Iron Fist Week ficlets
Written for various prompts on Tumblr during the past week.
1. Rand becomes a pet friendly office
(Set somewhere between seasons, after Danny comes back to New York.)
"Danny."
"Hi, Ward," Danny said, with the phone clamped to his ear, leaning over to clasp his ankle with his opposite hand.
"What's this memo on my desk, Danny?"
"Um?"
"The one about pets."
"Oh! Right! That. Was it unclear?"
"No, it says that we're going to make Rand a pet-friendly workplace, and I don't think you know what that means."
Danny straightened up, and hopped up to sit in the window of the dojo, where the light breeze from the open window dried the sweat on his naked torso from his morning workout. "I do know what it means. I've been reading up on it. You know, Ward, studies show that pets lower blood pressure and contribute to the overall health and wellbeing of employees who can bring them in to work --"
There was a deep sigh on the other end of the phone. Danny was still cautiously getting to know the adult version of Ward -- they'd only had a few in-person conversations since he and Colleen had gotten back from Asia -- but he could already picture the look on Ward's face that went along with that kind of a sigh. It might be accompanied by pressing his fingertips to his forehead like Danny was giving him a headache.
"And they don't belong at work, is what they don't do."
"Well, of course we'll have to take precautions about allergies. I think that part is in there?" He'd had Jeri take a quick look at the document before he had sent it over to the main office. She had raised her eyebrows in a disbelieving kind of way, added a few notations, and gave it her stamp of approval along with the cryptic comment, "I'd love to be a fly on the wall when you show this to Meachum."
"It's -- yes -- no -- that's not the point!" Ward said. "Did the thought even occur to you to discuss this with me first?"
"Um," Danny said, because honestly it hadn't. He'd just thought Ward would see that it was a good idea.
"Just because you have 51% of the company doesn't mean you can throw your weight around, you know. I'm the one who has to implement whatever brainiac ideas you come up with."
He did sort of have a point. "Do you think it's a bad idea?" Danny asked anxiously. "We don't have to."
Ward huffed out something that was somewhere between a sigh and a laugh that cracked in the middle. "Do you have any idea what a pain in the ass you are?"
"You keep saying I should take a more active interest in the company, but every time I do, you complain about it."
"God," Ward said. "Yes, we can have your doggie daycare, fine, whatever, but you ARE coming in next week to help me with the financial quarterlies, and that's not negotiable. It's part of the deal."
"Yeah, okay," Danny said, having no idea what financial quarterlies even were, but he guessed he'd ask Jeri about it in the upcoming week.
"And you'd better actually be here."
There was a delivery truck in the street below, and Colleen on the curb, signing for something that looked like the first shipment of materials for their dojo renovation. "I said I would, didn't I?" Danny said distractedly, leaning out to wave.
"Yes, which means absolutely jack and shit, historically speaking."
Danny opened his mouth to defend himself and then closed it. Building things back up with Ward meant that he had to just kind of roll with some things, especially when there were elements of truth to it. "I'll be there," he said earnestly. "I promise. Especially if there are dogs. Do you think Bernice in Shipping & Receiving will bring in that really fluffy Malamute puppy she has?"
Ward gave another of those slightly cracked half-laughs. "How is it that you're never here and yet, you know the names of people who work in our shipping department? Let alone what kind of dogs they have?"
It was mostly because Bernice and her puppy had been on the loading dock the last time he'd stopped by, going in the back way to avoid making it a big deal at the front desk. "I'll introduce you," Danny said.
"Aaargh," Ward said, and hung up.
"Is that a no?" Danny said, and he grinned at the phone and hung up too. He liked needling Ward. It was fun. He just had to remember not to do too much of it, because it was a little bit unpredictable when Ward would be gratifyingly-but-not-seriously annoyed and when Ward tipped over into being actually upset at him.
He hopped down from the windowsill and went to open the door for Colleen, who he'd just seen head up the stairs, carrying a window almost bigger than she was. He was totally going to make sure that Ward got to meet Bernice's Malamute puppy, he thought; it would probably shed all over Ward's suit, but Ward could use a little bit of dog hair in his life.
But first: helping Colleen carry a van full of building supplies up two flights of stairs.
2. Ward somehow gets roped into teaching business and money management lessons at the dojo cause they're trying to help these kids (maybe misty and others do too?)
"I cannot believe I got talked into this," Ward muttered, shuffling papers in his briefcase.
"I can't believe she asked you," Misty said, deadpan, and Ward scowled at her. Misty's serious expression dissolved into a smile, and she patted him on the shoulder. "Settle down. You'll do fine."
"Yeah, Ward," Danny chimed in, stretching himself into an impossible position in the corner with one leg propped up on the table. "It's what you're good at."
They were in the employee break room at the Bayard Center. Since Danny and Ward had been back in town, Colleen had floated the idea of having them come in to teach classes in the center, and somehow this had developed into Danny teaching them meditation and yoga, and Misty teaching them self-defense.
As for Ward, well ...
"I am not good at it," Ward muttered. "I have people to do it for me. That's what I'm good at. Delegating."
Danny switched to prop his other foot on the break room table and stretched into a new position. "First of all, that's not true, and well, second, if business is mostly delegating, then tell them that. A lot of these kids probably could run their own businesses someday if someone teaches them how. So teach them how."
"You can't learn how to run a business in a one-hour class two nights a week," Ward muttered.
Misty patted his shoulder. "Quit it with the negging. You're going to be good at this."
"Or at least he can't possibly screw it up too badly," Colleen said, coming in from the hallway.
"Hey, I'm doing you a favor here!"
"She's joking, Ward," Misty told him.
Colleen didn't confirm or deny this allegation. "Look," she said to Ward, as she grasped Danny's ankle and gently removed his foot from the break room table. "I've been teaching money management and small business classes here myself. But you have a background I don't. You can teach them things I can't. You could really make a difference in some 17-year-old's life. Don't you want to do that?"
"You convinced me, didn't you?" Ward announced, snapping his briefcase shut. "I'm here, aren't I?"
"And you're going to go out there and kick ass," Danny said.
Colleen looked alarmed. "No! No ass-kicking in the business classes."
Misty made a fist-punching gesture. "That's my job."
"I'm starting to regret this," Colleen said.
3. Ward + withdrawal symptoms
So maybe there are some cosmic scales being balanced somewhere, Ward doesn't know how all of that works, but he still thinks it's kind of unfair that he has to go through drug withdrawal again for reasons that are not actually his fault this time, for the most part.
Insult to injury is that he can't just tough it out in private, because Danny somehow talked him into staying at the dojo for the duration. And then Danny ended up being out half the time for vigilante reasons, which means Ward gets to do this with Colleen.
Yay.
Further insult to injury: Danny and Colleen's place really isn't set up for privacy. It's mostly an open plan and they don't have a guest bedroom, just a fold-out couch. There was some kind of argument that Ward slept through most of that resulted in Ward getting the bedroom, temporarily, so that he has as much privacy as possible. Danny and Colleen are sleeping on the fold-out.
Ward suspects this doesn't endear him to Colleen at all.
Sometimes, to his vast relief, he's alone here, and he makes himself coffee from instant (ugh) coffee crystals in their kitchen and sleeps and watches Netflix when he feels up for it. But Danny seems to have somehow acquired the idea that he really shouldn't be left alone, which means that half the time he holes up in the bedroom just to avoid shuffling out to the kitchen while Colleen is doing her thing on the couch, whatever her thing is.
At least he can drink water from the bathroom without having to go through the kitchen.
"Okay, you're being ridiculous," Colleen says flatly from the doorway.
Ward jumps and drops his earbuds. He's been watching some kind of nature show, which he doesn't really care about, but he can't seem to follow a plot right now.
Colleen is carrying two bowls. It smells ... good. Ward hasn't really wanted food for the last couple of days, but the salty/meaty smell is making his body sit up and take notice.
"I made ramen," Colleen says, sounding deeply annoyed by it all. "The broth and noodles were frozen. Most of the rest of it is fresh. If something isn't cooked to your liking, I don't want to hear about it."
She sits on the edge of the bed and shoves a bowl into his hands. Ward takes it carefully; his hands are shaky right now. Colleen follows it up with chopsticks and a spoon on top of a folded napkin.
Then she pulls up her feet and folds her legs and sits beside him on the bed and digs her chopsticks into the steaming broth, scooping up noodles.
She doesn't say anything. Neither does Ward. He cautiously samples the broth. It's salty and good.
The first few bites are amazing; the next few bites, somewhat less so, as his body decides it's done. He grits his teeth and pushes forward, eating mechanically even after it's not fun anymore. There's just ... not much choice, with her sitting there.
And then all of a sudden his body hits a wall, and a minute later, he puts the bowl hastily aside and gets up and stumbles into the bathroom and makes it just in time.
He doesn't have a whole lot of energy right now, so he's sitting with one arm draped over the toilet seat when Colleen says quietly, from the doorway, "Jeez. Ward."
Her steps are soft and light. She crouches beside him. "Just because I gave it to you doesn't mean you have to eat it."
He doesn't answer, resting his forehead in the crook of his arm. It was tests, with his dad; always, tests. You were never told the rules. You just had to figure them out. Guessing wrong was ... bad.
"Yeah, well, you didn't say so," he says after a minute, his voice rough.
Apparently it's the wrong thing. He senses her pulling back, and closes his eyes. His throat and sinuses burn; he's sweaty and miserable and too tired to even snap at her. He just wants to be alone.
Then Colleen says quietly, "Bakuto made me eat bugs."
Ward raises his head a little. He thought she'd left. Actually, she's sitting in the doorway.
"Danny and I joke about it sometimes," she said, smiling a little. "Like you do. I mean, he went through everything I went through and worse. It's something to laugh about. Something to exaggerate. But you know, what it came down to was, some of Bakuto's lessons were about being willing to live and survive anywhere. To live off garbage, if you had to. Off cockroaches."
Ward swallows carefully. "Do you really think this is the best topic right now?"
Colleen laughs softly. She leans her head against the wall. "No, sorry. The point is ... the thing I've realized is that I didn't really have a choice about it, even though he didn't actually make me do it. I mean, in the sense of putting a sword against my neck and forcing me. He never made me do any of it. He just asked me to. The weapon he used against me was disappointment. And ..." She takes a slow breath. "I was so desperate for it, for ... acceptance, for a place to belong, that I would have walked through broken glass for him. I did, even. Literally, sometimes."
Ward shivers; his muscles ripple, down his arms, through his abdomen. He's not too out of it or too miserable to recognize the olive branch that's being thrust out his way, even though there's some contrarian part of him that wants to set fire to it with sarcastic commentary.
You can always break things. He knows that very well. It's harder, much harder, not to. It's a balancing act, it's a series of careful steps, it's trying to learn how hard to push and when not to. And you don't get to take a break from that just because you feel like shit.
He doesn't think it's quite the right time to tell her that sometimes Harold would have him eat something just to see if he'd do it. She's not Harold. (And he also doesn't need to tell her that he always would. Always.)
So he says, carefully, "I know you're not my dad. Or Bakuto. But ... old habits, right?"
She laughs softly, and he feels a little inner tension unwind: it was the right thing to say. "Yeah," she says. "Old habits. You know, I hope I didn't ... I thought it might be nice for you to have someone to sit with you, instead of being off alone in the bedroom all the time."
"I tried to take the couch," he says, and she laughs out loud, and gets up and puts a hand down to help him up.
*
Colleen leaves him a clean pair of sweatpants and clean T-shirt (both Danny's) to change into, and makes him (slightly burned) toast. After he's had sufficient time to change and curl up under the covers again -- shivering now, waves of it, rolling through him -- she comes in and sets the plate of toast on the bedside table with a glass of water and a bottle of Gatorade.
"Doctor's orders," she says, "are to eat that if you feel like it, and only if you feel like it."
She then sits on the bed with her laptop on her knees, propping herself up against the headboard.
"Oh, come on," she says when he gives her a look from under the covers tucked up to his nose. "You're an adult. I'm an adult. Just say something if you want me to leave. Trust me, I'll understand."
He rolls onto his side and doesn't tell her to leave.
After a little while, he eats some of the toast.
4. Any pairing, different definitions of date night
"You know," Misty muttered, lashing out with her mechanical arm to nail another masked goon. "All I wanted to do was have dinner with one of New York's most eligible bachelors without anything going wrong. Is that really too much to ask?"
Colleen laughed out loud, barely winded, the jerk, and backhanded the hilt of her katana into another attacker's chest, sending him wheezing to the floor. "Have I ever told you about my first sort-of-date with Danny?"
"Is this really the time?"
"It's not actually -- ow! -- what you think."
"That one almost got you."
"Shut up." Colleen put her current opponent down with some kind of ninja move that Misty could barely even track. "Anyway, I just wanted takeout, and he showed up at the dojo with a full meal service, caterers, the works. We weren't even dating at that point. He -- whoa -- on your left there --"
"Got it." Misty flipped a guy, put a knee in his throat. "Stay down, asshole. What were you saying?"
"Just that it's never exactly been normal with us. I don't think we've ever had a date night that wasn't -- urgh -- fundamentally weird in some way, or didn't end with someone laid out on the floor, and not in the fun way -- yeah, stay there, buddy."
"Just because your love life is freaking weird doesn't mean mine has to be!" Misty protested, clotheslining another attacker onto the floor. "God, how many of these guys are there?"
"I think that was the last one." Colleen laughed and sheathed her katana, then cracked her knuckles. She looked like she was having fun. Weirdo. "Want to go down and see if the boys need our help?"
"Like there's any doubt of that," Misty muttered, and they hit the stairs.
5. White Collar/Iron Fist crossover (maybe Peter investigating Harold's death?)
"There's definitely something hinky about this company."
"The last time you went undercover in a big corporation like this, you got poisoned and stabbed in the heart with a needle," Diana said.
Peter frowned at her. It was raining; they were under the awning at a coffee shop, and she was standing at his table in a barista's uniform. "That's not going to happen this time."
"Sure about that, are you, boss?" Diana glanced around, then set down Peter's coffee and slid into the seat across from him -- with the rain coming down like this, there was almost no one around. "Have you found out anything else about Harold Meachum's death?"
"His first one, or his second one?" Peter said dryly. "Look, there's nothing that isn't weird about this place. They've not only had two supposedly dead people show up in the last couple of months, one of whom ended up taking a header off the roof, but two of the three owners are currently overseas for unknown reasons, the remaining one has suddenly started making a bunch of top-down changes, and everyone I talk to gives me a different conflicting story of weird things happening around the company. The one thing I am pretty sure of is that the rumors they were running heroin through the place are true --"
"You should hand it over to the DEA, then."
"That's on the table," Peter said. "But it's not just about drugs. Every time I find a company that's a known cartel front, it turned out they just recently cut ties with Rand. Like, within the last few weeks."
"Someone's cleaning house."
Peter nodded. "I just don't know why. All I know is, it kicked off right around the time Harold Meachum turned out not to be dead for about two days before he fell off the roof of the building and then the family rushed a cremation."
"Not suspicious at all."
"You're telling me." He glanced around and got up, holding out the cup to her. "You better give me this to go, after all. I've got a lot of work to do."
6. Ward and Misty get magic tattoos too
Okay, technically this wasn't a prompt. It was a post by
yutaya which can be found here, describing and illustrating tattoos for all of the main four (of course Colleen's and Danny's are canon) and then suggesting that it might be possibly to channel the Iron Fist power through the other two, and wouldn't they be surprised. So I ran with that. You can view the tattoo images and descriptions at the above link - I changed Misty's slightly.
--
For Danny it was that initial moment of hot golden triumph, part agony, part delight, with his fist trembling and his entire body still shaking from mingled exhilaration and exhaustion and pain. It was looking up to see the gold light reflected in Davos's eyes and with it, the first stirrings of resentment, the first stones in the wall dividing him from his brother.
It was the feeling of having spent half your life trying to achieve something and getting it and then that initial falter of not quite knowing if it was really what he wanted after all.
He sometimes thought that first moment of doubt had stayed with him for the rest of his struggle to gain control over the fire of Shou Lao, a shaky substrate wobbling under the weight of everything he'd done since. It was true, what they'd told him in K'un Lun, that to master the Iron Fist you must first master yourself, and that was a battle he wasn't sure he could ever win.
*
For Colleen it was searing pain and white-hot light, lighting up her nerve endings in pure agony and illuminating corners of her soul she'd long ago lost the will to look into. It was the feeling of finding something she'd been looking forward to all her life and never knew it, and at the same time feeling the crack widening between herself and Danny in a way she wasn't sure they could ever bridge.
It was the oddly satisfying click of finding something she had long ago thought broken beyond repair snapping back into place. It was having searched her whole life and never found her place in the world, and then suddenly finding it.
It was coming home.
*
For Ward and Misty, well ...
It wasn't supposed to happen at all, was the thing.
--
For Misty, the design was half painted and half tattooed, all part of a girls' bonding session with Colleen, where her arm switched over from metal to flesh. It was a reclamation thing, a way of saying This is part of me, I claim it. The design itself was based mostly on Colleen's tattoo with some aspects of Danny's, all of it designed by Ward, who had made himself a tattoo and apparently was doing tattoos for all of them now.
Anyway, it had been tattooed on her by a perfectly normal tattoo artist, and then Colleen helped her paint the metal part to match.
It wasn't supposed to light up.
It sure as hell wasn't supposed to give her the ability to punch through a foot-thick cinderblock wall to get Colleen out of a Hand prison.
*
There were pins in Ward's forearm, placed there years ago in a three-hour surgery after Harold broke his arm by twisting it behind his back. He'd been back to work the next day, doped to the eyeballs on painkillers. The scars had faded in time, twisting around his forearm if you knew where to look.
They were covered now by a spiraling tattoo, designed painstakingly in ink, incorporating aspects of his past and his present to build a new future. The dragon was for Danny, the birds for freedom.
When it lit up in golden fire, the pins were like little spikes of flame, stitching a line through the middle of his forearm. He could feel every one. And he hardly even noticed; he was too busy holding onto Danny, being terrified for Danny. He would have poured his entire life through his hands, the blood-covered hands trying to hold back the tide of Danny's life escaping through the gaping bullet wound in Danny's chest, but he wasn't expecting his hands to actually respond, let alone for a flood of golden fire to wash the blood away.
*
"We're like a club," Misty said cheerfully, leaning over to look more closely the tattoo on Ward's arm. He held it up for her inspection, to the extent that he could, anyway. His arms felt like they were made of rubber; he was lying down on the bed next to Danny's, after sleeping for (as it turned out) almost two days.
The tattoo wasn't quite like it had been before. There was a little bit of gold now, limning the black ink, as if it had been lightly gilded. Misty's was like that now too, he noticed, when she turned toward Colleen and Danny. Her arm glinted golden in the overhead hospital lights.
"It's not supposed to work like this," Danny said. Ever since waking up in the hospital after Ward had healed him (sort of), he'd been looking baffled. "I mean, it really, really isn't supposed to work like this."
"How do we know how it works, really?" Colleen was lightly stroking the tattoo on her forearm, seeming unaware that she was doing it. "It's not like these things come with a handbook."
"It's sacred," Danny said.
"Really?" Ward said, rolling his head to look toward Danny. "According to K'un-Lun, the most reliable of all possible sources?"
Danny looked like he was thinking about throwing something at him, but there was nothing convenient in reach.
"We don't know how it works, really, do we?" Misty asked. "It could be some kind of scientific phenomenon."
"It's not, though," Danny said. "Shou-Lao. It's the will of the dragon."
"Maybe Shou-Lao moves in mysterious ways," Ward said.
"Please never say that again."
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1. Rand becomes a pet friendly office
(Set somewhere between seasons, after Danny comes back to New York.)
"Danny."
"Hi, Ward," Danny said, with the phone clamped to his ear, leaning over to clasp his ankle with his opposite hand.
"What's this memo on my desk, Danny?"
"Um?"
"The one about pets."
"Oh! Right! That. Was it unclear?"
"No, it says that we're going to make Rand a pet-friendly workplace, and I don't think you know what that means."
Danny straightened up, and hopped up to sit in the window of the dojo, where the light breeze from the open window dried the sweat on his naked torso from his morning workout. "I do know what it means. I've been reading up on it. You know, Ward, studies show that pets lower blood pressure and contribute to the overall health and wellbeing of employees who can bring them in to work --"
There was a deep sigh on the other end of the phone. Danny was still cautiously getting to know the adult version of Ward -- they'd only had a few in-person conversations since he and Colleen had gotten back from Asia -- but he could already picture the look on Ward's face that went along with that kind of a sigh. It might be accompanied by pressing his fingertips to his forehead like Danny was giving him a headache.
"And they don't belong at work, is what they don't do."
"Well, of course we'll have to take precautions about allergies. I think that part is in there?" He'd had Jeri take a quick look at the document before he had sent it over to the main office. She had raised her eyebrows in a disbelieving kind of way, added a few notations, and gave it her stamp of approval along with the cryptic comment, "I'd love to be a fly on the wall when you show this to Meachum."
"It's -- yes -- no -- that's not the point!" Ward said. "Did the thought even occur to you to discuss this with me first?"
"Um," Danny said, because honestly it hadn't. He'd just thought Ward would see that it was a good idea.
"Just because you have 51% of the company doesn't mean you can throw your weight around, you know. I'm the one who has to implement whatever brainiac ideas you come up with."
He did sort of have a point. "Do you think it's a bad idea?" Danny asked anxiously. "We don't have to."
Ward huffed out something that was somewhere between a sigh and a laugh that cracked in the middle. "Do you have any idea what a pain in the ass you are?"
"You keep saying I should take a more active interest in the company, but every time I do, you complain about it."
"God," Ward said. "Yes, we can have your doggie daycare, fine, whatever, but you ARE coming in next week to help me with the financial quarterlies, and that's not negotiable. It's part of the deal."
"Yeah, okay," Danny said, having no idea what financial quarterlies even were, but he guessed he'd ask Jeri about it in the upcoming week.
"And you'd better actually be here."
There was a delivery truck in the street below, and Colleen on the curb, signing for something that looked like the first shipment of materials for their dojo renovation. "I said I would, didn't I?" Danny said distractedly, leaning out to wave.
"Yes, which means absolutely jack and shit, historically speaking."
Danny opened his mouth to defend himself and then closed it. Building things back up with Ward meant that he had to just kind of roll with some things, especially when there were elements of truth to it. "I'll be there," he said earnestly. "I promise. Especially if there are dogs. Do you think Bernice in Shipping & Receiving will bring in that really fluffy Malamute puppy she has?"
Ward gave another of those slightly cracked half-laughs. "How is it that you're never here and yet, you know the names of people who work in our shipping department? Let alone what kind of dogs they have?"
It was mostly because Bernice and her puppy had been on the loading dock the last time he'd stopped by, going in the back way to avoid making it a big deal at the front desk. "I'll introduce you," Danny said.
"Aaargh," Ward said, and hung up.
"Is that a no?" Danny said, and he grinned at the phone and hung up too. He liked needling Ward. It was fun. He just had to remember not to do too much of it, because it was a little bit unpredictable when Ward would be gratifyingly-but-not-seriously annoyed and when Ward tipped over into being actually upset at him.
He hopped down from the windowsill and went to open the door for Colleen, who he'd just seen head up the stairs, carrying a window almost bigger than she was. He was totally going to make sure that Ward got to meet Bernice's Malamute puppy, he thought; it would probably shed all over Ward's suit, but Ward could use a little bit of dog hair in his life.
But first: helping Colleen carry a van full of building supplies up two flights of stairs.
2. Ward somehow gets roped into teaching business and money management lessons at the dojo cause they're trying to help these kids (maybe misty and others do too?)
"I cannot believe I got talked into this," Ward muttered, shuffling papers in his briefcase.
"I can't believe she asked you," Misty said, deadpan, and Ward scowled at her. Misty's serious expression dissolved into a smile, and she patted him on the shoulder. "Settle down. You'll do fine."
"Yeah, Ward," Danny chimed in, stretching himself into an impossible position in the corner with one leg propped up on the table. "It's what you're good at."
They were in the employee break room at the Bayard Center. Since Danny and Ward had been back in town, Colleen had floated the idea of having them come in to teach classes in the center, and somehow this had developed into Danny teaching them meditation and yoga, and Misty teaching them self-defense.
As for Ward, well ...
"I am not good at it," Ward muttered. "I have people to do it for me. That's what I'm good at. Delegating."
Danny switched to prop his other foot on the break room table and stretched into a new position. "First of all, that's not true, and well, second, if business is mostly delegating, then tell them that. A lot of these kids probably could run their own businesses someday if someone teaches them how. So teach them how."
"You can't learn how to run a business in a one-hour class two nights a week," Ward muttered.
Misty patted his shoulder. "Quit it with the negging. You're going to be good at this."
"Or at least he can't possibly screw it up too badly," Colleen said, coming in from the hallway.
"Hey, I'm doing you a favor here!"
"She's joking, Ward," Misty told him.
Colleen didn't confirm or deny this allegation. "Look," she said to Ward, as she grasped Danny's ankle and gently removed his foot from the break room table. "I've been teaching money management and small business classes here myself. But you have a background I don't. You can teach them things I can't. You could really make a difference in some 17-year-old's life. Don't you want to do that?"
"You convinced me, didn't you?" Ward announced, snapping his briefcase shut. "I'm here, aren't I?"
"And you're going to go out there and kick ass," Danny said.
Colleen looked alarmed. "No! No ass-kicking in the business classes."
Misty made a fist-punching gesture. "That's my job."
"I'm starting to regret this," Colleen said.
3. Ward + withdrawal symptoms
So maybe there are some cosmic scales being balanced somewhere, Ward doesn't know how all of that works, but he still thinks it's kind of unfair that he has to go through drug withdrawal again for reasons that are not actually his fault this time, for the most part.
Insult to injury is that he can't just tough it out in private, because Danny somehow talked him into staying at the dojo for the duration. And then Danny ended up being out half the time for vigilante reasons, which means Ward gets to do this with Colleen.
Yay.
Further insult to injury: Danny and Colleen's place really isn't set up for privacy. It's mostly an open plan and they don't have a guest bedroom, just a fold-out couch. There was some kind of argument that Ward slept through most of that resulted in Ward getting the bedroom, temporarily, so that he has as much privacy as possible. Danny and Colleen are sleeping on the fold-out.
Ward suspects this doesn't endear him to Colleen at all.
Sometimes, to his vast relief, he's alone here, and he makes himself coffee from instant (ugh) coffee crystals in their kitchen and sleeps and watches Netflix when he feels up for it. But Danny seems to have somehow acquired the idea that he really shouldn't be left alone, which means that half the time he holes up in the bedroom just to avoid shuffling out to the kitchen while Colleen is doing her thing on the couch, whatever her thing is.
At least he can drink water from the bathroom without having to go through the kitchen.
"Okay, you're being ridiculous," Colleen says flatly from the doorway.
Ward jumps and drops his earbuds. He's been watching some kind of nature show, which he doesn't really care about, but he can't seem to follow a plot right now.
Colleen is carrying two bowls. It smells ... good. Ward hasn't really wanted food for the last couple of days, but the salty/meaty smell is making his body sit up and take notice.
"I made ramen," Colleen says, sounding deeply annoyed by it all. "The broth and noodles were frozen. Most of the rest of it is fresh. If something isn't cooked to your liking, I don't want to hear about it."
She sits on the edge of the bed and shoves a bowl into his hands. Ward takes it carefully; his hands are shaky right now. Colleen follows it up with chopsticks and a spoon on top of a folded napkin.
Then she pulls up her feet and folds her legs and sits beside him on the bed and digs her chopsticks into the steaming broth, scooping up noodles.
She doesn't say anything. Neither does Ward. He cautiously samples the broth. It's salty and good.
The first few bites are amazing; the next few bites, somewhat less so, as his body decides it's done. He grits his teeth and pushes forward, eating mechanically even after it's not fun anymore. There's just ... not much choice, with her sitting there.
And then all of a sudden his body hits a wall, and a minute later, he puts the bowl hastily aside and gets up and stumbles into the bathroom and makes it just in time.
He doesn't have a whole lot of energy right now, so he's sitting with one arm draped over the toilet seat when Colleen says quietly, from the doorway, "Jeez. Ward."
Her steps are soft and light. She crouches beside him. "Just because I gave it to you doesn't mean you have to eat it."
He doesn't answer, resting his forehead in the crook of his arm. It was tests, with his dad; always, tests. You were never told the rules. You just had to figure them out. Guessing wrong was ... bad.
"Yeah, well, you didn't say so," he says after a minute, his voice rough.
Apparently it's the wrong thing. He senses her pulling back, and closes his eyes. His throat and sinuses burn; he's sweaty and miserable and too tired to even snap at her. He just wants to be alone.
Then Colleen says quietly, "Bakuto made me eat bugs."
Ward raises his head a little. He thought she'd left. Actually, she's sitting in the doorway.
"Danny and I joke about it sometimes," she said, smiling a little. "Like you do. I mean, he went through everything I went through and worse. It's something to laugh about. Something to exaggerate. But you know, what it came down to was, some of Bakuto's lessons were about being willing to live and survive anywhere. To live off garbage, if you had to. Off cockroaches."
Ward swallows carefully. "Do you really think this is the best topic right now?"
Colleen laughs softly. She leans her head against the wall. "No, sorry. The point is ... the thing I've realized is that I didn't really have a choice about it, even though he didn't actually make me do it. I mean, in the sense of putting a sword against my neck and forcing me. He never made me do any of it. He just asked me to. The weapon he used against me was disappointment. And ..." She takes a slow breath. "I was so desperate for it, for ... acceptance, for a place to belong, that I would have walked through broken glass for him. I did, even. Literally, sometimes."
Ward shivers; his muscles ripple, down his arms, through his abdomen. He's not too out of it or too miserable to recognize the olive branch that's being thrust out his way, even though there's some contrarian part of him that wants to set fire to it with sarcastic commentary.
You can always break things. He knows that very well. It's harder, much harder, not to. It's a balancing act, it's a series of careful steps, it's trying to learn how hard to push and when not to. And you don't get to take a break from that just because you feel like shit.
He doesn't think it's quite the right time to tell her that sometimes Harold would have him eat something just to see if he'd do it. She's not Harold. (And he also doesn't need to tell her that he always would. Always.)
So he says, carefully, "I know you're not my dad. Or Bakuto. But ... old habits, right?"
She laughs softly, and he feels a little inner tension unwind: it was the right thing to say. "Yeah," she says. "Old habits. You know, I hope I didn't ... I thought it might be nice for you to have someone to sit with you, instead of being off alone in the bedroom all the time."
"I tried to take the couch," he says, and she laughs out loud, and gets up and puts a hand down to help him up.
*
Colleen leaves him a clean pair of sweatpants and clean T-shirt (both Danny's) to change into, and makes him (slightly burned) toast. After he's had sufficient time to change and curl up under the covers again -- shivering now, waves of it, rolling through him -- she comes in and sets the plate of toast on the bedside table with a glass of water and a bottle of Gatorade.
"Doctor's orders," she says, "are to eat that if you feel like it, and only if you feel like it."
She then sits on the bed with her laptop on her knees, propping herself up against the headboard.
"Oh, come on," she says when he gives her a look from under the covers tucked up to his nose. "You're an adult. I'm an adult. Just say something if you want me to leave. Trust me, I'll understand."
He rolls onto his side and doesn't tell her to leave.
After a little while, he eats some of the toast.
4. Any pairing, different definitions of date night
"You know," Misty muttered, lashing out with her mechanical arm to nail another masked goon. "All I wanted to do was have dinner with one of New York's most eligible bachelors without anything going wrong. Is that really too much to ask?"
Colleen laughed out loud, barely winded, the jerk, and backhanded the hilt of her katana into another attacker's chest, sending him wheezing to the floor. "Have I ever told you about my first sort-of-date with Danny?"
"Is this really the time?"
"It's not actually -- ow! -- what you think."
"That one almost got you."
"Shut up." Colleen put her current opponent down with some kind of ninja move that Misty could barely even track. "Anyway, I just wanted takeout, and he showed up at the dojo with a full meal service, caterers, the works. We weren't even dating at that point. He -- whoa -- on your left there --"
"Got it." Misty flipped a guy, put a knee in his throat. "Stay down, asshole. What were you saying?"
"Just that it's never exactly been normal with us. I don't think we've ever had a date night that wasn't -- urgh -- fundamentally weird in some way, or didn't end with someone laid out on the floor, and not in the fun way -- yeah, stay there, buddy."
"Just because your love life is freaking weird doesn't mean mine has to be!" Misty protested, clotheslining another attacker onto the floor. "God, how many of these guys are there?"
"I think that was the last one." Colleen laughed and sheathed her katana, then cracked her knuckles. She looked like she was having fun. Weirdo. "Want to go down and see if the boys need our help?"
"Like there's any doubt of that," Misty muttered, and they hit the stairs.
5. White Collar/Iron Fist crossover (maybe Peter investigating Harold's death?)
"There's definitely something hinky about this company."
"The last time you went undercover in a big corporation like this, you got poisoned and stabbed in the heart with a needle," Diana said.
Peter frowned at her. It was raining; they were under the awning at a coffee shop, and she was standing at his table in a barista's uniform. "That's not going to happen this time."
"Sure about that, are you, boss?" Diana glanced around, then set down Peter's coffee and slid into the seat across from him -- with the rain coming down like this, there was almost no one around. "Have you found out anything else about Harold Meachum's death?"
"His first one, or his second one?" Peter said dryly. "Look, there's nothing that isn't weird about this place. They've not only had two supposedly dead people show up in the last couple of months, one of whom ended up taking a header off the roof, but two of the three owners are currently overseas for unknown reasons, the remaining one has suddenly started making a bunch of top-down changes, and everyone I talk to gives me a different conflicting story of weird things happening around the company. The one thing I am pretty sure of is that the rumors they were running heroin through the place are true --"
"You should hand it over to the DEA, then."
"That's on the table," Peter said. "But it's not just about drugs. Every time I find a company that's a known cartel front, it turned out they just recently cut ties with Rand. Like, within the last few weeks."
"Someone's cleaning house."
Peter nodded. "I just don't know why. All I know is, it kicked off right around the time Harold Meachum turned out not to be dead for about two days before he fell off the roof of the building and then the family rushed a cremation."
"Not suspicious at all."
"You're telling me." He glanced around and got up, holding out the cup to her. "You better give me this to go, after all. I've got a lot of work to do."
6. Ward and Misty get magic tattoos too
Okay, technically this wasn't a prompt. It was a post by
yutaya which can be found here, describing and illustrating tattoos for all of the main four (of course Colleen's and Danny's are canon) and then suggesting that it might be possibly to channel the Iron Fist power through the other two, and wouldn't they be surprised. So I ran with that. You can view the tattoo images and descriptions at the above link - I changed Misty's slightly.
--
For Danny it was that initial moment of hot golden triumph, part agony, part delight, with his fist trembling and his entire body still shaking from mingled exhilaration and exhaustion and pain. It was looking up to see the gold light reflected in Davos's eyes and with it, the first stirrings of resentment, the first stones in the wall dividing him from his brother.
It was the feeling of having spent half your life trying to achieve something and getting it and then that initial falter of not quite knowing if it was really what he wanted after all.
He sometimes thought that first moment of doubt had stayed with him for the rest of his struggle to gain control over the fire of Shou Lao, a shaky substrate wobbling under the weight of everything he'd done since. It was true, what they'd told him in K'un Lun, that to master the Iron Fist you must first master yourself, and that was a battle he wasn't sure he could ever win.
*
For Colleen it was searing pain and white-hot light, lighting up her nerve endings in pure agony and illuminating corners of her soul she'd long ago lost the will to look into. It was the feeling of finding something she'd been looking forward to all her life and never knew it, and at the same time feeling the crack widening between herself and Danny in a way she wasn't sure they could ever bridge.
It was the oddly satisfying click of finding something she had long ago thought broken beyond repair snapping back into place. It was having searched her whole life and never found her place in the world, and then suddenly finding it.
It was coming home.
*
For Ward and Misty, well ...
It wasn't supposed to happen at all, was the thing.
--
For Misty, the design was half painted and half tattooed, all part of a girls' bonding session with Colleen, where her arm switched over from metal to flesh. It was a reclamation thing, a way of saying This is part of me, I claim it. The design itself was based mostly on Colleen's tattoo with some aspects of Danny's, all of it designed by Ward, who had made himself a tattoo and apparently was doing tattoos for all of them now.
Anyway, it had been tattooed on her by a perfectly normal tattoo artist, and then Colleen helped her paint the metal part to match.
It wasn't supposed to light up.
It sure as hell wasn't supposed to give her the ability to punch through a foot-thick cinderblock wall to get Colleen out of a Hand prison.
*
There were pins in Ward's forearm, placed there years ago in a three-hour surgery after Harold broke his arm by twisting it behind his back. He'd been back to work the next day, doped to the eyeballs on painkillers. The scars had faded in time, twisting around his forearm if you knew where to look.
They were covered now by a spiraling tattoo, designed painstakingly in ink, incorporating aspects of his past and his present to build a new future. The dragon was for Danny, the birds for freedom.
When it lit up in golden fire, the pins were like little spikes of flame, stitching a line through the middle of his forearm. He could feel every one. And he hardly even noticed; he was too busy holding onto Danny, being terrified for Danny. He would have poured his entire life through his hands, the blood-covered hands trying to hold back the tide of Danny's life escaping through the gaping bullet wound in Danny's chest, but he wasn't expecting his hands to actually respond, let alone for a flood of golden fire to wash the blood away.
*
"We're like a club," Misty said cheerfully, leaning over to look more closely the tattoo on Ward's arm. He held it up for her inspection, to the extent that he could, anyway. His arms felt like they were made of rubber; he was lying down on the bed next to Danny's, after sleeping for (as it turned out) almost two days.
The tattoo wasn't quite like it had been before. There was a little bit of gold now, limning the black ink, as if it had been lightly gilded. Misty's was like that now too, he noticed, when she turned toward Colleen and Danny. Her arm glinted golden in the overhead hospital lights.
"It's not supposed to work like this," Danny said. Ever since waking up in the hospital after Ward had healed him (sort of), he'd been looking baffled. "I mean, it really, really isn't supposed to work like this."
"How do we know how it works, really?" Colleen was lightly stroking the tattoo on her forearm, seeming unaware that she was doing it. "It's not like these things come with a handbook."
"It's sacred," Danny said.
"Really?" Ward said, rolling his head to look toward Danny. "According to K'un-Lun, the most reliable of all possible sources?"
Danny looked like he was thinking about throwing something at him, but there was nothing convenient in reach.
"We don't know how it works, really, do we?" Misty asked. "It could be some kind of scientific phenomenon."
"It's not, though," Danny said. "Shou-Lao. It's the will of the dragon."
"Maybe Shou-Lao moves in mysterious ways," Ward said.
"Please never say that again."
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