(closed) december catchall

[entreats]

Who: Ange (entreats), Chizuru (tealeafs), Daniel (miyagimagic) and various others.
What: December shenanigans.
When: During all of December.
Where: Locations vary.

Content Warnings: Bullying, (mild) violence, will edit to add more later.

( starters in the comments! if you want to plot anything with me, feel free to either pm the journal or contact me at queeningsquare, i'm always open to new ideas and threads! )

Comments

[terriblepurpose]

Even with his eyes closed Paul would know that this world is not his own. The taste of the wind is foreign to him, laden down with the unique imprint of this world's biosphere. There is an ocean nearby, the verdant flush of greenery, and through it all the hazy aftertaste of human petrochemical civilization.

There is also the voice he recognizes instantly, even before he looks away from the boy making his lonely way up the road.

"We're in a memory. It's Winter Mourning." Paul lashed the first of his bone and antler decorations together on the very first night of the new moon. He's been waiting for this since last year, planning it between his other endeavours, and he's come prepared: silver charms shine at his wrists, sigils and stars and moon phases, and his trusted ritual knife is hidden up one of his sleeves.

"Your memory, specifically, Sensei LaRusso." He glances between the man and the boy, uncertainty stamped on his features. "I apologize for the intrusion."

[miyagimagic]

Daniel slowly shakes his head. "It's random." It's not your fault, he means, though he's been saying those words so often to Paul already in their few interactions that he doesn't want to completely wear them out, even though he means them every single time. Still, it feels easier to word it this way instead under these specific circumstances.

They don't have a choice as to who they end up with inside of these, after all. "Nothing to apologize for."

.. though there's a faint awkwardness at having Paul of all people witness this specific memory. Sure, people witnessing his memories sits a little uneasily within Daniel at all times, but there are memories Daniel would have been able to brush off more easily. Memories that didn't involve Johnny, for one.

As much as Daniel knows who the bad guy is in this memory, it's not like he wants to damage Paul's view of the other man, not even when it's entirely because of Johnny's own dumb actions here.

Speaking of which, the moment Daniel opens his mouth to say something else to Paul, he's immediately drowned out by a loud sound, five boys on motorbikes approaching rapidly. They're all wearing helmets, but their jackets make it very clear who they are - the snake logo and the words Cobra Kai proudly displayed on their backs. They laugh and jeer as they get closer, audible even over the sound of their bikes, one of them calling out: "Looking for a shortcut back to Newark, Daniel?"

The bikes get closer to the boy who had been riding alone just a moment ago, surrounding him, absolutely crowding around him. There's one boy riding in the middle now, right next to the younger Daniel - blonde hair peeking out from under his helmet, perhaps a familiar, though younger, face visible from the open visor of the helmet.

Or a familiar though also younger voice, perhaps, as he calls out with: "He wants to learn karate! Well, here's your first lesson-- how to take a fall!"

The motor drives closer and closer, pushing Daniel to the side of the road, until the bike just starts moving right off the hill, the boy on it tumbling down, right past where Paul and the older Daniel are standing, falling off the bike and rolling further down until the body comes to a stop at the bottom, no longer moving for a moment.

The five guys on the motors just drive away without looking at the result of their action, still laughing, one of them calling out, "Good one, Johnny!" until they're gone.

Leaving nothing but Daniel, Paul, and the other Daniel - still lying there at the bottom of the hill, now at least faintly moving, groaning in agony.

[terriblepurpose]

The absolution in Daniel's words prompts Paul to focus on his younger version, shifting his weight between his feet in a tell subtle enough that someone less used to observing moody teenagers might miss it. Paul misses Daniel's faint awkwardness in his preoccupation with his own.

The problem he has is that he did choose this, even if he didn't (wouldn't have) chosen this memory. Paul knows the risks he incurs by diving into the Winter Mournings tradition again and again, drawing on his stockpile of antler and bone and bright wire to weave his chances to come across old memories of his own.

But there's no time to dwell. Paul tenses at the sound of approaching motors, and he stands still and poised for the duration of the pursuit. It's only when the younger Daniel tumbles past them that Paul almost starts forward, his hands coming up like he might be able to catch him before the fall. It's a reflex, jarred out of him by his distraction at the sight of Johnny's blue eyes glittering in the dark with ill intent.

The unhappy noises of Daniel in pain and the presence of the man next to him are at least assurance that nothing that happened to him tonight would leave permanent damage - or none visible to the eye. Paul stares down the hill before he looks back to the Daniel of the present, his eyes wide and bewildered.

"Why did he do that?" Paul asks, a whole wall of preconceptions teetering on a new crack in their foundational assumptions.

[miyagimagic]

Talk about a loaded question.

Daniel stares at the fallen form of the boy - his own fallen form, technically, but one he never got to see from this perspective. Not because he wants to see it necessarily, but because his mind needs a moment to chew on the answer.

He knows what that boy down there would answer. Because Johnny Lawrence is a jerk, probably. Because he's a rich guy who thinks he can get away with anything.

But as he sees the younger Daniel sitting up, obviously sore and uncomfortable, and dipping his fingers against the wound on his forehead, noticing the blood-- the older Daniel doesn't think that's his own answer anymore. Not necessarily.

"Because his teacher taught him you can't be strong unless you push others down." It feels a little easier to say when Daniel knows these memories don't hurt as much anymore. Everything that happened during his senior year of high school, everything that happened on Okinawa - it all pales in comparison to the terror that Terry Silver turned out to be, forcing most hard feelings about all this crap between him and Johnny back then mostly out of Daniel's heart, rendering him able to look at this situation a little more objectively, and see just how much of it had just been born out of Kreese in the first place.

He looks back at Paul and shrugs.

"I was just an easy target." Daniel doesn't have pride in excess, not the sort of thing that would keep him from admitting this. "The new kid in town, scrawny, only one parent. No money or connections."

[terriblepurpose]

Paul's expression twists further, and in that twisting some part of the shell he's accreted about himself breaks, distorted by the shift beneath the surface. (Human beings are not born to their shells. They never fit as perfectly on them as they do on those lucky invertebrates born to scuttle armoured and indifferent on a sea floor.)

"He told me about that." Paul looks away once more as soon as he's said it, but there's no undoing it now. The question is asked, answered, answered again in turn. Daniel sketches out in a handful of words why he was an easy target, and it slots all too easily into Paul's understanding of the world.

"His teacher. Not..." He doesn't need to articulate that aloud either. It's amazing all the things a person can say without saying them, if they stay staring fixed in the right direction, watching a memory of a boy pick himself up and dust himself off.

"I suppose everyone remembers things differently," Paul says, and when he flicks a needle from the cuff of his sleeve to hold in his palm he barely thinks about it, "What did you do about it?"

[miyagimagic]

Daniel momentarily wonders what Johnny did tell Paul, if not just due to that comment the other makes here about everyone remembering things differently. There are a lot of things Daniel has been able to shove aside, but if there's anything that still threatens to make him bitter when it comes to the blonde, it's the lack of accountability. Johnny still acting like he was somehow the victim of all of that. Daniel is mature enough at this point to acknowledge Johnny was the victim of something, of Kreese, of Cobra Kai, but is it truly so hard to say sorry for the hell I put you through? Chozen could do it, Terry is a total psychopath, so what's Johnny's excuse?

Daniel is not mature enough to not feel petty about that, and in some circumstances he may have acted on it, perhaps even reading too much into Paul's words here. Maybe he's assuming worse of Johnny than the other deserves.

The pettiness isn't something he'll act on in front of Paul of all people though. It's nothing about Johnny that holds him back - instead it's everything about Paul, and the way the boy already seems at all times like he carries the burdens of the entire world on his shoulders.

So Daniel just slowly exhales. "What was there to do about it?"

There's some resignation in those words, a feeling he's reminded of as he watches his younger self grab the half-twisted bike.

"If I ignored them, they harassed me anyway. If I fought back, they hit me twice as hard." The feeling is no longer his own, but that doesn't mean Daniel doesn't still recognize it, can't still recall it, especially in the face of this.

He watches the younger Daniel start to move, but since the memory doesn't end, he just vaguely gestures in the direction of the hurt boy before staring to walk down the hill to follow him, like Daniel is silently asking Paul to follow as well, even as he speaks on.

"My teacher made an agreement with theirs. We'd fight it out at the All Valley tournament, so they'd have to leave me alone until then." Daniel releases a faint huff. "I didn't even know a lick of karate."

[terriblepurpose]

Does he make it home? Paul wants to ask, even though the younger Daniel obviously does. There's something about watching him salvage his fallen bike that tugs at Paul, and he'd follow even without Daniel's prompting. He wants to hover, like somehow this decades - millennia, if they count from Paul's time - late useless concern of his might buoy the battered boy up invisibly.

"But you won in the end," Paul fills in, jumping ahead to the only part of this story he really knows. He wants to cling to it, like the prospect of a shiny trophy in the future will spark a light here to drive off the clinging shadows of fear and humiliation.

That may be why he doesn't append because you cheated, as much as it is Paul's manners and simple common sense. It also has to do with the ground Paul has to stand on, which is as treacherous as the slope beneath his feet - because didn't he do the same thing at his own teacher's request, triggering the cascade of conflict that followed?

"...did it stop, after that? Once you won the tournament." Paul worries the continued tentativeness of the question betrays him. He doesn't know what the customs of Earth are, but it's more than that; he doesn't know what the customs of teenage boys are, except lately, and it still so often feels like a country he views only through glass.

[miyagimagic]

The man tightly presses his lips together at the first words that leave Paul's mouth. Not even in a bad way, since it is a nice sentiment, and one Paul didn't even have to express here, technically speaking. But at the same time, it also feels.. a little naive, maybe.

(But isn't that nice in a way? Paul is always so serious, so burdened, always thinking about so much. Wouldn't it be nice if he could view the world for once this way, like winning a tournament might make everything magically okay? Daniel would wish that for him, he thinks.)

Maybe it would have been true, anyway, if that tournament had been the end of all of it. If Daniel LaRusso just went on to live a totally normal life after that.

.. it's as if Paul is traveling right along the same train of thought as Daniel, arriving at that follow up question just as Daniel's own mind arrives at that thought.

"Yes," he answers with a slow nod, staring at the boy limping his way home ahead of them, rather than sidelong at Paul. "It was our last year of high school. We all graduated pretty soon after the tournament. I hardly saw them after the tournament, and then not at all anymore once we left school."

He huffs, little more than an exhale of breath. ".. and only then again when Johnny walked into my dealership, over thirty years later."

It's tempting to leave it at that. Nothing else is really relevant to Paul, anyway. And it's not like Daniel has to vent, it's not like he was a victim when this cycle just kept continuing, it's just that he— and then—

He's fine, really. It's fine.

Maybe it's just that he doesn't want to be viewed only through the Johnny-coloured lens that Paul must have had after doubtlessly hearing stories about him from the other. There's more to his story.

It's why more words slowly escape his mouth, though they sound a touch more uncertain.

"This kept happening though. Even when it wasn't with Johnny and his posse."

[terriblepurpose]

The low, simmering resentment underneath Daniel's words would capture Paul's attention if the words that came with it didn't drive a spike through his focus to pin it to a single phrase for one static blurred instant.

Over thirty years. He knows the feud between them persisted. Anyone would know that from the simplest mathematics. There are feuds where Paul comes from hundreds of years old, sometimes thousands, ancient slights that fester beneath the surface of Imperial politics like rotting splinters.

But the way that Daniel says it...almost as if the idea is preposterous. That to hang onto this particular grudge so long after it had cooled to embers before being fed fresh oxygen is a strange act, and one not to lauded or even entertained.

The boy ahead of them looks younger than Paul is. Paul tries, for the very first time, to imagine how long ago seventeen might feel when he's Daniel's age. Or, if he listens to the second, softer sting in Daniel's next words, how not so long ago at all.

"So you had to keep fighting?" Paul asks, matching uncertainty for uncertainty. He wants that to be the answer, not - the example he still monitors with concern that still can do nothing for him. What happened at the top of the hill was not a fight. It was a demonstration of force and dominance. Paul knows all about those, and what their purpose is.

[miyagimagic]

That question has a simple answer too, Daniel thinks. Said answer being yes, of course, because the alternative was doing nothing and risking harm to the things that matters to him. Mister Miyagi, first and foremost, but also Kumiko, also Jessica, every single thing that he tried to hold on to for those few years of his life.

And then decades of nothing, the hope that maybe it was over, until it all started all over again.

Daniel breathes, staring ahead of them.

"They wanted me to." Johnny and his group, and a nebulous 'they' beyond it - because it's not like the details really matter here, right. With them walking here in the night of this memory, with Daniel unsure how much of this, or what's to come, wasn't somehow his fault. "They wouldn't take no for an answer."

There's a tiny pause, but then more words follow. Daniel isn't sure why he's saying them, really. Maybe it's because this memory makes his lips looser, or maybe it's just that it was so formative for him to hear this next thing from an adult when he was younger that he can't help but want to pass it on to a next generation, even when he isn't Paul's teacher, nor longs to take that role.

"I never liked fighting, you know."

[terriblepurpose]

This world, like Paul's own, demands violence. If this world is the past of his, or cousin to that past, then so it follows. Humanity is scattered to the stars and makes war from the ground up, as it ever has. If there's a difference, it's of degree, not kind.

Yet Daniel wants peace. Still believes in it, still strives for it, and he can't help but think of Midoriya again. How well he fits underneath Daniel's roof as another boy who fights because the world won't let him say no, not because he wants to. Paul bows his head, examining the rough earth underneath their feet.

"I don't know if I like fighting," Paul says, contained and matter-of-fact, "I'm good at it. I've always been good at it."

There's a joy in doing what one excels at. Paul has found it in fighting, at the best of times, when combat is a test or a game. Sometimes, in the darkness of the woods, he's found himself caught in heady exhilaration after a clash with a Beast. He is more than good at it.

But there are the other kinds of fights. The ones he can't say no to, or the ones he should say no to.

"That's what I did to Robby, isn't it." Paul leaves his inflection flat and unquestioning as he lifts his head again. The judgment is pronounced like a sentence. It may as well be.

[miyagimagic]

Daniel takes the boy's first statement mostly with a hum. There is a lot he could say to it, exploring the nuances between being good at something and liking something - because mister Miyagi was the best, and he didn't like it either.

But it doesn't feel as important in the light of the more surprising statement that follows. One that actually manages to tear Daniel's gaze away from the younger Daniel ahead of them as they still walk, instead glancing over at Paul with his eyes slightly widened. Surprise that this is being brought up, perhaps, or maybe just surprise that Paul is thinking this way at all.

"No," Daniel is quick to say though once he gets over the initial bump of surprise in the road. The answer is a little hasty, but doesn't sound any less firm for it, accompanied by a tiny shake of his head. The circumstances were so different, after all. Robby asked for the fight, for one, and even though Paul was the one escalating it, Robby didn't try to de-escalate it either, might even have wanted it, if not due to the mess that inherently exists between Paul and Robby due to Johnny's bond with either of them. It was something born out of mutual hurt, rather than one-sided hurt being taken out on someone else.

"You apologized to him, right?" The 'right?' isn't entirely necessary. Daniel knows he must have, after asking him for his permission. "Apologizing, feeling regret, learning from your mistakes.. That's what sets that apart from this."

He moves a hand to gesture at the small figure still trudging along in front of them, an apartment building slowly coming into view as the boy drags his bike closer and closer to that destination.