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Johnny slowly came to, overcome by stinging pressure in his nose and ears, biting down on something. He grunted around it, gagged, tried to spit it out until he realized it was compressed air he was choking down from a mouthpiece on a long hose, bubbling away.
He grunted again. His legs were heavy and he shivered to his core-–he had no shirt and just jeans. His eyes burned. He felt like Luke fucking Skywalker, but he wasn’t here to heal. He knew that much.
His thighs ached as he tried to kick upwards in the storm of his exhalations; an ankle chain stopped him an arm’s length from the surface, only the tips of his fingers breaking through. He thrashed into a wall of glass.
A blob of black clothes and slick white hair faced him on the other side.
He pounded on the glass and burbled.
Silver spoke condescendingly loudly, refusing to sound muffled. “Wel-come to my latest branch in Lake.View.Terrace, MR. LAWRENCE. The only location with a wall aquarium. And our first and last brainless goldfish.”
Johnny’s hair drifted in slow motion as he pounded the glass again. It was useless. He stilled, closing his blurry eyes, thinking of Daniel. Easy, Johnny classic.
Silver’s voice was suddenly clearer, like it was drilling through the pressure in his ears and straight into his head. “Yes! There’s more of that Miyagi defense! That’s why everybody loves you, Johnny. You’re the jock who listens!”
Johnny scowled around the regulator.
“I gotta say, time has been kind to you, pretty boy. At least until today.” He tapped his mouth.
Johnny’s eyes widened.
“You’ll just have to wait until Danny gets here. Very easy to bait him with his greatest weakness.”
No bubbles surrounded him for a moment. He shook his head wildly.
“Noo, I won’t hurt him. Again. But you will. Beyond repair. I’m gonna watch him watch you slip into the mystic. In a hammock on my lanai, of course,” he grinned, wiggling his phone. “You look so pretty swimming around behind that glass. Like a lesbian Daryl Hannah.”
He waved with a trill of his fingers, as Johnny gave his glass-protected smirk one last pound. He disappeared out the back, leaving Johnny only in the fading daylight and the glow of the neon cobra signs.
Johnny slumped his head against the glass. Sick fuck had to take his shirt off. The water was barely lukewarm. He probably would burn through most of this stash shivering.
Come Newark or high water, he had to focus.
There was a gravity of dread in his body, pulling him towards the bottom. The water felt unbearably thick. Breathing through his mouth majorly chafed his throat. He had to know how much time he had left.
He couldn’t rely on a broken, beaten Daniel to get him out of this, to get hurt worse–
“Mph,” he bubbled. The dark glass walls were closing in on him. He slid down the glass, his heart beating in his throat.
A flicker of heat started to build in his chest. The air was getting thin and he got more ravenous than ever. He grunted with strain, biting the mouthpiece hard. Why always this? The constant in these moments was Daniel, but this time he wasn’t sure he’d last long enough to see his face.
The door crashed open with a tinkling little chime.
“Johnneee!?! ” Daniel’s voice resounded as he staggered across the dark mats, aching all over.
Silver’s call was playing over and over in his head. “I know you’re on the mend, but I’d like to officially extend an invitation to my Lake View Terrace location.”
“And why the fuck would I do that?”
“I figured you’d want to snoop around. Such a spunky little amateur detective. I’m curious—how would you describe Johnny Lawrence if he were, say, a missing person?”
“You son-of-a—”
“Aquiline nose, cowlick? Personality of tuna water? Very expressive eyes in times of distress?”
“I swear to god, if you—-if you so much as—”
“What, defended myself? He came to ‘teach me a lesson’ for our little talk at Stingray’s. He had to be contained.”
Contained. He couldn’t bear to look, but he found Johnny’s eyes in the watery prison instantly.
He gasped a broken medley of curses, colliding with the barrier between them, pounding his fists against the tank. “Oh god, Johnny?!?”
The pruned palms of Johnny’s hands pressed against Daniel’s through the glass, as he held his shaken gaze. The relief that he had an air hose was fleeting.
Johnny’s face told him everything. His cheeks hollowed out with the effort to get one last puff. He rattled the chain on his ankle and slashed a finger across his throat, letting the dead mouthpiece fall to the bottom.
Johnny didn’t have a second to spare and Daniel had no curse to cover this. His voice almost broke. “I-I’m gonna get you out of there, hold on!?!” Shaking and fumbling, he pulled out a glass punch keychain with the LaRusso logo. “Every customer gets one,” he chanted. Terry hadn’t bargained on that.
Daniel punctured the clear wall between them with a useless little kiai he couldn’t hold back. The glass fell in tempered clusters, water rushing out, but not nearly fast enough.
Johnny struggled to stay conscious—the story of his life—and weakly kicked the glass, telegraphing his agony.
Daniel kicked fiercely. Plumes of air escaped Johnny’s gritted teeth. “No no nono—JOHNNY, not this close!!!” Daniel laced his hands and drummed into the glass with his whole weight.
Something primal took over, something that kicked Johnny into a gear he didn’t know he had. The pull of Daniel’s tear-stained face was stronger than anything else.
One last kick had him rushing out of the tank to the floor, as far as the ankle chain allowed, sputtering and gasping hard. Daniel fell to him in the pile of shattered glass, moaning unintelligible words as Johnny coughed up a lung. Everything throbbed and he was consumed by shivering. His chest bobbed up and down.
“That’s it, deep as you can,” Daniel said woozily into his matted gold hair, holding on tightly. “I gotcha.”
All Johnny could see were the purple bruises on Daniel’s eye and jaw. “—you’rehurt–”
“Me? He made you a human Sea World exhibit, for God’s sake!!”
Johnny finally sated himself enough to say more, looking up at him through wet lashes. “….i definit’ly pissed in there.”
”That’s more than okay,” Daniel clutched his hand and Johnny held it against his chest. “God, you’re freezing.” He wrapped his hooded sweatshirt around him. “Dammit, Johnny, you didn’t have to avenge me,” he growled, his voice cracking. “There’s no limit to what he’s capable of--I-I’m never letting you out of my sight.”
“…the hell are the chances of this happening twice?” Johnny sighed.
He had a point. “...this is all because of me.”
“...you're worth it, newark.”
Johnny’s piercing eyes closed and Daniel, for once, was speechless. He could see Johnny’s heart outside his skin, but this time it was miles from fear, and straining to touch the unknown.