me a – ” Johnny sputters slightly, as the phone goes dead, then turns back around with a low growl. “Damn it, Diaz,” He snaps, while he throws the phone toward Aisha. “I can buy my own shit.”

“Your phone has minutes, sensei?” Aisha asks, catching the phone easily in both hands, then peering at the screen.

“$15 bucks a card,” Johnny says, running a hand through his hair and scratching into his scalp. “The plans are rip-offs.”

“And if one of us is in trouble,” Robby says, flat, arms crossing over his chest, “He won’t know until we’re dead.”

Johnny scowls while walking over to said phone and opening it to confirm the stupid little message. “It used to be fine.”

“Before you talked to people,” Robby says, expression shifting until there’s something tense in his face that’s actually serious. “Mom would probably put you on her plan, if you asked.”

“No,” Johnny says, because Shannon has tried to bring it up recently in their tense attempts to actually talk to together, and he’s hung up on her twice already about it; hah, talk about actual wasted minutes.

Robby narrows his eyes. “I could switch out the SIM and you wouldn’t even notice.”

Johnny sneers back with a low scoff. “I would.”

Miguel hums dubiously, one eye narrowing and clearly taking Robby’s side. Traitor.

Like, so what if Johnny doesn’t have a solitary clue what Robby means by sim? He doesn’t think there’s much they could do to his phone that he couldn’t notice it; it weighs nothing and is the size of a post-it.

“How do you know Mr LaRusso?” Aisha asks, wandering over to the other side of the mats, back to her bag, and the momentum of the workout is officially lost. “Aside for um –” She glances to Robby, “Karate.”

“Daniel’s his soulmate,” Robby says, a quirk at the corner of his mouth that is almost a smile, which is just… No. It’s so irritating that making Brad look like an idiot won over Robby for LaRusso, but it’s never done Johnny any favors.

“Stop calling him that,” Johnny says, glancing over and mouth twisting with a sneer. “Sounds weird: Daniel.”

Oh yeah, no; he doesn’t like that at all.

“He told me to,” Robby says, blandly, probably just going to find reasons to say it more now Johnny tried to tell him not to do it.

“Oh, I… I always forget Sam’s parents aren’t soulmates,” Aisha says, belatedly, wandering back over from her bag and smiling a little while putting her glasses back on with a blink. “He’s nice?”

“He is not,” Johnny argues, ignoring a small, painful pinch behind his sternum and the snide intrusive voice at the back of his head wondering if LaRusso might forget, too, as if that matters any to him. “You just heard him conning me into going to the country club.”

“I can’t believe you’re going on a date,” Miguel says, leaning forward on his feet with visible excitement, looking half a second from clutching in front of his chest like a girl.

Johnny scoffs hard, raising a hand between them to push that shit away. “It is not a date.”

Johnny reaches up and runs his fingers through his damp hair, glancing back and forth across his closet. He reaches in, slowly, taking out a red button-up from the back that he hasn’t worn since around Robby was born. It’s something that he can imagine his mother quietly scolding would be too flashy for the country club, instead insisting he wear something nice and bland; he could save the red for his karate friends.

He snorts a little while tugging it on over his shoulders, refusing to be relieved when it buttons up just fine over his middle. He peeks quickly into the bathroom, after tugging on a pair of nearly-as-old black jeans, to check the fit still looks as good as it feels.

Not that it’s a date.

Johnny pulls up to LaRusso Auto with a glance across the front, but there’s only a couple with some weedy-looking salesman around an SUV. He peeks down at the radio in the car to see 6:35 blinking green back at him, and he’s pretty sure this one is actually right, considering someone else set it. He reaches for his phone, then pauses, instead rubbing at the back of his neck. “Shit.”

He slips inside the dealership with a vague sense of discomfort, swallowing hard, and while the bright smile and a point down the hall from the receptionist is unnecessary, it’s maybe helpful. He finds LaRusso in front of his desk with his back to the door, bent over one of those touchscreen computers. He’s got his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and Johnny finds his eyes drawn to how his arm flexes with every tap at the screen.

He clears his throat after a few mesmerized seconds, bumping his shoulder into the door jamb while forcing his eyes to roll up toward the ceiling. 

“Oh, Johnny,” LaRusso says, startling and turning around, then his eyes markedly drift up Johnny from the floor upward, as a grin slowly grows across his face. “Hey.”

Johnny drags his teeth across his lip, refusing to feel any gratification while he smooths a hand out across the front of his faultless choice in shirt. “You, uh… ready?”

“Yeah, yeah,” LaRusso says, dropping the computer to the desk and reaching for his jacket on the chair, though he doesn’t put it on, instead pulling up a sleeve to peer down at his watch while he turns for the door. “Lost track of time, I guess.”

“Little early,” Johnny admits, quietly, stepping backward to let LaRusso out of his office.

“Oh,” LaRusso intones, blinking down at his wrist a beat, then he turns back at Johnny with a long look and a short huff. “Okay.”

Johnny rolls his eyes forward, walking back out to the front ahead of LaRusso and wondering why he would read anything into that; he just left a little early, so what? It’s not like he’s happy to – to go to the country club, and he has some fucking suspicion neither is LaRusso.

He slips into the car and watches LaRusso throw his jacket into the backseat, then stares a little when LaRusso begins to unknot his tie, and feels his eyes widen when it gets thrown in the back with the jacket. He glances briefly over his shoulder, already knowing he’s going to forget to remind LaRusso about it and have to answer a bunch of dumb questions from the kids.

He coughs quietly, once LaRusso has settled, something building at the back of his throat at the sight of him stretching out in his passenger seat. “So, why were you so bitchy about me picking you up?”

“Because we hadn’t gone over your car,” LaRusso says, voice pitching and gesturing across the interior with an expression like this is some great offense. “Freakin’ hockey player showed up.”

Johnny rolls his eyes while he shifts it into gear and pulls out, pretty sure he’s doing an okay job pretending he hadn’t cared much either way.

LaRusso shifts around in his seat and points at the radio. “First thing – I don’t know if you noticed it was new, but got that out of a Bonneville. Yours had a STP tape stuck in it from 1994.”

“It got stuck in there like 2004,” Johnny says, remembering he had been pretty damned annoyed when it happened, but Purple wasn’t the worst tape to listen to forever. “You better have fucking kept it.”

LaRusso leans forward and pops open the glove box, reaching in and pulling out the black tape to wag before sticking it back in. “The speakers are all modern, though, but I figure that’s okay since you can’t see them – it was fun trying to fit those, by the way; I had to leave the garage for like an hour to cool off after.”

Johnny blinks and looks over with a bemused grunt – huh, did LaRusso just imply he did any of this?

“I had to special order this – took a month,” LaRusso says, reaching out and running a hand over the dash in front of him, which Johnny hadn’t even noticed was replaced, but is definitely lacking a gnarly big scar. “I gotta ask how the hell you cracked it?”

“I think… I had something in the seat for work?” Johnny scratches at the back of his neck. “I mostly just remember getting pissed about it.”

LaRusso exhales a low snort. “Okay, uh, what else is… Seats.” He reaches out and taps at the back of Johnny’s head, inexplicably, “I couldn’t resist sending them out to the embroider – look great, right? And not too flashy.” He goes quiet a beat, then tuts, “Though bet you wouldn’t have minded if the whole interior came back red.”

Johnny shrugs and looks pointedly down at his shirt, plucking at a button. “Probably not.”

 “And that’s… pretty much it, in here,” LaRusso says, clicking his tongue a bit under his breath, then he taps at the dash in front of him. “And there’s a bunch of stuff in the engine and suspension – can I take a guess it was throwing belts?”

Johnny rolls his eyes and wonders how the hell LaRusso could even tell that looking, but doesn’t want to admit he doesn’t know. “You work on a lot of the cars at your dealership?”

“God no,” LaRusso says, hand dropping back to his lap and out of sight. “But it’s how I started out – Mr Miyagi made me put my Ford back together after high school, then I kind of… did that for a while, after the bonsais fell through. Then I kinda got stuck in sales after talking to too many people.”

Johnny smirks a little and glances sideways, lifting a brow. “Bonsais?”

“The little trees, yeah,” Daniel laughs, but it gets weak and dies almost unsettlingly quick. “I uh, I tried selling those before the cars, believe it or not, but uh…” He glances at Johnny for a weird beat, shoulders visibly hunching a little, then back toward the window. “Easier to make a living in cars.”

“Don’t have to grow them, for sure,” Johnny says, scratching at his brow with a deep breath, reminding himself the doesn’t care about LaRusso’s weird looks. He gestures ahead of them, as the country club comes into view with endless green already spread out to the left of them. “Is the parking lot the same?”

LaRusso answers initially with a low, muttering grumble, then makes a dismissive wave toward the lot. “You can get valet, if you want. I don’t think much of this place has changed since the last time you were here.”

Johnny decides he’d rather not risk his car in the hands of some kid barely older than his own. He eases into a lot that looks a hell of a lot like the one he just left and parks, glancing over while he pulls the key, and notices LaRusso looks about excited as a Dutch at a parole hearing. “Okay. Remind me why we’re here.”

“Because I have to network with these people until I die or walk into the desert.” LaRusso says, hanging his head for a brief moment, then exhaling a long breath and reaching for the door handle. “I’m sure you get some of that from when you were a kid.”

“Kind of, yeah,” Johnny says, scratching a little at the side of his cheek and thinking about his mom, as he steps out of the car. “I got dragged here a lot to be charming and dance with handsy cougars who hated my mom.”

LaRusso blinks and tilts his head, a pinch at the corner of his mouth. “I can’t tell if you’re joking.”

Johnny scoffs at length. “I’m really not.”

“Someone told you that you were charming?” LaRusso asks, in a low, exaggerated voice of disbelief, leaning over the car with both hands flat on the hood.

Johnny snorts despite himself, shaking his head, and refuses to look LaRusso back in his smug face while the asshole laughs on their way to the entrance. It’s got a new coat of paint, a little electronic screen next to the door, but it’s definitely more of the promised same. “Fuck you. I was.”

“Uh huh,” LaRusso says, suddenly much closer, and he doesn’t quite elbow Johnny, but it feels almost like a near thing. “Maybe if you don’t talk or make any faces.”

“Whatever, LaRusso,” Johnny sneers, narrowly reining an old habit to give the doorman the finger. It’s not the same guy, or probably even the guy after him, but the hypercritical way he’s eyeing Johnny is pretty damned familiar, all the same. “Not everyone’s a damned car salesman.”

“Come on, man,” LaRusso says, head tilting to the side while he runs a hand through his hair, glancing over at Johnny with a pair of blinks. “Just call me Daniel.”

Johnny stares back for a beat, caught some by how LaRusso is doing that same thing with his eyes that he did in the dojo parking lot; at the school. It’s a deliberate sort of expression, he’s realizing late, and some bullshit kind of underhanded tactic. “…Fine.”

Daniel breaks out into a small grin, again nudging Johnny a little familiarly in the side with his elbow. He does, at least, do the kindness of leading them straight to the bar once they’re inside the main lounge. It’s not as busy as it could be, but is definitely full of what are easy to parse out as the types of people who are regulars.

Johnny freezes a little when he even catches a familiar stooped figure over at the fireplace, then takes a sharp breath and turns his head, offering Daniel a small, mocking sneer and picks up his Jack and Coke. “So how long am I stuck here?” He asks, as he trails Daniel away from the bar, toward the doors out to the balcony over the pool. “Hour, two hours?”

“Until I can’t stand it?” Daniel glances around the room himself while taking a sip of what sounded like was an order for some kind of flowers and vodka, but Johnny refuses to believe is a real thing. “Like I said, Amanda used to come, too, but we agreed to split days to halve the misery. She got weekends.”

Johnny catches a particular tone in Daniel’s voice, a little too sly for what was supposed to be a one-time deal. “You’re not going to try to make me come here every damned week?”

“She said she’d make her soulmate come, too,” Daniel says, tipping his head with a careless little smirk.

Johnny imagines happily shoving Daniel into the waiter passing behind him, then rolls his eyes hard, only to catch sight of the open bar, which is… Well, it’s something, but he’s still not fucking happy. “If they’re too trashy for the place, you’ll start going together again?”

Daniel raises his chin and offers a tight roll of his lips, then an amused squint builds in one of his eyes. “I think it’ll be just fine.”

“This better take of a lot off that fucking bill,” Johnny says, lowering his voice and leaning in closer, feeling a sneer building at the corner of his mouth. “All of it, even; you’re paying me by the hour.”

Daniel blinks like he doesn’t get it and narrows both eyes now, then inhales a sharp breath. “Oh, yeah. Don’t worry.”

“And I’m not dancing,” Johnny says, lifting his hand to emphasize a point around his glass at the open space behind them.

“They don’t really do that, anymore,” Daniel says, then sends a mockingly wretched glance in Johnny’s direction. “You didn’t get sent etiquette classes, too, did you? Because that was a waste of money.”

Johnny scoffs at the back of his throat, as he makes a point to glance up and down Daniel with a sideways shrug. “You’re just lucky I’ve got practice playing a rich dickhead’s prop.”

Daniel looks legitimately scandalized. “What did you just say to me?”

Johnny raises his eyebrows, pointing again before taking a drink with only the soft clink of ice cubes between them.

“Daniel – hi!” A pitchy voice interrupts, a tinkle of fake laughter following while she shoves in between Johnny and Daniel to press a floozy kiss to Daniel’s cheek. “Oh, who’s this?”

“John Lawrence,” Daniel says, a hand raising a little familiarly against Johnny’s back while he gestures with his drink, then pointing toward the crasher. “This is Amy Sway.”

“We’ve met,” Johnny says, trying not to think too much about the warmth at the small of his back. He recognizes the lady mostly for her tiny pinched mouth, which was pressed into a dissatisfied frown in his direction for about four days. “I did work on her entryway seven years ago.”

“I thought you looked familiar,” Sway says, brows going up with some bad imitation of surprise, then exhaling another one of those laughs while briefly glancing over at him. “Now how do you two know each other? Are you doing work for LaRusso Auto, John?”

“Johnny’s my soulmate,” Daniel interjects, cheerful, promptly shifting his hand around his drink and turning over his wrist to show the zeroes.  

Johnny swallows his next sip a little early, nearly choking while heat flares across the back of is neck. He’s heard Daniel call him that, a couple times, but it’s… It sounds more than a little unbelievable here surrounded by a bunch of people that Johnny’s got underpaid to do half-assed jobs for around the Valley. The reaction it gets out of Sway doesn’t help a lot.

“Is he?” Sway all but mocks, jaw actually dropping and rounding on Daniel with a doubtful little smirk.  “I always thought you and Amanda were made for each other.”

Johnny feels a tight squeeze at his middle that swoops low in his gut, and bites hard at his cheek while he tries to swallow a burst of… of discomfort. He doesn’t think Daniel’s hiding his fancy fucking headphones in his tiny little pockets, not that Johnny would need them, but that – They’d be pretty nice to have around.

“Hah, no,” Daniel says, voice pitching in a way that actually sounds someway condescending. He shifts on his feet and taps the edge of Johnny’s Vans with his toe in what could have been just an accident. “Me and her both knew that we’d meet our soulmates later in life – decided to take advantage. But Johnny, he… He’s something else.”

“That worked out well,” Sway says, a rankling smile on her face when she glances over to consider Johnny, then reaching up and touching at her cheek a little while looking back to Daniel. “You sure it’s not pla– ?”

“Yes,” Daniel interrupts, firm enough that it seems to startle Sway into silence.

Johnny raises an eyebrow and takes a slow sip from his glass, doing his best to concentrate more on her embarrassment than the heat blooming under his own jaw. He’s not sure what to make of Daniel’s answer, would’ve thought he would insist on platonic, at least publicly, with how it is every way else.

“Well,” Sway says, clearing her throat after another tense beat and pasting on a flakey grin. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks!” Daniel says, smiling back at her in a way that is familiar, in that it isn’t any kind of friendly.

Sway suddenly makes this face like she’s seen someone over their shoulders, eyes flicking as if they’re walking past; she quickly turns on her heel, waves a hasty goodbye to Daniel, to drift away with a brief tug at the edge of her hair.

“She watched,” Johnny says, flatly, narrowing an eye at her back before glancing over the Daniel. “The whole damned time.”

Daniel blinks rapidly and raises his brows.

“When I did her tile,” Johnny clarifies, gesturing with a turn of his glass at her back and her turned up nose where she’s stopped with another group to presumably torture them, too. “Watched me the whole time, like she thought I was going to steal from her fuck-ugly house.” 

Daniel shushes even as he laughs, then abruptly leans in close with an upward curl at the edge of his mouth. “She was probably watching you because you were sweating a lot in a thin shirt and carrying around heavy shit.”

Johnny stares for a beat, heat flaring against his ears at the transparent suggestion Daniel’s been paying attention to how he looks, then forcibly clears his throat. “Nah,” he says, looking out toward the pool with a shrug. “Those people usually offer me food.”

“Oh?” Daniel says, his voice lifting with open humor and shoulder briefly pressed to Johnny’s in a bump. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Johnny doesn’t even bother to let himself figure out what that’s supposed to mean. “What?”

Daniel just exhales a huff, leaning back away with a sip at the dregs of his vodka soda.

The next half hour or so proceeds just as awfully, a line of gossips approaching Daniel with the goal of actually asking about Johnny, until finally some old guy falls into real boring conversation. He seems to be trying to get Daniel to go public with this company, whatever the hell that means, and it somehow gets worse quicker than half a dozen people implying Johnny isn’t shit compared to Daniel’s ex-wife.

It altogether feels too much like his first year stuck here with his mom, her encouraging him to make nice with the other kids, with Sid’s jeering friends, with anyone, to figure out how to fit in with them. He feels about the same now as he did then – that it’s stupid and he doesn’t care, and Daniel hasn’t actually asked him to do jack shit, so fuck it.

“I need another drink,” Johnny says, lowly, damned positive no one around really thinks he’s going to add much to this conversation about stocks and bullshit and, also: not actually listening to it.

Daniel gives him a look like this is the worst thing Johnny’s done since high school, but doesn’t open his mouth, and Johnny smirks back while slipping out and away from the tight balloon knot of nerd shit.

Johnny lifts his hand to the bartender, who wanders over with a nod and a polite smile. “Can I get another Jack and Coke and a, uh…” He gestures backwards at Daniel, who’s now outright glowering at the blowhard who doesn’t seem to notice a bit. “Whatever you gave him, vodka and roses, or whatever.”

The bartender slowly leans away while grabbing the bottle of Jack Daniels, then another glass, all while giving Johnny a bewildered look. “…Elderflower, sir?”

“If it’s that – ” Johnny jerks a hand up while pointing at the bottle at the corner of the bar. “Sure.”

The bartender nods and looks down while grabbing a can of coke from a fridge, pouring it, but Johnny loses that line of thinking for a few seconds when a familiar shadow hits the corner of his eye. He shifts against the bar, feeling his back tighten and breath hitch, and jerks back into reality when the whiskey is set in front of him and a leftover Coke just next to it. 

“I guess I should give Mr LaRusso my condolences,” Sid greets, snidely, settling next to Johnny with a gesture to the bartender, who seems already to know Sid’s usual Pappy van Winkle, neat.

Johnny idly wonders what the nurse thinks of the liquor, who at least needs the bastard alive for the paycheck. He opens his mouth, then thinks better of it, exhaling a slow breath.

Sid raps his knuckles at the bar next to Johnny’s hand, clearly annoyed not to be acknowledged. “A real shame, he and Amanda are an amazing couple.” He pauses for a loaded beat, then clicks his tongue, “And I believe he’s well aware you’re more than a step down. The universe must really hate him, sticking him with you after what you did.”

Johnny keeps facing the back of the bar, not moving while watching the bartender pour from the corner of his eye. It’s a newer bottle, heavy with liquor, sloshing a dark amber inside the glass.

Sid chuckles lowly, leaning just that much closer. “If I were him, I’d be wishing it stayed blank. Save myself the disappointment.”

Johnny clenches his jaw at a roil in his gut, carefully lifting his own Jack and coke for a steady sip. He only has to wait it out until Sid gets bored or one of his creep buddies shows up, and above all: not react.

“If you want to do the man a favor, John? You pull that thing and disappear.”

“Weinberg?” Daniel barks, voice popping up at Johnny’s shoulder, cold and lashing in a startlingly unfamiliar way. “I heard you might be going senile, but I shouldn’t have to say to anyone that is uncalled for.”

Sid offers another low, croaking laugh, putting a hand up to placate Daniel while grabbing his bourbon with the other. “Good talk, kid.”

“Jesus fuck,” Daniel swears, exhaling hard through his nose with an actual growl, turning to watch Sid saunter back to that inane fireplace. “That was – How does he even know you?”

“He’s my stepdad,” Johnny admits, quietly, embarrassed heat burning across the back of his neck; he swallows hard, trying to get rid of some of the persistent tightness in his throat.

Daniel blinks rapidly, turning back on Johnny with a visible drop to his jaw. “He’s your what?” He says, leaning over at the waist and gesturing irately in Sid’s direction. “But he just – Jesus Christ.”

Johnny shrugs weakly, swirling the ice in his glass. “Always been like that.”

He involuntarily recalls his first interaction with Sid, who had waited until Johnny’s mom was out of earshot to say how truly perfect she’d be, if it weren’t for making one big mistake. It had pretty much set the tone for the rest of his life.

Daniel takes a deep breath, exhaling it hard with marked clench of his jaw. He seems to have fallen speechless, which before Johnny would’ve thought impossible, and now only finds unpleasant.

“Just can’t give him an inch,” Johnny adds, throwing back the rest of his drink. He clears his throat and looks behind him at the rest of the ballroom, seeking an out, and maybe in a literal sense. “You ready for me to make a scene so we can get out of here?”

Daniel scoffs a few times, tightly, leaning forward on his feet a bit and lifting a hand to point indignantly at his own chest. “I’m about to make a damned scene!”

Johnny raises his brows, glancing away and feeling even more awkward at this… resentment brought on seemingly just by what Sid said to him. He catches sight of a pair of familiar swinging doors, then forces a huff and manages a smirk. “You want me to find you some spaghetti?”

Daniel blinks and a bit of that ire fades into bewilderment, then comes back in a more familiar fashion. His fist darts out to jab Johnny in the sternum. “You’re such a jackass.”

Johnny shrugs while lazily blocking the gesture, and feels some of the tension sitting between his shoulder blades wane. He looks down at the bar, the glass sitting next to his empty one, and picks it up to offer.

Daniel stares at it for a beat, blinking once, then drops his shoulders while taking it. He lifts it for a sip, clearly letting that sit on his tongue, then sets the glass back down on the bar at Johnny’s elbow. “You know, I – ” He cuts himself off, shaking his head.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Daniel mutters, then rolls his eyes and lowers his voice, shifting a bit closer until he’s practically crowding Johnny into the bar. “Okay, fine. I just… I really can’t believe he’d say that.”

“It’s not a big deal,” Johnny says, forcing himself to look Daniel in the face and managing to keep his voice flat. “He just does that – he always says the shit that you don’t want to hear.”

“You mean that’s not true,” Daniel snaps, gesturing with a sharp lift of his hand upward at his side. “Johnny.”

Johnny rolls his lips together and forces a shrug, glancing down at the bar while wishing Daniel’s drink wasn’t something that sounded damned gross. He shifts his hand, thinking about it, but no – No, it sounds like drinking perfume.

“Shit,” Daniel swears, out of no where, scrubbing a hand up into his hair with a full body sort of shake of his head. “Lets just get out of here, okay? I – I think I’ve been going about this wrong.” He exhales a laugh that sounds more pained than any sort of pleased. “I didn’t… have all the information. I just – ” He shakes his hands quickly in and out at an apparent loss. “I kind of assumed it was a joke?”

Johnny furrows his brow. “What?”

Daniel abruptly presses the heels of his hands into his eyes, groaning for a pair of seconds. “Come on,” he says, then reaches out to tug at Johnny’s actual shirt to turn him toward the door. “We’re not doing this here.”

Johnny feels a sick swoop in his stomach, but reins an urge to slap Daniel’s hand away, only sending a sad glance backward at the bar. He shakes himself when Daniel lets go near the double doors, smoothing out his shirt, and refuses to look again to see if king bastard himself might be watching them. He forces himself to concentrate on what is in front of him: Daniel, mostly, who manages to stay half a step ahead of him until they’re back out in the lot. It’s dark and a little cool, a narrow sliver of sun left, and Johnny wishes he had remembered to throw a flannel or something in the car.

“Oh, wait – ” Daniel’s hands are suddenly all over Johnny’s pockets, shocking enough that he doesn’t react before the keys are already nicked off him. “No driving for you after chugging that whiskey.”

Johnny tries to lunge for the keys, a flush under his skin entirely erasing any longing for a jacket, but Daniel slips out of his reach, putting a row of cars between them in a bewildering skip of a move that he’s got to be too old for, not to mention the accompanying pitchy giggle. He rounds the Firebird with a little unintelligible mumble, blocking Johnny away from the driver side when he tries to go for it again, and unlocks the car with a quick two turn of the key in the door.

“First thing, just for the record,” Daniel says, banging on the top of the roof to get Johnny to look at him, then pointing at his TiMER. “If this goes blank, you better really be dead.”

Johnny rolls his eyes, not quite disagreeing, and finds himself briefly running his fingers across his own before forcing them off. He spent thirty years pretending it didn’t exist; he doesn’t know why now it’s so hard to forget.

“Oh!” Daniel says, leaning into the back seat and patting at his jacket, then tugging out a brightly colored card.

Johnny scowls and dodges when Daniel tries to shove the Tracfone card into his hands. “I told you no, LaRusso.”

“It’s for me,” Daniel says, firmly, grabbing Johnny’s hand forcefully and pressing the card into it, so both his hands are clasped around Johnny’s one. “I want to talk to you.”

Johnny finds himself briefly caught in Daniel’s unwavering stare, trapped between the warmth of his hands, and rolls his lips together as he swallows hard. He haltingly pulls away to stick the card into the door where he’ll hopefully remember it. “Fine, don’t nag me.”

Daniel nods and exhales hard, then shoves the key into the ignition. “I should’ve been that direct from the beginning. Fuck.”

Johnny eyes Daniel for a few seconds, then clears his throat after he puts the car in gear. “Don’t you need to move the seat up?”

The quickfire punch that gets him in the thigh fortunately manages to totally break the tension.

“You want to go to beach?” Daniel asks, hand tapping one way on the blinker, then the other, then back again, in a way that might not even be annoying on purpose.

Johnny glances out the window with a shrug. “If you buy the beer.”

Daniel scoffs under his breath, but he does pull up to the next strip mall without much more demand. He even gets the right Coors, when Johnny yells after him, though he refuses to let him at the sixpack until they’ve pulled off onto a familiar overlook that drops down to the beach.

Johnny hasn’t been here in a long time, but it hasn’t changed much, and he slowly descends down to the beach behind Daniel with a slow, careful breath through his nose. He slumps down on the sand once they hit the bottom, six pack of bottles cradled between his feet, and reaches for one, only to startle back when Daniel starts kicking sand around in front of him like a fussy toddler. 

“Johnny, I’m – ” Daniel paces back and forth on the sand, hands tight under his armpits for a few lengths. He drops them with an odd finality to his sides, winding them briefly into fists that he quickly, equally as uncomfortably relaxes. “No more joking – or not joking, whatever. I don’t even know anymore!”

Johnny drags his teeth sharp across his lip, entertaining the idea of responding, but Daniel seems to have that covered on his own.

“I – I wasn’t thinking, alright?” Daniel says, tone a little placating and clearly defending himself, but it’s just got Johnny feeling like he’s entering an argument halfway in. “I was giving you space! You clearly needed it, I thought – I get it, too, it took me a minute to wrap my head around. I had no idea that you might really think I…” He trails off, biting hard at his lip, then stops and turns to fix Johnny with an ambiguous stare. “What did you think you’d get when your TiMER went off? What’d you hope for?”

Johnny clenches his jaw against the attention, feeling set on the back foot; he doesn’t know what the fuck he’d hoped for, really, except maybe some kind of change – a chance with someone who didn’t know who he was, someone he could try to be anyone else with than who he’s been the last fifty-two years. He didn’t get that though, instead it’s someone who already knows exactly who he really is with no chance of a clean slate.

He can’t say any of that shit, though, so forces a shrug. “I didn’t… do that. Hope for anything.”

Daniel seems to find that answer disappointing, because of course he does, and scrubs both hands through his hair. “You know what, Johnny? I wanted to match to someone who got me, and you know what? I think I did!”

Johnny chews at his cheek and forces his head to stay lifted.

“And it’s not even just the TiMER – it’s everything else! The karate, the old car, the just plain… honesty? I... I tried to pack all that up.” Daniel gestures in the ludicrous shape of a box, as if Johnny needs a visual aid. “I kept thinking I needed to be successful, you know? Like I was going to meet my soulmate after fifty, I better have something to show for it? Right?”

Johnny shrugs a bit, having decidedly not taken that path.

“But you don’t give a shit,” Daniel continues, spreading his hands wide now fingers twisting into themselves, “About any of that; it’s practically meaningless!”

Johnny offers a weakly sarcastic smirk. “Sorry?”

“No, it’s great – man, you just want to do karate!” Daniel says, gesturing out at Johnny, then reeling his hands back in to point at himself. “I just want to do karate.”

“Great?” Johnny repeats, not bothering to rein a taunting sneer. “Too bad I was a fucking shithead to you, LaRusso, or you forget?”

“I mean, could’ve done without it, yeah, but if you hadn’t been so awful, I’d’ve never even learnt karate,” Daniel says, gesticulating in a furor while beginning again to pace back and forth against the sand. “And who would I even be without all that?”

Johnny has no idea; Daniel kicking him in the face has ended up a pretty big part of his life, too. It also sounds like Daniel’s put as much thought into this as Johnny, yet somehow come up with a completely different, dumber answer.

“So I decided I wish it’d been after Okinawa, but before the…” Daniel hesitates, offering an out-of-place wince, “The next All Valley.” He throws out his hands to encompass the sand around them. “On the beach here, so it’s full circle, and there’s a boombox again, but you don’t smash it because we need it for your manxiety attack.”

“You are…” Johnny briefly wonders if he was the one who hit Daniel a little too hard, or if it was some other jackass. “A real fucking nutcase.”

“What about you?” Daniel asks, plainly ignoring the insult with a bright glitter in his eyes. “You said you didn’t hope, but.”

Johnny lets himself think about that first night again, about Daniel winding up a fist, indignation in his big dark eyes and literal fire at his back. “Is there a bonfire?”

Daniel blinks and turns to look at the swells in front of them, then back to Johnny with raised eyebrow, “Sure.”

“Then yeah, whatever,” Johnny says, looking past Daniel at the ocean and trying not to get drawn back into thinking about that all over again, or coming to his own different, dumber conclusion. “Your little fantasy works. Not that it matters, it’s still just hate; you’d still hate me then or now.”

Daniel gestures with a frustrated shake of his hands and takes a breath, mouth opening, then just as swiftly he narrows his eyes. He looks thoughtful, all of a sudden, stepping forward a little too close to loom with his hands falling on his hips.

“What.” Johnny says, flat as he can make it, wary of getting another spiel on Daniel LaRusso’s patented total lack of sense.

“You’ve never actually said you hate me.”

Johnny comes up a little short at the statement, briefly clenching his jaw, then finally reaches down and slips one of the bottles out of the case. “Well, I – I do. Obviously.”

Daniel scoffs and leans back against his heels. He stays quiet for a long while, until Johnny’s halfway through the bottle, then exhales a lengthy, loaded breath. “You know that party after graduation?” He asks, looking back over. “Suze’s house?”

Johnny blinks slowly up at Daniel, then rolls his eyes toward the ocean.

“It’s okay, if you don’t,” Daniel continues, then points with a drop of his head to the beer in Johnny’s hand. “You must’ve been really hungover, morning after.”

“…Why?” Johnny asks, warily, though the assumption’s not much of a stretch, so much as the truth.

“Because you clearly don’t remember how you came over and asked very seriously if my knee was okay.”

Johnny briefly closes his eyes. “Shit.”

“And I said yes,” Daniel says, as he abruptly bends down and one hand falls to a hip, while the other raises in front of and close to Johnny’s face. “Then you leaned in really close and pointed me right in the face and called me a liar.”

Johnny really doesn’t remember much of that party, let alone getting close to Daniel anytime during it. He can see himself doing that, though, thinking of openers to a question that he clearly fucked up at the gate. “And.”

Daniel sinks down to sit in the sand, leaving barely any space between them. “And? You kinda seemed upset about it, Johnny.”

Johnny clenches his jaw, taking a long pull of his beer, and looks away from Daniel toward the glaring orange light of the sun dropping against the ocean. “When I was mad, being a total shit made sense; it… felt like it was what I had to do, but in the tournament I wasn’t mad and –“ He swallows, hard, “And maybe I realized it didn’t. It never did. Too late. It was just pain for the sake of it. And even if I won, what’d I even win?”

Daniel is quiet for a length, then exhales a slow, almost silent breath.

“I still did it, though,” Johnny says, glancing back over to stare Daniel in the face, liquid-eyed and still that same kid Johnny slugged on this beach and fucked over on that mat. “Didn’t make a difference.”

Daniel stares back, keeping quiet another beat, then shakes his head with a decisive jerk. “No. You saw someone acting like you did back then, and decided he needed a kick in the head,” he says, wry but serious, pressing solid into Johnny’s shoulder with a sideways shift. “And that’s a difference.”

Johnny rolls his eyes at the sky, ruefully enjoying the seep of heat against this shoulder.

“Okay, look –” Daniel starts, then briefly falters with a quiet sigh. “I did, for a few months, hate you – but I hated you like a teenager hates another teenager. I wanted you down a peg, I wanted you to get a taste of your own medicine, but I didn’t want you gone, you know?” He scoffs, tetchy, “Not like Kreese, after what he did in the worst kind of wish fulfillment, not like… like other people, later, not even as much as say Tom Cole, right now.”

“Tom Cole?” Johnny asks, rolling his head against his shoulder at the vaguely familiar name.

Daniel mutters something about what sounds like a commercial under his breath, mouth pinching with evident distaste. It’s not exactly an answer, or even the tiniest of an explanation.

Johnny snorts derisively – the guy must’ve stolen a time slot, or something. If he was an actual bad guy, or whatever, he’s pretty sure Daniel wouldn’t be so cagey.

Daniel sighs heavily and stretches his legs out across the sand, which can’t be real comfortable in his slacks. “And, you know, after the tournament, when I didn’t hate you anymore but I hadn’t realized it, maybe baiting you was… maybe it got to a point that if I was doing something and you didn’t notice, or if you were taunting someone else, I’d get kinda pissed. I was right there!” He laughs, a little pitchy, then drops off into a sigh. “Maybe I am a nutcase, but in my defense –” He grabs for Johnny’s TiMER wrist, tracing his thumbs gently against the zeroes. “You should’ve been paying attention.”

“LaRusso.” Johnny narrows his eyes, staring at Daniel’s hands where they curve so intently around his arm. “Daniel. Did you have a crush on me?”

“No,” Daniel says, a pair of beats too late.

“You’re really fucked in the head,” Johnny says, ignoring the denial, clicking his tongue a little. “I heard that’s a thing you can get with too many hits.”

“You’re my soulmate, so what,” Daniel says, pressing down now into the TiMER until plastic pinches into Johnny’s tendons. “You stared straight back – you still do.”

Johnny grunts lowly, conceding, and doesn’t flinch against the pain. “Maybe, but you only kicked me in the face once.”

Daniel huffs and releases Johnny’s arm to slap him in the chest. “I could do it again.”

Johnny looks down at the wrinkles in his shirt where the impact hit, and finds his next gamble of a terrible decision on the tip of his tongue. “The uh,” he starts, wetting his lips, “All those new kids keep asking when you’ll be there.”

“Where?”

“At the dojo,” Johnny says, coughing to clear the tightness creeping at the back of his throat. “Since you’re the one in the video actually kicking ass.”

Daniel blinks, then his eyes light up, grin getting wide and toothy like Johnny’s really said something awesome. “Are you asking me to help out at your dojo?”

“Help? As if,” Johnny says, shifting his legs and digging his heels hard until sand sinks into his Vans. “Just to like. Stand there and make me more bad ass by comparison.”

Daniel turns at the waist, jabbing hard into the soft part of Johnny’s shoulder, then his hand seems to just stay there settling warm against his shirt. “Johnny, come on,” he says, strained, and it’s clear he’s not talking about the dojo.

Johnny tilts his head, tucking his chin, and lets himself kiss Daniel LaRusso, soft and a little clumsily, on the mouth. It’s not like he imagined, because he never really let himself do that, always baulking whenever the thought got too close. He pulls away a beat later, heat flaring across every inch of his skin, and opens his eyes to catch Daniel staring back. He isn’t sure what to do with the look, heavy and warm, except feel pinned underneath it.

Daniel takes a quiet breath through his parted lips, as a smile settles softly at the edges of his mouth. “I am so happy it’s you.”

“…Yeah?” Johnny croaks, immediately shamed by his own weak tone.

“Oh yeah,” Daniel says, leaning in for another kiss, brief but clingy desperate, thumbs sliding hard against Johnny’s cheekbones. He shifts to press damp kisses into his jaw – one side, then the other. “You been dug under my skin long before the TiMER, Johnny Lawrence.”

Johnny fails to swallow a quiet, earnest noise at the back of his throat.

Daniel leans in again, lingering, voice quiet while fingers tap out an uneven beat against Johnny’s face. “Why did you ask if there could be a bonfire?”

“…You were pretty,” Johnny admits, rolling his eyes to the dark sky, away from however Daniel might react at the admission. “You were mad as hell, and the fire lit you up even more.”

Daniel ruins the attempt to avoid him by dragging Johnny’s head back down seemingly just to show off his grin. “And I’m the one ‘fucked in the head’?”

“You must’ve knocked the sense out of me,” Johnny says, as a lazy smirk grows at the corner of his mouth.

Daniel only grins wider, leaning in to press his brow to Johnny’s, while his tone drops to a low tease. “Oh yeah, like that was never a problem before you met me.”

“Ask anyone,” Johnny says, holding Daniel’s dark eyes a beat longer, then closing his own, as he tilts his chin for another kiss.

Johnny checks decades of assumptions and discovers a lot of things that night, but the stupidest of them all must be that Daniel LaRusso owns four fancy car dealerships and sleeps on the fucking floor.

He can’t believe the universe gave him this guy.