#and the last thing he needs is his ma coming in unannounced to find daniel sat on his bed with a scantily clad blond pretty boy

[cobrakatharsis]

alright, so. ‘i dream of jeannie’ lawrusso au derived from cobra-sigh’s post which got sent to lottie zappedbyzabka by a delightful anon and lottie then said fantastic but what about the reverse and THEN sent it to me and promised me a diamond ring if i wrote about it. we run a complicated economy. anyway thank u cobra-sigh, anon, and lottie.

OKAY. so daniel moves to california with his ma for his senior year. doesn’t have a single friend in the valley, but just like in the movie manages to ‘new kid’ (and ‘daniel larusso’) his way into getting invited to the beach party. it’s…unremarkable. the stretch of beach is as nice as the weather and the people he meets are nice enough too - he meets a bunch of them, boys his age, and they talk and kick a soccer ball around. he meets a nice girl called ali and they kind of hit it off before she eventually leaves with her friends, but by nightfall he’s kind of bored of the company. they don’t have the best vibes and aren’t paying him all too much attention once his novelty wears off, so daniel ends up just kind of wandering along the shore on his own, enjoying the fresh experience of california.

he gets farther than he realises, and a long way down the beach he notices a glint of bright red lodged in the wet sand, being jostled by the lapping waves. it’s…a vase? no, more like a bottle. it’s ornate, adorned with gold and gems, and unlike a vase it’s sealed shut at the top with something like a cork. daniel glances around him, wondering if he’ll see some sort of evidence of where it came from, but there’s no one at all on this area of the beach. he can just barely see the glow of the fires marking his group in the distance, little pinpricks of golden light on the endless dark empty beach. so, giving into his curiosity, he picks up the bottle and tilts it, examining it, and finally pulls it open. absentmindedly traces his fingertips over the decoration as he does, the thought ‘it’s empty’ already forming in his head before he’s suddenly surrounded by smoke.

and then there’s a guy.

daniel does not at all process what just happened. he panics, assuming that this is the owner of the bottle or something, come sprinting over to ask him why the hell daniel’s touching his stuff - to which daniel is fully prepared to ask why the hell this guy’s just leaving his stuff in the surf - but there’s no aggression or anything on his…very pretty face, very close to daniel’s. in fact, he’s smiling at daniel, pale eyes all wide as he stares at him like he’s dazzled, but he doesn’t say anything. it’s then that daniel notices his clothing, or…lack thereof. the only solid piece of clothing he’s wearing is a tiny, tight pair of shorts, and the rest is floaty see-through fabric he’s draped in, embellished with elaborate embroidery and gold at the edges, doing nothing to impede daniel from briefly staring directly at his…ample chest, washed rosy behind the sheer red fabric.

he averts his gaze immediately, cheeks burning, but the stranger doesn’t seem to mind. he crowds even closer, in fact, and takes daniel by the hands, finally bursting out with that big beautiful smile still on his face that daniel freed him! - “i’ll give you anything, master. i owe you. seriously, anything. everything!”

daniel thinks maybe he passed out on the beach or something, and now he’s having some sort of especially abstract dirty dream. but things feel decidedly real when, after a little more anxious conversing and learning that the stranger’s name is johnny - and subsequently wondering if this is a prank because that’s definitely a bad pun on ‘genie’ - johnny looks right into daniel’s eyes and lights up again like he’s seen something there, something he’s especially delighted to see. and then he’s pressing his lips to daniel’s, kissing him deeply. his skin is soft and warm, and he smells like really old bookstores do, and he’s so gorgeous. he says he’ll stay by daniel’s side forever, give him whatever he wants, and daniel tells him that he absolutely does not have to do that - seriously, johnny’s free - and also his ma will not be happy if he brings back a pretty, almost-naked boy from the beach to stay with him forever, but johnny just smiles at him and disappears neatly back into the bottle like he’s proving a point by doing so.

daniel looks despairingly around him again. the beach is still empty and quiet, almost eerily so now without johnny, and there’s not a single witness to what daniel’s about to do.

he sighs deeply and picks up the bottle and heads home.