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All the life lessons and muscle memory exercises that can be milked from the restoration are done. The work however, is far from done.
That whole Saturday, Daniel buries himself in the fine tuning-- things he wouldn’t even trust in Sam’s hands. He knew from the moment he laid eyes on the trashed dojo; there would be things he’d have to do in solitude, straining to hear Mr. Miyagi’s voice in the breeze.
There's no breeze. Nothing that amounts to the labor of a fly's wing.
It’s a hundred degrees straight into the late afternoon, and he’s running on nothing but the remnants of this morning’s bitter coffee. Nonstop. Everything has to be perfect.
A steel water bottle has been boiling in the sun since this morning, barely touched. Daniel tells himself there’ll be time for that when the work is done. When he sanded the deck and painted the fence for hours as a kid, he barely had a jelly glass of Tang.
After the perfect amount of pete moss is patted on the re-potted bonsais, he hauls three more bags of loam onto the deck. He rests his hands on his knees, puffing, sweat rolling down his chin. What was I gonna do with these?
He tries to ground himself. Daniel-san, fly too close to sun.
I’m fine.
Sometimes Mr. Miyagi was too nonchalant about disorder, to the point it was maddening. This couldn’t wait.
He hears a car screech to a halt out front. If you were here, you’d check those brakes, he wants to say to Mr. Miyagi. Or did he say it out loud? As exhausted as he is, he registers the different sort of clunk when someone closes the door of a coupe.
Johnny comes through the gate, in his black gi, and he knows something is off when a slouched, wet Daniel casually nods “Hey...” like it’s just the mailman.
Johnny eyes the scene cautiously. He’d braced himself in the car before coming in. He didn’t want to face what had reduced Daniel to burning tears, but the place is pristine, without even a wisp of toilet paper in a tree. It’s barely been two days. “Listen, uh...I’m--I’ll be out of your hair in a sec. I just wanted to give you this.”
He hands Daniel an envelope full of cash. Daniel thumbs through it, the numbers flying out of his head as quickly as they go in.
“That should cover the damages,” Johnny says. “I haven’t gotten any of my kids to confess, but whatever, I know I have to eat it. Just don’t tell Kreese,” he shrugs, knowing this is only a half-joke.
“… I….” Daniel kneads his forehead hard, feeling like something is trying to cut its way out from the inside. “I dunno what to say…”
Well, that's another red flag. Johnny waits, his throat tightening. Daniel’s eyes are overcast, his chest working hard for someone standing still. He looks like a dog in a parked car.
Daniel's headache veers into a heavy numbness. He puts the envelope down on the deck, and the blob of sweat on his own shirt catches his attention. “Ey, look--inkblot test,” he mutters, gesturing weakly at it. "I see a tree an' you prob'ly see someone gettin' their ass kicked."
Johnny has seen him drunk, but it's different from this. “All I see is that you look like shit, LaRusso. How long have you been grinding out here?”
“Since six. I gotta get everything the way it was, whatever it takes.”
Johnny looks him over, blue eyes flashing with guilt. Whoever slashed their way through this place had no idea who they were dealing with, someone still awash in grief after seven years. Johnny knew full well. He’d seen the obituary. “C’mon, sit down, you’re fucked up from the heat.”
“Oh please...you’re lookin’ at a shochu geiko master….” Daniel says, and sways forward, forward, planking into Johnny’s arms.
“Hhholy diver--!" Johnny strains, the heavy heap so slick he's almost sliding out of his grasp.
“...I’m fine.”
“Yeah, now that you got a human crutch!”
Shochu geiko, fuck. It all comes back to Johnny, those days in Death Valley with the boys and Kreese. Sparring until Tommy was seeing keg mirages and Jimmy threw up. “This is nothing, pussies!” Kreese barked. “How’d you like it to be 109 with humidity like a boiling rag over your damn face? Being in combat and the ground opens up to spears tipped with shit? Who’s getting impaled today, your opponent or you??”
Johnny hears the Cobras’ pleas and tastes the desert ash, the bitter thoughts that they deserved it. Daniel is supposed to be safe from all this in his stupid little garden.
Johnny’s hand lingers in the air before grasping Daniel’s flushed cheek. He’s burning up, his pulse racing in his temple, breathing wearily. The eye contact in that moment is soft and miserable. “Blue in the gills, LaRusso, you’re not good.” Johnny lays him down gently on the deck.
“... florence fuckin’ nightingale over here…” With one clumsy hand, Daniel sheds his soaked T-shirt over his head, finding no relief.
Ignoring the T-shirt shaped tan lines, Johnny anxiously scans the tautness, the dusting of dark hair. For some reason, he hadn’t expected that to be there. “Just don’t hurl on me, ok?” He takes the discarded shirt, soaks it in the pond in a fisted hand, and returns to the patient's side, mopping his brow with it. Daniel leans into it, groaning, and Johnny can’t help remembering Miyagi’s ministering hands on the All-Valley sidelines, gently frantic. It’s as if the old man dropped that role on him the moment he stepped on these grounds.
There’s a metal water bottle on the deck and the water inside is like warm tea, but he sits Daniel up on his knees and puts it to his lips anyway. “Drink it, ShamWow. Piss warm or not, you need it.” Of course, Daniel is trying to talk as Johnny pours it down his throat.
When the water runs out, Daniel coughs and goes slack, a pool of paleness and wet cargo shorts. "This house is all I have left of him.”
“I know,” he sighs, “and I’d never lay hands on it. Deep down, you know that. I need to...hear you say you believe that I didn’t do it.”
“... oh, I know, it was someone who hates demetri. When did I say you had somethin’ to do with it…?”
Johnny flinches. When? The tearful accusation had only dominated his mind for the last 48 hours, ruined him, every flash of Daniel’s teeth and tremor in his voice. “C’mon, shochu geiko master, you're going for a dip in your little pond. NOW.”
“No no no, i jus’ cleaned it--” are Daniel’s last words before Johnny tackles him in.
The cold water is a shock to Daniel as much as he needs it. He struggles against Johnny’s grasp, his bare back to the wet black gi. “I have to finish,” he trembles.
Johnny turns him to his face. “You need to cool off. You’re gonna kill yourself. I bet you never listened to your Sensei, either!”
He finally starts to submit, his knees buckling in the water. “...not always…” He’s breathing slower, and Johnny has hard thumbs on the pulse in the crooks of his arms.
“Just stop, LaRusso. Jesus. Someday there won't be anyone around to catch you!”
Daniel is getting less disoriented, and starts to cringe with embarrassment at everything he was trying to bury in yard work. His endurance wasn’t nearly what he thought it was...not as strong as his belief in the mirage holding on to him now. “...really stupid, I know...this...this is much better,” he sighs.
“Always thought I could give you some pointers on how to be cool.”
“Oh, real clever...”
“Get your hair wet, Princess, come on.”
Johnny takes him by the shoulders as they kneel to the bottom. The water actually is pretty clear, and they just hover in the most peaceful seconds of the entire year. Black gi, bare chest. Airless, muffled stillness feels like a safer place for the long look being exchanged. They tell themselves it’s a game of chicken to see who surfaces first, but the space is getting narrower between their chests. Johnny panics and bolts first, then they’re both holding on to the rocks on the side of the pond, unsure of what just happened.
“You, uh.. You need to crash. This place have a bed?” Johnny asks, instantly regretting the question. “A twin or whatever?”
Daniel just nods choppily, boosting out of the water.
“Can I trust your ass to stay in it while I call somebody to pick you up?”
“...alright. I’ll change into some dry clothes. You should too, John.”
Johnny isn’t sure why the shortest form of his name sounds like some kind of incantation. He flinches. “Uh... ok. Don’t want to track water through the place.”
Johnny changes in the bathroom, Daniel in the one existing bedroom still in the house. “Decent yet?” Johnny calls out, toweling his hair, not feeling like himself in Daniel’s pocketed t-shirt and cargo shorts. What the hell were all these pockets for? Fishing bait? Throwing stars?
“Yeah, what’s takin’ you so long?”
“High maintenance much,” Johnny grumbles under his breath.
He fills a glass with water from the bathroom and goes in to find Daniel flopped on top of the covers in the sunny little bedroom. Of course, it has a bamboo headboard and a picture of a bonsai tree on the wall. Their hands brush on the glass, warm and wet with condensation. Daniel sits up against the pillows and downs the water, trying not to inhale it the wrong way. He’s never seen Johnny’s hair in direct sunlight, and it’s a gold that would make an old time California miner put a pick-axe in his head.
Johnny sits at the foot of the bed. “You look better?” He isn’t sure why it arches into a question.
“...listen, I can’t accept the money after you just...knocked me out of my stupidity. This shit coulda gotten serious--”
“No, alright? It’s for the damages, and...pain and suffering. Flashy lawyers always throw in a little extra for that, right?”
Daniel blinks back a creeping sting in his eyes. There’s been a lot of pain in the last few days, but the fact that Johnny tried to assign a monetary value to it makes a fresh ache bloom in his chest. “ ...Is Kreese gonna find out? Does he look at the books?”
Johnny has migrated to the center of the bed. “He won’t find out. That’s not your problem, anyhow. Just rest up.”
“If you’re worried about how he’ll react, he shouldn’t be there.”
“Shh. Easy. You’re getting all worked up agai--”
"So you can think you’re responsible for me and I can’t feel the same after everything that happened today?”
“Daniel, drop it, I’m not kidding.”
Blood rushes in his ears and he tries to keep a poker face, because Johnny doesn’t realize the carefully guarded name he just dropped.
Daniel is horrible at poker, and self preservation isn't his strong point.
He leans in and crashes into Johnny’s mouth with his, and Johnny can’t say for sure if his eyes widen, because they’re closed before he can think. Daniel’s hands are steadying him on his borrowed cargo shorts, and Johnny’s arms surround his back to stop them from falling.
Maybe this is Daniel’s messy way of saying thank you--for the first name or the heatstroke prevention, he isn’t sure. Daniel’s hands slip under the borrowed shirt that’s tighter on Johnny’s frame, and he smiles to himself, the curl of his mouth tangible as he scales his ribs.
Maybe this is what Johnny briefly considered underwater in the pond, but he probably would’ve drowned from all these groans and sighs.
Johnny can’t remember if anyone has ever touched his nipples before, but right now they feel like volume knobs, and he’s getting blasted with an orchestra.
He throws his head back. “LaRu--” Cut off by lips worshipping his again, until they roll off the edge of the bed onto the floor, the kissing seamlessly uninterrupted.
Johnny feels like the wet t-shirt in the yard. “How are we doing this...” he whispers, feeling like the one in a heat delirium. Didn’t he come here to drop off an envelope? Now he’s lying under Daniel, feeling like he’s about to go over the falls.
“I don’t know,” Daniel hums against his neck, cool to the touch, kissing and nibbling. “Please just stay. I could do this for hours.”
And it hits Johnny--the origin of their sloppy desperation is protection. At the root of everything, they’re trying to protect each other from Kreese.
His venom that emboldened the vandals, no doubt. The shadow of his arm on Johnny’s neck.
There was a good chance Kreese had seen the money deducted in the Quick Book. He’d left the laptop open on the desk.
“Okay…” Johnny swallows, his forehead against Daniel’s. "Just until..."
He doesn't find an end to that sentence as they press into each other again. I could do this for hours loops in Johnny’s mind, and maybe for two fugitives with melting wings, a life measured in hours is good enough.