Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"Son," Harold said, in the same tone that someone else might have said Here's that broom you ordered, "this is your bodyguard. The Hand sent her."

Ward, who had just walked in the door of the penthouse, stared at him for a second and said, "What?"

It was after midnight, and he'd been up since five this morning. Almost out of the office, finally, and then Harold called, fucking Harold, who couldn't wait until morning, because it could never wait until morning, not when Harold knew full well that there was never a time that Ward wouldn't come running—

"Try to pay attention, Ward," Harold said. He was mixing up a smoothie at the sideboard near his desk. "Want some of this? You look like you could use the antioxidants."

The woman—bodyguard, Ward supposed—stood off to the side at a sort of parade rest, straight-backed and still. Ward hardly spared a glance for her.

"My—what—no. No, I don't want a smoothie. Or a bodyguard, for that matter." A dry headache born of fatigue and tension had begun screwing its way into his temples. He wanted sleep. He wanted a drink, or a handful of pills: something to kick this headache and maybe relax a little. "Why do I have a bodyguard?"

"I don't know." Harold's tone implied that the question itself was unreasonably foolish. He sipped from the glass of toxic-looking green sludge, rolled it around in his mouth, and then stirred in a spoonful of something or other. "She's a gift from the Hand. Don't look a gift bodyguard in the mouth, so to speak. They think you need one. And I wouldn't say that questioning them on that point is a good strategic move, Ward. I can if you insist, of course, but the consequences are on your head." He shrugged and took a sip. "Ah. Perfect. Sure you don't want some of this?"

"No—I—" Ward stopped and took a breath. "Right. What am I supposed to do with her?"

The woman shifted slightly, and made a low sound, an annoyed sort of throat-clearing noise.

"Is this where I have to explain the purpose of bodyguards to you? Keep her with you, I expect. The Hand wouldn't have given her to you if they didn't think there was a need. Drink?" Harold asked, turning to the woman.

She gave Harold a puzzled look that Ward could relate to, and Ward finally took a good look at her. His first impression was that she was incredibly small and not at all intimidating-looking, as bodyguards went. Her hair was tied back in a practical ponytail, and there was a sword scabbard strapped to her back, over the top of her leather jacket.

She did not fit the aesthetic of his office in the slightest.

God. How was he going to explain her to Joy?

"No, thank you," the bodyguard said to Harold, after a moment of low-key bafflement, and turned towards Ward. She had to look up at him. For fuck's sake, they'd given him a pocket-sized bodyguard. Of course they had. She had a solemn face and an intense, fierce stare. "I've been instructed to stay near you. I'll keep out of your way. I'm trained for this."

"Great." Ward laughed; he couldn't help it. "So do I feed you? Take you for walks?"

She regarded him silently with what was either a resting murder face or an expression that meant she actually wanted to murder him.

"Go on, take her home with you," Harold said, making a little dismissive gesture. "You should be glad the Hand are so invested in your welfare, Ward. Don't be ungrateful."

"Yeah," Ward muttered. "I'm sure they are. Night."

The bodyguard shadowed him closely out of Harold's penthouse, pausing briefly by the door to snatch up a small black backpack he hadn't even noticed; she slung it over her shoulder as they got into the elevator, settling in next to Ward and just a little bit behind him, so that he had to turn his head to see her.

It was creepy having her there. She moved almost soundlessly, like she was walking in some kind of sound-muffling ninja shoes. Ward had to glance down to make sure that she wasn't wearing black ninja socks or something, but no, they were just ordinary shoes.

"Stop staring at my feet," the bodyguard said. "It's weird."

Ward jerked his gaze back to her face. She regarded him levelly. Resting murder face, that was definitely it. Under the harsh lights in the elevator, she looked a little less scary and more human. Her ponytail was sloppy, not like Joy's sleek every-hair-in-place updo, but more like she'd pulled it back in the morning and then forgotten about it; there was hair spilling out in spiky little clumps. She had a scar on her cheek, low down, trailing a fine white line down her jaw, and there was a trace of a fading bruise at the corner of her mouth—Ward knew all too well what those looked like, and all the many shades of colors they turned before they healed. This one was about a week old. Training accident? Fight? Had she won the fight or lost it? The results might be relevant to his survival, and he was still invested in that, despite all the reasons he had not to be.

"Aren't you supposed to do what I tell you?" Ward said.

It was all he could think of to say. He was used to having private security around—it went with being Harold Meachum's son—but they were employees of the company and not usually attached to him personally. They did what they were told and otherwise stayed out of his way. It was an arrangement that worked for him just fine. This, though ... this was one of those completely unnerving Harold situations, where he didn't know the rules and everything was totally batshit and he was supposed to go along with it like it was perfectly normal.

"My orders are to protect you," the bodyguard said. She turned her gaze ahead, resting it on the elevator doors rather than looking at him. Ward was familiar with that particular look. She didn't like him much. Well, it was mutual.

"From absolutely fucking what?" he asked, with every grain of snide sarcasm he could scrape together when he was this tired.

"Anyone who means you harm." Her voice was flat. Her gaze remained on the doors.

Ward pinched the skin between his brows with his fingertips.

The elevator doors slid open, and the bodyguard moved out ahead of him, gliding as quietly as a shadow, then placed a hand in front of the doors and held them while he got off. Ward gave her a look as he stepped out onto the marble lobby floor. The bodyguard took up her position at his side and a step behind him, as before.

"Yeah, but the Hand never cared enough to send a personal security guard before, did they?" he said. "Something's changed. You guys must think someone or something is after me. So, fine. That's my life. Come on, just tell me who Harold pissed off this time."

The bodyguard huffed out a little sigh. "We believe someone called the Iron Fist may try to kill you, or send someone to kill you."

Fuck it. He didn't want to be right. He fell back on snark, as usual.

"Fantastic. Iron Fist. Sounds like a sex toy." Then he stopped in mid-stride as the implications of the situation sank in. The bodyguard nearly bumped into him, but gracefully sidestepped in time. "My sister. Joy. Shit. Is she in danger too?"

He was reaching for his phone, but the bodyguard's hand shot out to catch his wrist. Her fingers were shockingly strong, considering her unimpressive size.

"Security has been provided for your sister too," she said.

"She's not supposed to know anything!" Ward snapped, trying to wrench himself free. She hung on implacably. Okay, maybe she wasn't the most useless bodyguard of all time. At the very least, she was really fucking strong. "If she finds out about the Hand, they're going to kill her, and having one of—of you show up on her doorstep isn't exactly subtle, you know?"

"Your sister's security detail is discreet and competent," she said, looking up at him with no discernible expression in her intent dark eyes. "She's not likely to be a target. We believe that, as the company heir, you're the main target."

"But you don't know," he snapped, looking down at her. "If Joy is in danger, I swear to God—"

"There is an entire security detail on her right now. Don't call her; you'll only upset her. She'll be safe. The Hand guarantees it."

"Oh, the Hand guarantees it," he muttered sarcastically, but he let his phone slip back down into his pocket. The habit of obedience was too ingrained. Still, he kept complaining, because it was the only outlet he had. "Joy gets a team of ninjas following her around the city, and I get a travel-sized personal bodyguard. This fucking day, I swear."

The bodyguard shrugged, a graceful rippling movement. She took a step back, out of his personal space, and resettled her bag over her shoulder.

"So am I just supposed to call you 'hey, you,' or ..."

"My name is Colleen," she said.

"Sounds like an Irish barmaid."

She gave him resting murderface again, and that was the last thing either of them said to each other for the entire ride to his condo.

At Ward's condo, Colleen dropped the backpack just inside the door (it clinked when she set it down) and prowled around like a restless stray cat. In her black clothes, with her messy hair, she looked impossibly out of place surrounded by his stylish chrome-and-white decor, not that she seemed even slightly aware of it. She peered into the bathroom and both bedrooms, wandered around his living room, stalked through the spotless kitchen (Ward rarely used it, but his cleaning service polished the marble countertops on a weekly basis anyway) and examined the large windows displaying their striking view of the city at night.

Ward poured himself a large glass of bourbon. He needed it to deal with this day. He palmed two pills and washed them down with a swig of booze.

"If you haven't found any bombs or assassins hiding in the closet," he said, "I'm going to bed."

Colleen looked around from checking the locks on the door. "Do you have a preference for where I sleep?"

Great, he was supposed to play host now too? He hadn't even thought about that part. He supposed that bodyguards did have to sleep like ordinary people, come to think of it. "I don't care. There's a perfectly good guest bedroom." Then it occurred to him that she had exactly one job and she couldn't do it when she was sleeping. "What if I'm attacked while you're asleep?"

"I'm a light sleeper," Colleen said. She picked up the bag. It clinked again.

"What's in there?" Ward asked. "Nunchucks?"

More resting murderface. "It's an overnight bag."

"You travel prepared, do you?"

"Always," Colleen said. She went into the bathroom and firmly shut the door.

"What the actual fuck," Ward muttered. By now, though, the combination of pills and booze was spreading warm golden syrup through his bones and muscles, and he might actually be able to sleep for a few hours if he hit the right point in the trajectory from pleasantly endorphin rush to achy, unpleasant crash afterwards. He was exhausted enough that he had just enough mental capacity to make sure the bedroom door was shut and then move a chair in front of it (like that'd help if she decided to kill him in his sleep) before stripping off his pants and collapsing on the bed.

The alarm tore him out of uneasy dreams. He ached all over, sticky-mouthed and gritty-eyed and headachy. Typical morning, in other words. Luckily he had a solution for that.

He rolled out of bed, grabbed the pill bottle off the nightstand and dry-swallowed one, then stumbled out into the living room in his boxers, and was halfway to the kitchen for a drink of water when he remembered, oh right, unwanted bodyguard.

Colleen was sitting on Ward's modish and largely unused white sofa, dressed in either yesterday's clothes or their identical twins—black jeans and a sleeveless black T-shirt—with the leather jacket and scabbard beside her on the couch. She was reading a magazine she had picked up off his coffee table. She glanced up. Resting murderface was leavened by a quirk at both corners of her mouth.

"Shut up," Ward said, in defiance of the fact that she hadn't actually said anything. It was his home, damn it. He hadn't asked to have her here, so if he wanted to walk around in his underwear and a rumpled suit shirt he hadn't bothered to take off last night, he was damn well going to do it. He poured himself a glass of water and tossed back half of it. He was desperately, painfully thirsty.

"Why do you subscribe to this?" Colleen asked, flipping the magazine over.

"I don't know. What is it?"

"Town and Country."

"No idea." He had taken out a few magazine subscriptions (or, technically, had his assistant do it) out of a vague feeling that he ought to. A few magazines on the glass-and-chrome coffee table made the place look more lived-in, which for some reason felt like it mattered even though he had never actually ended up entertaining here; the Rand building had much better facilities for wooing clients, and Joy was the one who handled that part anyway due to Ward's general lack of people skills. He usually threw the magazines away after a month or two without looking at them.

"Because there's an ad in here for a two-thousand-dollar ice bucket, and I was wondering if you had one."

"No," Ward said. He opened the cabinets. They were nearly bare. Today of all days he wanted a cup of coffee, and he wanted it right now; he didn't want to wait and get one from the coffee machine in the office. He had an extremely expensive espresso maker, but there didn't seem to be anything in the cabinets except half a jar of expired peanut butter and a lot of half-empty bottles of expensive alcohol.

"There's also an article on how to know whether you're over-paying your staff," Colleen said. "It's got a market-value guide and everything."

Ward was used to feeling like shit in the mornings, until he got himself up and running—headache, vaguely dehydrated feeling, sour stomach—but this was really not helping. "You know what?" he said. "You insist on being here whether I want you here or not, so make yourself useful and go get coffee. You want the place on the corner with the all-black sign, and no, I can't be bothered to remember the name. But they make decent coffee. No sugar, dash of cream, and I want their house dark roast coarse ground."

Colleen gave him a flat look. "I'm your bodyguard, not your personal assistant."

"My wallet's in the bedroom. Probably in my pants. Use whatever you need. I'm taking a shower." He lurched into the bathroom, and it occurred to him as he shut the door that he'd just invited her to rob him blind, but who cared? He carried a couple hundred in his wallet, tops, and a few credit cards, all of which he could easily cancel if he had to.

A shower helped clear his head somewhat, and by the time he stepped out, he was coherent enough to remember that he was either going to have to walk to his bedroom in yesterday's slept-in shirt and boxers, or naked. Damn it. He was used to being alone at home. He wrapped a towel around his waist, poked his head out of the bathroom, and scuttled to the bedroom like he was in enemy-held territory.

"I brought bagels," Colleen called from the living room.

Ward dressed in the bedroom, and touched up his shave job and slicked back his hair in the bathroom before strolling into the living room feeling halfway in control again. He found that she had brought a lot more than bagels. There was an entire mini breakfast buffet on his marble kitchen island: a large cardboard coffee cup, some bagels, little tubs of flavored cream cheese, and assorted pastries, each with one corner cut off.

"That one's not great," Colleen said, pointing with a plastic knife. "Way too much goat cheese. That one's good, though—with the apricots. You didn't say how much coffee you wanted, so I got you a lot."

Ward stared at her, then took the top off the coffee cup. It was dark tan, just like he'd asked for. At least she was competent.

He tried to get past her at the counter, but she didn't move (elbows in place, eating sample-size pieces of all his pastries); he had to go around. He opened a cabinet to get down a bottle of brandy.

"Are you really spiking your coffee with booze at six in the morning?"

"Want some?" Ward said.

"No."

"Good, because I wasn't going to offer. You need to have your head clear to protect me." He tasted the coffee. "I didn't tell you to get food."

Colleen looked at him and moved out of the kitchen, taking a bagel with her. "I was hungry," she said, through a bite.

"Is this what having a bodyguard is going to be like? Really? Insubordination and breakfast buffets?"

"And here I was just wondering if it's going to be all coffee runs and complaining," Colleen said. She sat on the couch and picked up the magazine again.

She was getting crumbs on his immaculate white sofa. "You're not allowed to eat there," Ward tried.

"Fight me," Colleen said out of the corner of her mouth, around another bite of bagel.

He still hadn't decided what to do with Colleen by the time they got to the office.

"My sister can't see you," he said. "She's going to ask questions that I don't have answers to. Why don't you wait downstairs, with the other security."

Colleen shook her head. "I'm supposed to stay with you. Those are my orders."

"From who?"

"From my sensei." And now her expression was flat and fierce and cold. "When he tells me to do something, I do it."

"Great. Hooray." But Ward couldn't help thinking of Harold, and midnight penthouse runs that he couldn't say no to. And he also thought, if there was really someone dangerous around, maybe she should be upstairs—she could protect both him and Joy that way. "Okay, but don't talk to my sister, okay? Just stay out of sight, if you can."

"I'm supposed to stay with you."

"I don't care." Standing outside the glass doors to the office lobby, he reached over to grab her arm. "Listen, I don't know how much anyone explained to you about the Hand and my family, but I was serious before. If Joy finds out they so much as exist, let alone that our—" He stopped; it was simply too ingrained, not saying Harold's name in public in a nondeniable way. "—if she finds out about the person who introduced you to me, they'll kill her, understand? And I won't risk Joy. I don't give a damn if I'm in danger. She's the one who matters here."

Colleen looked at him, then down at his hand still grasping her forearm, and carefully, deliberately twisted and broke his grip—effortlessly, it seemed, her arm slipping out of his grasp like it was greased. "The Hand isn't going to hurt your sister," she said. "The real danger is the Iron Fist."

Ward barked out a sharp laugh. "Yeah, right. Nice story. Maybe this Iron Fist is seven feet tall and breathes fire, I wouldn't be surprised at this point, but I've spent the last twelve years knowing the Hand would kill me if I stepped out of line. So don't get near my sister. There's a little conference room adjoining my office where you can stay. Hardly anybody ever goes in there. Sound good?"

Colleen gazed at him with a tiny crease between her brows. "You know, I think someone's been telling you lies about the Hand."

"Apparently, that makes two of us," he said, and went inside.

She followed him, making so little noise that he kept having to look back to see if she was still there. It was like having a wraith floating along at his heels, through security and up to his office—this did get some looks, particularly from the security guards, but Meghan wasn't in yet and neither was Joy. Colleen went into the conference room where Ward pointed her, a little private one adjoining his office, normally used for conference calls or private meetings with clients. There were windows looking out onto the city from the conference room, but none into the main office, which was the important thing.

"Do you ... need anything?" he asked, feeling oddly responsible. As much as he didn't want her here, sticking her in the conference room without so much as a glass of water felt weirdly wrong, like leaving a dog in the car without the windows rolled down or something.

"I'm fine," she said, and began browsing along the file drawer labels.

"Stay out of the company files."

She gave him a quick flash of murderface. "I'm not here for industrial espionage, Mr. Meachum. I'm here to protect you from the Iron Fist. And I will."

Something about having her call him Mr. Meachum gave him unpleasant Harold vibes. "Just call me Ward. And stay in here, unless you hear the sound of the Iron Fist breaking in or something. Whatever that sounds like," he muttered, swinging the conference room door almost all the way shut.

She did, surprisingly, stay put. Joy came and went, apparently noticing nothing wrong, which Ward supposed said something about his general ability to lie to her and act normal while everything was terribly weird. At noon, Meghan brought him a panini and a coffee, leaving it on the edge of his desk while Ward was buried in a phone call with one of Rand's suppliers.

It was generally a toss-up whether he was hungry or not—it depended, really, on what sort of day he was having—but in this case he'd eaten one of Colleen's apricot pastries and a bagel, and he didn't normally have breakfast, so he wasn't hungry at all. He took the sandwich bag into the conference room, and Colleen looked up sharply and guiltily from an open file folder on the table in front of her.

"Get out of our files! Jesus Christ," Ward said, reaching for it. Colleen pulled away in a way that left him with a general sense that she could have easily taken it back if she wanted to, but just didn't feel like bothering. "Why are you looking at our files? What are you really here for?"

"Don't flatter yourself," Colleen said. She backed off and leaned against the wall with her arms folded. "I don't care about your corporate accounts from the 1990s. I'm just looking for something to do."

"Yeah, well ... lunch," Ward said, slamming the paper bag down on the conference room table. "If the Iron Fist shows up to murder me, you'd better be out of here in two-tenths of a second, not buried in our financials from 1973."

But no one showed up to murder him. At the end of the day, after Meghan had gone home, Joy stopped by his office and sat on the edge of his desk. "You work too much," she said, reaching over to tug playfully at his tie.

"Only way to keep ahead of the competition," Ward said, bantering back on pure autopilot.

"Yes, well, take a night off. Come over to the townhouse for dinner. We'll order in from Garabaldi's, get their triple-decker lasagna."

Dad used to take them to Garabaldi's, long ago. It was comfort food for them. He could picture them sitting on the floor, shoes off, passing appetizers back and forth, and laughing, like they used to ...

With Colleen lurking in the doorway like a dark, ominous, murderfacey shadow?

He managed not to flick his eyes toward the conference room, where Colleen had a single lamp on. Joy didn't seem to have noticed, probably assuming that it was just part of the office lighting.

If he went with Joy to the townhouse, maybe he could help keep her safe—well, not him personally, maybe, but Colleen could. Or maybe, and perhaps more likely, he'd lead danger right to her door, and open up a Pandora's box of questions that would end up getting her killed.

And perhaps more to the point, Colleen was Hand herself. Now that he thought about it, she was probably at least as much of a danger to him as anything she was protecting him from. He didn't want her too close to his sister if he could help it.

"Sorry. I can't tonight." He pointed to the computer screen. "Got to finish these. Rain check?"

"Rain check," she said with a smile—a smile that faltered slightly as she glanced at the half-empty whiskey glass beside his computer. "Good night, workaholic."

"Night, Joy."

After her tapping heels faded away and the elevator dinged, the lamp in the conference room went off, and Colleen came out with her black leather jacket slung over her arm.

"You know, it's after seven," she said. "You do eat, I presume."

"Are you seriously nagging me out of my office? You're my bodyguard, not my mother." Though it occurred to him that something other than booze and hydrocodone would probably be a good idea at some point. Breakfast was an increasingly long time ago.

"I'm hungry," she said. "If you're not going home soon, I'm going to grab something from the vending machine."

"Fine, whatever." Ward shut the computer down. "We're leaving, let's go, why not. It's not like I have work to do or anything."

Annoyance flickered over Colleen's features before her resting murderface settled in again. "I didn't say you had to. I'm not here to tell you how to live your life."

"My sister nags me if I work late anyway. Let's go."

She settled into her position at his shoulder, but still with the same insistence on stepping out of elevators and doors ahead of him, then fading behind him again. It was so smoothly done that he couldn't really stop her.

It wasn't until they got out of the company car at his condo that she said, "Did you know there are cameras in your office?"

"Cameras?" Ward said blankly.

"Mr. Meachum—your father ... when I was at his penthouse, I noticed he had monitors with a variety of different views." She smiled slightly. "I don't think he realized I was paying attention. But I was. And then I recognized your office from the monitors when I saw it."

Fucking Dad. Ward didn't know why he was even surprised.

"No," he said. "I didn't know."

Rather than having a relaxing dinner of Italian food with Joy, he had takeout tapas with Colleen, quiet and stiffly awkward, especially when their hands bumped while reaching for the assorted cartons on the coffee table. There was nothing he could think of to make small talk about—So, how long have you worked for the Hand, anyway? Kill a lot of people?—and he couldn't stop thinking about the fact that this small, unassuming woman could easily kill him if she wanted to.

Or if her orders changed.

Was she here to protect him, he wondered uneasily, or because the Hand wanted an assassin handy just in case?

He wasn't sure what it said about him that it had taken him as long as it had to think of that. This might just be Dad and the Hand's weird way of getting rid of him if he got in the way of whatever-the-fuck they were planning now. Strangely, the thought really hurt. He knew Dad was an absolute shithead, but Ward was still his son, for God's sake. And also useful, or at least he tried to be.

"This is ridiculous," Colleen muttered, and she reached for his remote and turned on the giant, wallscreen-style TV. Ward jumped when the sound came on. "What? I assume you knew there was a TV there."

"Well, yeah, obviously, but I never watch it." The TV was tuned to a sports channel. Ward tried to remember if he'd even turned it on in the years he'd lived here.

"I'm going to assume you don't have a religious objection to television or anything like that," Colleen said, flipping channels.

"No, I'm just not home much."

She looked around the living room, and Ward found himself in the uneasy position of seeing it through her eyes—sterile, tidy, largely devoid of personal touches or even personality.

He'd bought it sight unseen. When Harold had deemed for some inscrutable Harold reason that Ward ought to move out rather than continuing to live in the Rands' old townhouse with his sister, the instructions Ward had given the realtor were to find him something professional-looking and stylish. He didn't care what it looked like. An interior design firm did the decorating.

And he'd never really left a stamp on it since then, had he? He counted back and—God, he'd lived here five years now. It still looked like a hotel room.

"This is a pretty swanky place, I have to say." Colleen leaned back on the sofa, and put one booted foot up on the coffee table. Ward opened his mouth to tell her not to, and then thought, what the hell; his cleaning service could buff out the smudge if it left one. And maybe, in the meantime, it would give the place a very tiny hint of personality.

"Yeah, well, that's what money tends to get you," he said.

"Along with a lot of other things."

"It's how the world works," Ward said. He got up. "You want a drink? No, wait, you're on duty."

"That's the police, not bodyguards, as such," Colleen said. She'd turned the TV to a movie with a lot of explosions and car chases. "What have you got?"

"Scotch. Bourbon. Brandy. Wine, red and white."

"Beer?" Colleen asked hopefully.

"Uh, no. Not a beer guy. Not enough bang for your buck."

"Mmm," Colleen said, sounding disappointed. "Wine then. Any red you've got."

There was a mostly-empty bottle that smelled like vinegar—he didn't drink wine much—so instead, he opened the bottle of Chateau Pontet-Canet that Joy had given him a couple of Christmases ago. He brought their drinks over to the couch.

"Thanks," Colleen said, and she flashed him a quick smile as she took the glass, possibly the first smile he had seen from her.

Stilted conversation, awkward drinks—so far, having a bodyguard was like being on the worst blind date ever. Which gave Ward a brief, disconcerting mental image of the two of them on a date.

Jesus, when was the last time he'd even bothered to bring someone back here? And that led to an even worse thought—did Dad have cameras here? Had he watched the last time that Ward had—

Well, that was an image that was going to lead to him never having sex ever again, even if he lived the kind of life that tended to lend itself to having an active social life.

"That was a really weird thing your face just did there," Colleen said.

"Were you assigned to me so you could insult my face?"

"Yep, okay," Colleen said, "this is fun," and turned up the volume on the TV.

They watched the movie for a few minutes.

"I can see that you're aching to critique this," Ward said.

Colleen let out a breath. "It's just that his technique for clearing rooms is so bad."

"I knew it."

"Seriously, he keeps letting his partner cross into his line of fire. It's so careless."

"I have approximately twelve thousand channels, not to mention Netflix and Hulu and every pay-per-view that exists. There's got to be something else on besides shitty cop movies."

"This is fine," Colleen said, and sank down on the couch until the wine glass was resting on her chest.

Five minutes later there was a sword fight on the screen and it looked like her eyes were going to roll right out of her head.

"Right," Ward said, "we're watching something different." He reached for the remote.

"Some wuxia would be nice if you can find any," Colleen muttered.

"I have no idea what that is but okay."

"Chinese martial arts movies. At least I can be reasonably confident that the fight scenes will be competently choreographed."

"How do you spell that?"

It turned out the top hit for "wuxia" on Hulu was Kung Fu Panda. Colleen looked deeply exasperated.

They ended up settling on Finding Nemo, which was ... an unexpected kick in the gut, actually. It was the last movie, or at least one of the last movies, that Ward had watched with Danny and Joy before Danny and the Rands died. It had just come out in theaters, and they went to see it twice. Ward had felt, at the time, that he was definitely too old for a movie about animated fish, but the little kids really wanted to see it and somehow Ward got dragged along both times.

It was one of his last clear memories of Danny. Both Danny and Joy were starting to hit that age when they were turning from small cuddly children into leggy, stubborn little beanpoles, full of opinions which were mostly designed to make his life more difficult. For some reason the main thing he remembered about those movie trips now was that Danny had really wanted popcorn with triple butter and a box of M&Ms (he liked to mix them together). Ward had bought them nachos instead because he was having to spend his afternoon doing this and at least someone else wasn't going to get what they wanted. And Danny had looked disappointed at first but then grinned at him and told him the nachos were good too, and took a chip dripping with fake cheese.

The nachos were actually terrible. Ward let the kids eat most of them, the two of them reaching back and forth across his lap while the movie played. The popcorn would probably have been better. At the very least it wouldn't have left faux-cheese stains on his pants.

He wasn't sure why he was thinking of that now. It was a long time in the past, Danny fifteen years dead. He got up, and got them more drinks, though Colleen hadn't made it more than about halfway through her glass of wine.

By the time the movie finished, with the happy fish family reunited, Colleen looked a little bit ... not sad exactly, but ... pensive.

"What?" Ward said shortly. "You got something against sushi?" He'd spent way too much time during the movie thinking about Joy and Danny. Even when all the characters were technicolor fish, the happy-ever-after ending was just a reminder that in the real world, dead people didn't come back into your life (okay, with one notable exception, but that was a major outlier), and happily reunited and harmonious families might be a thing, out there somewhere, but definitely not in Ward's experience. It was also a reminder that he was drifting farther away from Joy, and ... okay, this was a terrible choice of movie, all things considered.

"It's a nice movie," Colleen said quietly, and got up and went into the bathroom. She closed the door firmly behind her.

Ward took a handful of pills and went to bed.

It was one of the Harold dreams, which ranged from not-great to awful to "won't even try to sleep tomorrow night" bad. This was somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Ward was trapped in a maze, and every direction he went, Harold was sitting there with a handful of lawn darts—not the modern blunt-tipped kind, but the old-fashioned, steel sort. "Not that way, Ward," Harold said, almost kindly, and hurled a dart at him. He had a dozen of them sticking out of his flesh, as he fell through a trap door into a pit of octopi with Harold's face on every tentacle, still smiling as they pulled his arms off. "It's all right, Ward," Harold said, "you weren't using those anyway, and the company needs them; you have to be a team player about this, Ward, don't be so selfish, I thought I raised you better than this—"

He woke up with the light on and Colleen leaning over him with her sword drawn, looking toward the window.

"Jesus!" Ward yelped. He scrabbled back and slammed into the headboard. He was drenched in sweat and his head throbbed in time with the pulse of his hammering heart. "What the fuck?"

"You were screaming," Colleen said. Her voice was calm, but she still looked faintly unnerved as she stepped away from the bed and resheathed her sword. "I thought you were being attacked."

Still blurred with drugs, booze, and sleep, he reached for the clock. 3 a.m. Wonderful. "Yeah, well, I'm not, so go away."

Colleen started to turn away, then hesitated in the doorway. "Are you ... all right?"

"It's nightmares!" Ward said, exasperated. "Everyone has 'em. Turn off the light on your way out." He buried his face in the pillow.

Even with the room dark and calm again, it still took forever to get back to sleep, and he woke to the alarm foggy-headed and dazed, after maybe another hour of sleep. He had to drag himself through a shower. It occurred to him that he couldn't remember the last time he'd had a decent night's sleep, although at least most of the time he either managed to successfully drug himself into oblivion or he woke himself up screaming, as opposed to being awakened by a Hand ninja waving a sword in his face.

The living room smelled like coffee.

"Breakfast is on the counter," Colleen said from the couch. She had her boots up on the coffee table again.

"I don't eat breakfast," Ward said, with a narrow-eyed stare at the brand new buffet of bagels and pastries spread out on the kitchen island. He couldn't stomach anything of the sort, the way he was feeling right now. On the other hand ... coffee. And it looked like she'd gone to the same place. There was an enormous cardboard cup with the familiar white-on-black logo on it.

"More for me then," Colleen said, and flipped a page in the magazine she was looking at.

Ward spiked the coffee, and palmed a pill—they were medicinal, but he still felt weird, self-conscious maybe, taking them openly in front of Colleen. He'd gotten in the habit of avoiding having Joy see him, and it seemed to translate over to Colleen as well. Though ... Dad saw it, didn't he? Dad saw everything. Multi-armed tentacles, indeed. Ward gave a sharp little laugh.

"What?" Colleen asked, looking up from her magazine.

"I wasn't talking to you."

"If you're holding a grudge about me waking you up," she said, flipping a page, "I was just doing my job. Also, I wouldn't have minded sleeping through the night myself."

"Oh, shut up," Ward said, and Colleen looked up from her magazine. With his head throbbing and his eye sockets aching from lack of sleep, his emotions still scraped raw from the night's dreams, he was fed up with this cheap, fake facade of camaraderie they had somehow managed to erect during the last couple days' worth of forced cohabitation. "I don't want you here. And let's face it, you don't want to be here either. Just because we watched a stupid kids' movie together doesn't make us friends."

Colleen stared at him. "You really aren't a morning person, are you?"

Ward snatched up the cup of coffee and threw it at her.

Her reflexes were so fast that she barely seemed to move; she was off the couch and batting it away, and the coffee bounced to the side and rebounded off the back of the couch and splashed over the white fabric covering.

Colleen stood staring at it. So did Ward. Then she gave him a look that was wide-eyed with surprise.

"That is in no way my fault," she said, and it was so banal, somehow. That, and the still-startled look on her face, made him let out a laugh. And then he couldn't seem to stop. He leaned on the edge of the counter and laughed, not entirely sure he was enjoying it, but there was something just so fucking funny about this entire situation, with an actual ninja assassin looking dismayed over a coffee stain on the couch.

Colleen smiled faintly. She went to the sink and wet a dish towel.

Ward waved her off. "You don't have to clean that up. I have a cleaning service. They'll deal with it."

"If we don't do something now, the stain will set."

"Yeah, so? Cleaning service. And if it's too stained for them to get out, I'll buy a new couch."

"You'll buy a new—okay then." She blew out a breath and wrung out the towel in the sink. "Fine, and in the meantime, someone who makes minimum wage is going to spend hours of her day trying to scrub out that coffee while panicking that she's going to get fired from the cleaning service if you come in and find a stain. Do you have any white wine? It's good for stains. I, uh ... I think I read that somewhere."

"For Christ's sake," Ward said. He reached for his phone and looked up How to remove a coffee stain from upholstery.

He was half an hour late getting to work, and his shoulders ached from scrubbing at the couch. On the bright side, they had actually gotten the stain out.

"Why do you have white furniture, anyway?" Colleen asked him in the elevator up to his office.

"Because it looks good!"

"Does it?" Colleen said.

"It looks professional, anyway. I told the property management company that I wanted a place that looked suitable to someone with my job, which is, you'll recall, CEO of a major pharmaceutical firm."

"And that's your main criteria for a place to live?" Colleen said in disbelief.

He didn't have a chance to unload any of the many sarcastic comments that immediately sprang to mind, because the elevator doors slid open, and Meghan jumped up from her desk. "Mr. Meachum," she began, and stopped in surprise at the sight of Colleen, with her leather jacket and sword and ponytail. Ward had almost started getting used to her enough to forget just how out of place she looked at a Fortune 500 company.

"Yes, hi, very important business, please forward any messages to my office," Ward snapped, and marched Colleen past Meghan's desk before inconvenient questions could be asked.

"Your sister was looking for you!" Meghan called after him. "And you have a teleconference with Roxxon in five minutes!"

Ward didn't bother answering, but he did notice how Colleen's eyes flicked around his office as soon as she walked in, going straight to a couple of specific corners of the room. The ones with cameras, he'd bet. Fucking Dad.

"So off to the storeroom again, I assume," she said, rearranging her sword in its carry-case on her back.

"It's a conference room, and yes. And no snooping this time!" Ward snapped at her back.

No Iron Fist, again—just a day filled with meetings. Whenever Meghan came in, she looked around the office nervously, but she never asked him about the person who had come in with him, or where that person had gotten off to.

It was possible, Ward thought, that he had never really appreciated what an asset he had in Meghan.

After Meghan had brought his lunch and then left again, Colleen came in and leaned over his desk. She nudged a post-it toward him, with her hand carefully curled to hide it from the cameras. It looked like she was just looking at the computer, but the note said TALK IN CONFERENCE ROOM?

Ward rolled his eyes. She was, if anything, even worse at subterfuge than he was. Colleen gave him Resting Murderface, and he gave up and came into the conference room with her. She shut the door.

Ward backed up to the wall and reached for a stapler.

"Really?" Colleen said. She perched on the edge of the conference table. "I'm your bodyguard. My job is literally to stop you from being killed."

"You're also Hand," Ward pointed out, but he put the stapler down. "So what do you want? Just tell me so I can get back to having my brain melt out my ears from going through last month's purchase orders from our overseas contractors."

Colleen stretched out her legs one at a time, bending over to touch her ankle, but her attention was on him the whole time. "I've spent the morning canvassing this entire room for cameras or bugs, and I don't think there are any in here. We can talk freely if we need to."

"You literally dragged me in here to tell me that."

"It seemed important."

"So my dad's spying on me. It's not like I have any secrets from him anyway."

Colleen straightened up. She was frowning slightly, not a murderface expression but a sort of thoughtful look. "Ward, your father is ... he's an ally of ours, but he's not precisely one that we—I'm not sure how to put this—"

"He's a bugfuck crazy homicidal bastard," Ward said. It felt strangely good to say it out loud, after spending so many years playing the bereaved son of St. Harold the Benevolent for the paparazzi and Joy. "Yeah, that's not news. So?"

"Ward—"

Ward's phone vibrated. He pulled it out and ground out, "Oh for God's sake."

After work, son, let's chat about how the bodyguard situation is working out.

"He knows I know about the cameras," Ward said, jamming the phone into his pocket.

"How would he know?" Colleen asked. Perfectly reasonable, if you didn't know Harold.

"Because I'm in here right now and not out in my office where he can see me. So," Ward said, straightening his tie, "I'm going back out there. Stay in here and leave me alone unless the Iron Fist shows up and tries to kill me."

The Iron Fist did not. Damn it.

Joy came in shortly after quitting time, as he was scooping papers into a briefcase. "Ward, you are going to dinner with me. That's not a request."

"Why?" Ward asked warily.

"What do you mean, why? Because I want to spend time with my brother? Because we never talk anymore and I want to know how things are with you?"

Ward exerted a powerful effort of will not to look toward the conference room. "Yeah, well, too bad. I've got a dinner meeting tonight."

"With who?" Joy asked.

"An important client."

"You aren't going to tell me?"

"It might not pan out," he said, bullshitting wildly. "Don't want to get your hopes up. Just ... working an angle, I guess. Anyway, some other time."

Her annoyed expression softened into something milder. "You're always working an angle, aren't you?"

"It's what's made this company what it is," Ward said brightly, parroting one of Dad's favorite lines.

After Joy was gone, he tried to make a run for the door, but wasn't fast enough to evade Colleen.

"Do you ever tell her anything?" she asked, as they got into the elevator.

"Fuck off, my relationship with my sister is none of your business. Anyway, if I have to lie to her all the time, it's because of you people—you Hand."

Colleen raised an eyebrow. "How so?"

"What do you mean, how so? Because you brought my dad back from the dead and now we're at your mercy, does that sound about right?"

Outside the building, he turned on his heel and walked in the direction of the penthouse. It wasn't a particularly short walk, but he often walked it rather than driving, because he usually started these walks in an agitated state and it gave him time to calm down and settle himself (as much as that was possible) before having to deal with his dad. Colleen started to turn toward the Rand parking garage, then saw which way he was going and hurried to catch up.

"Ward—Ward, wait." She settled into step beside him, or something like it; he was walking fast enough that she had to alternately walk and trot to keep up with her shorter legs. "We are trying to help you!"

"We—we who? The Hand? The secret shadowy ninja organization that's run my family's lives ever since Dad signed us over to them in exchange for a cure for cancer? Sure. Very funny. See me laughing."

"That's not who we are," Colleen said. She sounded upset.

Ward spun around and stepped into the shadowed doorway of a closed bank. The marble entryway arched above them, but the lights were dim in the lobby, the building locked up for the evening. Colleen stepped in with him. It almost felt private.

"What are you really doing here?" he asked, looking her in the eyes. "What are your orders?"

"To protect you from the Iron Fist," she said promptly. "And to capture the Iron Fist, and bring him to my sensei, Bakuto."

"And then what?"

"What do you mean, then what? Then you'll be safe."

"Safe," Ward said. He leaned against the marble side of the entryway and tried to fold his arms, but his briefcase got in the way. He set it down at his feet. "I haven't been safe in twelve years, because of you people."

"Yes, you told me earlier that you think the Hand would hurt your sister. But, Ward—that's not how we are."

"You've been keeping my dad prisoner for twelve years."

"What?" Colleen said.

She was obviously lying. Her job here was to play innocent, part of whatever game the Hand was playing with him now—and he was just so sick of it, layer upon layer of mind games, Dad and the Hand and the whole fucked-up mess of it. He took a step closer, and Colleen pulled back.

"Do you know how many times I tried to get out?"

She looked wary. "No. Get out of what?"

"Out of—this! Dad, and ... all of it."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Colleen said.

"I have a private account," Ward said. It just spilled out, even knowing, knowing she could be (almost certainly was) reporting back to his dad, to the Hand, to God only knew where. "I've used it to buy tickets, five times, a dozen times. And I pack bags for both Joy and me, and I just—sit outside Joy's place, and I ... I go back and unpack, because you know what? It wouldn't help. You're right, he watches everything, Dad does, and the Hand does, and—you want to know what happened the one time I actually did go to the airport, just to check us in, planning to go back and get Joy afterward? You want to know?"

"I don't think you want to tell me all of this," Colleen said. Her dark eyes were wide and fixed on his face.

"I started to check in and a security guard came over to talk to me. I left before I could find out what he wanted." He decided not to mention that he'd left his bag just sitting there, and hadn't even remembered it or thought of going back for it until his cab was halfway back to his condo. Humiliating. Oh well, it wasn't like clothes and toiletries were irreplaceable. "I don't know how Harold fucking knew, but he does, he always does. Between him and the Hand, they know everything I do, every goddamn thing, and that's even more true now, isn't it? Now that you're keeping tabs on me."

"I'm not—" Colleen began.

"I don't fucking care! You're either their tool or another dupe, and either way, I don't think it matters." He laughed sharply, found himself worryingly teetering on the edge of tears, and reached down to pick up the briefcase. "So you won't tell me why you're really here. Figures. Go ahead, put this in your report to Dad. You can put down that his son had a nice little breakdown, maybe even add that you calmed me down. Make yourself look good."

"Ward," Colleen said. She sounded startled. He wasn't looking at her. "Are you—okay?"

Ward carefully dragged his hand through his hair, smoothing it back for his meeting with Dad. He wished there was a restroom around here that he could see how his game face was put together, but he had a feeling he didn't want to know.

Without looking at her, he said, "I haven't been okay for twelve years. Not since Dad died and your buddies brought him back to put cameras in my office and fuck up my life. And you know what the worst part is?"

She didn't say anything.

"As much of a monster as Dad is," Ward said, speaking to the street instead of her, "the Hand has him on a leash, because they want something from him. And sometimes I start to think about what that is, and I don't want to know ... you know?"

With his hand clenched tight on the briefcase, he strode out of the alcove. After a moment, he was aware of Colleen behind him. He wasn't quite sure how, because she was still ghostly silent, but he had become attuned to her enough, or something, that he knew she was back there, following him.

She went with him into Harold's art-deco building, did her usual elevator-clearing thing, stepped in with him. She was very quiet the whole time.

If she really was here to report back on him, and he couldn't think of another plausible reason why she would be here, Ward wondered what she planned to tell Harold about his cooperation, or lack thereof.

There was a smell to the penthouse. Ward always forgot about it, only to be hit with it every time he walked in. It was fetid and sinus-clogging; it stuck in his throat and made him want to gag. He was pretty sure it was Dad's little mini-greenhouse jungle, that green smell of rot and decay. Sometimes, on bad days, he fancied that it was Dad himself.

"Hello, son," Harold said from over at the workout end of the room. He'd been working out on the punching bag; his hands were wrapped, his hair slick with sweat. Ward found himself instinctively tensing. Dad was always a little bit more ... volatile, at times like this. Like he'd gotten in his practice on the punching bag, but wouldn't mind working out a little more on the live version.

"Yeah, I was on my way home, so can we just get this over with?" Ward laid the briefcase on an end table in the hallway. There was no sign of Dad's little yes-man, that Kyle kid; probably for the best, all things considered. The nighttime glow of the city filtered through the room's tall windows. Most of the light at the moment came from the greenhouse. Colleen looked around, her gaze quiet and steady, taking it all in.

"Sit down, Ward." Harold was almost jubilant. He all but ignored Colleen. "Do you know, I think we're close to a breakthrough on this entire situation. Drink? Either of you?"

"What situation would that be?" Ward said. He didn't sit down.

"The Iron Fist situation, of course. Please try to keep up, Ward."

"I don't even fucking know what an Iron Fist is, aside from some kind of assassin who is supposedly after me."

Harold poured a couple of fingers of whiskey into two glasses. He held out one to Ward.

"Son, there is a lot you don't know. I've been dealing with things above your pay grade. But let's just say all of this is very close to reaching a resolution, and then we'll all be safe. Or at least," Harold added, raising his glass, "safer than we are now. Drink to that?"

Ward clicked his glass with Harold's, entirely uncertain what tonight's game was supposed to be. He didn't like the way Harold was ignoring Colleen. It was hard to tell if it was just that Harold considered her a part of the penthouse furniture—he did tend to treat security staff that way, now that Ward thought of it—or because he'd already gotten his report from her and didn't feel the need to debrief her about it.

Ward took a slug of the whiskey and drank most of it before he managed to stop himself. Dad loved those little signals of weakness. The whiskey stung his throat, half-painful and half-pleasant.

When he lowered the glass, Harold refilled it with a casual slosh from the bottle. Fucker.

"Not going to offer her a drink?" Ward asked, just to be a shithead, with a glance at Colleen. She had taken up her resting parade position, but gave him a look that was both intense and curious.

"Don't play games, son, you know you aren't good at it." Harold sipped his whiskey. Ward forced himself to sip his, as well. "Now, let's discuss how your acquisition of the dock property is going."

"What," Ward said blankly. He'd forgotten entirely that the docks were a priority of Harold's these days. "What does that have to do with anything?"

Harold lowered the glass and gave him a look. Ward tensed instinctively.

"You know, Ward, I sometimes wonder what on Earth you understand of what goes on around you," Harold said casually. "If you think at all. It's like your thoughts are insects trapped in amber, and sometimes you dredge one up to look at it, examine it like some sort of scientific curiosity, and then put it back."

There was a slight rustle from Colleen, a gentle shifting of position. Ward glanced at her, wary enough to check and make sure she wasn't about to stab him in the back. She was back in parade rest, eyes straight ahead, as a good bodyguard should be.

"I can't do what you want if you don't tell me," Ward said. It came out petulant, rather than defiant as he'd intended. It was somehow doubly humiliating that Colleen was here to witness this. She was only his bodyguard, but he was going to have to look her in the eyes after Dad had done whatever degrading things he had in mind, and that was an extra insult. Which Dad was probably well aware of, come to think of it. Ward braced himself for whatever was to come.

"But that's always the problem with you, Ward. You need to be told what to do rather than figuring it out on your own," Harold said. Ward closed his eyes briefly. He'd walked right into that one. "Of course we need the dock property. It's an important part of our operations going forward. You recognize that, don't you?"

"I don't even fucking know what we're doing next quarter, Dad," Ward said. "Because you never tell me."

Harold turned around and set the whiskey glass lightly on the edge of a shelf containing an artwork of some kind, a bronze mask that looked old and expensive. And Ward thought, Oh fuck, I'm in for it now.

"Son," Harold said, and abruptly threw an arm around Ward's neck.

Ward jerked in surprise. It was like a noose. His entire body was rigid with anticipatory fear at having Harold this close. And yet on some level, there was a kind of relieved pleasure that wanted to take this as the hug it almost was. It was a mockery of affection, and he knew that, but it was also his dad holding him in a kind of embrace.

Harold leaned his temple against Ward's, and Ward could smell the whiskey on his breath. The wet green note of decay was a sweetish undertone. He really hoped it was just the greenhouse.

"I don't think that it's too much to expect," Harold said casually, "that you could think forward enough to anticipate at least some of the things I'm going to need you to do without needing to have it written on spreadsheets with colored bullet points. Is a child's chore roster the only thing you understand, Ward?"

"Yes, sir," Ward said quietly. "I'm sor—"

"Men don't apologize." The arm around his neck tightened painfully, somewhere between embrace and headlock. "What's the matter with you?"

There really wasn't anything he could say when Dad got like this that wouldn't make it worse, and he knew that—agreement and disagreement were equally suspect—but somehow it never stopped him from trying. It felt as if there was some solution just beyond his fingertips that he never could quite grasp, a magic combination of words that would head off the storm, instead of being in in the full path of the hurricane.

"So you're telling me that all the time and effort I invested in making you great, Ward, in making you a man, strong and forward-looking, was essentially wasted effort, given what I had to work with."

Yes. No. Say nothing. Ward scrambled wildly for the right answer from a tempting buffet of equally wrong things to say.

"I'm trying," he said. It sounded pathetic even to him. So it was stupid honesty that he fell back on. Figured.

Harold let out a long sigh. "Yes," he said. "That's what I'm afraid of."

The vicious gut punch was not entirely unexpected, but he still wasn't braced for it. Harold's knuckles went in under his ribs and he doubled over, gasping. Harold let go, of course, the friendly arm over his shoulders dropping away as soon as he needed the support. Ward wheezed, trying to suck in a breath, choking on bile. One of his knees hit the coffee table with a bruising impact.

"Ward, Ward," Harold said, with gentle disappointment. "I think by this particular time in our lives, I can expect you to—hurk!"

Okay, that was unexpected.

On the occasions when Ward was in the penthouse with Harold's private security, Harold had never bothered to hold back. No one had ever said anything, or done anything.

Until now.

He didn't even see Colleen move. He was doubled over, breathing through the pain, and there was a thump and a huff of breath, and then he straightened up, blinking watering eyes, to see Harold up against the wall with Colleen's katana at his throat.

Ward stared.

"If you do that again," Colleen said quietly, "I will break your arm. The first time, that is. The second time I won't be so kind."

Harold stared at her, too. He was standing on his toes, his powerful body braced back with every muscle tensed to get as far away from her as possible. Ward felt that pose, down to his bones, and he had never thought to see it in Harold—Harold, who never met a situation he wasn't in control of. But now Harold stood with his back against the wall, stretched on tiptoe, Colleen's blade dimpling his throat.

"I'm going to need a yes," Colleen said.

Harold sucked in a breath. He coughed a little. He didn't move otherwise. Neither did her blade.

"You work for the Hand," Harold got out. "You have to obey them, and that means you obey me. I am—"

"A threat to my principal," Colleen said. Her voice was low, but it carried. "That's the job I've been given, and it's the job I have until anything changes. I was personally tasked by my sensei. As for you, I don't like you at all, and I don't think my employers would have any problem if I end up having to take you out of the equation. I have no orders to the contrary."

"Colleen," Ward croaked out, in the most warning tone he could manage. Strangely enough, he wasn't entirely sure how he meant it, as a warning to leave his dad alone, or a warning to her, that she was getting in over her head.

"Are you all right?" Colleen asked, in a matter-of-fact tone. Her blade never wavered.

"Fine," Ward said. He made himself straighten up. Strangely enough it was having Colleen there—not wanting his goddamn Hand bodyguard to see him curled over in pain—that made it easier to get his back straight and not give in to the nauseating ache. "I'm good."

He had sometimes fantasized about Harold's death: a speeding bus, a bolt of lightning to the penthouse, a sudden tragic collapse of the ceiling due to structural instability. Even in his own mind, he skirted around actually putting any culpability into his own hands. Maybe because patricide was one of the moral lines he hadn't crossed yet. Or maybe it was just that he didn't dare that level of rebellion even in his own head.

Now he caught himself wondering—terrible thought, wonderful thought—how far she'd actually go, if he asked her to.

He could actually be free. He was dizzy with the possibility of it.

Free of Dad, anyway. There was still the Hand to contend with. And that brought him crashing down to earth. Dad was still the lesser evil, when it came right down to it. This small woman with the katana was, in her way, more of a threat to him than Dad had ever been.

But she was standing between him and his dad. No one had ever done that before. Never.

Ward cleared his throat and coughed a little. He needed his voice to come out steady. There was just a slight, humiliating wobble at the beginning. "So are we finished here? I'll get on the dock deal first thing tomorrow, but I don't see any need to waste time if we've done everything we needed to do. Time is money, right Dad?"

Oh, he was going to pay for that jab later. But it was worth it right now, with Harold flat against the wall, eyes glittering like a trapped snake—and unable to do anything.

In a voice that was surprisingly, deceptively calm, Harold said, "Yes, son, I think we're done here. I'll be in touch tomorrow to see how that dock deal is coming along." He added, with an icy curl of suppressed venom, "Try not to disappoint me. I know that's hard for you."

Ward picked up his briefcase without saying anything. He had a win here; he couldn't believe it, but he had a win, however temporary and tenuous it was. He knew all too well how easily he could turn a win into a loss with a single wrong word. He wasn't going to do that this time.

Instead he said, "See you tomorrow, Dad. Colleen? Coming?"

There was a long moment. Then Colleen stepped back, eyes still on Harold, who remained with his back against the wall. She neatly sheathed her katana, not taking her gaze off Harold.

"I'm here to protect him," she said. "That's my job. Don't forget it."

"Oh, don't worry about that." Harold's eyes gleamed, and again Ward was reminded of some kind of cold-blooded creature, a snake or a shark. "I won't."

As they got into the elevator, Ward felt like he was on a high, riding some kind of narcotic rush without having even taken anything. He couldn't stop playing it over and over in his head, Colleen slamming Harold into the wall, the blade dimpling Harold's throat, the sheer amazement of seeing Harold scared and off balance for a change. He couldn't believe they had—well, he wasn't naive enough to think they'd gotten away with it; Dad would make him pay for that, in some cruel and petty way that he wouldn't see coming until it was too late to get out of it.

But just for that instant, Harold had lost. Ward had won. Okay, technically Colleen had won, but he had—they had—come out on top. He didn't ever get to have this.

"So you know how to use that sword," he said. He was a little surprised that his voice came out calm. Normal-sounding, even.

"It's not on there solely for decoration, no," Colleen said. She was a step behind him, as always, but he could hear the suppressed smile in her voice.

"Think you could teach me?"

There was a silence. The doors opened on the lobby. It was empty as always, and as always, Colleen slid past him, graceful and competent, looked around and reached back to catch the doors. All in a single rippling glide.

"The way of the blade takes years to master," she said. "You must devote yourself to it fully."

"So that's a no, then."

"Correct. However," she said, as they began walking toward the exit, "I could teach you self-defense. Basic kempo, kenjutsu."

"That sounds complicated."

"I think you could stand to learn to roll with a punch," she said.

They went out onto the sidewalk. The night air was cool. Ward glanced back at the building. They could speak freely here—probably; he didn't really see how Harold could bug the sidewalk. "You're going to want to be careful. He's—"

"I know he's dangerous," Colleen said. "I'm familiar with the type, more or less. Ward ..." He couldn't remember exactly when she had taken him up on his offer to call him by his first name, but it felt oddly natural now. "Were you speaking literally when you said the Hand brought him back from the dead?"

"Yep," Ward said flatly. "Dead as a doornail. Unambiguous. Cancer isn't like going over a cliff in a speeding car, the body was never found, et cetera. He was definitely dead."

Colleen nodded a little. "I've heard of that."

"Of course you have," Ward sighed. He pulled up a rideshare app on his phone, not particularly wanting to fuck around with the company cars just then.

"The other thing I've heard is that they can come back ... worse. Was he ..." She hesitated. "Was he like that before?"

Was he? That would involve opening a can of worms that Ward preferred to leave firmly sealed.

"Does it matter?" he asked tightly.

"I suppose not," Colleen said. She brushed her hand across the corner of her mouth: right where the bruise had been, though it had faded now to invisibility. And it occurred to Ward, very suddenly—he wasn't used to thinking about other people like this—to wonder what her Hand sensei was like.

But the moment passed, if it had even been a moment. He pushed the button to call a rideshare, and got an ETA of two minutes; there usually wasn't much wait in the middle of Manhattan.

His stomach still ached and he wasn't hungry yet, still hopped up on adrenaline, but they were going to need to eat something sooner or later. And Colleen might be hungrier than he was. She had to have burned some calories up there, throwing Harold into the wall.

Ward was going to be playing that back in his head forever.

"What do you want tonight?" he asked Colleen. "Takeout-wise, if you could get anything you wanted, price no object. Uh, available in Manhattan, obviously, but we have basically everything, unless you want something like your favorite childhood restaurant from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. That might take a little more time to arrange."

Colleen looked at him, turned his way under the streetlights with her brows tilted in a quizzical expression. It was a look she had been turning on him a lot lately; her murderface had somehow morphed into this. Not that it was all that different, and yet somehow the entire aspect was warmer. It was all in the set of her mouth, apparently.

"If you're seriously asking," she said, "there's a place in Chinatown I really like. It tastes like home. Childhood. They have a few things I didn't even know you could get here."

"Sounds great," Ward said. "If they don't deliver uptown, I'll just have the car swing by there. And—" He should probably spend the evening working on the damn dock acquisition, but he didn't really care right now. In fact, he was enjoying the petty little rebellion of spending the entire evening goofing off when Dad had given him orders. "We'll eat our weight in Chinese food and find something on TV, I guess."

"I'm going to find a streaming service that has actual wuxia, or at the very least a Jet Li movie," Colleen said. "I am not sitting through another evening of cartoon fish and improbable Hollywood attempts at fight scenes."

"Yeah, fine, whatever, I'm subscribed to probably everything that exists, so you ought to be able to find whatever you want on there. I don't even know what there is; I haven't really looked."

"Wait until you see actual, decent martial arts stuntwork compared to the dreck you're used to," Colleen said, paging through her phone. "It'll blow your mind."

"Like I'm going to know the difference."

"You will when I start teaching you self-defense." She sounded cheerful. Perky, almost. He hadn't realized she had that setting. "We could even start tonight. In fact, that's a good idea, a little falling lesson before we eat, if you aren't too sore."

"I'm setting myself up for a world of pain, aren't I?"

The corner of her mouth quirked up. She didn't look up from her phone.

And the weird thing was, in spite of all the pain he'd gotten that he hadn't even asked for, he was actually looking forward to it.

Chapter Text

After all of that about the Iron Fist, Ward wasn't expecting him to show up at all. And he really wasn't expecting him to show up pretending to be Wendell and Heather's long-dead son.

It was a few days after the penthouse. There hadn't been any more summons, which had Ward tense and on edge. Harold was planning something, he fucking knew it. The unfamiliar satisfaction of besting Harold, for once, had faded in the cold light of day, washed away by the knowledge that he never got on top of Harold for long, even with Colleen's compact bulwark of badassery apparently, somehow, planted firmly in his corner.

The bruises from the penthouse were fading, but they were layered over with fresh bruises, hidden beneath his bespoke suit. Colleen wasn't kidding about teaching him to take a punch, and she wasn't gentle. But after thirty years of Harold, he appreciated it. He didn't want people treating him with kid gloves; he didn't like it. Colleen's training was rough and matter-of-fact, pushing him hard, taking nothing for granted—but she didn't cheat, she didn't lie, she didn't jerk the rug out from under his feet just as he tried to stand up. He wasn't yet ready to trust that she wouldn't, but for now, the kempo lessons with Colleen were an anchor to pivot his day around.

They had been doing it in the gym of his building. Ward assumed that his condo was bugged, but was less sure about the gym. He was almost never down there, and Harold couldn't possibly have put cameras everywhere. At least Ward had to assume not, for his own sanity.

That first night, they'd done it with Ward still in his office clothes: jacket and shoes off, tie loosened, top buttons of his shirt undone. When they broke for the night, his shirt was splattered with blood from a nosebleed she swore was an accident, and he woke up with bruises in places Harold had never managed to put them. Colleen had given him a look that was almost apologetic when he came limping out of the bedroom in the morning. There were pastries and coffee on the kitchen island.

After that, he started keeping a gym bag at work. They did it at the gym the second day, but after that, Colleen had started taking him down to a dojo she apparently used to have in Chinatown. These days, it was empty and echoing, devoid of students, but it was still hers, and in its dusty silences, she threw him onto mats and taught him blocks and falls.

So he was halfway prepared when some homeless crazy person barged in and started rambling about their parents. He was up and on his feet and ready, balanced like Colleen had showed him, and already planning his reaming of the security guards downstairs who had apparently let this wacko get up here.

What he wasn't prepared for was Colleen, who erupted out of the conference room and slammed Homeless Crazy Guy into the wall, pressing her katana to her throat.

"Iron Fist," she growled.

"Hi?" Homeless Guy said.

"What," Ward said. "That's the Iron Fist you're so worried about?"

Which of course was when Joy walked in.

There was a tense moment with everyone talking at once, Homeless Guy trying to put in a few words too, and then Security showed up, a day late and a dollar short, pointing guns at everybody. Ward thought he deserved a medal for walking everybody back down. At least when he ordered the security guards downstairs, they went. Joy, Colleen, and homeless not!Danny were something else.

"I don't know why you don't want us to call the police, Ward," Joy hissed. The Meachum siblings were in a huddle behind Ward's desk, while not!Danny had been coaxed onto the couch and given coffee, which he was staring at like he wasn't entirely sure what it was. Colleen sat across from him with her katana across her knees. "These people are clearly unhinged, they should be where they belong, in jail or a mental ward or Central Park or God knows, somewhere definitely not here—"

"All the more reason to walk them quietly outside without making a big deal out of it," Ward whispered back. In his pocket, his phone was vibrating like a rattlesnake's tail. "Do you want to see this splashed all over the front of the Post tomorrow?"

They both looked over at the two intruders on the conversational grouping of sleek Rand furniture. Not!Danny took a cautious sip of the coffee, made a horrified face, and spat it back into the cup. Colleen's hand twitched on the katana.

"No, obviously not," Joy sighed. "You don't have to walk them down; I'll just call Shannon up and—"

"You need to finish the Redmond contracts," Ward whispered hastily. The less Joy was involved with this, the better. "I'll get rid of them."

"Is that your phone?"

"Client," Ward whispered, after a quick glance at the phone gave him a glimpse of Frank N. Stein's name, completely unsurprisingly. "Don't worry about it. I've got this, Joy."

He was sort of surprised that it worked, but then, there were times when it was really handy to be able to play the ultra-competent big brother that Joy thought he was, the business genius who had grown the company fivefold since their parents' deaths. She left with a few backward glances, Ward giving her a reassuring smile, which dissolved into a glare at the pair on the couch.

"Come on, let's get out of here," he snapped at them, and grabbed his jacket.

Colleen was already on her feet, gesturing at not!Danny with her sword.

"This is not the homecoming I pictured," not!Danny said, as Colleen herded him into the elevator. Ward tried not to make eye contact with a baffled and horrified-looking Meghan.

"This is your master assassin?" Ward said to Colleen on the trip down to the lobby, gesturing at the guy who looked like he had escaped from a Woodstock anniversary festival.

"I'm not an assassin," not!Danny said.

"I don't know either," Colleen said quietly.

She had moved to put herself unobtrusively between Ward and whoever-the-fuck the blond guy was, not blocking him entirely, but putting her shoulder in the way, so that the other guy would have to go through her to get to Ward. He tried to convince himself that it didn't feel good.

"I don't know why you think I'm a threat, but I'm not," not!Danny said. He actually looked hurt, which made him look weirdly like the kid version of Danny, even though Ward knew he wasn't. "That's really you, Ward, right? And that was Joy? Wow, you guys are so—"

"Shut up," Ward said.

The elevator door opened onto the lobby, and Ward saw why security had been so sluggish to respond to their calls.

"Not a threat, huh?" Ward said dryly, as they picked their way around groaning security guards, staggering to their feet and being helped up by their coworkers.

Not!Danny seemed to shrink a bit, hunching into his awful, stained shirt. "I didn't mean to cause trouble. I just needed to get upstairs, and they wouldn't let me in."

"And the idea of calling upstairs never occurred to you," Ward said, opening the door so Colleen could herd him outside.

"No," Not!Danny said. "It really didn't. I've been gone a long time, you know, and—"

Something in Ward snapped. They were outside the building, away from Harold's surveillance, and there was no fucking reason to keep up the pretense any longer. He lunged to grab the guy who definitely wasn't Danny by the greasy, filthy shirt—and a couple of things happened at once.

First of all, Danny just wasn't there. He glided to the side so quickly that he hardly seemed to move, and a the same time, he raised a hand to bat Ward away. Ward could see it coming with all the helpless clairvoyance of one of Harold's corrections—he knew this was going to hurt, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Except Colleen moved in at the same time.

She deflected Danny's hand, batting it aside with the same casual speed that Danny had been moving to strike Ward, or knock him aside, or whatever he'd had in mind. And Danny reacted to that, whipping a hand around, Colleen moved with lightning speed, and there was a blur of movement, flicking past Ward's stunned perception, that ended with Colleen's blade at Danny's throat, and Danny's fist at Colleen's.

For a moment, no one moved. Ward took a careful step back toward the door. Maybe he could get whatever was left of Rand's apparently useless security guards to help out here.

But Danny was the first to break, dropping his hand and opening it with a sort of ceremonial flourish of his fingers, as if it was significant somehow. "I'm sorry," he said.

"Back up," Colleen ground out. She pushed him across the walk in front of Rand's entrance, until his back hit a concrete balustrade.

"I am really sorry." The Danny impersonator looked past her at Ward. "Ward—you are Ward, right? I just want to talk to your dad. Is Harold around?"

"He's dead," Ward said, tasting the words like bile on the back of his tongue.

"Oh." That wide-eyed look of shock was so Danny that it cut Ward somewhere deep, in some place he hadn't really acknowledged in a long time. "All of our parents are dead now. I grieve—"

"You'll shut up, is what you'll do," Colleen snarled. She still had her blade pressed to Danny's throat, which didn't seem to be bothering him as much as Ward would have expected. "We're going to take a ride, Iron Fist, you and me."

"Wait, you're leaving?" Ward said, startled. He had gotten so used to Colleen following him everywhere that the idea of Colleen having an independent existence was new and unwelcome. "Going where? Why? How?"

"This is what I'm here for," Colleen said. She gave him a small, tight smile, and he saw that with the hand not holding the blade, she had depressed a button on her phone. "You're not in danger anymore, Ward. We have the Fist."

"Wait," Danny said.

"Wait," Ward said, in the same instant. She was leaving? Now? Just like that? Leaving him to—everything, to empty nights in his condo and whatever revenge Harold was planning—"You can't leave, you're my bodyguard, I fucking order you to stay here. Whatever he is, whatever he does, just give him to someone to deal with."

"This is my duty, Ward." He wasn't sure if it was just his wishful thinking that the look she gave him was soft, maybe a little wistful. "I came here to do this."

"You came here to protect me!"

"Hey, I feel like I'm missing a few things here," Danny said.

A car pulled up at the curb, a black SUV. The door in the back swung open. Ward stared. In spite of what his life was like, he couldn't help thinking all of this felt like something out of a movie.

"Okay, wait, no," Danny said, as Colleen swung him in that direction. "I'm serious." His hands were at his sides, and the fingers curled on the right one. "I'm not kidding here. No."

The way that it came out, angry and petulant and somehow young, was like a direct shot to the hindbrain, carrying Ward straight back to childhood. It was so Danny that it hurt.

What was different was the golden glow igniting between his clenched fingers.

"What the hell," Ward said, and just then something tiny—a pebble, dart, it was impossible to tell—sped from the open door of the parked black SUV and buried itself in the skin at the nape of Danny's neck.

Danny made a faint sound and went boneless. Colleen, looking both surprised and exasperated, dropped her katana to catch him. Then she was just standing there, holding a limp double armload of homeless, filthy blond guy.

The paparazzi were going to have a field day with this.

Colleen started to crouch down to pick up her sword, carefully adjusting her knees and her grip on the guy who apparently called himself the Iron Fist. Ward got there first, picked it up and handed it to her carefully, hilt-first.

"Thank you," she murmured. Adjusting her grip on not!Danny, she wiped the blade on her thigh and sheathed it.

And then she began dragging Danny down the steps from the Rand plaza to the car at the curb, and Ward just stared at it, at Colleen dragging whoever-the-fuck this was out of his life forever, at Colleen going out of his life forever.

He caught up with her. She was strong, but it was taking her a while to manhandle a guy several inches taller and completely boneless down the steps. All of which was making this even more likely to make the evening news or attract the attention of Rand security.

"You looked like you could use some help," he said, getting a grip on not!Danny's filthy shirt—not that he wanted to touch the thing. What had this guy been doing, sleeping in livestock pens?

Colleen made one of her small irritated noises, but he knew that she could easily have brushed him off if she really didn't want the help, and she seemed to appreciate it. They got not!Danny down to the car and dumped him in the back. Colleen slid in after him and reached to close the door, but she clearly wasn't expecting Ward to pile in after her and slam the door, shutting all three of them into the back of the SUV.

On the grand scale of dumb things he'd done in his life, this was probably right up there, and not the least reason being the generally livestock-y smell of Danny, which was slowly starting to permeate the new-car upholstery smell.

"Ward," Colleen began.

"Think you could shove over a bit? I can't find my seat belt."

"Ward, you shouldn't be here."

"But he wants to be here," said a quiet voice from the front seat. The speaker leaned around so that she could look between the seats. It was hard to get a good look at her—the back windows were tinted, so most of the light was coming in the front, but she was tiny. Little old lady, was Ward's initial impression. There was something about her voice that commanded respect, which was something that Ward had always responded badly to.

Still, he jumped when the locks popped down.

"Well, here we go," Colleen murmured. "Ward, move, you're crushing my arm."

"I'm crushing your arm?"

They were still squirming around trying to get settled when the woman in the front said something quiet to the driver, and the SUV jolted away from the curb, leaving a little of Ward's stomach behind with it.

Locked into the back of a black SUV. This ought to be worrying him a lot more than it was.

Strangely, though, it was more exciting than anything else. Wherever he was going, he was pretty sure Harold wasn't watching, and whatever he was heading into was something that Harold, presumably, wasn't in charge of. That was so different from his life up until this point that at least the novelty was interesting.

He finally managed to find his seat belt. Not that he cared about seat belts much in general (being in a car accident was so far down on the list of unpleasant things he expected to happen to him that it hardly registered) and it wasn't like it really mattered if he put on a seat belt in the tinted-window kidnap car. But it was the principle of the thing, the scrabble for some small vestige of normalcy.

Next to him, Colleen was very tense, and it began to sink in that she was actually scared, or at least deeply nervous. It looked like they were heading for the Brooklyn Bridge.

"Where are we going?" he asked quietly.

Colleen shook her head, although whether that meant she didn't know or couldn't talk about it, Ward had no idea.

They drove for a while, and when they stopped, Ward had no idea where they were. Somewhere in Brooklyn, the geography of which he had never been that clear on. They drove slowly through a chain-link fence surrounding what appeared to be an abandoned factory, and his nervous feeling heightened. If there was one thing he had learned, hanging out with Harold for all these years, it was that nothing good ever happened in a place like this.

Colleen was ratcheted tense as wire next to him, which didn't really help with his sense that something bad was going down. He had the stray thought that if he died here, Joy wouldn't know about Harold. She wouldn't know enough to keep herself safe. He should have written her a message, left it somewhere Harold wouldn't know about—no, there was nowhere like that. He didn't have any way to signal her without Harold knowing.

Joy was smart. She was tough. She would be okay.

The car went ahead and drove into the factory itself, through a half-open loading door that looked like it had been hanging on its sagging hinges for years. They stopped just inside, and the locks popped up.

"Out," the woman in the front said.

Ward started to reach for his door handle, then realized Colleen wasn't moving.

"Is my sensei here?" Colleen asked. She got a grip on the homeless guy by the arm. He had sagged onto her during the drive, napping on her shoulder; Ward didn't envy her being that close to him.

The woman hopped out of the car while Colleen was talking, and there was a sharp rattle against the side, a brisk tapping, making Ward jump. "Out," she said again.

Ward opened the door, and discovered the tapping was the cane in the woman's hand. She was even tinier than he had realized. He could probably have picked her up with one hand.

But he had spent enough time around Harold—more than enough time around Harold—to recognize the way she moved, that supreme confidence. Nobody could have paid him enough to lay a hand on her.

Not really sure what else to do, he got out and stood looking around while Colleen wrestled not!Danny out of the other side of the car. There wasn't much to see. The only light came in through the open door, filling the corners of the cavernous space with shadows. Whatever equipment used to be here had been removed long ago, leaving only rust stains on the floor.

The driver turned out to be massive, a slab of muscle crammed into a three-piece suit. Ward gave him a wide berth as he went over to the door and swung it shut. The darkness was not complete; light filtered in through high, dirty windows, casting them in twilight gloom.

Ward moved around the car to get closer to Colleen, who was standing there looking very uncertain, with not!Danny's arm looped around her neck. He seemed to be something vaguely close to conscious now, but still really out of it, leaning most of his weight on her.

He ought to feel right at home here, Ward thought. From the look of him, he'd been sleeping in places like this.

"So now what?" Ward asked Colleen quietly.

"I—" Colleen began, but just then footsteps rang on the catwalks above them, and abruptly the lights came on.

It was painfully bright after all that dark. Ward threw his arm over his face. When he lowered it, a group of people were approaching them, the guy in the lead smiling at Colleen.

"Bakuto!" Colleen said.

And Ward thought, Oh.

This was what Colleen looked like happy.

He had never seen it, not really. Not when she was sparring with him; not when they were watching movies on his big-screen TV or casually bickering over the raspberry-filled Danish in what had become their standard morning breakfast buffet.

Now she was looking at this guy like the sun had come up and choirs of angels were singing. There was something about it—about the two of them, about that look—that made Ward think, for an uncomfortable moment, of Harold and his weird little assistant, Chris or Kyle or whatever the guy's name was. There was no particular reason why it should have reminded him of that ... but it did.

"You've done well, Colleen." Bakuto's voice was quiet and measured. Charisma, Ward thought. This guy had it in spades. "Did you have any trouble?"

"He was very easy to catch," Colleen said. "More than I was expecting."

"Who is he?" Ward asked.

They both turned to look at him, Colleen slightly annoyed, Bakuto looking like he'd just noticed Ward for the first time. "And who are you?"

"This is Harold Meachum's son." The old woman had tap-tapped her way around to their side of the car. "He has decided he wants to be a part of this."

"Actually—" Ward said.

"A wise choice of sides," Bakuto murmured.

"Sides?" Ward said.

"You want to be rid of your father, do you not?"

"I ..." All of this was moving too fast for him to keep up with. "I guess?"

"Harold is a useful tool, at times," the old lady remarked. She looked up at Ward, then tapped his shin with her cane. Ward jumped back; Colleen twitched as if to make a move in his direction. "You seem not very useful. Untried. Soft."

"But even the softest metal can be tempered and hardened," Bakuto said. He was smiling slightly. "Don't you say that yourself, Gao? Look at Colleen here. She came to me soft and untested, and she has become the finest weapon in our arsenal."

Colleen looked like she thought that was a compliment. Ward couldn't imagine why.

"You need metal in the first place, and not sand," Gao said.

"Look, all of this verbal sparring is delightful, but trust me, I'm used to dealing with someone who has a PhD in insulting me," Ward said.

The person who wasn't Danny stirred abruptly with a soft groan, his head drooping on Colleen's shoulder. Ward had to look away. He was absolutely fine with this bunch doing whatever they wanted with this guy; it was nothing to him. It would have been easy if he'd just let Colleen drag the homeless weirdo off to wherever they were taking him. But for some reason—Ward himself still wasn't sure—he had invited himself along, and now he was in the middle of it and forced to actually watch.

"I think we'd best secure him," Bakuto said.

"Indeed," Gao said.

They both started to move forward, then stopped and looked at each other, and Ward got at least one of the things that was going on here. These two were in some kind of uneasy truce.

After a moment's standoff, Bakuto gestured to the people who had come down with him, and two of them moved forward and took not!Danny from Colleen. She relinquished him with what appeared to be a certain amount of mingled reluctance and relief. They bound his hands, which was pretty normal. Then Gao moved forward and started pulling a handful of what looked like bamboo barbecue skewers out of her bun and started poking them into the guy, because of course this had to get weird. She stuck a couple in his neck, and a few more up and down his right arm: crook of the elbow, shoulder, inner arm.

Not!Danny had started stirring when they tied his hands, a sort of reflexive jerk of his body that had Colleen reaching for the hilt of her katana, but he turned docile again when the skewers went in, slumping against his captors. He appeared capable of standing with support, and that was about it.

"So who is this guy?" Ward asked. "He's not really Heather and Wendell's son, is he?" Somehow he couldn't quite bring himself to say Danny's name.

He wasn't sure why it was so important to him to keep pushing at it, risking upsetting a couple of incredibly dangerous people to get a straight answer about it. Danny hadn't been important to him. He was just the child of Ward's parents' friends, far too young to actually be friends with; five years was an eternity at that age.

"Of course he is," Gao said.

That was not even slightly what Ward was expecting. "Wait. What?"

"This is Danny Rand." Bakuto turned to give the homeless guy one of those serene smiles. For some reason it raised the hairs on the back of Ward's neck.

"Danny Rand is dead," Ward said flatly. There weren't many things he was sure of in his life, but that, at least, was a constant.

Gao gave him a very slight smile. "And you've never seen anyone come back from the dead before?"

"There's a damn big difference between someone dying of cancer and pasting on the rocks in the Himalayas from twenty thousand feet."

"It was a surprise to us as well," Gao said, with another of those little smiles. "But a convenient one, because it meant we would know exactly where the Iron Fist would be found, if not precisely when. He was always going to come back here."

Ward turned to look at Colleen, who didn't meet his eyes. Something was growing in him, a dawning certainty, sealing up the cracks in the suspicions he had already been harboring. He'd known it didn't make sense for either Harold or the Hand to be that interested in his welfare. He'd even asked Colleen about it. And she had never given him an answer, not really.

"You're not a bodyguard," he said. "You never were. You're an Iron Fist trap. And I'm bait."

"I'm also a bodyguard," Colleen said. She sounded defensive.

"Yeah, maybe, just not my bodyguard."

It shouldn't have hurt. He was long over the sting of that sort of betrayal—or so he'd thought. There wasn't a person he'd trusted in years who hadn't turned out to be on Harold's string one way or another. Or—trust wasn't the right word; trust was something distant for Ward, something that existed in theory but not in reality.

If he had ever come close to trusting anyone in the last twelve years, it was Colleen. He hadn't realized that until now, as if he had started leaning on something that had been jerked away.

He suddenly, powerfully wanted a drink, or a whole damn handful of hydrocodone. Something to blur the edges of all of this. He touched the pocket where he normally kept a few pills on him and realized it wasn't there. He hadn't had one this morning; he'd been too distracted with the Iron Fist thing, and he and Colleen had gotten in some sparring before he came into the office, so he hadn't taken anything before leaving the condo—and he just hadn't thought about it.

No wonder the world seemed too bright and too sharp and too much. He wasn't even prepared to handle his normal life sober, let alone whatever was going on here. He took a step back—and bumped into Gao's driver.

"The man who judges all things by their surfaces will step onto the lake and drown," Gao murmured.

"That makes exactly no sense," Ward said, bristling automatically into sarcasm. He had no other real defense; he never had. It wasn't like he'd ever managed to fight back against Harold. Now he was in this room full of incredibly dangerous people, a room full of blades tucked just out of sight, because—why? Because he thought he could trust a woman he barely knew and felt sorry for a person he hadn't seen since they were kids? Stupid, stupid. Harold would have kicked his ass all over the penthouse for this, and Harold would be right.

"You know," Bakuto said, looking back and forth between Ward and the—not a Danny impersonator, he supposed he should start thinking of him as Danny Rand. "If that's Wendell Rand's son, and that one is Harold Meachum's, we have between us in this room a massive controlling interest in Rand Industries."

"You think too small," Gao said. "There are bigger things to worry about than one tiny company."

"One tiny company with the funds to buy and sell any property in this city. That could be useful, don't you think?"

"Ward," Colleen said quietly. He couldn't look at her. "I think you probably ought to go. They'll take you back uptown—"

"I think actually we should talk a bit." Bakuto settled a hand on Ward's arm. The gesture looked friendly, but it was a Harold move—the plausibly deniable veiled threat, the shared awareness that the grip could tighten until muscles tore and bones snapped—and Ward felt his own instinctive physical reaction kick in, his body going utterly still and tense. "No point in coming all the way down here without doing business. That is what you understand, isn't it—people like you? Business? Money?"

"He's no part of this," Colleen said.

"I can speak for myself, thanks," Ward snapped. "Not my bodyguard, remember? What was it you wanted to talk about?"

"Let us go discuss business matters, then," Bakuto said, and gave Ward a small push of direction. Friendly on the surface, once again, but just enough to give a hint of the steel under the velvet glove.

Oh yeah, Bakuto played this game well. Ward couldn't help noticing Colleen's small frown out of the corner of his eye. Not that he gave a damn, about that, or about the way that she settled into her bodyguard position as soon as they started walking. He didn't particularly want her at his back, but it still felt natural having her there. He had gotten that used to her in just this short a time.

The more fool you, then.

Bakuto's guys followed along, hauling a stumbling Danny, and Gao brought up the rear. Ward couldn't help glancing back, now and then. It was hard not to try to see Danny, the kid, in the features of the adult.

They could be lying about that. He didn't know how they could possibly know for sure, short of a DNA test, and it wasn't like ten-year-old Danny's DNA would just be lying around. Still, they seemed pretty certain.

"What are you planning to do with the Iron Fist?" Colleen asked, as if picking up the drift of Ward's thoughts. She had no right to do that, no right to know him. Ward continued to ignore her.

"That's a very forward question, Colleen," Bakuto said, glancing back. "I taught you better than that."

"Apologies, sensei," Colleen murmured, and in spite of his current feelings toward her, Ward felt himself bristle; it was something beyond conscious thought, stirred by the echoes of Harold that he could hear in Bakuto's smooth voice.

You know it's shit, don't you, Colleen? You may have lied to me, conned me, but you're smart. Too smart to believe that bullshit. I know it's bullshit with Harold, even if I fall for it every time. You must know that too.

They wound their way deeper into the factory, through narrow, badly lit hallways. This place was so over-the-top that only the Hand could pick it, Ward thought. It should have been the setting for a horror movie or a first-person-shooter video game.

In the dim, eerie hallway, he didn't manage to avoid jumping in surprise when he realized Gao had migrated up alongside him in perfect stealth. There was a movement from Colleen as well, quickly stifled.

"So tell me, son of Harold," Gao said. "What do you want most in the world?"

"To get my dad off my back," Ward said promptly. Well, it was true. It occurred to him immediately that he was literally saying this to the people who were responsible, more or less, for the situation his entire family was in now—he didn't know exactly how Gao fit in, but it was obvious that she was highly placed in the Hand. "And to keep my sister safe."

"Not Daniel Rand?"

"Why would I care about Danny Rand?" Ward said.

Ruthlessly, he pushed down memories he didn't want. His childhood was mostly a blur anyway; the clearest Danny-related memory he had now was sitting in his stiff suit next to a crying Joy at Danny's funeral. Danny had been an annoying pest who used to follow him around, a constant reminder of everything his life wasn't and never would be.

... no, even that was too much; it was a reminder of how Danny had been woven through the fabric of Ward's childhood world.

Danny was nothing. He was a piece of jetsam from Ward's past that had somehow washed up on the shores of his present-day world.

From the way they talked about the Iron Fist, Ward had expected him to be seven feet tall and capable of punching bare-handed through a brick wall, not some kid whose hand Ward had held on his first day of grade school.

"How did he survive?" Ward asked. The question came out of nowhere, but it was something he was really curious about. As he'd said to Gao earlier, curing cancer was easy compared to curing a fatal plane crash.

"Yes, we'd all like to know that," Bakuto said over his shoulder with a pointed look at Gao. Ward sensed that he had scraped the surface of yet another aspect of the palpably simmering resentment and distrust between the two of them.

"You should ask the Fist that, not I," Gao said serenely. "I am only an old woman, and one cannot plan for all eventualities."

"Wait." Ward had, now that he thought about it, never wondered all that much about the accident that killed Danny and his parents. Planes crashed, especially planes flying through stormy weather in high mountains. Now the implications of Gao's words sank in. "You mean this was part of a plan. The Hand killed Heather and Wendell?"

"Of course not," Colleen said.

Gao laughed quietly, and the look she cast up at Ward was sharp and shrewd. "When Harold Meachum came to us for help with his problem, what were we to do?" She shrugged. "An arrangement of mutual benefit. He gets the company. We gain a toehold into the city."

"What," Ward said.

"She's a liar, Ward," Colleen said.

"Why would I lie about simple facts? Ask your sensei," Gao said, and fell back to join Danny's guards, wrapped in calm complacency.

"Bakuto," Colleen said.

"Quiet yourself." Bakuto's voice was sharp. "You serve the Hand well, Colleen. This woman seeks to sow dissent among us."

Ward tried the thought on, like a slightly ill-fitting jacket. Harold and the Hand killed Danny's parents.

After all the revelations that had been hitting him rapid-fire in the last few minutes, he was almost numb to this one. Why the hell not. It wasn't like he didn't know Harold was a monster. He just hadn't quite realized Harold had been that much of a monster that early.

They emerged from a side door onto a stretch of concrete walk and an old pier beside the ruffled gray East River. Ward turned up his collar against the chill, and realized abruptly that he knew where he was—sort of. This was that stretch of Red Hook that Harold had been prodding Ward to acquire for the company, or at least adjacent to it. Same general area.

They had also come quite a ways from the car. From anything. Ward turned and looked down the long stretch of concrete and old piers. It looked like the area got more gentrified some ways along the shoreline, but out here, it was just them and the seagulls.

"What are you planning on doing with us?" Ward asked, rubbing his arms. The jacket he was wearing was meant for the Rand offices, not standing on the industrial waterfront with the wind whipping past him. "Did you bring us out here to kill us?"

"The boat will be here soon," Gao said, squinting out across the water, as if he hadn't spoken. Bakuto, however, took notice.

"You are full of questions, aren't you?" he said, swiveling around. His voice was still mild, but there was a sharp undercurrent to it. "What gives you the right to expect answers?"

"Now, Bakuto," Gao said, limping up to give him a brisk tap with her cane. He gave her a look of deep dislike. "The boy could be useful yet. I think perhaps Harold is approaching obsolescence, don't you? It might be useful to us to have a new contact in Rand. Someone a bit more tractable."

Great, Ward thought, standing shivering in the wind. His main useful skill was doing what he was told. Thanks, Dad.

"You haven't answered my question, sensei," Colleen said.

Her voice was clear and crisp, carrying over the wind. She left Ward's side and went to stand in front of Bakuto, her shoulders back and chin raised.

Ward was suddenly afraid for her.

"I did," Bakuto said. "It is a question that will answer itself in time. You know better than to be so forward."

"With respect, sensei, I would like to differ. I brought you the Iron Fist. You owe me answers about what I am part of." Colleen kept her chin up, meeting his eyes, but Ward read in her body language a mix of fear, respect, and deference that he recognized mainly because of the sympathetic vibrations it set up in his own muscles.

Bakuto wasn't Harold. But they were cut from the same cloth.

Gao, a few paces away, leaned on her cane and watched with a contented look.

"I owe?" Bakuto's voice was a silk sheath over a blade. "You owe me, child ... student ...Daughter. Don't forget where I found you, and what you were then. I made you, and I—"

"She doesn't owe you shit, asshole," Ward said.

He was pretty sure they'd both forgotten he was there, based on the sudden startled looks they gave him. It was actually a relief to see Colleen's Ward, you fucking idiot expression again. She had turned so meek in Bakuto's presence that it was nice to know she still thought Ward was a raging asshole.

As for Bakuto, his face had settled into a look of cold calm, with a slight smile. Ward's stomach went cold. That was the sort of expression that, with Harold, tended to be followed with a punch to the solar plexus.

"You forget your place," Bakuto said.

"What place?" Ward snapped. If he was going to get offed on this pier, he may as well go down doing what he did best: being a raging asshole. After all these years of meekly licking Harold's boots, it was astonishingly satisfying. "I don't owe you a toenail clipping. Between you and her, I can tell which one has the real power here."

He tipped his chin toward Gao. She was also about a million times more dangerous, but Ward hadn't survived as long as he had without having a finely honed sense for how to suss out the prevailing power balance in a room and throw his support behind the side most likely to win. Gao smiled slightly.

Bakuto took a quick step forward and drew his sword.

Ward hadn't actually even noticed he was wearing one. Other than that, Bakuto was dressed like a businessman in weekend casual, in slacks and a white shirt and open black jacket. The scabbard hung low at his hip, along his leg. The sword was a slim katana, similar to Colleen's. It leaped to his hand as if meant to be there.

Colleen stepped into his path and drew hers, too.

Ward was frozen in place.

Colleen stood between him and Bakuto, sword in a guard position. Bakuto stared at her, and then lightly raised his sword and saluted her.

"A gallant show, child. Step aside."

Jesus, was he just planning to behead Ward on this pier or what? Ward glanced around and found that the other Hand soldiers had the calm expressions of people who watched stuff like this every day. Gao looked as if she found the whole scene immensely entertaining.

Ward almost missed it, but there was a blue flicker under Danny's half-closed eyelids. Danny was still slumped on his captors, bristling with acupuncture needles like a mangy porcupine, but the Iron Fist was awake ... for whatever that was worth.

"Step aside," Bakuto repeated more curtly, when Colleen didn't budge.

"I'm his bodyguard," Colleen said. "You gave me this assignment, sensei. I will honor it."

Her voice was calm, but there was a slight quiver underneath. Ward wasn't sure if he would have registered it if not for spending so much time around her over the last couple of weeks. He had never expected to hear fear in Colleen's voice.

"Colleen." Bakuto sighed and lowered his sword. Ward went, if possible, even tenser; this was the moment when you had to brace for the sucker punch. "You have served the Hand well and honorably. You did everything we asked of you and more. You have done what a hundred strong men could not do, and brought us the Iron Fist. It is time for you to enjoy the satisfaction of a job well done. Please return to the car and wait for us."

Colleen didn't move.

Bakuto gave another little sigh. He smiled.

The upward slash of his lowered sword, when it came, was faster than the eye could follow. Ward jumped, with a startled "Jesus!" Colleen blocked it, just barely.

"Well done," Bakuto said. He switched to another attack, casually passing the sword back and forth from hand to hand.

Colleen managed to block this flurry as well, but she was driven backward, and Ward hastily scrambled out of the way.

It was like watching Colleen and Danny fight outside the Rand building, the same shocking speed and general sense of sureness and competence from both combatants. Except in this case, the gleaming edges of the blades suggested that the loser would not be walking away.

Was he really going to kill her? Ward backed up to the side of the building. As usual, everyone seemed to have discounted him entirely. He tried to think if there was anything he could do to help her. Nothing he could think of was likely to do anything more than distract her. A gun would be nice ... if he had one.

If I get out of here, I'm never fucking going anywhere unarmed ever again.

There was a sound from Colleen, a slight, soft grunt. It took Ward a moment to realize what had happened, but then he saw the flutter of torn fabric over her thigh, the bright gleam of blood.

"I taught you very well," Bakuto said. He had retreated a few steps. His sword glistened with her blood. "But I did teach you. I know everything you know, and more besides. You have acquitted yourself well, and have nothing left to prove. Do you yield?"

"Do you plan to kill him?" Colleen asked between her teeth. She held the sword with arms that trembled slightly with fatigue, held crosswise over the front of her body.

"After all this trouble? Most assuredly."

Ward cast a quick glance at Gao to see if any help was coming from that quarter, but she had the cheerfully interested look of a sports spectator. The only thing she was missing was a bucket of popcorn.

He missed Colleen and Bakuto re-engaging, but there was a fast-paced flurry of footwork and the quick clattering of deflected blades. They broke apart again, both panting.

And then all hell broke out from the Iron Fist direction.

There was a sudden rapid flurry of fighting, and by the time Ward had managed to redirect his attention from Colleen's fight to Danny's, it was already over: Danny's guards were on the ground, and Danny was stumbling away, weaving and yanking acupuncture needles out of his neck.

The other Hand closed in on him, and Ward got to see the Iron Fist fight all-out, no holds barred and no quarter given. It was actually kind of astonishing, especially with Danny clearly as sick and out of it as he was. It was all autopilot, like his body moved without Danny being fully in control. Ward knew absolutely zilch about kung fu or whatever they were doing, but even he could tell that Danny, or whoever or whatever Danny had become, was good at this.

But he was also badly outnumbered, still reeling from the drugs and whatever Gao's needles had done to him. They got the drop on him, slammed him into the side of the building, and Ward felt something unfamiliar, some kind of lingering vestige of a protective instinct from childhood, back when Danny and Joy were just little kids and Ward was, at times, the only thing standing between them and much bigger playground bullies.

He hadn't even liked Danny. It was a kind of muscle memory, the same as the way he found his body tensing up when Harold laid a hand on his arm. He couldn't do anything for Colleen, but fists and feet were something else; this was a kind of fighting he could do, even if he wasn't very good at it. Still, it was no conscious thought process that had him launching himself at the backs of the Hand warriors, snatching up a broken 2x4 from the junk scattered along the side of the warehouse and slamming it into the back of one of the guys who had Danny pinned against the side of the building.

The result was predictable but still painful, and the next thing Ward knew he was on his back, looking up at sky. A moment later, a booted foot came down on his chest and he looked up dazedly at the Hand guy looking down at him, hands curled into fists. He leaned down and grabbed Ward, hauling him up with a hand clenched around Ward's neck.

Great. From hero to liability in five seconds. Typical.

"I'll break his neck!" the Hand goon snapped. Ward could have told him that wouldn't make a difference; Danny probably barely remembered him. But somehow it did make a difference. Danny left off beating on random members of the Hand who were still trying to fight him and stumbled back a few steps.

"No, don't!" Danny said. He absently pulled the remaining acupuncture needles out of his arm and dropped the handful of needles on the concrete dockside. Out of sight, Ward could hear that the fight between Colleen and Bakuto was still going on: the scuffle of feet, the clash of steel, the heavy breathing of the combatants. Well, at least she wasn't dead.

"Surrender, Iron Fist," the Hand said.

Ward could barely breathe around the fist clamped on his throat, but he was still kind of amazed to see Danny drop his hands to his sides.

"Just don't hurt him," Danny said.

"Really?" Ward said, which resulted in the fingers on his throat clamping tight enough to cut off his oxygen. Seriously, he'd just helped Colleen hustle Danny into a Hand SUV and haul him off to a murder warehouse. What was wrong with this guy; did he have no self-preservation instinct at all? Ward would have told Danny exactly how much of an idiot he was being, but trying to breathe had become more of a problem.

And then something else happened.

Danny's fist started to glow.

It had happened back at the Rand building, but it had been over so fast that Ward had thought he was imagining things. Ward's vision, by this point, was telescoping around the edges, but he thought he saw a look of surprise cross Danny's face as he raised his fist, which by now was glowing like an old-fashioned incandescent lightbulb. Like his hand was doing something and he wasn't entirely sure he was in the driver's seat.

And then Danny whirled and brought his glowing fist around and down.

It was like getting punched with a fist the size of a semi truck.

Ward's captor had absolutely no chance of holding onto him, and Ward had no chance of doing anything other than tumbling like a rag doll. He didn't have a chance to brace himself in the slightest, and all he could do was throw his arms over his head until he landed with a bruising shock against the bottom of the warehouse wall.

The first thing he saw when he picked himself up was Gao standing with one hand over her face, not knocked over or particularly troubled by the shockwave that had sent everyone else tumbling. Danny was back on his feet and doing some kind of final beatdown on the remaining Hand guys. Colleen and Bakuto were nowhere to be seen.

"Colleen," Ward croaked out. His throat felt like he was coming off a week-long cold. There were probably going to be bruises. Interestingly, he thought as he stumbled toward the side of the pier, that was something Harold had never done to him. Of course, it would have been difficult to pass off finger-shaped bruises around his neck as the legacy of a car accident. And that was a revelation he was going to have to examine at length a while later (or push it down, never to be thought of again): he had always assumed that Harold just lost control sometimes, but he'd never lost control in a way that left bruises or broken bones that weren't plausibly deniable.

Huh.

Anyway. Colleen.

He leaned over the side of the pier and saw her splashing in the water below. Bakuto was some ways away, swimming swiftly for a nearby dock. Ward reached a hand down and felt Colleen's small, strong fingers wrap around his, ice-cold from the East River water. He yanked at her, and she struggled up onto the concrete waterfront with his help. Somehow she had hung onto her katana. Waterlogged, she flopped onto the concrete, coughing and gasping. The water pooling under her was tinged with blood.

"Hey, guys," Danny said, stumbling up to them. He was still weaving and looked one wrong move from pitching over, which was definitely something you wanted to see from someone whose hands were deadly weapons. "I think you're on my side? Sort of? Anyway, there's a boat there."

While all of this was going on, the boat the Hand were waiting for had motored up to the dock, and then had its crew knocked over like bowling pins by Danny's Iron Fist thing. Danny and Colleen went and cleared off the deck, unceremoniously throwing Hand overboard, while Ward climbed down behind. He found himself in the weird position of being the only one of them who knew how to run a small speedboat. Apparently Colleen didn't have the background of childhood vacations in the Hamptons to draw on, and Danny had been too young.

As they motored away from the dock, with Ward struggling to control the throttle and trying to look like he knew what he was doing instead of having run a boat a few times back in the late '90s, he glanced back to see how Gao was taking all of this.

She had strolled out to the end of the pier and stood there in the wind off the river, watching them leave, making no move to stop them.

What the hell WAS this? Ward wondered. A test?

Bakuto was nowhere in sight. Too much to hope he'd sunk and drowned.

Ward twisted around. In the back of the boat, Danny was clumsily trying to help Colleen bandage her own bleeding thigh.

"Lie down," Colleen said. "You're going to fall overboard."

Needing no more encouragement, Danny slumped into a heap of ropes and other boat things, while Colleen went ahead and snugged tight a bandage made out of, apparently, the torn-off sleeves of Danny's filthy shirt.

"You are totally getting tetanus," Ward said.

"Don't hit that tanker," was Colleen's answer.

"Shit!" He steered to the side.

There were a few minutes when Ward simply motored up the river. He was cold, with the wind of their passage flowing over him, but he also felt weirdly free. If there was one thing he was pretty sure he could be sure of, it was that Harold definitely wasn't watching any of this. He had gone completely off script for the first time in twelve years, and maybe his entire life, and it felt incredible.

Gao was definitely planning something, he thought. And Harold wasn't going to take it lying down if his favorite puppet acquired a new bodyguard and then dropped off the face of New York. Also, he wondered what Joy was doing right now.

Colleen limped up to join him at the helm.

"You should be sitting down," Ward said, giving her a look. As well as being utterly drenched, there were small cuts all over her, gouged out of her jacket and scored across her cheekbones. She merely gave him one of those Colleen looks, and he gave up. "How's our new Iron Fist?"

"Passed out from chi depletion, I think." She gave him a quick, critical look. "Do you have a cell phone on you?"

"Uh, yeah?" And it probably said a lot about his trust in both family and institutions that throughout the entire confrontation, the idea of calling anyone had not even occurred to him.

"I suggest you throw it overboard, if you don't want anyone to track us."

"Uh. Oh." He pulled out his phone, gave it a single regretful look—there were several calls from Joy—and then pitched it over the side. RIP, phone. It sank beneath the gray water without a trace.

Ward looked ahead, making sure their way was clear, steering the boat on a straight course up the center of the river.

"Where should we go?" he asked.

"I don't know." Colleen huffed out a breath, and abruptly sat down with her back against the steering console. Ward looked down at her, worried, but she seemed to be basically okay, or at least not likely to collapse from blood loss anytime soon.

Having your entire worldview pulled out from under you must be a shock, he supposed. He wouldn't know for sure; he had never really had that kind of disillusionment with Harold.

"So the Hand's probably after us," he said.

"Probably," Colleen said, and tipped her head back against the steering console. River water squished out of her braid. They probably should find somewhere she could get a shower pretty soon, Ward thought. Being submerged in the river with a bunch of open cuts couldn't be good for a person.

"And Harold."

"Of the options," Colleen said without opening her eyes, "I think your father is probably the lesser evil. But yes."

"Wonderful," Ward said. He tried to remember exactly where the East River went. From his vague recollection, there was a lot of city and then, eventually, Long Island Sound. How far could they go, actually? Long Island? Connecticut?

He glanced back at Danny sprawled in a pile of rope. Danny looked dead, but Ward figured Colleen would have told him if Danny had actually died back there.

"Open to suggestions about what to do next," he said.

"I don't know," Colleen said, so quietly he could barely hear her over the speedboat motor.

He couldn't just leave Joy with Harold. He was going to have to do something about that. But for now, he had the wind in his face and an open lane of ruffled gray water ahead of him.

And it occurred to him that they were all like that, him and Colleen and Danny. Colleen probably hadn't had any more choices in her life than he had. As for Danny, Ward didn't know, but it probably didn't give you a great start in the world when you got caught up in a sequence of events that started with your dad's evil business partner and a ninja cult murdering your entire family, and ended with you showing up in New York with a magic weapon in your hand.

"So maybe I'll just drive for a while," he said.

"That sounds good," Colleen said quietly, and turned her head to look out across the gray water. After a little while, she shifted so that her shoulder was resting against Ward's leg, and stayed that way as he piloted them up the river, hand resting on the tiller, and nothing but gray ruffled water ahead of him.

Chapter Text

He ended up taking them to the old Long Island house. He hadn't thought about that house in years, but the family still owned it, and you could get there by water. It didn't occur to Ward until he was pulling up at the dock below the house that Harold, or the family holding company, or someone might have rented it out. It was also possible that someone had figured out what they were up to and gotten there ahead of them.

But it didn't look like it—in either case. The place was closed up and, after Ward cut the boat engine, completely silent. He bobbed there at the dock for a minute or two, looking up the expanse of slightly overgrown lawn. From what he remembered, there was a caretaker who came around every couple of weeks, cut the grass and checked the furnace, routine maintenance kind of things.

"Where are we?" Colleen asked. She was on her feet, hand resting on the butt of her katana, but looked like she ought to be sitting down. She was very pale and there was a raspy note in her voice. Her clothes had dried on her; her hair was a thatch, half pulled out of its braid and frizzing up as it dried. Danny was still asleep in his pile of boat stuff in the back.

"It's a house we own," Ward said. "The Meachums, I mean. It's usually kept move-in-ready just in case the family wants to come out for the weekend or we have a rich client who needs something nicer than the corporate suite in town."

Colleen's eyebrows went up. She impatiently swiped a mass of hair out of her eyes, and retied her ponytail while looking up the lawn at the rambling three-story house with its gables and bay windows. "Must be nice, being rich. Is anyone here now?"

"I don't think so, but I'm about to find out."

He climbed awkwardly onto the dock and started tying up the boat to one of the mooring cleats, then realized he couldn't remember any of Dad's lessons on knot-tying. (Dad used to hit him over the knuckles with the end of the rope when he got it wrong. You'd think this would have made it stick, but apparently not.)

It didn't help that his hands were shaking. This was partly because it had been a fucking awful day and partly, he suspected, because he hadn't had a pill in way too long. This was going to become a problem sooner rather than later. If he was lucky, there was something at the house.

He settled for wrapping the rope around the iron cleat a bunch and tying it off in a messy square knot. If Danny woke up drifting out to sea, that was his problem.

Colleen glanced back at him, and then limped alongside Ward up the lawn to the house. A nice guy would probably have told her she could stay behind with the boat and rest her leg. Ward had never claimed to be nice, and he wanted a bodyguard with him.

He didn't have a key, but he crouched at the back porch and felt around for the key-hiding fake rock. The key was still inside, and the locks hadn't changed. Ward listened for a moment, and then opened the door and let them in.

The house had the slightly musty smell of a place that had been shut up for a while. Colleen touched his arm, signaling him to stay put, and then glided ahead of him; there was a slight hitch in her step, but otherwise she was entirely silent. She vanished down the hallway. A few minutes later she came back.

"It's empty," she said quietly. "The front door is securely locked. Who knows about this place?"

"Well, Dad, obviously," Ward said. He leaned against the wall. His legs were shaking now, too. "But I don't really see Dad—well, okay, Dad probably would cooperate with the Hand if they were hunting for us, I guess. I get the impression asking him is pretty low on their priority list right now. Though who knows."

"So we're not safe here."

"We're not safe anywhere. We may as well be somewhere with showers and bedrooms, at least for now. Or we could take the boat to Canada," Ward said, closing his eyes. "If we do, you get to drive."

He opened his eyes to find her frowning at him. "Are you all right?"

"Says the woman with a hole in her leg," Ward snapped. "Look, why don't I see if I can find a first-aid kit while you go roust Sleeping Beauty."

Colleen hesitated briefly, then gave a brisk nod and limped out the door.

Ward made a beeline for the nearest bathroom and ripped into the medicine cabinet.

By the time he heard them come in, he'd torn apart all three bathrooms and the bedroom drawers looking for prescription drugs, coming up empty. The hardest painkiller he could find was ibuprofen. Fucking Dad, what was even the point of a fucking vacation house occupied by the idle rich that didn't even have a spare bottle of Valium from 1998 hanging around in the back of a closet somewhere?

There was booze at least, in the form of a well-stocked liquor cabinet. Ward poured himself a giant bourbon. It was that kind of a day.

Colleen limped in. "Did you find a first-aid kit?" she asked, looking at the drink in his hand.

He had completely forgotten he told her he was looking for one. "Upstairs."

Colleen gave him a look he couldn't quite read and limped off. Danny came in a minute later, walking unsteadily. "Whoa," he said, staring around. "This is the old vacation place, isn't it?"

Danny's reaction to the house killed a few more of Ward's stubbornly lingering doubts that this was really Danny. He clearly recognized the place.

"Whoa, hold on there," Ward snapped as Danny started to wander in the direction of the kitchen. "Why don't you just sit down on the couch there until Colleen gets back."

"I don't think we're in danger," Danny said.

"That's not what I'm worried about."

Danny gave him a look, and lowered himself carefully onto the couch, probably reducing its resale value measurably for every minute he spent there. First thing, Ward thought, was getting him into something clean. One thing he did vaguely remember seeing in the bedrooms was some clothes. He knocked back another deep gulp of bourbon.

"So am I a prisoner or a guest?" Danny asked.

"I haven't figured that out yet," Ward said. "Don't push me. Do you want a drink?" he asked, topping off his glass. Might as well be polite to the guy with the glowing weapon hand. It had already occurred to him that if Danny wanted to fight them, they couldn't beat him. He just hoped it hadn't occurred to Danny.

"I don't really drink. I mean, not much. It interferes with my flow of chi."

"That was way more explanation than I needed for a simple no."

"It's probably not good for you to drink like that either," Danny said, eyeing the full glass of bourbon in Ward's hand.

The entire burden of everything that happened today—kidnapping, almost getting killed, now being on the run from a ninja death cult—combined with the crawling itch under his skin spilled over in a flood of murderous rage that, for a blinding furious instant, almost had Ward pulling a Dad and grabbing something to hit Danny with. "Why don't you just shut the fuck up and go put something on that doesn't smell like the floor of a cattle pen."

"Funny you mention cattle, I rode all the way across the Atlantic on a—"

"Danny, I don't fucking care, just go take a god damn shower. There are two bathrooms upstairs and Colleen's in one of them but—"

"I remember where the bathrooms are, Ward." Danny levered himself up off the couch, catching himself on the back of it; he was still visibly exhausted. The scowl he directed at Ward, however, was 100% pure unvarnished ten-year-old Danny. "You're still just as much of a dick as you were when we were kids, you know that?"

"And you're still a giant pain in my ass," Ward muttered as Danny went upstairs, and gulped down more bourbon. It was at least taking the edge off his emotions somewhat, but it did nothing for the crawling discomfort clutching at his insides and prickling the skin on his arms. He felt queasy. That was probably just bourbon on an empty stomach. Hopefully.

He couldn't afford this right now. Taking the bourbon with him, he went into the kitchen to find out whether someone might have stashed a bottle of Percocet behind the cornflakes. Hell, at this point he'd settle for heroin if he could get his hands on any.

He didn't find heroin, or hydrocodone, or any other damn helpful thing, but he did find that the kitchen was well stocked with canned goods, crackers, breakfast cereal and other dry items. The refrigerator was empty and unplugged, but hummed cheerfully when he plugged it in. The stove worked and so did the taps. They had all the comforts of home for however long they dared to stay here.

Colleen limped into the kitchen and took a slow look around at the counters, which were covered in the canned stuff and boxes of cereal he'd pulled out of the cabinets and hadn't bothered to put back. She had showered, it looked like, and changed into slightly oversized clean clothes, a sweatshirt with the sleeves rolled up and a skirt. Her feet were bare. There were bruises on her legs. Ward jerked his gaze away; it felt a little too intimate to stare at. It also occurred to him uncomfortably that the skirt might have belonged to Danny's mom.

"I'm going to do laundry," Colleen said. "Why don't you change and I can wash what you're wearing too. There's no telling when we might have a chance to pick up clothes that fit."

"No need," Ward said shortly. "I have clothes here. It's our family's house—"

A cramp caught him off guard. It wasn't a bad one, but he clutched at the edge of the stove with his free hand to steady himself. The bourbon slopped onto his hand.

"Are you all right?" Colleen asked. She had picked up that little crease between her brows again. She also had some fresh bruises on her face; it had been less noticeable when she was in her previously bedraggled state. "Were you hurt in the fight?"

"I'm fine," Ward said tightly. "And you know, you're right. I should go change." And incidentally tear apart the master bedroom for drugs.

"So were you just going to leave all of this sitting out, or—"

"I'm doing inventory!" Ward snapped, stalking off. "Put it away yourself if you care. And burn whatever Danny was wearing. I don't think a single run through the laundry is going to make a dent in the horror."

The shower was running in one of the bathrooms when he went upstairs. He conducted a more systematic survey of the bedrooms, and found no drugs, but he did pick up a clean shirt and slacks from the bedroom that he used when he stayed out here, which wasn't often anymore.

He discovered when he peeled off his sweat-soaked clothes that there were bruises all over his hip and side, probably from when Danny's magic fist had slammed him into the ground, to match the bruises on his throat. Thanks a bunch, Danny, that's another punch in the face I owe you, as if the entire being-on-the-run-from-ninjas thing wasn't enough.

But at the same time, something else occurred to him, as he buttoned the shirt with shaking fingers. He had been too panicked, too distracted, and too physically miserable to really think of it before. But it was similar to the thought he'd had on the boat.

Dad's not watching this.

At least ... he didn't think Dad was watching this. But there was no reason why Dad would bug the vacation house; it made no sense. Ward never came out here anymore. And anyway, Colleen would have found bugs or cameras if there were any.

He sagged against the bed, legs feeling weak for reasons that, for once, had nothing to do with adrenaline crash or drug withdrawals.

Dad wasn't watching. Dad didn't know where he was. Dad hadn't anticipated this.

Dad's reach was long, but he wasn't omnipotent.

And Ward still had his getaway fund. He could buy them all tickets to Canada, or no, somewhere even farther would be better. Malaysia. Tierra Del Fuego.

... wait, did Danny even have a passport? He had to, didn't he? How had he gotten here? Maybe Ward should have let him get to the end of that sentence about riding across the Atlantic and hope the rest of the sentence wasn't something like "... on a whale."

How the fuck was Danny alive, anyway?

Dad killed Danny's parents.

Ward rubbed his eyes. Everything ached and itched. Why did things always happen at once? Maybe he could take the speedboat and go buy drugs on the street. He had only the vaguest idea of how you went about buying street drugs, but people did it all the time, didn't they? How hard could it be?

Someone knocked on the bedroom door.

"What!" Ward snapped.

"Just wondering if you want me to wash anything for you," Colleen said through the door. "And also, we probably should move the boat, because that's going to be visible to anyone passing by if they're looking to see if the house is occupied."

Crap, she was right. "Yeah, just give me a minute," Ward said. He sat on the edge of the bed until his legs felt a little steadier, then got up, gathered up his clothes, and left the bedroom.

Colleen was loitering at the top of the stairs. Ward shoved the ball of clothing at her.

"Those pants are supposed to be dry cleaned, you know."

"If this ruins them, I'm sure you can afford more," she said dryly. She gave him a critical once-over, gaze snagging briefly on the mostly-empty glass of bourbon in his hand. "If you show me how to run the boat, I'll move it."

"I can handle a damn boat."

"Right," Colleen murmured. Her leg hitched visibly as they went down the stairs, but she was evidently powering through it.

Ward left the bourbon glass on a sideboard and went out the back door, hoping to get the boat moved without an audience. There was an old boathouse adjacent to the dock that was big enough to accommodate the boat. He didn't bother starting the engine for this, just untied it from the dock (that was the part that took the longest, with a lot of swearing and a torn fingernail) and then pushed it into the boathouse and shut the door.

He did give another passing thought to taking the boat and trying to buy drugs, but the way he felt right now, he'd probably run the boat into a container ship in the harbor or end up halfway to the Caribbean. Or, more likely, get caught and tortured by Gao's people until he gave up Danny and Colleen, which he would obviously do in about half a second, especially if they offered him drugs.

Maybe, he thought optimistically, he could just sleep this off. Maybe Danny and Colleen had already crashed in separate bedrooms, and he could go upstairs and sleep overnight and wake up—well, not a hundred percent, but at least not feeling like this. And then they could deal with the whole ninja problem.

He opened the back door and was hit with food smells from the kitchen. His stomach lurched and he gagged and had to lean against the wall for a minute until the nausea subsided.

Okay, maybe not.

"Ward, hey!" Danny called.

Showered and wearing what appeared to be a set of Ward's workout clothes, he looked less like a homeless person and more like a hipster. His hair was bright gold in the afternoon sun shining in through the windows, and very curly.

"Do you want something to eat, Ward? Colleen and I were just heating up some soup—"

"Nope," Ward said tightly. "I do not."

"Oh. Were you hurt? You don't look great—"

"I'm tired, Danny, and it's been a really shitty day, and I'm going to go lay down for a while."

"Oh, Ward, there you are," Colleen said, coming in from the kitchen with a bowl of soup in her hands. Ward averted his eyes. "We need to make plans."

"Great," Ward muttered and flopped on the couch in the living room, forgetting about his bruises until his side blazed with pain. "We're all screwed, how's that for a plan?"

Colleen sat down across from him, very carefully, favoring her leg. She didn't say anything, and it occurred to him, gradually, through his own physical and emotional distress, that Colleen's life had also blown up in her face today. She had gone from being an unquestioning member of the Hand to being hunted by them, on top of having fought her—mentor, or boss, or whatever he was ... to protect Ward.

She's a bodyguard. That's what she's supposed to do.

But these were the people who had sent her to bodyguard him in the first place. She would have been entirely within her rights to just stand aside and let Bakuto go ahead and separate Ward's head from his shoulders or whatever he was planning on.

She had chosen Ward, instead. It hadn't quite hit him with the same visceral impact as that day in Harold's penthouse, when she had done what no one had ever done, and stepped between Ward and his father. But it was the same thing, really, just a different form of it.

She chose me.

Maybe, he thought, he could start trying to be a little nicer to her.

"Do you want some soup, Ward?" Danny called from somewhere kitchenwards. "It's Campbell's!" He sounded like that was a selling point. Maybe it was for him, after wherever he'd been for the last fifteen years.

"I already said no!" Ward called back, with all the vehemence he could muster. In his current condition, that wasn't a lot. As if to underscore the point, a painful cramp rippled through him, wrapping around his insides like a squeezing hand. He tried to still his shivering. Looking up, he found Colleen watching him thoughtfully. "What?" he snapped.

Danny came back from the kitchen with a large bowl of soup and a box of crackers. "It's so wild being back here," he remarked, looking up and all around while he emptied an entire package of crackers into his bowl of soup. Ward tried not to shudder. Danny used to do that when he was a kid, too, and Danny's horrifying sludge of Campbell's and crackers was not something he really needed to have in his vicinity when he felt like shit anyway.

"—remember that, Ward?"

"What?" Ward said, wrenched out of his thoughts.

"I just said, remember playing hide and seek down at the boathouse with Joy? You used to try to push me into the water, but I'm a pretty good swimmer—"

"I don't want to go down memory lane with you right now, Danny. Or ever."

"Are you always like this?" Danny said.

"No," Colleen said. "Sometimes he's worse."

Ward hauled himself a little straighter on the couch. The back of his shirt was drenched and clinging with cold sweat again. Lovely. "Excuse me if I'm not enjoying being on the run."

"I mean, as far as places to hole up, this is pretty far from crashing in a barn, Ward," Colleen said. "For however long we can stay here. Overnight is about as far as we ought to push it, I think."

"Can your dad help us, Ward?" Danny asked, and a fresh wave of cold sweat broke over Ward that, for once, had nothing to do with drug withdrawals. Danny didn't know. Apparently he'd been too out of it with the acupuncture to have picked up on what was being discussed during their walk to the docks.

Ward's gaze flicked quickly to Colleen's, in time to catch her look of dismay as well.

Oh well, better to rip off the band-aid. "Harold's working with the Hand, Danny, and he also planned your parents' murder. So no."

"He what?"

Danny set the soup bowl down with a clatter that slopped soup over the edge onto the coffee table.

"Thanks, Ward," Colleen muttered.

Danny's right hand was curled, not quite into a fist, but something dangerously close to it. Little flickers of yellow light played across it. Ward found it weirdly hypnotic.

"You've got to be wrong," Danny said. "Or lying."

Ward barked a short laugh. The nice thing about feeling this bad, with his self-control this fractured, was that he couldn't be bothered to care about hurting Danny's feelings. Ward's every illusion had been shattered, some of them today; why should he be the only one feeling like shit around here? "Harold's been in bed with the Hand for years, Danny, and they're nested deep in Rand, too. He teamed up with them to kill your parents and then figured, hell, why not just stay cozy? Oh, and they brought him back from the dead too, just in case that wasn't enough."

"Ward," Colleen said.

Danny scrambled to his feet, fist clenched tight, golden light spilling out of it. "That can't be—Harold was my father's friend. He was—he was Uncle Harold, he's your father, Ward, there's no way he could be—"

"He's right, Danny," Colleen said.

"And who are you, anyway? Aren't you actually one of the Hand yourself? They certainly knew you. Why are you helping us? Or are you?" Danny stepped back, lit with the eerie light pouring out of his hand. "She could be reporting back to them, Ward. We can't trust her."

Ward laughed again; he couldn't help it. "How do we know we can trust you?"

"What?" Danny said, wide-eyed.

"You show up out of nowhere after fifteen years with some kind of Day-Glo fist thing and all these kung fu skills, no explanation for where you've been or how you managed not to die with Wendell and Heather—Do you know the reason the Hand sent Colleen to protect me, Danny?"

"The Hand sent—"

"It was to protect me from you," Ward snapped, on his feet now too. "Turned out it was at least partly a lie, I was bait for an Iron Fist trap, so that's a thing, but you are dangerous, aren't you? You took out those men back at the pier without breaking a sweat. How do I know that part wasn't true after all? Maybe you did come here to kill me!"

Danny's face was a baffled mix of hurt and truculent anger. "What about you? If Harold's some kind of evil monster like you say, how do I know you aren't working with him?"

Colleen got to her feet. "Okay, now that we've established that no one can trust anyone, why don't both of you sit down."

Danny jerked away when she tried to put a hand on his arm, and raised the glowing fist in front of his face. "Don't touch me!"

"Jesus," Ward muttered, and turned away.

"Where are you going?!" Danny yelled after him.

"Bathroom!" Ward snapped back. Bourbon on top of opiate withdrawal symptoms had been, it turned out, a bad idea.

They left him alone for a little while—he could hear (when he had the attention to spare for anything) yelling in the living room, then ominous silence, and then Colleen, without even knocking, walked in on him in the middle of a round of dry heaving.

"I knew it," she muttered, and grabbed him by the arm, pulling him to his feet. "Up."

"I'm fine," Ward snapped hoarsely. He stumbled away from her and slammed into the wall.

"Is it those pills you were taking? It's not the booze, you've had plenty of that. I used to work with street kids, Ward, I know withdrawal symptoms when I see them."

"What's happening?" Danny asked, behind her. Great, it was too much to hope that Danny and his glowing hand had just marched right back out of their lives as suddenly as he'd come in. "I knew you were sick, Ward. What's wrong with him?"

"He's addicted to something and he's going through withdrawals from it," Colleen said, firmly steering him toward the downstairs bedroom.

Oh look, it was actually possible to be even more humiliated. He hadn't realized that it would bother him this much having all of this happen in front of Danny. "I'm not an addict," he snapped as she pushed him into the bedroom.

"No, you're just doing an impression of one. Sit," Colleen said, pushing him onto the bed. She opened the closet and sighed at the row of empty hangars. "Danny, go upstairs and get something clean that looks like it'll fit him, okay? Something loose and comfortable like you're wearing, preferably."

"Okay," Danny said, and dashed off.

"It looks like you two are getting along now," Ward said, glowering at her. He actually felt a little better, or at least not any worse, just achy and bruised and tender all over. His head pounded.

"Martyrdom isn't a good look on you, Ward," Colleen said. She crouched down, thrusting her hurt leg awkwardly out to the side, and started taking his shoes off.

"What are you doing?" He tried to pull his feet out of her grasp, but she was simply too strong.

"I told you, this isn't my first rodeo with this kind of thing."

"That's not what I meant." But what he did mean, he wasn't quite sure, so when she marched out and came back with a damp towel, he took it meekly and started mopping at his face.

"When did you take the last one?" Colleen asked.

"Last night." There was clearly no point in pretending he didn't know what she was talking about.

"Well, the bad news is, you've got a ways to go yet, but it shouldn't get too much worse from here. And," she added with a slight smile, "at least you aren't doing this in a barn."

"Yay."

"You ought to eat something, or at least stay hydrated. I know it doesn't seem like it, but you really will feel better if you do. Want me to bring you some tea? Soup?"

"I'm willing to compromise on water."

Colleen limped off and came back with a water glass. As she set it beside the bed, Ward said quietly, "I'm worried as hell about Joy."

"She's almost certainly fine," Colleen said. "None of this will spill onto her. If it does, she has your father—for whatever that's worth."

"It's worth a lot where Joy's concerned," Ward said. "Still, I wish I could warn her."

"She's safer if you don't. No one has any reason to involve her at this point."

Ward was less sure of that—it appeared there was some kind of power struggle going on inside the Hand; Joy seemed like a natural hostage. On the other hand, Joy was resourceful and capable, and if there was one thing Ward did trust Harold about, sort of, it was that he'd do whatever it took to protect Joy.

"What about you?" Colleen asked, sitting on the edge of the bed beside him. She idly rubbed at her thigh above the bulk of the bandages, visible as a lump under the skirt. "Will she worry about you? Try to look for you?"

"Of course she will. She's my sister." The defense came naturally enough; the doubts he kept private. Joy had known about the drugs and alcohol for a while, even though they carefully talked around it, never about it. She had occasionally mentioned, just casually, the possibility of "discreet places" she knew. She might just think he'd checked himself into one of those.

"And you don't have your phone."

"No, because someone made me throw it overboard."

"Right," Colleen murmured. "I don't have one right now either. Danny—"

"Probably doesn't know what a phone is."

Colleen made a little choking sound. Ward glanced up and met her eyes, and somehow her obvious struggle not to grin made him grin in spite of how lousy he felt, which caused her grin to break through, too. They were both grinning at each other like fools when Danny came back in with a bundle of clothing and some towels.

"I thought these would be useful too," he said, dropping them on the end of the bed. "It just took me a while to figure out where they were. Did you remember there's a whole entire linen room at the end of the hallway—"

Colleen patted his arm, breaking him off in mid-anecdote. They really were getting along better now. Apparently they'd worked something out while Ward was otherwise occupied. "We'll give you a little privacy."

"Really? That'd be a first."

She left, jerking her head pointedly behind her at Danny, but Danny, either completely immune to subtext or simply choosing to be, loitered in the doorway anyway.

"What," Ward said irritably.

Danny hesitated, and finally said, "So things really changed a lot since I was gone, huh?"

That was so laughable Ward couldn't even bring himself to laugh at it. He just acknowledged it with a tired grunt.

"Is Joy okay, Ward?"

This tread much too closely to things he'd been thinking about earlier. "Better than me," he said. "She always was. Tougher. More resilient. She's fine."

She'd better be.

"Good," Danny said. He looked down at his hands. "I missed you, all of you. I really missed you a lot."

If Ward wanted to fight—which on some level, he did—he could have said I didn't miss you at all. Which was sort of true ... and sort of not. And somehow it was harder to say it to Danny's face than it would have been to the idea of Danny, the vaguely remembered blond kid who had tagged around after him, always underfoot—and then wasn't, leaving him reeling from Danny's absence. Not missing him, nothing so simple as grief; it was a ... a hole, a gap, that Ward kept stepping into when he wasn't looking.

"Well, you're back now," Ward said. It was stupid, inane, but somehow it seemed like it was something Danny wanted to hear, because his grin was sudden, bright and happy, and it punched straight into something at the center of Ward's chest.

"Yeah," he said. "I am. I'll come back in a little bit and check on you, Ward."

"Just what I wanted," Ward muttered, but it was to himself, mostly. Danny was already gone.

He changed into the dry, clean clothes—slightly musty, smelling of closet, but better than the sweat-sodden ones he was wearing—and dutifully sipped a little water because he didn't want to find out if Colleen had methods for making him drink. Then he lay on his side. The door was mostly closed. The light coming in was lamplight; it was growing dark outside. He heard Danny and Colleen talking quietly, just far enough away that he couldn't quite make out the words.

He felt distinctly better than earlier, although it was in a carefully balanced way, as if he could move too suddenly and tip himself over into new, untapped realms of misery. The drug craving gnawed under his skin. He curled his fingers into the pillow and tried not to think of all the things he could do. They didn't keep cars here, which was probably for the best; taking the boat out right now was beyond him, or at least likely enough to end in disaster that he'd have to be suicidal to try it. But he could probably drive. He wondered if Colleen would help him rob a pharmacy if he told her to. She was certainly intimidating enough. They could wear stocking masks.

The thought made him smile, and he might have slept a little, because he suddenly jolted awake as the door opened. The bedroom was dark, the only light coming in from the hallway.

"Sorry," Colleen said. She came in and placed a package of crackers on his bedside table, along with a wet, folded cloth. "Close your eyes for a minute, I'm turning the lamp on."

Ward obediently covered his face with his arm. "I didn't know you had this setting," he said, frowning up at her as his eyes adjusted to the light. He was still dazed, caught somewhere halfway between sleep and waking, his brain fuzzed into near-total nonfunctionality.

Colleen looked flustered. "What setting?"

"Being nice to me."

"Oh, that. I'll go back to making your life hell soon enough." She looked over her shoulder. "Danny, come on in. Ward, we had an idea for something that might help."

"It's Colleen's idea," Danny said. "I don't know if it would work."

Well, that sounded promising. Ward rolled over and grimaced. He was stuck to the sheets with sweat, and on top of that, his side had stiffened up. Everything hurt. His head pulsed in time with his heartbeat. "Don't keep me in suspense here."

"It's something Bakuto said about the Iron Fist," Colleen said. "According to him, it can do more than just destroy things. It's all a matter of how you use it. Danny says he's never done this before, but we think he might be able to heal you with it."

"It does that?" Ward said. At this point he was beyond being surprised by anything. He tried to get a look at Danny's hand. It was, at the moment, just an ordinary hand. "Can he do your leg too?"

"It's not that kind of healing," Colleen said. "It's more like purification. Poison, blood poisoning, things like that. Which is essentially what's wrong with you now."

"No, not to be scientific about this or anything, but it's exactly the opposite problem I'm having now. There is no poison in me. That's the issue. If I could poison myself at this particular moment in time, I'd be fine."

Danny sat on the bed beside Ward; the mattress dipped under him. "It's worth trying though, don't you think? I didn't know the Iron Fist could do that. How does it work, Colleen, did Bakuto explain?"

Colleen shook her head. "Not exactly. What I remember him saying is, you make a fist, and then open your fist. Does that help?"

That sounded perfectly opaque to Ward, but Danny frowned thoughtfully, as if she'd said something sensible. "I can try."

"Wait a minute," Ward said, pushing himself up on his elbows. "I don't know how I feel about being a guinea pig here."

"The worst that can happen is that it does nothing and you still feel as bad as you do now," Danny said in an absent monotone. His entire being was apparently focused on his hand, curled loosely in a fist and starting to glow.

"Are you kidding? I can think of so many more worst-case scenarios than that. You could, for example, blow me up."

"I'm not going to blow you up, Ward."

"How do you know? I find it extremely hard to believe you never blew anything up by accident when you were learning to use that thing!"

"I didn't, though." Danny's voice was slow, dreamy. He carefully uncurled his hand, finger by finger, with gold light spilling through his skin. "I haven't really had a chance. I haven't had it long. I've only ever used it a few times."

"You—what? Are you telling me you're an amateur? This is an even worse idea than I thought!"

"Trust me, Ward," Danny said, laying his hand on Ward's chest.

"I very much do not trust you." Ward almost went cross-eyed trying to look down at what Danny was doing.

Danny's touch was very gentle, his fingers splayed out across Ward's chest.

And—Ward couldn't explain what happened, but something did. It was a warm, soft feeling, spreading outward through his veins. It was actually very much like the relaxing heat of a stiff drink, or the syrupy lassitude of narcotics ... like that, but not either of those things. It was very much its own thing. He wouldn't have been surprised to see golden light spreading under his veins, but it wasn't visible like that; there was just the glowing locus of Danny's hand on his chest, the light reflecting across Danny's intent face and Colleen's wondering expression.

Danny pulled his hand away. The glow died, and with it, the warmth, but it left a strange, pleasant languor behind. The cramping and aches had faded almost entirely. Ward was very tired, and thirsty, and sort of hungry. He felt almost normal.

"What," Ward said, "the hell."

"Did it work?" Danny asked. "I can't tell if—I—oooh ..."

He ... swooned was really the only word for it, sagging sideways onto Colleen, who swung smoothly to catch him.

"Danny?" Ward sat up quickly, sending a spike through his temple. He wasn't a hundred percent, in fact pretty far from it, but he felt a lot less like warmed-over death. "Is this the chi thing again?"

"It's the chi thing," Colleen confirmed. She carefully tilted Danny over and laid him out, limp and floppy, on the bed. "His chi is probably low anyway from the chi-blocking acupuncture they did back at the docks."

"I absolutely hate that what you said almost makes sense to me now."

Colleen smiled her quicksilver smile and touched two fingers lightly to Danny's neck. "His pulse is strong, his breathing's steady. He'll be fine. You look a lot better, too."

"I've gone from 'kill me now' to feeling like I might live. Huge improvement from earlier, trust me." His stomach growled. It had no doubts, anyway. "I think you mentioned soup earlier."

"I did. Come on."

Ward slid off the bed carefully, trying not to disturb Danny, although it looked like an earthquake probably wouldn't do that. He followed Colleen through the house, lit by lights glowing from polished brass fixtures, bringing back eerily strong memories of childhood vacations here.

Colleen was limping heavily. "You sure Danny can't do anything about the leg?" Ward asked.

"We can find out when he wakes up and has a chance to recover. It would be useful to be able to fight better."

"That's not why," Ward said. "You look like you're in pain."

She gave him a quick, startled look, really baffled for a minute, as if she wasn't used to anyone worrying about her. Ward entertained the pleasant fantasy of planting his fist in Bakuto's face.

Colleen took a saucepan out of the refrigerator and put it on the stove. She checked the contents of the pan, opened another can and dumped it in. The cans were still stacked all over the countertops. Ward thought about putting them away and then decided he couldn't be bothered. He was tired to the bone; it felt like he was coming off a week-long flu, just hitting the point when he was starting to feel okay again, but still didn't have energy yet.

"You guys make any plans while I was out?" Ward asked. He looked inside the open box of crackers on the end of the counter, and ate a couple, then held it out to Colleen.

She took a handful. "Not really. Of course it'll all become moot if they burst in tonight. It's probably not a good idea to spend too much time here. I thought maybe we should go down and sleep in the boat just to be safe, but ..."

"But we're all exhausted," Ward said. "And hurt."

"And we'll do better in the morning if we get some sleep tonight. Anyway, if they're not here yet, they probably aren't going to show up in the next few hours." Colleen shrugged a little. "We should take turns keeping watch."

Volunteering to take the first watch was probably what he should have done at this point, considering he'd been useless all afternoon, but at this point he was so tired that staying awake long enough to eat a bowl of soup was a questionable proposition. Ward ate another handful of crackers instead.

"Anyway ... there are a lot of ways we could go from there," Colleen said quietly. "We could run. But we would be running forever. The Hand's reach is long."

Ward managed, with a great force of will, not to make a sarcastic comment to that. "I can't," he said. "Joy is here."

"I know. And Danny's probably not going to go either." Colleen turned to stir the pan's contents. "The only other option we have is taking the fight to them."

Taking the fight to them. An entire organization of ninja death cultists, and Harold, and who knew what else; there was no telling what Danny had gotten into in the time he'd been gone.

It was insane and they were probably going to die.

And he'd rather do that than run.

After twelve years—hell, forget that, an entire lifetime under Harold's thumb, he now had ... something, he wasn't sure what exactly, but it felt like something tentative and new, unfurling slowly around him. It was like ... a glimpse of a future, a feeling that maybe his entire life wouldn't be Harold and pain and lies and drugs and being a person he couldn't stand. Like there was something beyond that, and some kind of path to get there.

Maybe this was what hope felt like.

"What kind of TV reception do you have here?" Colleen asked, laying out bowls on the counter. "I believe I was in the middle of elevating your lowbrow entertainment tastes."

"Are you sure wuxia isn't going to feel like a day at the office, after the day we've had?"

Colleen snorted. She wrapped a tea towel around the pan's handle and began pouring its contents into the bowls. "It could also be research. Educational. Very important."

"I wouldn't want to interfere with your education. Lead on then."

She took her sword with her into the living room, and they both chose chairs with maximum view of the exits, and no one said anything about it. For all she'd said about lowbrow tastes, the show she picked was a ridiculous martial arts flick with a lot of fighting and not much plot to speak of. Ward oozed down onto the couch and Colleen pointed out various bits of choreography she particularly liked.

And Ward kept thinking, every now and then, Dad's not watching. He doesn't know about any of this.

It felt like he should be using this possibly-temporary freedom for something else—something useful, something sneaky, something at the very least less completely useless than watching an old martial arts movie with his bodyguard. But honestly, the more he thought about it, the more it seemed appropriate that the first Harold-free evening he'd had in twelve years was spent like this. It was pointless and relaxing and fun. Exactly the kind of thing Harold would disapprove of. Harold would probably have all kinds of things to say about Ward failing to improve himself and indulging his inner child.

And you're not here, Dad. So you don't get a say in this.

"You want popcorn?" he asked. "I think I saw a bag of it in the kitchen, and there used to be a popper in the closet somewhere."

Colleen, who was spilled limply on the couch kitty-corner to his, looking half asleep, raised her head a little. "Sure," she said with about a quarter of a smile, and it occurred to Ward that at some point, what he used to think of as Resting Murder Face had simply started looking like Colleen. She didn't smile much—so what? Neither did he.

He peeled himself off the couch and went to find the popcorn maker.