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The fact is, Johnny is afraid.
Johnny is afraid, like he's always been, like he always will be. He'll never admit it, of course. Who likes admitting that they're afraid? It's a sin; it's unheard of; it's weakness, and there is no weakness in this dojo.
But when Johnny looks over at the beach one night, pumped with adrenaline, with the need to change, his smile fades as his eyes drop to see brown hair and olive skin. The boy has a smile like no other, all crooked teeth and dimples — charming, beautiful. And Johnny feels something red hot, something burning inside him, too close to desire, to passion, and he's afraid again.
The fact is, Johnny doesn't like being afraid. Who does?
So he turns it into anger. He utilises it. He exploits it in a way that leaves both of them hurting inside and out, respectively. And there's something about seeing the boy writhe and groan in pain, something about seeing something beautiful be destroyed by his own hands that doesn't tamp down the fear in his heart.
So Johnny keeps being afraid, which means he keeps being angry, and he keeps using Ali as an excuse — He moved in on my girl! — but even Bobby, little shit, can see through him, can see right inside him, with his earnest eyes and the sympathetic twist of his mouth.
---
The day after they run LaRusso off the road, he ditches the guys to check the same road and see if he's cracked his head open somewhere.
He leaves with a heavy heart. He leaves with fear tingling underneath his skin.
---
The fact is, LaRusso can never leave well enough alone.
The days and weeks leading up to the Halloween Dance are – amicable enough. That’s the best Johnny can put it. The morning of, when they’re all preparing and Johnny’s helping with all the painting and brushing and whatnot (it’s Jimmy’s fault, okay, the absolute nerd), headphones on and feeling absolutely fucking amazing, he senses someone behind him, staring.
It’s enough to unnerve Johnny, but when he turns around, all he sees is a blur of blue and brown hair and olive skin.
He swallows heavily, looks around for a good moment, before going back to what he was doing.
The night of is when disaster strikes.
It starts like how it always starts: with anger, with misplaced passion, with the intent to hurt, to take revenge, to get back, etc.
LaRusso can never leave well enough alone.
So they chase him down, watching as his stupid fucking costume gets wrecked as they go farther and farther until he tries to climb over a chain-link fence, until he meets his certain doom.
So they pull him down, so Johnny pulls him close, so close that he can hear LaRusso’s heartbeat (he doesn’t want to think it’s his own, knows it’s for a different reason) pounding against his chest.
And it plays out for him in slow motion—the way LaRusso’s head is thrown back, lips parted and grunts getting punched out of him with every push and pull of Johnny’s hands (disastrous, destructive, calloused, ugly hands), and he feels it again. Red hot and burning, all-consuming and Johnny doesn’t want to put a name to it, doesn’t want to make it real.
But it’s like the smog around them affects him to the point it messes with his head, his vision so clouded that it’s like it’s only him and LaRusso in this wretched place on such a wretched evening, the moonlight and the distant streetlights haloing LaRusso and from this angle — he looks beautiful.
He looks beautiful like this — destroyed and hopeless, weak in Johnny’s arms, and it’s such a twisted thought that fear washes over him once again, dousing the red-hot and burning feeling inside him with something colder, something that sobers him up, something to turn into anger, to turn into a passion that he’s familiar with.
So instead of I adore you, his traitorous mouth says You couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you twerp? And the familiarity of his fists colliding with skin, with LaRusso’s skin almost shocks him, but adrenaline pumps in his veins alongside the fear (ever present, never backing down, familiar, familiar…) and he has to utilise this, to exploit this, to turn it into something useful. So he watches as his foot makes contact with LaRusso’s face, watches as bruises bloom on his smooth and delicate skin, watches as big doe-like eyes get framed in black and blue.
But then Bobby pulls him aside, and Johnny can see the rage and sympathy in his eyes. Johnny almost looks away, but that would mean an admission of fear, an admission of weakness, so he doesn’t and stands his ground. Bobby says, “He’s had enough man!”
“I’ll decide when he’s had enough!” Johnny retorts when he means I’ll decide when I let him go. I haven’t had enough of him yet. I don’t want to let him go.
“What is wrong with you Johnny?” But Bobby knows, Bobby knows exactly what’s wrong with Johnny, because Johnny’s life ended when he was fourteen; when he kissed Bobby Brown in his room and Bobby turned away with something akin to disgust and pity.
“An enemy deserves no mercy!” Johnny says instead, and Bobby calls him crazy for it, and he’s not wrong, Johnny thinks.
Well, Johnny thinks that he thinks, because before he can really think, they’re all going down one by one, and then it’s all black.
---
When LaRusso had first peeked into the dojo, quiet and jaw slacked like the little mouth breather that he is, eyes wide and almost sparkly, Johnny had no trouble finding him through the heads of his peers.
It’s not his fault, of course. LaRusso’s wearing that bright red jacket of his, and he’s the next most interesting thing to look at in the dojo.
Now, the day after the Halloween Dance, when he catches sight of LaRusso again — this time not alone, fuck — the same phrase that popped into his head the first time makes a reappearance.
This is gonna be good.
---
The fact is, Johnny kinda misses the fear. It’s almost addicting, the feeling. The absence of it almost drives him insane, so he goes out of his way to seek it out; to seek LaRusso out.
He does it in ways that toe the line between harmless and harmful, and it comes back, the fear. The fear of disobeying his sensei, the fear of breaking a truce (Johnny always honours truces, a sad fact), the fear of accepting the fact that he likes this, the contact, the closeness with LaRusso.
At some point, in between shoving the paperwork in LaRusso’s hands and leaving with a final kick to an open locker door (because honestly why would anyone leave that open Jesus), LaRusso calls to him, inquiring, a genuine curiosity in his tone with only a smidge of that annoying lilt he has that grates Johnny’s gears just right.
“What pleasure you get from all this?”
Johnny’s face twists. “All what?”
“Your big shot attitude,” LaRusso clarifies, “I mean we both know you can kick my face in so why do you still bother?”
Johnny does most of everything deliberately. He’d trained himself to do everything deliberately. He’d deliberately slipped into the asshole rich kid persona to appease not only his stepfather but for his mother; he’d deliberately become the best in their dojo as to show he’s more than the shrimpy little nerd he used to be.
So his slow steps towards LaRusso are deliberate. His next words, however, aren’t.
He grabs LaRusso’s shirt, fists curling into the soft material, and he sneers, faces too close too fast, and sneers, “Maybe because I like to, you ever think of that?”
And he reels. The next deliberate thing he does is to not let this show on his face. LaRusso just drives him insane in all the worst ways possible, and this—what Johnny just said, what Johnny keeps doing is too close to an admission, too close to acceptance.
Johnny can’t have that.
“You ever think your teacher might be wrong man?”
Johnny can’t have that.
He slams LaRusso against the wall, anger bubbling inside him, and it takes everything in him not to collide his fist with Daniel’s unbruised face (not for the first time, he thinks about how beautiful he looks like this, unbruised — clean. But there is no trace of Johnny, and something under his skin itches to leave a mark, itches to leave something that shows everyone Johnny’s laid his hands on him) and instead raises his index finger, the mere force of it causing his hand to tremble.
“Watch your mouth runt,” he hisses and tries not to notice the way LaRusso’s lips part in such a scandalous manner, “Or I might forget my promise and rip your teeth out.”
LaRusso looks away for a fraction of a second, and Johnny can’t have that.
Johnny slams him against the wall one more time, just to have those eyes on him again, knowing it’s not for the last time, but knowing that it’s the only time it will ever happen with just the two of them, before he takes his leave.
---
The one-sided argument with Sid about the stupid stain on his sweater is worth it if it meant that LaRusso got into full-body contact with him, having barrelled into him like a fucking bull.
---
“Is this even about Ali anymore man?” Bobby asks him, watching the bonfire crackle and fizzle. He passes the joint over to Johnny, who doesn’t answer, instead choosing to take a hit.
He watches the smoke escape from his lips, and he closes his eyes, falling back onto the sand.
He thinks, then, of slender olive hands taking the joint from his own, slipping one end into soft, plump lips, cheeks hollowing with the inhale before he removes the joint, long eyelashes almost curtaining deep dark browns, and then their lips meet, and he’s exhaling the smoke into Johnny’s mouth.
Johnny doesn’t jolt out of the daydream. In fact, he quite languidly opens his eyes, lazily tosses his heavy head to the vague direction of Bobby. He thinks, again, briefly, about Bobby. Sweet Bobby, been there since the start. Through thick and thin, through sickness and in health. He thinks—no, no. He knows, Bobby is good. Bobby can keep a secret. Admittance to Bobby is not acceptance.
The words slip through his lips easily enough. “It never was.”
---
Two things:
- He’s Johnny fucking Lawrence. Of course he’ll come out on top. He’ll win, get the girl, and continue torturing stupid little LaRusso.
- Daniel LaRusso is nothing compared to him. That shrimp will lose by the first round if Johnny had a say in anything.
- Daniel LaRusso is the most beautiful boy he’d ever laid eyes on and he’s scared he’s so scared and the weeks in which Daniel was free from bruises the weeks in which their hands would brush sometimes because their seats are fucking right next to each other in history and shit shit shit shit fuck Johnny’y screwed.
So, three things, really.
---
Watching LaRusso is thrilling, Johnny realises with a start.
The little shit is fast, like he’s always been. Agile and slippery, worming his way through the rankings. He catches himself almost grinning as LaRusso wins against Tommy, and instead schools his face into cool indifference.
He almost feels bad for him when he faces against Dutch, but then he remembers himself and goes to hyping Dutch up, clapping his shoulders hard.
He and Sensei have to turn around for the last half of that fight, Jesus Dutch.
The fight with Vidal goes through like how he expected it to: he wins. Of course he does.
LaRusso steps onto the mat. Bobby is doing the same when Sensei says, “Bobby.” And Bobby stops, peers at Sensei curiously. “I want him out of commission.”
Even Johnny has to gawk at him.
“But Sensei, I can beat this guy,” replies Bobby.
Then Sensei turns to him, slow, threatening, like a predator analysing its prey. “I don’t want him beaten,” he says, and is that a hint of venom in his voice?
“I’ll be disqualified!”
“Out. Of. Commission.”
Johnny’s blood runs cold, fear gripping him like a vice.
This time, he’s sure it’s not something he can easily turn into anger.
Bobby steps on the mat.
Johnny grips his belt like his life depends on it, and forces himself to watch, forces himself to not look away, forces himself to face the consequences of the shit he creates.
And, when Bobby sets off, target locked, Johnny flinches, almost runs forward, a word stuck in his throat, a word that sounds too similar to stop or wait, but that can’t be, can it?
This is what he wanted.
Johnny sets his jaw and wills himself to drown out Bobby’s panicked apologies and Daniel’s pained screams.
This is what he wanted.
--
Bobby quits by angrily tossing his belt in front of Sensei. Johnny doesn’t stop him.
--
The next fifteen minutes is spent waiting in agony. The not knowing is almost worst than the knowing, it seems. Other than that, of course, is that Johnny will not be fucking taking a consolation trophy.
Johnny does his best to act cocky, act like the rich asshole kid everyone seems to think he is, swaying on his feet with a smirk as he’s almost announced to be winner.
Almost, until Ali runs out and whispers LaRusso’s return.
Little punk.
And this is it, isn’t it? The moment Johnny’s been waiting for. The unscratchable itch; to have and to hold LaRusso again, with fists colliding and kicks thrown and skin touching skin in the most painful ways imaginable. He maps out the areas he’ll leave bruises on LaRusso’s skin: his chest, his back, his pretty little face.
But it’s LaRusso who gets the first point (stomach) and the second point (his back, copycat). His nose is bleeding, and it’s fine okay, he’s fine, he can walk it off later, but the referee calls for a timeout and he’s being sent to Sensei.
Sensei holds his face, almost gingerly, really the only gentleness their Sensei can ever give them.
Then he says, “Sweep the leg.”
Not for the first time, Johnny’s blood runs cold, fear making his skin prickle.
Unlike Bobby, he says nothing, and stares instead in disbelief. And Sensei must have seen something, something he doesn’t like, because he asks, “You have a problem with that?” And there’s an edge to his tone that Johnny’s too familiar with, that Johnny fears.
He searches for something in Sensei’s face, anything that means he can say yes, say That's not fucking fair, but he finds nothing, so he says, “No sensei,” and he almost feels bad for lying.
“No mercy.”
The walk back to the mat feels like a walk to the gallows; to his deathbed.
He doesn’t get what he wants. He never does. His first point is to LaRusso’s face, the next is to his side.
But then, he thinks, he’s got two points in, hasn’t he? If he lands one more he doesn’t have to do it. Doesn’t have to follow what Sensei said. He’ll still win. They’ll still win.
He’s too quick.
He’s too fucking quick and the twerp never fucking stays down and—
Johnny thinks again, while he’s kneeling, about all the times he never gets what he wants. He starts with the little things; that toy car he wanted when he was little, a bedroom of his own back when they were still scraping by; then a good father in Sid; then Ali; then a good senior year.
Now this.
Johnny never gets what he wants.
Sweep the leg.
Johnny hates that he never gets what he wants.
Weeks later, he and Bobby will share stories of how it feels to have a knee break under your command, under your doing. How the ligament shatters, how it snaps and bends in a way that can only be described as unnatural.
Now, Johnny only hears ringing in his ears as he watches Daniel writhe on the floor clutching his leg.
The kick to the face, Johnny thinks, is something that he deserves.
It’s his turn to writhe on the floor, practically dragging himself across the mat as he covers his face because god fucking damn it it hurts, and he’s sure it’s bleeding again and it might be a little broken, but he can’t complain about it because the kid with the stupid broken leg won the stupid tournament and fuck he lost fuck.
Fuck.
He grabs the stupid trophy from the jackass holding it, blinking hard through his tears, and tries to say above the crowd, “You’re alright, LaRusso.” And he hopes against hope that LaRusso, blockhead that he is, can hear what it truly means, can see what Johnny’s trying to say, because Johnny’s not a man of words, he never was. But this is the most he’s done, the most he will ever do, to say I’m sorry.
---
The thing about fear is that it grips you like a vice and never lets go.
The thing about snakes is that they’re either constrictors or venomous. The thing about cobras is that they’re both.
And the thing about Kreese is, well.
The thing about Kreese is that he’s Johnny’s fear personified, and a cobra combined.
“That’s not fair I got second place!” he argues, because what else can he do now? He can feel it all falling apart, with Bobby quitting, who’s to say the others won’t?
“Second place?” and Kreese sounds so disgusted by it, so repulsed that Johnny can feel it through the fear forcing his feet to stay and not walk away. “Second place is no place! You’re off the team!”
“That sucks! I did my best!”
“What did you say?” And he sees it for what it is: a taunt, a challenge. A test for Kreese to see who he really is, where he really stands.
And he takes it.
“I said I did my best!”
“You’re nothin’! You lost! You’re a loser!”
“No, you’re the loser, man!” Johnny retorts lamely, and he’d wince at himself if he wasn’t in front of a man he considered his father, his safe haven.
“I’m the loser huh?” he says, disbelieving.
“Yeah.”
And then he’s grabbing Johnny’s second place trophy and breaking it and tossing it across the parking lot.
“Now who’s the loser?”
And Johnny feels it. Feels the fear turning into something else, something dangerous, something akin to anger, something he’s unfamiliar with.
It almost feels like acceptance.
“You know,” he says, “You’re really sick, man.”
Before he can really process anything, Kreese has him in a chokehold (venomous and a constrictor), and suddenly he can’t breathe, and he’s shutting his eyes so tight he sees stars, and he’s begging to something, to someone.
He can’t hear anything above his own choked out sounds, can’t feel anything other than leather on leather and leather on skin.
There’s only darkness behind his eyelids, but somehow he feels himself slipping further into it, and he doesn’t want to, because this is the most pathetic fucking way to die. Choked out by your father figure in a parking lot. That’s not going down the Johnny Lawrence history.
And suddenly, as if his prayers were answered, Kreese is ripped away from him, and he’s falling forward limply with no one to catch him but himself.
It takes a while for himself to come to, but when he does, Kreese is kneeling some feet away from him, and he’s surrounded by his friends, and in front of him is LaRusso, peering down curiously.
“Hey,” he says in that Jersey twang. Johnny’s heart aches and he closes his eyes again, so hard he meets the stars once more. “You okay man?”
Johnny thinks his face crumbles, because then LaRusso is standing there awkwardly, hand hovering between them uselessly.
“He’ll be alright,” Bobby answers for him. A half-truth, because how does one recover from such a thing?
How does one recover from such a betrayal?
---
It’s Christmas break and Bobby drags them over to apologise to LaRusso.
A unanimous decision, in Bobby’s words. Although in reality Dutch had grunted and whined and LaRusso’s a big boy, and Johnny hadn’t really said or done anything but grunt, but Bobby knows best in times like these.
What a mom, that guy, honestly.
But LaRusso’s not there when they arrive, which, what the fuck, hello? Broken knee? Limited mobility?
The thought of LaRusso’s broken knee would make Johnny sick if he wasn’t reeling at the information that the guy wasn’t there? Apparently?
“He might be over at Mr. Miyagi’s,” she says, and fetches a paper to write the address on.
They all look at each other. Johnny sighs. “We’ve come this far.”
Bobby nods firmly.
When Mrs. LaRusso comes back and slips the paper in between Bobby’s open palms, he says, “We’re sorry Mrs. LaRusso. For giving you and Daniel a hard time.” Bobby gulps audibly, the sound causing Johnny to twitch. “We’re never going back.”
That one, an actual unanimous decision, the ring of bruises under Johnny’s turtleneck a dealbreaker enough.
Mrs. LaRusso’s face, which had a tight expression the entire time they were there, which, fair, softens, and it almost looks like pity. Johnny’s stomach twists at the thought.
“Good,” she says, “I’m glad.” There’s honest-to-god relief in her voice, and Johnny can’t wrap his head around it, the thought of the mother of the kid he beat up sympathising and practically caring for their wellbeing. “I can’t forgive you for Daniel, but thank you for coming over and apologising. It’s good that you’re away from John Kreese.”
Johnny looks away, just for a second, then looks Mrs. LaRusso in the eyes.
His throat still hurts, but he speaks just to say, “Thank you, ma’am.”
--
They burst through the side gate when they arrive, because no one’s answering the knock at the front door and Dutch and Tommy, ever the adventurous duo, had found said side gate.
LaRusso, with great effort, attempts to look imposing with a clunky knee brace on and a lanky posture.
“What are you doing here?” he demands, crossing his arms. Mr. Miyagi places a hand on his shoulder, and it’s enough for LaRusso to calm down and back away.
“We wanted to make amends,” Johnny says before the others can, voice still gravelly and throaty. “And apologise. We wanted to fix things and… and your mom said you’d be here.”
“We’ll do it your way,” Bobby adds. “We’ll do whatever you want. Leave you alone, help you around in school; it’s all up to you, man.”
LaRusso studies them with squinted eyes before Mr. Miyagi ushers him to the side, and they put their heads together, discussing whatever the fuck. But it seems they come to an agreement when LaRusso perks up, almost like a dog, and beams at them. And call Johnny crazy but there might have been a hint of something evil in that smile.
“Mr. Miyagi needs help waxing some cars and painting some fences,” says LaRusso, shit-eating grin and all.