Archive of Our Own ^beta

“we have not touched the stars,
nor are we forgiven, which brings us back
to the hero’s shoulders and a gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it."

—“snow and dirty rain,” richard siken

❀

It starts, like everything in Daniel’s life seems to since he was sixteen years old and facing down some asshole on the beach his second night in California, with an argument instigated by one Johnny Lawrence.

To be entirely fair, things have been going pretty well with the combined dojo situation—as well as can be expected when Daniel is Daniel and Johnny is Johnny and neither of them is willing to compromise their teaching methods most of the time. Most days, teaching feels like a study in unstoppable force meets immovable object, except Daniel couldn’t really tell you which is which, just that there’s always a collision. There’s just something about Johnny that keeps pulling Daniel in to butt heads with him—a gravitational field all his own, and Daniel’s been stuck in his orbit since he first saw the Cobra Kai sign go up in Reseda. Maybe even longer.

Okay, so maybe things aren’t going quite that well. But they’re trying, and Daniel hasn’t crane kicked Johnny in the head out of sheer annoyance yet (though admittedly it was a close thing that first day) so he figures it could be worse, even if Johnny Lawrence has the most questionable teaching methods known to man.

Take today, for example.

“Did you just flinch?” barks Johnny’s incredulous voice at Daniel’s back.

“No!” Nate protests.

Several voices ooo dramatically, and Daniel, who’s supposed to be supervising Sam and Demetri practicing for the balance wheel, resists the urge to turn around just to make sure Johnny isn’t about to do something stupid, like hurl a kid into the pond. It’s happened once already.

“What else d’you wanna call that, shrimp, winking with both your eyes? Preparing to block a punch with your nose?”

Daniel rolls his eyes heavenward and starts counting to five. Behind him, the debate continues.

“He definitely flinched, Sensei.” That would be Hawk joining in. Daniel can feel a headache building.

“LaRusso!” Johnny hollers. Whatever he wants, Daniel doesn’t care to be part of it.

He clears his throat, moves forward to correct Demetri’s form. He keeps stepping out with the wrong foot, leading with the wrong shoulder, which throws both of them off. Sam’s giving him a look as he demonstrates the proper steps, but Daniel ignores it.

“Yo, LaRusso!”

Daniel breathes out slowly through his nose, steps back, and gestures for his students to go again.

A hand lands on his shoulder just as Johnny says, directly into Daniel’s right ear, “You deaf or something?”

It takes every ounce of willpower Daniel has not to land his elbow in Johnny’s gut on instinct alone. Back before this whole business with Johnny started up again, that wouldn’t have been his first instinct at all, or even his second. He spent years training himself to be calm and collected, to avoid visible frustration and always keep a cheerful face for customers and colleagues alike. Daniel stopped throwing the first punch a long, long time ago, but something about the last year, something about Johnny Lawrence and all the parts of Daniel’s past he unwittingly carries with him, is bringing out sides of himself Daniel hasn’t seen since he was eighteen and incandescently, mind-numbingly, all-consumingly angry.

He's not angry anymore, he doesn’t think. But he’s certainly something; something he isn’t normally, and Daniel blames Johnny for it. This is partially because it makes sense it’d be his fault, even if correlation doesn’t always equal causation, and partially because Johnny Lawrence is so easy to blame. Daniel hasn’t gone to Mass since Jersey, hadn’t been paying attention for longer, but he thinks if there’s not a patron saint of causing problems already, maybe someone ought to consider canonizing Johnny.

“What do you want?” he asks, trying and failing to keep his tone free of resignation.

Johnny jerks his thumb back towards a pouting Nate, currently being badgered, albeit good-naturedly, by a few of the Eagle Fang students. “You got a flincher.”

He says it with an air of significance, as though Daniel’s supposed to know what that entails in Johnny Lawrence-speak. He doesn’t. It could mean any number of things, none of which, Daniel’s sure, are particularly good ones.

He raises his eyebrows questioningly, and Johnny raises his right back. For a minute, they just stand there, looking at one another, waiting for someone to make the first move. It’s Johnny who finally does—strike first, and all that.

“Jesus, LaRusso,” he snorts, “didn’t anyone teach you to unflinch your students? That’s, like, day one of karate type shit.”

Maybe when John Kreese is your teacher, Daniel wisely does not say. It’s January. December wasn’t so long ago. Sometimes he swears there’s still bruises mottling Johnny’s neck, half-hidden beneath his shirt collars. Sometimes Johnny’s still short of breath when they demonstrate moves for the kids. They’ve talked about Kreese in the sense that they’ve strategized how to beat him, but they haven’t talked about what happened hardly at all.

They didn’t talk about it back in ’84, either.

Wearily, Daniel says, “And how, exactly, should I ‘unflinch’ my students?” He’s about ninety-five percent sure he doesn’t want to know the answer—so sure that it’s an exercise in self-restraint to avoid making sarcastic air quotes. Most things about Johnny Lawrence involve restraint on Daniel’s part. He barely resists the urge, instead stuffing his hands into his jacket pockets and steeling himself for whatever cockamamie teaching method Johnny’s got up his sleeve this time.

“Hawk! Diaz!” Johnny calls. The two boys snap to attention, eyes sparkling with anticipation. “Unflinching demonstration, please.”

“Yes, Sensei!” they practically shout. There’s a brief muttered discussion of do you want to do it and it was your turn last time, you do it, during which Daniel only has a few seconds to wonder how many times they’ve done this for there to have been not merely a last time but enough times that they’re keeping count.

And then Hawk punches Miguel in the face.

Daniel swallows a yelp. Several of his students cringe. The Eagle Fang kids cheer while Demetri and Sam roll their eyes. Miguel, however, takes the punch with a grin, slapping Hawk’s back afterwards like it was nothing, and Daniel wonders at the sheer joy there. When he was sixteen, a punch was a punch; there was nothing joyful about it. There was no fun in violence; not in being the one punched, and not even in doing the punching. (There was maybe one moment, on the beach that night—the moment when Daniel’s fist met Johnny’s nose, skin on bone on skin—where it might’ve been, but then Johnny hit back, then Johnny said no mercy, and then he hit Daniel again, never seemed to stop hitting—so neither could Daniel. It’s just been a matter of who hits harder ever since.)

Johnny’s karate is so different from Daniel’s it’s like they’re speaking an entirely different language. It’s always been like that, maybe, in word and body both. Maybe they never could have been friends, with or without what happened on the beach that night. Maybe this entire shared dojo is an exercise in futility, a demonstration of exactly why oil and water don’t mix, just in case anyone made the mistake of forgetting.

Which is good, because maybe Daniel did—in that bar, in his old apartment building, at the Mexican restaurant, at the Christmas party. Outside the shattered front windows of Cobra Kai not so long after.

Maybe Johnny forgot, too.

They can never forget for long, though, is the thing.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” says Johnny, pulling Daniel out of his ever-spiraling thoughts. He looks almost proud, which makes Miguel and Hawk beam back at him, twin moons reflecting the sun’s light. “You can’t freeze up in a fight just ‘cause you’re worried about getting decked, can you?”

“No, Sensei!” all the Eagle Fang kids chorus, which would almost be cute, if not for the context.

Johnny’s hand, still inexplicably on Daniel’s shoulder, squeezes once. Daniel had almost forgotten it was there.

“We gotta unflinch your kids, LaRusso,” Johnny continues, sounding disconcertingly earnest, “or the tournament’s as good as lost.”

If it was Johnny from a few months ago saying this, Daniel might’ve been inclined to ask if Robby had needed unflinching before the last All Valley. But things are different now, despite Robby being the same old sore spot as ever, one both of them worry like a scab, always looking to make the other bleed.

Instead, Daniel breathes out very slowly and steps out from under Johnny’s hand. It hangs in the air a moment before falling back to Johnny’s side, not that Daniel’s paying attention or anything.

He says, “We are not punching children in the face, Johnny.”

“Well obviously,” huffs Johnny, but it’s Johnny, so of course that wasn’t obvious. “They can do that part themselves.”

Which honestly might be worse, and Daniel thinks about saying that, but Johnny’s already rubbing his chin and mumbling to himself, off in his own world.

“Shame that Robinson girl isn’t around anymore,” he mutters. “She had a mean right hook.”

Daniel tries to picture the Aisha he remembers from playdates and sleepovers with Sam punching someone in the face. Somehow he can’t fathom it, even after the tournament last year. Even after the videos Sam showed him of all the Cobra Kai sparring matches. All at once, he feels inexplicably tired.

“We’re not actually going to get punched in the face,” comes Demetri’s voice from Daniel’s elbow, “are we?”

“No, Demetri,” Daniel sighs. “You’re not.”

Now, if only he can get that through Johnny Lawrence’s head…

❀

It turns into an argument, because there hasn’t been one single thing between the two of them in the history of forever that hasn’t.

“Jesus, LaRusso,” Johnny finally says, pacing back and forth inside the dojo where they moved the argument ten minutes ago for at least the illusion of privacy—the walls are thin, and they both know full well the kids are eavesdropping outside. He stops in the middle of the room, throwing his hands up in frustration. Daniel doesn’t flinch at the sudden movement, but something inside him does. “What the hell do you think karate is anyway? Sometimes you get punched in the fucking face, okay? That’s life, and it’s my job to teach them how to take it!”

Daniel bites back about five sarcastic comments about how life ought to be, and hey, just who was it who was doing the punching when we were in high school, huh? Didn’t I know how to take it on the beach? On Halloween? At the tournament? He knows he’s being petty, and that he’s well past the age when he should still be gnawing at high school transgressions like a dog with a desert-dry bone. Knowing’s never been the best defense against feeling, though, is the thing.

He breathes in for four, holds for seven, exhales for eight. He feels like he’s doing it as often as he breathes normally these days, but at least it clears some of the annoyance fogging his brain. Johnny’s still waiting for his answer, arms folded, rocking back and forth on his heels like some kind of caged animal. It’s been a few weeks since they started this endeavor, and still he looks wildly out of place in Mr. Miyagi’s house. Daniel’s house?

The dojo.

Whatever.

“Okay,” Daniel begins, pinching the bridge of his nose, “I see what you’re saying. You have a point and I acknowledge that.”

“You do?” Johnny asks. He could at least sound a little less shocked, Daniel thinks.

“Yes. But I don’t think letting them punch each other directly in the face is the best way to, er, unflinch them, as you put it.”

“You got a better idea, Newark?”

“Yeah, actually,” he replies. “I do.”

❀

Unsurprisingly, Johnny does not like Daniel’s idea, and just as unsurprisingly, Daniel doesn’t care. For whatever reason, totally unrelated to the fact that Daniel happens to own the space he’s allowing Eagle Fang to use for practice and could just tell them to get lost if he wanted to (he wouldn’t actually, but hey, Johnny doesn’t know that), Johnny goes along with it. He bitches about it the entire time, though, and this, too, is nothing new.

“All right, everybody, fall in,” Daniel calls as they emerge from the dojo. Everyone scrambles to pretend that they haven’t been trying to listen in on the entire conversation. None of them succeed. For one thing, Bert had his ear against the door when Daniel opened it. “For the rest of the lesson, we’ll be working on the flinching issue, which Sensei Lawrence so helpfully pointed out.”

Demetri raises his hand.

“Yes, Demetri.”

“We’re not, you know, doing the punching thing, right? Because you said—”

“No, Demetri. We’re not doing the punching thing.”

Miguel rocks back on his heels from where he’s standing next to Sam. “So, what are we doing, Sensei LaRusso?”

Daniel grins even as Johnny rolls his eyes and says, “Trust falls!”

Half of them stare at him blankly while the other half groan in concert. Daniel shakes his head. Kids—you can never win with them, can you? But it’s a good plan, if he does say so himself, good for Johnny’s purposes and Daniel’s—teamwork, for one, and trust building—and no one gets punched in the face. Everybody wins!

He’s got plenty of experience with trust falls, too. They used to do them at the company retreats every year, up until Louie freaked out and dropped Anoush, who ended up spraining his wrist because of it. He got a raise out of the whole thing, but they didn’t hear the end of it for months, and they quit doing the trust falls after that. Still, it’s not like you can forget how to do them. They’re simple. Easy. He’s done them a dozen times at least. Daniel’s got this.

“Trust falls are for pussies,” Johnny says, mercifully sotto voce. Daniel resists the urge to elbow him in the nose. Then, louder, “All right, LaRusso. Let’s show them how you want ‘em to do it.”

He heads over to an open patch of grass, the kids parting like a sea before Moses, clearly expecting Daniel to follow. And it would be right about now, actually, that Daniel realizes he might have made a miscalculation. A lapse in judgement, if you will. Because here’s the thing: he’s won the battle, but now he has to demonstrate trust falls with Johnny Lawrence, so it’s starting to look like he lost the war.

And—

It's not that Daniel distrusts Johnny, not actively. Not anymore. It’s hard to when he looks at him and remembers that night outside the dojo, Johnny through the shattered window, the nod he gave in answer to the question Daniel couldn’t even ask. Before that, even, when he blasted through the doors to see a twisted recreation of another December nineteenth playing out on the mats before him. They’re on the same side now, and for once, Daniel believes it.

But some part of him is still sixteen and running faster than he’s ever run in his life on Halloween night. Some part of him is still climbing the fence with Johnny’s arm reaching up to grab him around the waist.

He can’t help it, standing across from Johnny Lawrence in the back garden of Mr. Miyagi’s house thirty years too late. He hesitates.

“If you drop me, LaRusso, I’ll kick your ass,” Johnny says. Daniel’s gaze snaps to his, but Johnny’s expression is unreadable. In many ways, things between them haven’t changed since they were teenagers. In others, though? Johnny used to wear his emotions as prominently as that red leather jacket of his. Now he’s older, and when Daniel looks at him sometimes, he doesn’t have a damn clue what’s going on behind his eyes.

Daniel clears his throat. “You’re okay with that?”

“What, you dropping me? Did you not hear a word I just said?”

“Not that,” Daniel says, sinking back into the comforting familiarity of mild annoyance. This, he can do. “I’m not going to drop you. I meant that you’re fine with being the one to fall?”

Johnny looks at him for just a second too long before answering, mouth bunching up as though he’s considering his words before he says them. It’s entirely un-Johnny-like, and a little strange to watch.

Of course, then he ruins the illusion by saying, “I bet I fall better than you do anyway.”

But there’s something about his expression, something about the way he looked at Daniel when he hesitated for just the barest of seconds. Something that tells Daniel this might be on purpose. This might be an out.

Here, Daniel thinks, is proof that Johnny Lawrence can change. Has changed. Is changing. Because what is this if not mercy?

“Okay,” is all he can think to say. It comes out surprisingly soft, so he clears his throat again and says it louder. Firmer.

“Good,” Johnny says. He turns towards the kids and yells, entirely too loudly, “Okay, chuckleheads, circle up and pay the fuck attention.”

Daniel, still feeling off-kilter, doesn’t even bother to tell him to mind his language. Johnny looks at him expectantly, and he realizes now would be a good time to explain the exercise before they demonstrate it.

“Right,” he says. “So, the point of a trust fall is pretty self-explanatory. You want to fall without buckling, flinching, or bending your knees to catch yourself. Either your partner will catch you, or you’ll hit the ground, and either way, it won’t be the end of the world…”

He takes them through it a few times, fields a few questions, and then it’s time for their demonstration. Daniel explains how trying to catch yourself will make things harder for your partner, directs the kids’ attention to how Johnny’s supposed to keep his arms folded over his chest the entire time, steps back, and then—

For all his bluster and posturing, Johnny Lawrence doesn’t hesitate to fall. He doesn’t buckle, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t unfold his arms even a bit. Daniel blinks and finds himself looking down into Johnny’s upside-down smirk. The crown of his head is pressed against Daniel’s sternum. Daniel’s hands are on his elbows, unwavering. Simple. Easy. He’s done it a dozen times.

“See?” he says, mouth suddenly dry. “I told you I wouldn’t drop you.”

“Yeah,” says Johnny with a shrug, his voice unexpectedly warm. “I knew you wouldn’t.”

Daniel blinks, thinks, What?

And then Johnny, in true Johnny Lawrence fashion, says, “Surprised I didn’t knock you over, though. You’re kind of a shrimp, LaRusso.”

Daniel drops him. The ground is soft, after all, and Johnny knows how to fall. Johnny squawks indignantly on impact, but it’s clear he’s just offended, not hurt.

“Don’t be an ass,” Daniel tells him. “I mean, I know it comes naturally to you, but have you ever considered being nice?”

It’s mostly a joke. Johnny rolls his eyes.

“I’ll have you know I could wipe the floor with your scrawny ass at a being nice tournament,” he says.

“Oh, yeah? Would that be before or after I kick you in the face?”

“Illegal kicks aren’t nice, LaRusso.” But he’s grinning as he says it, and maybe Daniel is, too.

With a snort, Daniel reaches down to give him a hand up, and Johnny takes it, grip calloused and warm and steady. Daniel opens his mouth, another quip on the tip of his tongue—

—and Johnny surges up and flips him neatly over his shoulder, sending Daniel sprawling onto the grass.

The thing is: he does it gently, hands never losing contact until he’s practically set Daniel down on the lawn instead of hurling him with no mercy like he might’ve once, not so long ago. When Daniel levers himself up onto his elbow, he sees Johnny’s grin has turned shit-eating.

“Oh, you asked for it,” Daniel says a little breathlessly, suddenly sixteen again with a handful of blueberry pie and about fifty fewer inhibitions. Johnny only grins wider, as if to say bring it on.

“Um,” says Miguel from somewhere over their heads, and Daniel remembers all at once that he’s not sixteen, but he does have an audience of teenagers he should not be giving any ideas. When he glances up, said teenagers are observing their tussle with expressions ranging from bafflement to naked curiosity. Hawk has a thoughtful look on his face that Daniel doesn’t understand or like one bit. At least nobody's got any phones out, which means no one's recording anything. Yet.

Fortunately, Johnny, oblivious as ever, comes to the rescue as he climbs to his feet and reaches down to haul Daniel up as well, thankfully without tossing his over his shoulder this time.

“Okay, you little shits,” he says, heedless of Daniel’s tired protest of language! “You saw how it’s done. Pair off and get falling.” As they all shuffle off, separating into pairs and finding spots across the garden to work, Johnny yells after them, “And I better not see any flinchers by the end of this!”

Eagerly, Hawk begins, “Can we—”

“No,” says Daniel immediately. “You cannot practice throwing each other.”

“Yet,” Johnny adds, holding up a finger, because of course he does. Hawk seems mollified by this, allowing Miguel to tug him off to a corner to practice.

Surveying the proceedings with his hands planted on his hips, Daniel says, “If we get through this without someone falling and hitting their head, it’ll be a miracle.”

“Nah, that’ll happen,” Johnny replies, running a hand through his hair and leaving it wild. There are still the traces of that grin on his face, softening it into something Daniel’s not quite used to seeing. “My money’s on Demetri. That kid's just asking to be dropped.”

Daniel sighs, but he finds himself smiling again. Maybe he hasn’t stopped.

❀

Thankfully, the rest of the lesson goes without incident or injury. Daniel finds himself alone in the garden after, picking up any abandoned scrunchies and water bottles to store indoors until tomorrow, when someone inevitably comes looking. He takes longer in doing it than he absolutely has to, and he even manages to pretend, if only for an hour, that it’s not because he doesn’t want to go home just yet.

Can you really call a place home if you don’t live there anymore? he wonders. It feels like he hasn’t been living in that house for a long time, since even before the separation, and before Cobra Kai broke in and trashed the place.

But Amanda’s on a trip for the weekend, taking a much-needed break in some spa with a few friends, so Daniel’s keeping the kids at the house instead of staying here at the dojo like he has been since New Year’s. They aren’t officially separated or getting divorced (though sometimes he lies awake and thinks it’s only a matter of time, because everything in his life seems to go sideways eventually); just taking a break, as Amanda put it, sitting quiet and pale at their kitchen table the morning after the Christmas party, broken glass still sparkling on the floor in the watery winter sunlight. It certainly feels like there’s more breaking than taking going on, at least to Daniel. She took the kids to visit her family for New Year’s, and Daniel didn’t go because she asked him not to. The day after New Year’s, her mother unfriended Daniel on Facebook, which he still doesn’t know how to feel about.

He didn’t blame Amanda then, and he doesn’t blame her now, which is maybe the hardest part. Karate, in essence, broke into their home and trashed the place, hurt their daughter to the point where she’s having nightmares every single night, and yet Daniel still can’t give it up. He thinks he wouldn’t be able to even without their pact with Kreese. Since starting karate again, he’s felt more like himself than he can remember feeling in years. Cleaning out the home dojo was like cleaning out his own head—a return to form. Going back to the basics that Mr. Miyagi taught him so long ago. In a way, it was like having his best friend back, or as close to it as he could manage.

It was a lot like having himself back, too. His world is so different now than it was when he was thirteen, sixteen, twenty-five, even thirty. He’s changed himself to fit in with it, the business meetings and the country clubs and everything else that comes with being an adult, a businessman, a success. At some point over the last twenty or so years of his life, Daniel packed away the kid from New Jersey he used to be, boxed him up and put him in the attic where he wouldn’t be in the way when the adults got down to business. He didn’t mean to box karate up, too, or Mr. Miyagi, or any of it, but after Mr. Miyagi died, it was just—easier. It was easier not to think about it, to listen to a podcast over coffee in the mornings instead of doing kata, to take up jogging instead of spar with a partner who wasn’t there anymore.

The worst part is that, for a while, he hadn’t even missed it.

And then, of course, Johnny Lawrence waltzed into his dealership, and everything came back like high school was yesterday, and Daniel missed it. He missed it like crazy. Like a limb. Like Mr. Miyagi. Now he just can’t let it go, not after getting it back. Not after so long spent missing it with an ache he barely registered until he knew how to put a name to it. Pandora’s Box is open. Hell is empty and his karate demons are here.

Really, Daniel’s never been particularly good at letting things go.

(That’s not the sum of the problems with his marriage, to be sure, but it’s certainly part of the equation.)

Maybe that’s why he’s still thinking about this afternoon, even as he finishes cleaning up the dojo and turns out all the lights. Maybe that’s why, as he locks the door and climbs into his car, it’s with thoughts of Johnny’s unexpected restraint from today front and center. He remembers the top of Johnny’s head against his collarbone, warm and solid through his shirt, the shape of his grin gleaming up at Daniel, the calloused strength of Johnny’s palm against his own. These are all things Daniel never saw in high school, never felt, never could have had, and never could have believed possible either. The gentleness as he guided Daniel’s body up and over his head is so contradictory to everything Daniel thought he knew about Johnny Lawrence. He wonders when that happened, wonders how long he’s been refusing to see the change. He’s never thought of Johnny as capable of gentleness before today—never much thought of him as anything but angry and spiteful and crude, to be honest.

And Johnny Lawrence can be all those things in spades, but wasn’t Daniel, too? Isn’t he still, on his worst days?

The truth is that when Daniel was sixteen years old, he learned to scan Johnny for signs of aggression, and he had it down to an art. He could have sold tickets and called it a performance. He could have narrated every twitch, every glance, every sign of aggravation like a fucking National Geographic show. But does he truly know how to read Johnny Lawrence past a prey animal assessing a distant predator, the way a gazelle knows a lion in pursuit but not at rest? Did he ever?

Daniel doesn’t know.

He swipes a hand across his tired eyes and reaches to turn on the radio. He doesn’t need to think about any of this right now; he needs to be focusing on getting back to the house, getting dinner on the table, checking in with Amanda to let her know everything’s fine.

And yet he’s still remembering the curious sense of relief that came from submitting to an unstoppable force, to his own momentum—from not being immovable for once. What was it Newton said about objects in motion, objects at rest? He remembers so much of high school so well you’d think he’d remember this, too, but then again, Newton wasn’t blond or giving him black eyes every month, so maybe it was a lost cause. Daniel’s pretty sure Newton wasn’t talking about a car salesman practicing karate three centuries after he died, but it still feels oddly applicable. It still feels like maybe he spent too many years at rest, and now the outside force of Johnny Lawrence has set everything back in motion before Daniel even realized he missed it.

On the radio, Mark Knopfler sings about Romeo and Juliet and bad timing. Daniel knows a thing or two about that.

“—Anyway, what ya gonna do about it?”

He switches stations.

“You take it on the run baby, if that’s the way you want it baby—”

On second thought, maybe the radio was a bad idea. Daniel turns it off and heads for Encino. Somehow, the silence that follows him home is worse.

❀

Despite his best efforts, Daniel finds himself watching Johnny all week. It’s a lot like when they went to school together, except now Daniel’s not on the lookout for signs that Johnny’s going to try to kick the shit out of him. He notices things he never did before—the encouragement he gives his students, oddly-phrased as it may be, for one. The way he calls foul when fights get too aggressive, for another. Daniel has no doubt that’s not the Cobra Kai way. But the Cobra Kai way isn’t really Johnny’s anymore, now is it? There are fist bumps with Hawk and hair ruffles for the smaller kids, and of course, there’s a certain softness in the way he watches Miguel fight and laugh and play.

(There are things there, things having to do with Robby, that Daniel doesn’t know how to unpack, but either way, the fact that Johnny cares about his students is undeniable. Daniel’s pretty sure John Kreese never looked at a teenager with this kind of pride.)

It’s dizzying, at times, to look at the man who used to cause him so much grief and see him goofing off with a bunch of kids. To look at him and not see the shadow of Kreese or Silver lingering there. Sure, Johnny can be an asshole, but he’s not cruel. Not anymore.

The more Daniel observes, the more he sees. The more he sees, the more he finds himself wondering what it would be like to do more with Johnny than just demonstrate individual moves for the kids. It’s only an idle curiosity, of course—that is, until the next day, after classes. The kids have all left and Daniel’s cleaning up because he always does. Johnny, for some unclear reason, stayed after to help. Daniel hadn’t realized he was still here until he wandered back into the dojo and nearly scared the shit out of him in the middle of waiting for the water for his tea to boil.

“The hell are you still doing here, LaRusso?” Johnny asks, which really ought to be Daniel’s line. He nods in the general direction of the yard and the sparring deck. “I mean, this is my job. What’s your excuse?”

Daniel clears his throat. “I live here.”

“I’ve been to your house, LaRusso, and it’s a lot bigger than this one.”

Oh, great, so he’s going to make Daniel spell it out for him. He turns away from Johnny under the premise of checking on the teakettle—flimsy, at best. It’s hardly even steaming yet, much less boiling.

“Actually,” says Daniel, quieter than he intends, “I’ve been staying here since the holidays, not at the house.”

There’s a brief moment of silence before the penny finally drops. Then:

“Shit, Amanda kicked you out?”

The weirdest thing about this conversation, Daniel thinks, isn’t that he’s having it with Johnny Lawrence of all people. It’s that Johnny actually sounds sympathetic. Two months ago, Daniel wouldn’t have believed him capable of the emotion.

“Not really,” he says, arms not so much folded as wrapped around himself, trying to shield his many soft and vulnerable spots from showing. He knows it’s not working—his tone sounds far too raw for that. “It’s a—a mutual break, I guess you could say. We’re figuring some things out. Or trying to.”

“Shit,” Johnny says again. Daniel can’t help but agree.

They stand there in silence for so long that Daniel could almost forget Johnny was ever there in the first place—no small feat for someone whose very presence is like the physical manifestation of an airhorn blast.

Finally, as the water’s beginning to boil enough to rattle the kettle softly, Johnny clears his throat. He’s probably going to say something like, Well, sucks to be you, man, but I’m gonna head out because I’ve got a life to get back to, unlike you, who got kicked out of yours. And Daniel?

Daniel, quite suddenly and desperately, doesn’t want to be alone.

Naturally, he says the first thing that comes to mind, the first thing he can think of that might actually convince Johnny to stay.

He says, “Will you spar with me?”

When he turns around, Johnny’s looking at him with brows furrowing in confusion. Daniel thinks he’s going to say no. What he does say is more surprising.

“Thought your karate was for defense only,” Johnny says. “Wouldn’t sparring fall outside of that?”

Of all the times for him to grow a brain—

Daniel huffs. “Then do the wheel technique with me; that’s not sparring.”

“Yeah, but why do you need me to do any of this?” Johnny seems genuinely baffled, and Daniel doesn’t know how to explain any of it to him—the loneliness, the curiosity, the way he’s groping around in the dark for the person he wants to be. “You have plenty of students to practice with. Hell, why not your daughter?”

Daniel doesn’t have an answer for Johnny. He doesn’t even have one for himself. All he knows is this is something he wants, though he’s not sure how or why or when it started coming on. It’s not even that he wants to fight Johnny, not the way he used to want to when they were kids. Just—he wants to know what it would be like now that things have shifted. He wants to know if it’s different. He wants to know if things have really changed.

“Come on,” he tries, “you know sparring with a kid isn’t the same. And I can’t do the wheel with Sam—our weights don’t balance evenly.”

“Oh, so you just want me for my body, huh?”

For approximately four seconds, Daniel is sixteen again in that he fantasizes, momentarily and violently, about throttling Johnny Lawrence. But he breathes in for four, holds for seven—and the moment passes. The fact that this is becoming a regular occurrence should probably concern him, as should the fact that it apparently doesn’t. It’s just part of Johnny’s incredibly odd charm, he supposes.

“Fine,” Daniel manages. He’s not sure why the rejection stings so much, and from Johnny Lawrence, no less. “It was just a suggestion. You don’t have to. If you have better things to do, that’s fine.”

“LaRusso—”

The kettle whistles, cutting Johnny off and startling Daniel so badly he jumps. He snatches it off the eye, slams it down on another, and fumbles with the stove knob until the heat’s off. He braces himself against the edge of the stove with one hand and lets out one frustratingly shaky breath, then two, until his heart rate is somewhere closer to normal than to galloping.

Johnny’s still there when he turns back around, which is somehow surprising.

“Look,” he begins. Daniel cuts him off.

“I said it’s fine, Johnny,” he says wearily. “I really don’t mind.”

He really, really does mind.

“No,” says Johnny. That’s all.

“No?”

“I’ll fight you, or whatever. You owe me one, anyway, ‘cause I did your pussy trust fall exercise. I’m not doing that wheel shit, though,” he continues, before Daniel can get his hopes up. “You wanna spar? We’ll spar.”

❀

Daylight’s fading toward dusk as they circle each other on the sparring deck. In some ways, it feels like this is their natural state—always circling, never stopping. Daniel sticks to what he knows, to what Mr. Miyagi taught him; he circles, arms up, and waits for Johnny to strike.

Karate for defense only.

Yeah, Mr. Miyagi, I know. I remember.

The strangest part is that Johnny mirrors him, step for step, as though they really are on the balance wheel instead of in a sparring match. Johnny, for whatever reason, isn’t striking first. It’s a little bit like if he truly were part of Miyagi-Do; if they were on even, equal footing. But then circling is all they’d ever do, like planets bound both together and apart by gravity. Oddly enough, Daniel’s not too keen on the idea.

“Not going to hit me?” he asks after a moment or two have passed in silence.

Johnny smirks. “Ladies first.”

Daniel rolls his eyes.

“Come on, strike first for once in your life,” Johnny goads playfully. “No one’s watching, LaRusso. They’re not gonna care. Don’t you want to punch me in the face? You’ve done it before.”

“Yeah, because that went so well for me last time,” Daniel snorts. Arms up. Keep circling. Defense only.

“What gives, Newark? Scared I’ll kick your ass?”

Daniel swallows and tries to keep his face neutral, but he can still see the exact moment that Johnny realizes that maybe Daniel is scared, just a little. Maybe not of Johnny in particular, but of what Johnny is capable of doing. Of what he’s done before. That kid from Jersey, he’s still in there somewhere, even if Daniel boxed him up and shoved him as deep as he could get him. And that kid was keeping score, counting the hurts even when he tried not to. There were, Daniel knows, an awful lot of hurts to count.

Johnny’s expression sobers, and he starts to step back, starts to lower his arms, but Daniel wants this, okay? He does. Sometimes things scare you and you do them anyway. Fear isn’t the end of all things; it’s just another part of the process.

“No,” he says. “It’s okay.”

You won’t hurt me.

Johnny looks skeptical, but he falls back into his stance, and Daniel’s blood sings. They only circle for another few steps before Johnny finally does strike first, freeing Daniel to move in answer. It’s a kind of mercy, almost, and Daniel is all too happy to lose himself to the fight.

It’s true that for him, karate is only for defense, for ending things and not starting them. His ma always used to say he could start enough shit with his mouth—God knows he didn’t need karate for that. And anyway, karate's about balance, and Daniel knows this. It doesn’t mean he loves sparring any less. There’s something almost holy about a fight—something awesome in the original sense of the word. Terrifying, all-encompassing, complete. When Daniel’s doing karate, he feels the most complete he’s ever felt. Watching Johnny fight, sometimes he thinks Johnny must feel the same.

Johnny starts things. Daniel finishes them. Johnny acts, Daniel reacts. Offense, defense. Balance.

Every hit he throws, Daniel blocks, and every time Daniel strikes back, Johnny evades. He really did pick up defensive tactics from that day of Miyagi-Do training—even if he didn’t want to, the muscle memory kicks in, and Daniel bites back a grin as Johnny executes a perfect wax on, wax off. I did that, he thinks, dodging the elbow Johnny throws back at him. He’s never felt so alive. It’s like he’s been waiting his entire life for this moment, this fight, this feeling. For the day he can finally fight Johnny Lawrence without being afraid.

Daniel goes in for a kick—

And Johnny sweeps his leg out from under him.

It’s the same leg from ’84. Sometimes Daniel jokes that his knee aches when it rains.

But that’s where the similarities to their teens end because this time, Johnny catches him by the elbows as he’s going down and stops his fall, even though Daniel’s known how to take a fall for years.

Maybe not this one, though.

He stares at Johnny, not quite in shock but not entirely out of it, either. He has no idea what just happened, other than the fact that they’re not fighting anymore, and Johnny looks—Christ, he looks almost sheepish.

“Sorry,” Johnny says after a moment, giving him a crooked little grin. The sunset has limned him in liquid gold, haloing him so bright he’s almost hard to look at. He releases Daniel’s elbows, taking a step back, and gestures vaguely in the direction of Daniel’s leg. “Old habit.”

Looking at him standing there, still breathing hard from the match, just as blond and ridiculous as he was in high school, Daniel thinks he knows a thing or two about old habits.

“So, uh,” Daniel manages, “point, Lawrence?”

Johnny laughs. “I think we can just call this one a draw, yeah?”

And there it is again—mercy.

“Yeah,” says Daniel, wiping his hair out of his eyes. He’d taken off his hachimaki after cleaning and didn’t realize until now he forgot to put it back on. He’s still a little breathless from the fight. “Okay.”

Johnny heads home pretty much right after that, though to Daniel's knowledge he hasn't got anything to do that should have him ducking out so fast. Then again, what does Daniel know about Johnny? Less than he thought, it seems. Either way, he's gone before Daniel can figure out a suitable excuse to ask him to stay, or why he wants Johnny to stay in the first place. He goes to bed sorer and more exhausted than usual that night, but feeling better than he has in weeks.

❀

(When he sleeps, he dreams of being seventeen and facing Johnny across the arena in the All Valley again. This time, instead of sweeping Daniel’s leg and driving an elbow into his knee, Johnny just walks across the mat to where Daniel stands ready with his arms up. This time, Johnny reaches out and touches Daniel's elbows with the very tips of his fingers.

And Daniel lets him.)

❀

Daniel spends the next three days doing his best to pretend that he’s not constantly thinking about the aborted sparring match. He’s not doing a very good job of it, he knows, but it’s surprisingly difficult to look a guy in the face when you spent the last thirty minutes zoning out thinking about his hands on your elbows without a clear thought as to why.

Before this year, Daniel could list on the fingers of one hand how many times he and Johnny have touched, much less fought, without the intent to hurt. Maybe it’s an adjustment period. Maybe he’s in shock. Can you be in shock about karate rivalries, or the death of them?

Probably not, he decides.

The strangest part of it is Daniel almost wants to spar with Johnny again.

If you told him back in the eighties (hell, if you told him even six months ago) that he’d not only be on decent terms with the guy, but actively want to spar with him for fun, Daniel would’ve laughed until he busted a rib. But here he is, thinking about it. Wanting it. Trying to figure out how to ask Johnny to go again without sounding like he’s spent, you know, multiple days trying to figure out how to ask it.

It's probably a lost cause; if there’s one thing Daniel’s gotten good at since graduating high school, it’s overthinking.

It must be some kind of dramatic irony at work, then, when Johnny—lingering after the kids have left and helping with some of the cleanup—comes to stand beside Daniel at the edge of the pond, and the words slip out before he can stop himself.

“Want to try the wheel technique with me?”

Johnny looks at the platform floating serenely in the pond, then at Daniel, then up at the sky for a long couple seconds. He sighs.

“What the hell. Yeah, sure. I’ll do the fuckin’ wheel technique with you.”

In retrospect, that was a lot easier than Daniel expected it to be.

It’s never really cold in California, per se, not compared to the way January in New Jersey felt, but Daniel still hisses as the chill of the pond robs him of all his body heat below the waist. Johnny yelps but otherwise doesn’t complain, which is surprising but not unwelcome.

It takes a few tries to get on the platform—Johnny’s still Johnny, after all, and he’s never really understood the concept of wait. They manage it on the fourth try, but not before Daniel’s already more than three-quarters soaked.

“Okay, follow my lead,” Daniel says.

“Why do you get to lead?” Johnny gripes, but he falls into a mirrored stance.

“Because you literally don’t know how to do this exercise, that’s why.”

“Bullshit I don’t know how to do it. I’ve seen your kid do it, like, a billion times, haven’t I?” (“It's been less than a month,” Daniel mutters. “You’ve seen it maybe twice.”) “And Miguel says I’m a visual learner or some shit. How do you know I haven’t learned it visually, huh?”

“Do you want to do this or not?”

“Fine, fine.” Johnny gestures for Daniel to start. The gesture makes him wobble, which makes Daniel wobble, but Daniel spent a lot of time learning how to handle wobbling on the bow of Mr. Miyagi’s boat back in the day, and muscle memory is a godsend. He adjusts. The platform steadies. They don’t fall.

When they’re both relatively stable again, Daniel meets Johnny’s gaze. He gives Daniel a nod, and slowly, Daniel starts to move. Johnny follows along as best he can, which is better than Daniel was expecting.

He’s oddly attuned to Daniel’s movements. It was like this for a few breathless moments back during that stupid garage smackdown he started, Daniel recalls. Maybe Johnny was studying him just as closely in school as Daniel was watching him. The thought pops into Daniel’s head, unbidden, and he tries to shake it away, to stay focused on his movements, on keeping them slow enough for Johnny to match. They circle one another, just like the other night—but this time, no one’s going to strike.

This is probably a better idea than sparring, Daniel thinks. This way there’s no chance of something like the other night happening again. After all, the entire point of the balance wheel is not touching. Call it curiosity, call it the chicken exit, call it an experiment of sorts. Daniel wants to know if it was a fluke, or if this is something he can keep doing. If this is something he can have.

They’re doing fine—better than fine, even—until Johnny grins and says something like, See, I can do this in my sleep. Daniel turns his head to look at Johnny and his stupid smile, which means he looks almost directly into the setting sun, like an idiot, which means he loses focus and stumbles over his own feet. Suffice it to say, they both end up in the water.

“Sorry,” Daniel gasps, shaking water out of his eyes as he surfaces. A terrified koi fish darts past his leg, then another.

“Jesus, give a guy some warning,” Johnny says from across the pond. He’s got the heel of his hand pressed up against his temple, and—oh shit, Daniel realizes. There’s blood seeping from underneath his fingers.

“Fuck,” he says, sloshing his way over. “You’re bleeding. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Johnny says, trying to wave him off like there’s not blood already streaming halfway down his cheek. “Just knocked my head on the platform is all. I told you this goddamn thing isn’t level.”

Daniel’s pretty sure the wheel being level has very little to do with them falling off. That one’s definitely on him. He tries to peel Johnny’s hand away from his head to look at the wound, but Johnny swats at him in irritation.

“You’re bleeding,” Daniel says.

“Yeah, you said that already.”

“Johnny.”

Johnny sighs and finally looks at him. There’s blood dripping down his wrist, mixing with the water beading his skin.

Daniel says, “Let me help. Please.”

And Johnny does.

❀

(It’s just a small cut, in the end. It only takes two butterfly stitches to close, and even that is probably overdoing it, but Daniel’s good at overdoing things. His ma always said so, at least.

“It looks worse than it is,” he says, tossing aside a bloodied washcloth and reaching for a gauze pad. He’s already slapped Johnny’s hands away from scratching at the cut twice in ten minutes; he’ll have to cover it for there to be any chance of the stitches lasting more than twenty. “I always forget how much head wounds bleed.”

“I’ve had worse,” Johnny says, examining the tatami mats on the floor like they’re the most interesting thing in the world. He seems vaguely embarrassed by the attention, but what was Daniel supposed to do, let him drive home with a head wound still bleeding all over the place? Yeah right.

“I’m sure you have,” Daniel mutters placatingly. He tries to hold the gauze with one hand and reach for the medical tape with the other, but Johnny keeps moving around. With all that restless energy, he’s like a cat. A really big, really blond, really annoying cat. “Will you hold still please?”

Johnny rolls his eyes but holds mostly still, which is probably as good as it’s going to get. Daniel tears off a piece of medical tape with his teeth and leans back in to fix the gauze, wobbling a bit as he does. Maybe it’s the chill lingering from the water or the fact that he hasn’t eaten since noon, or just that he’s gotten older and his balance isn’t what it used to be. He wouldn’t think anything of it, if not for Johnny, who reaches up with one hand—three fingers, to be precise—and steadies Daniel by the hip.

He didn’t know three fingers could make such a difference, and yet he’s never felt more secure in his life.

Daniel finishes taping the gauze, smoothing down a peeling edge with the pad of his thumb, and straightens back up. A second later, Johnny’s fingers fall away from his hip.

“There,” he says briskly, stepping back and busying himself with putting the first aid kit back together. “Good as new.”

“Yeah,” echoes Johnny, unmoving. “Good as new.”)

❀

Two days later, after the last of the kids have left, Daniel stores the rest of the equipment away and finds Johnny sitting on the edge of the sparring deck, elbow resting on his drawn-up knee. The gauze Daniel taped to his brow has been replaced with a band-aid, barely visible under his headband. He looks entirely at home, like maybe he’s always been sitting there, waiting for Daniel to come along.

“Best two out of three?” Johnny calls when he sees Daniel approaching, one corner of his mouth pulling up into his familiar crooked smile.

“Technically, using the balance wheel doesn’t count as sparring,” Daniel can’t help but say. What he means is yes, and Johnny seems to understand, because he’s already climbing to his feet and offering Daniel a hand up, bypassing the stairs entirely. Daniel takes it and tries to tell himself it’s not because he’s been thinking about Johnny’s hands on his elbows, Johnny’s fingers on his hip. He manages to pretend, if only for a moment, that it’s not because he wants to be touched like that again.

Not many people know what Daniel’s capable of and still handle him with gentleness. He wonders if it’s the same for Johnny.

They face each other in the fading light, bow, and begin.

This, Daniel thinks, is what it means to be alive.

❀

What’s the saying—two is coincidence but three’s a pattern? Well, a pattern is exactly what it becomes. Lessons will end, they’ll clean up the dojo, and then spar until they can’t anymore. They always say they’ll go to three, but neither of them ever keeps score anymore. They fight until they’re too sore or too tired or it’s too dark outside, and then they go a little longer, because they never seem to want to stop. This is exactly what Daniel’s been missing in the years since Mr. Miyagi died. Maybe even longer than that.

In no time at all, it’s become the highlight of Daniel’s days.

Sparring with Johnny makes sense in a way that nothing else in Daniel’s life seems to right now. He knows how to respond to a kick or a punch, knows how to circle and dodge and redirect momentum. It’s not the same with anything else.

Things aren’t going well with Amanda, and he knows it’s probably his own fault. There’s a distance between them, one that he can’t quite figure out how to bridge. He knows he’s not putting his all into it, but Daniel’s beginning to think nothing short of going back in time and avoiding this whole mess before it can start will be able to fix it. There are two problems with this thought, of course, disregarding the impossibility of time travel.

One: Daniel doesn’t think he’d choose not to get involved, even if he had the chance.

And two: when he really thinks about it, usually late at night or alone in his office or before his coffee in the mornings, Daniel’s started to wonder if the problems weren’t there the whole time, and they both just pretended not to notice.

They had dinner last week and spent the entire time talking about anything but their marriage—the kids, the carpooling situation, the dealership. Nothing about karate. Nothing about how they can fix this. Daniel spent half the time wishing he could have gotten a round or two in with Johnny before he had to leave to meet Amanda, and the other half feeling guilty for thinking it.

He can’t help it, though—the only time he feels truly balanced of late is when he’s practicing karate with Johnny across from him, matching him strike for strike.

After dinner, before they went their separate ways, Amanda kissed him on the cheek. Daniel almost feels like he should have shaken her hand instead.

Their marriage has turned into a session on the balance wheel itself, it feels like. They can’t figure out how to cross the distance without everything upending, so they just keep going in circles. At least they aren’t fighting. Mostly, Amanda just seems tired. Daniel feels the same.

❀

One sparring session turns into daily sparring sessions turns into Johnny staying after, sometimes to eat when Daniel can convince him, mostly for a drink before heading home. It’s only ever a drink, because Daniel threatens to repossess the van, paint job or no paint job, if Johnny tries to drive after more than one Coors Banquet. When he says this, Johnny gives him an incredulous look that clearly conveys the (frankly concerning) fact that Johnny probably drives drunk more often than he does sober, but if Daniel can’t stop it entirely, he can at least stop it sometimes.

So, yeah, sometimes they drink. Mostly (and this is the really weird part, to Daniel), they talk. Pretty much anything is fair game, from bands to hockey to lesson plans for the next week. Daniel tries to keep it casual at first. Polite. But he’s started to realize that maybe, just maybe, he and Johnny are friends, absurd as that sounds.

It’s been a long time since Daniel’s had a friend in more than Facebook, his family, and his coworkers, though he’s not sure any of those even count. So long it's coming up on eight years this November, in fact.

Like karate, it seems it took Johnny crashing into his life for Daniel to realize what he was missing.

“Amanda’s mom unfriended me on Facebook, you know,” he tells Johnny one night, as they sit on the back deck with their feet in the grass. He doesn’t know why he says it. Maybe he just wanted someone to know.

In the light glowing through the paper paneling of the door behind them, it’s hard to make out Johnny’s expression. Not that Daniel’s looking, or anything.

“That blows,” Johnny finally says. He takes a swig of beer. “You should unfriend her back.”

Daniel can’t help the laugh that bubbles up at that. He feels oddly light. Better. “That’s not how Facebook works, Johnny.”

A huff, rendered softer by the darkness. “It should be.”

“Yeah, everything’s a fight with you, isn’t it?”

There’s a pause before Johnny says, “Not everything, LaRusso.”

They don’t say anything else for a while after that.

❀

Fridays, Daniel picks Sam up from school and they go to the dojo together. After classes, he drives her back home. Sometimes they get dinner on the way, like they used to when Mr. Miyagi was still alive and they’d spend weekends at his house, just the three of them, clipping bonsais and practicing kata in the garden.

This Friday, Daniel knows for a fact that Anthony’s at a sleepover and Amanda won’t want to cook—that was always his department—so he stops by In-N-Out on the way to Encino to pick up dinner for the three of them. He doesn’t know if he’ll be eating in the house or the car, but he figures Amanda will appreciate the gesture either way.

Samantha’s been quiet for the majority of the drive, spending it mostly scrolling on her phone. That’s not unusual in and of itself—she’s a teenager, after all, and heaven knows Daniel spends enough time of his own on his phone—but there’s something different about her silence today. Less absorption in the World Wide Web and more reluctance to talk, Daniel thinks. He’s always been good at reading her, even if it’s been harder since the school fight. Since she started high school in general, maybe. He turned the radio on a few streets ago when it seemed pretty evident she didn’t want to talk and he didn’t want to pressure her. Now Seger’s playing, singing about running and getting older, both things Daniel’s feeling a little too close to home right now, but turning the music off means Sam will notice, so he lets it be.

As he’s waiting to pull up to the window to pay, however, she finally sets down her phone and asks him maybe the last thing he’s expecting her to.

“Are you and Mom getting a divorce?”

He takes it back. Seger’s fine. Seger’s great. Seger isn’t asking him about his crumbling marriage, which is good enough for Daniel.

Really, Daniel thinks, he should have seen this coming. He should have been bracing for the inevitable moment when Samantha or Anthony finally got up the courage to ask. He should have fixed this by now, or at least worked up a careful, well thought out, honest answer to have on hand the first night he graduated from sleeping on the couch to sleeping in a different fucking house.

But he didn’t, and now the best he can do isn’t careful or thought out or prepared, just honest.

Daniel says, “I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?” Sam bursts out, fingers wrapped so tightly around her phone that her knuckles have turned white. That’s Daniel’s fault. All of this, he thinks. All of this is his fault. This isn’t a problem he can crane kick away, and it’s not a question he knows how to answer.

Ask his ma, ask any of his teachers from high school—Daniel’s never been very good about having the answers.

“It’s complicated,” he sighs. It’s maybe the worst answer he can give, short of saying I don’t expect you to understand. He doesn’t, because he doesn’t understand it and it’s his own goddamn marriage—but that’s not what Sam wants or needs to hear. This much, Daniel knows.

His daughter bites her lip and looks away, hair tumbling forward to shield her face from view. She’s right next to him, but somehow she feels a million miles away.

“Would you be angry,” Daniel says at last, “if we did?”

He doesn’t know what possesses him to ask this of his teenage daughter, other than the fact that perhaps—perhaps he needs to know. Perhaps she needs to say it. Nobody ever asked Daniel if he’d be angry if his father died. This isn’t the same thing, but he’s asking anyway.

Sam is quiet for so long that they make it the rest of the way through the drive-through and sit idling at the light for the turn-out onto the boulevard, and Daniel thinks she’s not going to answer at all before she speaks.

Very quietly, nearly drowned out by Seger singing about moving eight miles a minute and seeking shelter against the wind, Samantha tells him, “I don’t want to be angry.”

Daniel doesn’t miss the fact that it isn’t a no.

“Yeah,” he breathes. “Yeah, me neither.”

❀

It’s well past dark again and somehow, they’re talking about karate.

“I started karate ‘cause I didn’t want to be weak, you know?” Johnny says, waving one hand in the air. They’re both lying on their backs on the sparring deck despite the time—a consequence of fighting for just a little too long and deciding a rest out here couldn’t hurt. It’s nice. Something about the darkness makes talking easier, Daniel’s found. Maybe he and Amanda could figure things out if one of them just turned out the goddamn lights.

“I can’t imagine you ever being weak,” Daniel snorts.

“Hey, you think I came into the world with these muscles, LaRusso? I’ll have you know I worked for this bod.”

“Do my ears deceive me or was that Johnny Lawrence admitting he’s not perfect that I heard? Wait, wait, say it again. Let me get my phone. I’ll record it.”

Point, LaRusso, he thinks.

“Ha, ha,” says Johnny dryly. “Maybe you should take your big mouth and start a stand-up comedy routine. I’ll bring the tomatoes.”

Point, Lawrence.

They’re both quiet for a moment before Johnny resumes the thread of his thought.

“Anyway,” he says. “It worked, and I liked it. Got good at it. You know how it went. It’s—fun. It was fun.”

Daniel thinks, was.

Johnny continues, “It’s supposed to be fun, right? The fighting. I liked it.”

A beat. Daniel breathes in, breathes out. Breathes in again.

“I still do. Like it, I mean. The fighting, not hurting people. That wasn’t supposed to be a part of it. I guess things just got messy, y’know?”

Because he does, Daniel says, “Yeah.”

“I don’t…I don’t want it to be like that for Miguel. Or Hawk. Or any of them. But offense isn’t always about hurting people. Fighting isn’t always about hurting people, even when they’re assholes. That’s not what I’m trying to teach the kids.” A pause. Johnny sighs, which turns into a yawn. God, Daniel’s exhausted. Johnny probably is, too. “Anyway. I just wanted to tell you, I guess. Since you’re always going on about defense, and shit. Doesn’t have to be the only thing, ’s what I’m saying.”

Daniel hums wordlessly. He feels more than sees Johnny looking at him. He can picture his expression perfectly, even in the dark: jaw set, brows furrowed, mouth quirked a little to the left.

“I really did tell Miguel not to fight dirty at the All Valley,” Johnny tells him quietly. He snorts. “Guess that’s not the most ringing endorsement of my teaching abilities, is it?”

“We all make mistakes,” Daniel replies. He’s certainly been making enough of them lately. He wonders, idly, if this counts as one.

It doesn’t feel like it. Daniel’s not sure what it feels like. That’s kind of the problem.

“Anyway,” says Johnny, voice lighter, “didn’t you sucker punch me when we met? I’d say that qualifies as offense.”

Met, Daniel thinks, is an optimistic word for what happened on that beach.

“That wasn’t striking first,” he says as airily as he can manage.

“Yeah, but you still struck.”

Daniel doesn’t really have an answer to that. At least not whatever kind of answer Johnny seems to be looking for.

❀

“Are we sure this is something that needs fixing?” Amanda asks quietly, staring into her glass of white wine.

“What do you mean?”

She gestures with the hand holding the wine, indicating everything and nothing. They’re sitting in the kitchen in the house that he’s almost forgotten is his, theirs, not just hers. The kids have gone to bed, and it’s just them here.

“I don’t know. It seems like things weren’t getting better. Before, I mean.”

Amanda pauses, but Daniel doesn’t say anything. He just waits for her to continue, to get to the point. With Amanda, there’s always a point.

“You just seem…happier. Since New Year’s.”

He doesn’t know how to explain that it’s because he’s finally found a friend who isn’t from work or the country club, and said friend happens to be his sparring partner, co-sensei, and former high school bully. That the happiness is not a product of being apart from her, or he doesn’t think it is, anyway. Correlation doesn’t always equal causation, and all that. It probably doesn’t in this case either.

Daniel stares down at the table, pressing the pad of his thumb into a nick carved when Anthony tried to set the table for Thanksgiving three years ago and dropped all the forks, tines-down, a rain of silver spikes. He remembers the crash, the silverware skittering across the dining room floor. He remembers Anthony standing there with his shoulders hunched up and a sheepish expression on his face because he’d been trying to carry too much and he knew it, but he’d tried to anyway, because Daniel didn’t get to choose what parts of himself he passed on to his children.

“Daniel,” Amanda says. There’s something knowing about it, and it makes him absurdly jealous. What wouldn’t Daniel LaRusso give to know himself again?

He looks up at her, at her wobbly smile, at the fine lines at the corners of her mouth. He’s forgotten what it’s like to kiss her. What was it Seger sang about wishing you didn’t know what you do? He can’t remember. He can’t remember a lot of things, it seems.

Daniel places his hand atop hers and asks, “Are you happier?”

The way her shoulders slump tells him everything he needs to know.

❀

Johnny, Daniel thinks, touches him differently than Amanda does. (Or did, anyway. He and Amanda haven’t exactly been doing any kind of touching since December.) Which—of course he does; there’s no world in which Daniel’s soon-to-be-ex-wife and his ex-high school bully turned co-sensei should be comparable in anything, least of all this. But hey, the world is downright weird sometimes. He’s getting divorced and he made up with the guy who tried to kill him that one time and he spars with Johnny Lawrence on the nightly. Why shouldn’t he be comparing the two, at this point?

It certainly seems like he’s always comparing them, these days. Has been for a while now, if he’s honest.

Daniel hasn’t been very honest lately.

For a while there, he managed to get away with telling himself he was just touch starved. That he was missing Amanda, missing having friends, missing anything that wasn’t the feeling of Johnny Lawrence touching him with something that, for once—and then more than once; then always—wasn’t violence. Funny how that happened. Funny how he didn’t notice.

Sometimes, Daniel wonders about that. Usually when he’s nursing a martini, or when the sun catches Johnny’s profile just right so it looks like he’s got a halo, like the saints and apostles and other important people they put on the stained glass windows in church. He wonders how long the softness, the change, has been there, just waiting for him to see it. He wonders how often he hasn’t wanted to.

He also wonders, just a little, why he’s seeing it now.

Daniel thinks he might have an answer to that, but it’s going to take more than a martini or two to admit it to himself, that’s for sure.

❀

Daniel leaves himself open when he goes in for a crescent kick. He knows it. Johnny knows it. He got excited, got distracted, started thinking about getting a third hit in and winning the match—they’re keeping count today, for once. Figures it’d be today.

He watches, as if in slow motion, Johnny consider the opening, consider the way he could sweep Daniel’s leg out from under him, the same damn leg, send him sprawling, maybe bang his knee on the boards, who knows? He braces himself. He’s ready.

Johnny doesn’t take the opening.

The kick connects. Johnny goes down.

Point, LaRusso.

“I win,” he says, mostly to annoy Johnny. It’s fun to rile him up.

He stands over Johnny, who gazes up at him with something almost like affection, a little like amusement, and entirely indecipherable. Daniel’s had at least a dozen dreams about this exact scenario. Part of him wonders if he’s dreaming now, but no—he can feel the ache in his muscles, smell sweat and grass and pond water, taste as much on the back of his throat when he gasps down air past his grin.

“Like it was gonna go any other way,” says Johnny, and lets Daniel help him back up.

❀

There were probably a few times back in the eighties when Daniel thought about kissing Johnny Lawrence. Not, like, seriously or anything. Just one of those things you do in passing, like, if he were a girl I’d probably be into it, guess it’s a good thing he’s not, what a world, right? Ha, ha.

Ha.

Real funny, Daniel thinks.

In retrospect, he always did have a thing for blondes.

❀

“So,” says Johnny, leaning against the door frame and looking infuriatingly good in nothing but jeans and a flannel. It’s not fair, really—if Daniel wears flannel shirts, everyone assumes he’s gay, always have. Which, well, he kind of is, but it’s not like he knew that.

Daniel shakes his head, refocuses on Johnny. He’s had more than one martini, and things are getting a little hazy.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, confused, because he’s pretty sure Johnny left after just one round, something about having dinner at Miguel’s. That was hours ago, so what’s he doing back now? And did it have to be now, when Daniel can’t trust himself to keep his mouth shut and not do something stupid?

“Left my phone,” Johnny says, holding it up like he’s trying to prove something. He’s probably the only person in California who can leave his phone somewhere for, like, four hours and not realize and not freak out without it. “Saw the light on, thought I’d stop in for a drink. Looks like you’re doing just fine on that front.”

Daniel glances at the gin still sitting on the counter, the open container of olives he hasn’t bothered with since his first glass. He scowls. Like Johnny’s got room to talk to him about anything alcohol related.

“Oh, don’t give me that look,” Johnny says, crossing to the fridge. Daniel listens to him fishing around for one of those god-awful beers he’s apparently developed a habit of stocking. “It’s not nearly as cute as you think it is.”

“I am not,” says Daniel, rather offended, “cute.”

Johnny snorts. “Didn’t say you were.”

Except he kind of did, and now Daniel’s thinking about it. Shit. A minute later, he’s back in Daniel’s line of sight, plopping down beside him.

“So,” he says again, popping the cap and flicking it at Daniel. Daniel catches it. He’s not that drunk. “How are things going with Amanda?”

Daniel downs another swallow of his martini and wrinkles his nose. Too much gin. Johnny watches him expectantly, but Daniel hates to disappoint. Always has.

He says, “You know, I don’t think they’ve been going for a long time, actually.”

Then he downs the rest of the glass, gin or no gin. The way Johnny’s looking at him means he probably needs it. He looks at Daniel like he understands. Why the fuck would Johnny Lawrence understand what Daniel’s going through when Daniel himself can’t figure a damn thing out? When has he ever figured anything out, come to think of it?

God. He misses Mr. Miyagi. He misses when he wasn’t fifty-two. He misses a lot of things.

“That why you’re in here wasting away in Margaritaville instead of sleeping?”

“Martinis,” Daniel says irritably. “I drink martinis, Johnny.”

Johnny shrugs. “Still a pussy drink, and my question stands.”

“It’s not a pussy drink, and we’re getting divorced,” Daniel snaps. Because they are. He just got the papers today, though he hasn’t managed to bring himself to sign them yet, just stared at them long enough that he decided, fuck this, and got out the gin and the vermouth and the olives and set to work. He kind of wants to get up and grab the bottle of gin, maybe down a few straight shots of the stuff, just to see if it’ll make all the anger go away. He hates being angry. Hates it like boards under his knuckles, splinters in his skin. “There. Happy?”

If a man can’t breathe, he can’t fight, he remembers.

Daniel’s been drowning all his life.

Johnny says, “No.”

(Contrary to what Daniel might think, it’s been a long time since Johnny’s enjoyed seeing him miserable.)

He doesn’t say anything else. Doesn’t look at Daniel either, which is fine. Daniel’s a little busy trying to steady his breathing, hold for seven and all that. He keeps losing count somewhere around three. In the end, talking is easier than thinking.

He says, twirling the stem of his empty glass between his fingers, “What about you, then?”

“What about me?” Johnny asks, sounding almost wary.

Daniel shrugs. “Anyone special in your life recently?”

He still thinks about seeing him and Ali together at the Christmas party, sometimes, looking like nothing had ever gone wrong between them. If he hadn’t known better, it would have been easy to assume they were dating. Married, even. Like Daniel wasn’t even a blip on the radar for either of them senior year.

And there was Carmen, too, wasn’t there? That night at the restaurant? It must take someone special to get Johnny Lawrence dancing, he thinks.

“What the fuck, LaRusso?” is Johnny’s unexpected response. “You say you’re getting divorced and then you want to know how my dating life is going?”

There’s an oddly guarded quality to his voice that Daniel swears wasn’t there before, but he’s not really sure what to make of it. Maybe if he wasn’t drunk, or maybe if he were more awake—but he is, and he isn’t, and Johnny Lawrence is an indecipherable puzzle to him in this moment. An unbreakable code. The fucking Rosetta Stone or something, and God help Daniel; it’s all Greek to him.

“Just trying to make conversation,” he mumbles, a little defensively. Johnny sighs.

“You’re a piece of work, LaRusso, anyone ever tell you that?”

“Yeah. You. On a weekly basis.” The fondness in his voice is nakedly obvious to Daniel, but Johnny, sipping his beer, doesn’t seem to notice. Daniel’s not sure if he’s grateful for that or not. “Thought you were seeing Carmen. At the restaurant.”

“Yeah, well,” says Johnny, “that was before my kid put Miguel in the hospital. So.”

“Ah.” Daniel supposes that makes sense. “’M sorry. Her loss.”

Johnny shakes his head, half-smiling down at his bottle for reasons unknown. “You’re so goddamn drunk right now, aren’t you?”

“Am not.” He’s had a reasonable amount to drink, thank you very much. He says as much to the raised eyebrow Johnny gives him, which only makes the eyebrow go higher. Daniel didn’t know a person could get an eyebrow that far up their forehead, but Johnny’s managing, somehow. It makes him think of the restaurant again, of sitting not quite across from each other and jibing back and forth, of wanna step in the parking lot, see whose leg can go higher? The thing is, Daniel sort of did.

“I think I know drunk when I see it,” says Johnny. The fact that Daniel can’t come up with a satisfactory response for that probably means that he’s right, which is annoying. He sighs. Point, Lawrence.

Johnny sets the beer on the table—on a coaster, no less; maybe Daniel’s been a good influence on him after all—and rises to his feet.

“C’mon, LaRusso,” he says with a sigh. It’s not a very exasperated one. “Let’s get you to bed.”

Daniel’s probably going to be rolling that one around in his head for a few days once he’s got less gin in his system, but as it happens, his initial reaction is, “Shit, what time is it?”

Johnny snorts, leaning down to help Daniel to his feet. “Like, one-thirty or something.”

“You came back for your phone at one in the morning?” Daniel asks, bewildered. He’s a little unsteady on his feet, made a little unsteadier by the way Johnny wraps a hand around his upper arm to support him.

Johnny shrugs. It’s a tight movement, short and sharp and jerky. He says, “Gotta have it handy. In case—you know.”

Daniel doesn’t know. Johnny must read it in his face because his expression crumples, just a little, and he sighs.

“In case Robby calls.”

Daniel says, softly, “Oh.”

“Yeah. Oh.”

They don’t say too much after that. Later, Daniel will remember something of Johnny making him drink two glasses of water, the sound of the olives being put back into the fridge, the sleep-blurred silhouette of him standing in Daniel’s doorway for just a few seconds longer than necessary. Long enough for Daniel to whisper, Night, Johnny.

Long enough to see Johnny’s shoulders fall, just a little.

Daniel can’t remember if Johnny says anything back.

❀

(The thing is, Johnny deflected when Daniel asked him if there was anyone else. Anyone special. Daniel only realizes later that’s what it was.

He doesn’t quite know what to make of it.)

❀

January passes. February creeps in. Daniel manages to convince Johnny to try the balance wheel with him again after class one Saturday. They end earlier in the afternoon than on weekdays, meaning there’s plenty of time and daylight to do the warmups before they start on the wheel itself. Daniel might’ve planned it that way, if he’s honest. Which he won’t be if Johnny asks, mind you, but Johnny doesn’t. He usually doesn’t. Daniel’s started to count on that, just a bit.

Maybe it’s the weeks of sparring or maybe it’s the teaching together or maybe it’s just that they’ve learned how to read each other better than at the outset, but this time, it’s seamless. Synced. Balanced.

Daniel leads, and Johnny follows perfectly. Johnny improvises, and Daniel follows without a second thought. He knows Johnny’s style like the backs of his own teeth—not by sight, but by feeling. Innately, almost.

Ten minutes pass, then ten more. Daniel stops paying attention. The world has narrowed to this little platform on the pond, water lapping at his heels, Johnny moving across from him, round and round, like a star. Like a planet. Like that song by The Cars.

Like there’s something between them, something with enough gravity to hold them here, keep them orbiting still after thirty years. Objects in motion, and all that.

The sun is going down. Neither of them is leading anymore. They’re just moving together.

That’s the point.

That was always, Daniel realizes, the point.

❀

His knees are aching and his feet are cold by the time they’ve finished, but Daniel doesn’t care. They didn’t even fall getting off the platform. It feels a little bit like a miracle.

He wishes Mr. Miyagi could’ve seen it.

Johnny offers him a flash of a smile when Daniel hands him a towel on the deck, which is probably why Daniel decides, What the hell?

“Maybe I could show you kata next time?” he asks. Kata is absolutely not Johnny’s style, not even within the realm of his kind of karate—but then, neither is the balance wheel, really. Neither is Daniel, but they’ve been sparring and teaching together over a month now. It would be really nice to have someone to do kata with again, Daniel thinks.

“Cute,” says Johnny, rolling his eyes.

Daniel rolls his back to hide his disappointment.

❀

(But Johnny’s there early Sunday morning when Daniel steps into the yard. Waiting.)

❀

“Miguel said he walked in on you and Sensei Lawrence doing kata before classes,” says Sam on Friday. She’s helping him pick up before they leave and grab some dinner.

Fridays are the one day Daniel doesn’t spar after class because of this, and for the most part, he doesn’t mind it. It means he gets a little extra time alone with Sam, something that’s harder and harder to do as she’s gotten older and busier and more preoccupied. Of course, right now, he’s not sure that’s a good thing, judging by the way she says Sensei Lawrence in conjunction with doing kata. Not really disbelieving, but in the ballpark.

“Miguel was right,” Daniel says, because he’s not really sure how else to respond. There’s no point in denying it, as Miguel very much did interrupt them this afternoon, pulling up short when he stepped into the back garden, eyes flicking back and forth between Johnny and Daniel, all three of them frozen in place while the gears visibly turned inside Miguel’s head, though Daniel still isn’t sure what conclusion he came to, in the end. But it’s just kata, after all. No touching involved. That’s kind of the tagline of his relationship with Johnny, actually: no touching, not unless they’re fighting. Not that Daniel’s going to tell Samantha that. And not that he has, you know, a relationship with Johnny, outside of a business sense. They’re friends, that’s all.

His daughter doesn’t say anything, and Daniel’s never done very well with silence, so he says lightly, “I’m converting him to the Miyagi-Do way. He just hasn’t figured it out yet.”

Sam looks down at the unused beach towel in her hands, kicking at the grass. She’s got that look on her face that means she wants to say something, but she can’t quite figure out how. It reminds him of Amanda; she’s got the same expression. It’s one he’s seen an awful lot of since December.

Finally, Sam says, “Miguel said you were really good. Together.”

Miguel’s right, Daniel doesn’t say. You’d never believe it, knowing Johnny, knowing Daniel, knowing how different they are, but Johnny’s good, and so is he, and so are they when they’re together. Sometimes, Daniel feels like he could take on the world if he had Johnny with him, circling at his back. They could have been unstoppable if they hadn’t been enemies, way back when.

Maybe they still could be.

“That’s nice of him,” Daniel replies instead, because somehow he can’t bear to admit any of this to—well, to anyone, “but it’s just kata, not a tournament match. Maybe you two should join us sometime.”

It doesn’t look like Sam believes him.

Come to think of it, Daniel doesn’t know if he believes himself.

❀

The kids start giving them looks after that, which means Miguel told more than just Samantha, or Samantha told someone else, but honestly, Daniel’s money’s on Miguel. He’s a sweet kid, but he has zero filter sometimes. He’s a lot like Johnny that way. After two days, Daniel’s fed up enough with it that he tells them all if they want to practice kata, they can come early before class on the weekends and do it with them. Let them see for themselves that it’s just kata, nothing more.

He doesn’t like losing those mornings, but he doesn’t want them to think he and Johnny have anything to hide.

Because they don’t. They really, honestly don’t.

Which is a little disappointing to Daniel, but he’d prefer not to think about why, exactly.

Anyway, they still have evenings, and doing kata with the kids is nice, mostly. Johnny sticks around for it, and that’s nice, too.

❀

When Johnny brings up the Valentine’s Day dance at the high school, Daniel is surprised for two reasons. First, because he’d all but forgotten about Valentine’s Day, considering he hasn’t got anyone to spend it with for the first time in, what, twenty years? Amazing how easily these things slip by you when you haven’t got a reason to prioritize them. Second, of course, is because Johnny knowing anything about high school dances is surprising to Daniel. The only dance he can remember Johnny going to was the Halloween one, which isn’t really something he likes to dwell on. He can’t even recall if Johnny was at their prom or not. He was a little busy getting dumped, after all.

But anyway. The dance.

“What about it?” Daniel asks curiously. They’re seated on the edge of the sparring deck, eating lunch. More accurately, Daniel’s eating lunch, and Johnny’s eating rolled-up bologna, which is not the same thing. He contemplates, briefly, the logistics of paying Miguel to sneak celery into Johnny’s fridge. Knowing Johnny he’d just throw it away.

“Miguel asked me to teach him how to waltz,” Johnny says with mild distaste.

Daniel, mystified, asks, “Why?”

“Some bullshit about how they’re doing a waltz with randomly assigned partners this year, so ‘everyone is included’,” Johnny says, making air quotes and rolling his eyes.

“That actually sounds nice,” Daniel can’t help but reply.

“Of course you’d say that.”

“Well, it does!” Daniel insists. “What’s so bad about that?”

Johnny grumbles something he can’t make out into his bologna, and then (blessedly) swallows and admits, each word like pulling teeth, “I don’t know how to fuckin’ waltz.”

Daniel stares. Johnny scowls.

“Stop giving me that look, LaRusso,” he growls, but Daniel can see his ears turning red with discomfort.

“Sorry,” he says automatically. “It’s just—I figured, what with you being from Encino and all, you know, that time at the country club with Ali—”

“That was a long time ago,” Johnny says stiffly. “Anyway, we mostly didn’t dance back then.”

“You didn’t?”

“We’d go talk somewhere our parents wouldn’t annoy us, yeah. Don’t you go to those things now? Haven’t your kids ever gone off and done that shit?”

Actually, they’re mostly on their phones instead, but Daniel supposes he’s got a point.

“Well,” he says diplomatically, “waltzing isn’t hard. You can probably—”

“If you tell me I can find a video on MeTune or whatever, I’ll kick your ass.”

“YouTube, Johnny.”

“Who cares? Do you know how many goddamn ads I gotta sit through to watch one measly video that isn’t even useful?”

Sometimes, Daniel legitimately wonders how Johnny’s survived this long in the twenty-first century.

He sighs. “Why is Miguel asking you, anyway? Why not Carmen?”

“Probably ‘cause nobody asks their mom how to dance, duh.”

Daniel opens his mouth to say, Hey, I did. Johnny doesn’t let him get that far.

“Nobody except you, obviously,” Johnny says. “And you don’t count.”

“Why don’t I count?”

“Because you’re you, LaRusso,” he replies, like that makes any kind of sense. Apparently it does to Johnny, but then, so do a lot of things that are otherwise incomprehensible to Daniel, and probably the rest of the world at large.

“Okay, well, how about I teach Miguel how to—”

“No,” Johnny cuts him off immediately.

He throws up his hands. “Why not?”

“You’ll teach him to waltz like a pussy or something.”

“What does that even mean?” Daniel says helplessly, burying his face in one hand. Johnny doesn’t bother to reply, because of course he doesn’t. Fine, he thinks. Time for a new plan. Daniel sighs and sets his food aside before climbing to his feet and turning back to offer Johnny a hand. Johnny blinks at it, then at him.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“How about this? I,” says Daniel, “am going to teach you how to waltz, so you can teach Miguel, so Miguel doesn’t have to ask his mom and you don’t have to use YouTube and nobody’s a pussy, or whatever your weird hang-up about my dancing ability is. Everybody wins.”

Johnny just keeps staring at him. Daniel rolls his eyes.

“Come on, it’ll take, like, five minutes, tops. Waltzing’s easy. You can learn kata just as fast.”

Johnny pulls a pretty amusing face at that, but he wipes his hands on his sweats and lets Daniel haul him up onto his feet. The kids have all left for an hour, carpooling off to get lunch, so there’s no funny looks or phone cameras to worry about. It’s just the two of them on the sparring deck. In the whole world, maybe.

“Okay, face me and put your left hand on my shoulder—no, your other left. My right.”

“Why do I have to be the girl?” Johnny grumbles, switching hands. “If anyone gets to lead it oughta be me.”

“You need to know how to follow so you can show Miguel what it’s like to have a proper partner,” Daniel explains patiently, trying not to think about how close they are right now, closer than on the wheel in the water, closer than when they bow to each other before sparring. Trying not to think about Johnny’s hand on his shoulder. “And anyway, I thought you didn’t know how to waltz.”

He brings his own hand up to Johnny’s shoulder blade, reaches out with his left to take Johnny’s right. Johnny’s shoulders are tense under his touch.

“Yeah, but I know the guy leads,” Johnny scoffs. It sounds forced, somehow.

“We’re both guys, Johnny.”

“Speak for yourself, Danielle.”

Daniel sighs and decides not to take the bait. This will take a century if he gives in to the urge to start arguing with Johnny, and time is something they don’t really have right now.

“I’m going to step forward with my left foot,” he begins instead, “and you’ll step back with your right. Just watch my feet, okay?”

Johnny seems only too happy to focus down at their feet instead of staring awkwardly over Daniel’s right shoulder. The tips of his ears are flushed, and his hand is sweaty in Daniel’s—or maybe Daniel’s is sweaty in his?

Daniel steps forward. Johnny steps back, perfectly in sync, just like on the wheel. Just like Daniel’s thrown a punch and Johnny’s dodged it.

“Now bring your other foot back,” Daniel coaches, and Johnny does. “And now step together, that’s right.”

They go slowly for a bit, with Daniel saying the steps aloud. Then a little faster—forward, together. Back, together. Again. Eventually he only counts aloud: one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. Like points in a match, except they’re not fighting anymore. Haven’t been for a long time.

Soon, the only sound is the shuffling of their footsteps on the wood, the wind in the trees, the occasional splashing of a fish in the pond. It’s nice. Peaceful.

Johnny keeps watching their feet, though he doesn’t need to. He mirrors Daniel perfectly. If not for his discomfort earlier, Daniel would swear he already knew how to do this. But Johnny’s always been a fast learner, picking up the kata Daniel showed him after just one or two tries, ingraining the Miyagi-Do techniques in a few hours when it took Daniel days as a teenager. Johnny’s built for muscle memory, Daniel thinks, and he’s spent an awful lot of time opposite Daniel, hasn’t he?

Fighting’s a lot like dancing when you think about it.

By now, Johnny’s certainly learned the steps well enough to teach Miguel, but he doesn’t pull away. Neither does Daniel. They just keep going, stepping carefully in circles, hand in hand. It’s nice, Daniel thinks again. This is nice.

They’re interrupted by the sound of one of the kids’ cars pulling up out front, dirt and gravel popping under the tires. Johnny immediately steps back, hands pulling away, and Daniel tries to quash his disappointment at the loss of contact.

Johnny clears his throat. “Uh. Thanks, I guess.”

He won’t meet Daniel’s eyes, instead saying the words to the general vicinity of Daniel’s left ear. There’s redness creeping up his neck and stiffness in his shoulders and Daniel thinks, suddenly: oh.

He thinks he gets it. He thinks maybe Johnny does, too.

But he can hear Hawk and Demetri arguing loudly in the dojo, heading towards the back, so all he says is, “Anytime.”

❀

It’s surprisingly easy to persuade Johnny to chaperone the dance with him. Daniel had a very convincing explanation prepared about needing to keep an eye out in case Cobra Kai tried to pull any funny business, but when he texted Johnny his initial proposal, fingers poised to continue, Johnny just texted back FINE in all caps because he’s never seemed to figure out how to text properly, because of course he hasn’t. And that was that.

It's a good thing, too, because Daniel’s not really here to chaperone. Johnny’s taking it surprisingly seriously, though, standing by one of the gym exits with his arms folded, staring down any kids who try to leave. He’s even wearing a button-down—the same black one from December, which Daniel thought looked nice at the time (still does, honestly) but now leaves a bit of a sour taste in his mouth. Knowing Johnny, it’s the only one he owns. He looks amusingly out of place among the pink and white crepe paper and balloons everywhere.

About an hour into things, they shift over to the waltz, which—okay, Daniel can’t help but agree with Johnny here, just a little. It’s a nice concept, sure, but also maybe not the greatest idea for a high school dance. After all the drama of last fall, though, and the ongoing karate turf war, he supposes the school board is looking for any way to look good and inclusive for the parents.

Daniel grabs a couple plastic cups of punch (guarded by a teacher so as not to end up spiked, though he was a teenager once, so he’s not sure how effective that’ll be) and sidles up beside Johnny.

“So,” he says, handing Johnny one of the cups, “how’d it go?”

“How did what go?” Johnny asks, squinting through the low lighting to watch Miguel dancing with a girl Daniel’s never seen before. Sam and Hawk are paired off somewhere; Daniel saw them cracking jokes and pretending to step on each other’s toes a minute ago.

“Teaching Miguel how to waltz,” Daniel says. Johnny glances over at him, and he adds, “Seems like he’s doing fine to me.”

He’s nice like that.

Johnny harrumphs and downs some of the punch. “He said he could tell I was lying when I told him I knew how to dance even if dancing was for losers and that he was just gonna watch a video tutorial or some shit so I made him do twenty pushups for being a pussy.”

“You did what?” Daniel asks rather faintly, though he’s not really surprised. It’s more of a reflex at this point. A ritual.

“Then I taught him how to waltz,” Johnny says. “Obviously. You see him over there? He’s killing it.”

“He is,” Daniel agrees, because Miguel is doing better than most of the other teenagers he can see from here. It’s a low bar, to be fair, but still.

“He always does,” says Johnny. He sounds proud. Daniel supposes that’s his star student, after all. It would be hard not to be proud of Miguel, after everything, or maybe because of it.

They’re both quiet for a few moments, just drinking overly-sweet punch and watching a bunch of high schoolers suck at waltzing. It’s not a bad way to spend an evening, Daniel thinks, when you’ve got good company. Then he thinks that maybe he should get his head checked because he’s considering Johnny Lawrence to be good company, but whatever. It’s a little late to claim something like temporary insanity as the cause of all this—the karate war, the shared dojo, the sparring. What Daniel’s about to do.

“Hey,” he leans over and says into Johnny’s ear. “Wanna get out of here?”

Johnny looks at him with an expression Daniel can only categorize as mild incredulity. “Isn’t that the thing we’re supposed to be stopping people from doing?”

Daniel shrugs innocently.

“Jesus, LaRusso, I thought you were the responsible one here.”

“C’mon, didn’t you ever sneak out of a dance?” Daniel teases, nudging at Johnny’s ribs with an elbow. It’s a rhetorical question, which Johnny well knows, seeing as Daniel once ambushed him when he was rolling joints in the bathroom on Halloween.

“Where are we going,” Johnny says flatly. He doesn’t say it like a question, so Daniel doesn’t deign to answer, just loops his elbow through Johnny’s and, after checking no one is watching—though he doubts anyone’s going to care if a couple of adults sneak off, and not a pair of horny teens—drags him out through the door they were watching. There’s at least three other chaperones within sight of the door, so it’ll probably be fine if they leave it alone for a while, he reasons.

And even if it wasn’t, he might not care anyway. Johnny’s always had a way of making him act like an idiot, after all, whether they’re seventeen or fifty-two. He kind of wants to know if that will hold true when they’re older. If Johnny will stick around that long to see.

The halls are empty, but Daniel pulls him a ways away from the gymnasium anyway, just in case anyone does come out here. He doesn’t really want an audience of teenagers for any more of his life than he already does.

“You gonna tell me what we’re here for, or am I just supposed to assume you’re finally going to murder me and be done with it?” Johnny asks, a little huffily, pulling out of Daniel’s grasp when they stop. The hall is lined with lockers as far as the eye can see, which isn’t very far considering most of the lights are off.

They’ve redone the building since he and Johnny went here—at least twice, Daniel thinks—so the hallways aren’t open air anymore like they used to be. He wonders if he could still find the spot where his locker used to be, where he spent handfuls of minutes, collected into hours across the year he spent here, talking to Ali and her friends, or (more often, before the truce) being shoved around by Johnny and his buddies. It wasn’t the world’s most pleasant experience at the time, being slammed against the lockers with Johnny Lawrence up in his face, but if Daniel racks his brain he can still remember the cologne Johnny used to wear, and the freckle on his chin you only notice when you get up close enough, like when he’s got you pinned against the lockers, for example, or when you’re teaching him to waltz.

“I’m not going to murder you,” Daniel tells him, and he can’t help the fondness that colors his voice.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He steps around so he’s facing Johnny, breathes in, holds, breathes out, and says, perhaps a little too quickly, before he can change his mind, “Want to dance?”

Johnny stares. “I— you— what?”

“I said,” Daniel begins, but Johnny shakes his head.

“I heard you the first time, I’m not deaf.”

“Could have fooled me, with how loud you were playing Kenny Loggins this morning,” Daniel can’t help but say.

“Stop fucking talking,” snaps Johnny, though not angrily. Daniel stops fucking talking, just watches as Johnny runs a hand through his hair and breathes out harshly through his nose, mouth working as he tries to find what to say. When he finally does, it’s just one word. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why me?” Johnny asks frustratedly. “I thought—”

He stops. Stares at his feet. Stares at the lockers. Stares anywhere but Daniel.

“You thought what?”

Look at me, Daniel wants to say. Look at me, Johnny.

“I don’t know. I don’t fucking know what I thought.”

Daniel steps a little closer, but only a little, because Johnny’s got a little bit of a caged animal look about him right now. It’s a curious reversal of roles from their youth, when Johnny was predator and Daniel was prey, right here in this very high school. The halls have been rebuilt and the layout is different and so is everything between the two of them now. They’re the same but different, relationship remapped and reordered and rebuilt. Daniel thinks he’s getting the hang of it, but the thing about relationships is they’re supposed to go both ways. This will never work if Johnny won’t let him in.

“Does there have to be a reason?” Daniel asks softly.

“Yes.” Johnny’s looking at him, now, like he’s trying to read a novel in the lines of Daniel’s face. Like all the answers will be there if he just looks hard enough. And they are, Daniel thinks—they are there. But he’ll say them anyway. He’ll show mercy.

“Okay,” he says, even softer. He reaches for Johnny’s hand, and Johnny lets him. “The reason is that I want to. That work for you?”

“Okay,” Johnny echoes. It’s a little strangled, and he clears his throat before continuing, “But I’m leading this time.”

Daniel can’t help it—he laughs. Johnny rolls his eyes in mock-offense, which just makes him laugh harder.

“Sorry,” he gasps, “I’m sorry, it’s just—your face.”

“Yeah, yeah, real funny, LaRusso. You’re a regular clown.”

“You can call me Daniel, you know. I mean, we run a business together.”

That shuts him up. It takes a few seconds for Johnny’s brain to reboot before he can come up with a response. When he does, of course, it’s nothing short of typical.

“Your students don’t even pay you,” Johnny says. “That’s not a fucking business.”

“Figure of speech.”

“I’ll figure your speech—”

“Oh, yeah?” Daniel asks, raising an eyebrow. “Tell me more about that, Johnny. I’m dying to know how you’ll do it, exactly.”

Johnny flushes, folding his arms across his chest. “Jesus. You’re the worst, you know that?”

The thing is, he says it with absolutely zero venom. If anything, Johnny Lawrence calls him the worst like it’s a compliment. Like it’s the best goddamn thing since karate or fast cars or hard rock. Naturally, Daniel beams.

“I know,” he says. Johnny just sighs.

“We dancing or what?”

They’re definitely dancing.

“Hang on, hang on,” Daniel says, going for his pocket and pulling out his phone. Johnny watches in bemusement as he pulls up his FM radio app. “We gotta have music for this.”

He taps through a couple stations, all classic rock or oldies, though it feels disrespectful to call anything younger than his mom an oldie, not that anyone else cares. “Separate Ways” is going on one, and Daniel swats Johnny on the arm before he can suggest they try to waltz to Journey. Maybe if it were “Open Arms”—maybe. Finally, on the fourth station, he hears something that gives him pause.

“Janey was lovely, she was the queen of my nights—"

It feels a little like fate, if fate were a thing Daniel believed in.

“This’ll do,” Daniel says.

“Figures you’d be a Seger fan,” Johnny snorts. Again, there’s no bite to it. There hasn’t been for a while.

“—there in the darkness with the radio playin’ low—”

“Hey,” he complains, “Seger’s a classic.”

“People say anything that came out before the nineties is classic, LaRusso; doesn’t mean it’s true.”

He does have a point. Daniel once saw a pair of jeans thirty years his junior listed as “vintage Y2K” on Facebook Marketplace. It made him die a little inside.

“There will be no Bob Seger slander on my dance floor, Johnny Lawrence.”

“This is a school hallway, and it’s not yours.”

“Are we dancing or what?” Daniel says, parroting Johnny’s own words back to him, and Johnny grumbles but takes the hand he’s offered.

“I am leading this time,” he insists.

“Johnny—”

But the look on Johnny’s face pulls him up short.

“Do you trust me?” Johnny asks. That’s all. Simple and to the point—two things Johnny Lawrence almost never is. And—

Well. He’s been letting Daniel lead in just about everything else for weeks now, hasn’t he? Sparring, kata, conversations, teaching him to waltz. This entire time, Daniel’s been leading, and Johnny’s been letting him, ever since that day with the trust falls. Before that, even—at the tournament, or when Daniel barged into his newly-opened dojo, always reading his body language and posturing himself against whatever front Daniel offered, like a mirror. Like a dance.

How long has he been waiting for Daniel to notice?

How long has he been waiting for Daniel to see?

“Okay,” Daniel says after a minute. “You lead.”

Yes, is what he’s saying. Yes, I trust you.

And the thing is, he does.

Johnny’s hand comes to rest on his back, and Daniel settles his on Johnny’s shoulder, and then they’re dancing.

“Against the wind,” croons Seger from Daniel’s breast pocket, and he hums along. “We were running against the wind.”

Forward, together, back, together, around and around in the darkened hallway. It feels like maybe this was always going to happen. Like they were always heading towards this point. The song hits the duet, and Johnny dips him. Daniel’s already moving into it on pure instinct, body responding to Johnny’s movements before his mind has caught up to them. They stay like that for a moment, Daniel’s weight supported almost entirely by Johnny’s grip.

“If you drop me—” Daniel begins, and Johnny’s already pulling him back up with a grin.

“You’ll kick my ass,” he says. “I know.” Then, leaning closer, into the shell of Daniel’s ear: “But I didn’t.”

And Daniel didn’t expect him to.

“Nice moves, Lawrence,” he says, and then he turns his head so that his forehead rests against the juncture of Johnny’s neck and shoulder. He does it partly because of the inhalation Johnny rewards him with, and partly to reassure himself there aren’t any bruises there—not anymore. There aren’t—Daniel knew this—and yet, it didn’t hurt to check. Quite the opposite, actually.

“Nice moves yourself,” says Johnny. He hesitates before adding, “Daniel.”

They’re not really waltzing anymore, just sort of turning in slow circles in the half-dark, like all the couples at senior prom who weren’t busy being dumped by their girlfriends, which Daniel was. Johnny’s hand slides down his back to rest against his waist. Daniel closes his eyes, leans into the music, leans into Johnny like he’s been wanting to for a while now.

“Against the wind. I’m still running against the wind.”

There’s no pretense in being held this time. No falling or hurting required, or if there is, it’s a different kind of falling entirely.

“I’m older now but still running against the wind.”

And anyway, Daniel knows how to fall. It just took him a while to figure it out. But he got there in the end, didn’t he? They both did. Bob Seger keeps singing, and they keep turning, and Daniel thinks, just a little, that he could get used to this. If he wanted to.

And here’s a secret, poorly kept: he does. He does want to. And maybe he will, someday.

For now, though, he’ll take the hallway and the dancing and Johnny Lawrence, and that’ll be good enough for Daniel.