Archive of Our Own ^beta

Ward woke up chained to a wall with a splitting headache, and his first thought was Dad.

Then things started coming back, a trickle and then a flood of memory into the parched desert of his brain. Dad was dead, had been dead for months now. Ward had watched him burn.

But it wouldn't be the first time he'd come back. It wouldn't even be the second time.

Ward leaned his head back against the ... concrete? It was dim but not completely dark; there was a small window up high in the ... whatever the hell he was in. Some kind of utility room, it looked like. He jerked his arms, first one, then the other. He seemed to be handcuffed to iron pipes on the wall. His legs were free, for all the good that did.

The recent past was a hazy blur, and icepicks stabbed his temples every time he moved his head. Fuck this, and fuck that, and fuck me ... The months since Dad died had been a roller coaster of struggling to stay on the wagon only to fall off for various reasons -- mostly because (between jitteriness and nightmares and god knew what else) he couldn't sleep without pharmaceutical assistance, so week-long bouts of sleeping for only a couple of hours a night were interspersed with handfuls of pills that started the clock at zero again. He was going to have to go to rehab, or try NA, some goddamn thing to break that cycle. Danny had said --

Danny! That jolted him forward, jerked up short with the handcuffs scraping his wrists. Danny and Joy needed to know that Harold was back. If Harold was back ...

He let his head rest against the wall again, and tried to control the hammering of his heart, the way his breathing tightened at the thought of Harold, of being snared in his dad's grasp once again. The worst part was that it came with ... almost with a sense of relief, a sick twisted relief that he hated. It would be familiar, at least. His life under Harold's heavy thumb had been miserable, but the last few months had been miserable in a different way; he'd been treading water as hard as he could, trying to learn how to be the person he'd been pretending to be for the last decade. The visionary heir, the brilliant young executive ... he wasn't that person, and he was only slowly starting to figure out the kind of CEO he actually was, trying to embrace his own plodding, determined stubbornness as a strength rather than the cowardice and lack of ambition that Harold had always told him it was ...

But the idea of Harold coming back was ... it was terrifying, it was smothering, but it would also mean someone else to make the decisions, to give him a direction, to have all the answers, to ...

Stop it. He literally tried to kill you. You can rely on Dad to have all the answers right up until he doesn't need you anymore, and then you're disposable, and you KNOW that.

He screwed his eyes shut for a moment, and opened them when they didn't feel dangerously wet anymore. Instead he looked up at the gray, utilitarian ceiling of the closet or cell or storeroom or whatever he was chained up in, and tried experimentally yanking on his cuffs. He was starting to feel less fuzzy-headed, less emotionally unstable, and increasingly confident that this wasn't Harold, it couldn't be, because he'd been as sure as he could be that Harold was dead --

The Hand could have switched the bodies, they could have faked it, you KNOW they're capable of it, and so is he --

Okay, this line of thinking was getting him nowhere. Now that he was starting to feel a little more mentally together, he was becoming aware that he was painfully thirsty, and queasy, and also starting to need a bathroom.

"Hello?" he called. "Is anyone there?"

He tugged on the cuffs again, and then began to experiment with range of motion. There was a separate cuff on each wrist, with one end cuffed to rusty iron pipes and the other to him. He was able to slide them up and down the pipes, at least to the point where the pipes joined with other pipes, which was only a couple of feet on each side, but between that and the length of the handcuff chains he could slide his back up the wall and not quite stand up. It wasn't comfortable, and his head swam until he stabilized, but it gave him some range of motion, at least. His entire body ached, especially his shoulders, and there were shooting pains in his hands. He wondered how long he'd been out.

"Who's doing this? How long are you planning on leaving me here? I'm a very important person, you know!"

Okay, wrong tactic. It began to occur to him that if this wasn't Harold, which was the most likely option, then being a very important person (or at least a somewhat important person) might be exactly why he was here. Kidnapping billionaires for ransom was probably still a thing.

"Whatever you want me to pay, I can pay it!" he yelled. Still no answer.

He slid back down the wall to sit on the floor again. It was chilly here; he flexed his ankles, trying to get the feeling back in his toes. His feet were bare and he was wearing pajamas. No surprise he was cold.

What had happened? Now that he was starting to be able to think again, he was pretty sure last night had been one of those "down a fistful of Ambien and half a bottle of bourbon and try to get some sleep" kind of nights (that he was going to have to stop doing if he actually wanted to get clean rather than scrabbling on a slippery slope that took him a little farther down every time, and also maybe risking lethal poisoning on a regular basis wasn't the best idea either). Anyway, that explained why he currently felt like shit, and also had probably made him hellishly easy to kidnap, a problem that had never occurred to him.

"Hello!" he yelled. His voice cracked. The only thing worse than someone (Harold) coming to do ... whatever they were going to do him was someone not coming. He could easily imagine himself buried here forever, with no one even noticing that he was gone --

No, they would notice. In fact, they probably already had. Not that he'd been an absolute model of reliability for the last few months; there had been late days, and a few days when he'd called in sick after sliding off the wagon hard -- he really was going to have to stop that. Now. He was stopping it now, as soon as he got out of here, whenever that turned out to be.

But still, the company would notice. Even Danny might notice. Eventually.

Ward leaned his head back against the wall and tried to calm his rapid breathing -- his uncertain stomach wasn't appreciating the incipient panic attack very much. For some reason his thoughts kept circling back to Danny, if only because Danny was the one person who might care if he went missing, beyond the practical exigencies of the company. Maybe.

It was hard to say where things stood with Danny these days. Since Danny had come back to New York a couple of months ago, they'd been tentatively and uncertainly feeling their way back towards ... something. Ward still didn't know what. They were linked by the company, and if not for that, he wasn't sure if they would have had anything to do with each other. And certainly it had been about the company in the beginning. Mostly.

But it hadn't been for the company that Danny had come to the penthouse. It hadn't been for the company that Ward had shot his dad on the rooftop that night.

He screwed his eyes shut again, but that didn't help; he could still hear the sharp report of the gun, feel it buck in his hand, see the blood blossom across Harold's shirt before Harold went over the edge. It wasn't the visceral feeling of the knife sliding in, the blood hot on his hand. But it was ... it was final, in a way that the first time hadn't been. It was a final break with his old life, and the person he'd been. It was a new beginning ...

A new beginning that had felt very much like the old, and had apparently led him to this. He opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling and wondered if Danny really would come, if Danny would notice he was missing, if Danny would just assume he'd missed their standing lunch date (which he'd already cancelled on a couple of times) because Ward was being Ward again, untrustworthy and selfish and enough of a mess that even Joy had gotten to the point that she didn't want to deal with it anymore --

The door opened.

Ward scrambled to sit up straight, and managed to get on his feet, in the hunched-over posture that was about the closest he could come to properly standing up, by the time they were all in the room. There were four of them inside, and he glimpsed a couple more outside. They were dressed in black. Every one of them except the apparent leader had a black scarf knotted around their head, only the eyes showing, and Ward's stomach sank to his feet.

Hand.

Fuck. They were supposed to be gone. Danny had said they were gone.

The ringleader was surprisingly young, a woman perhaps in her twenties, with hard eyes too old for her face, and her hair pulled back in a tight braid.

"I can pay," Ward said. He wet his lips. "Whatever you want, I can --"

She struck him hard across the face, snapping his head back against the wall. His head rolled back around and he stared at her, tasting blood on his lips. He'd had worse from Harold, much worse, but sudden violence always shocked him; he never got used to it, or got past that initial frozen-rabbit feeling when his brain wouldn't work and his limbs wouldn't work and everything just shut down.

"We don't want your filthy money," the woman said. She was American, local even, by the accent. "Where is Harold?"

Ward took a breath. Then he started to laugh. He must have looked and sounded like a madman, laughing at her through bloody lips.

"Stop it!" She backhanded him again. His teeth snapped together, biting his tongue, and suddenly the situation didn't seem so funny.

Ward swallowed blood, then spat it out, and said, "Boy, are you guys in for a disappointment."

"Explain."

Ward hesitated for an instant, but there was really no way to cover this up, and no lie he could think of that wasn't going to come back on him horribly as soon as they figured out the truth. "Harold's dead. Really, truly dead. Died the final death. Shot and then burned. I was there."

She stared at him, clearly trying to figure out if he was lying, and Ward braced for another blow that didn't come. "Then who's in charge?"

"In charge of what? Rand? That'd be me." He'd already decided he wasn't going to sell Danny out to these psychos -- not again, not ... not unless they tortured him, which he had a feeling he wasn't going to handle well. Correction, then: he was going to try not to sell Danny out. He wasn't going to sell Danny out right away.

"Not your stupid company! Why do we care about your company? In charge of you." There was a cracked note of desperation in her voice.

"In charge of ..." And then he got it, and he laughed again; he couldn't help it. "Me? You think I'm Hand? I'm not Hand. Jesus Christ."

"Stop laughing!" She drove her fist into his stomach this time. He doubled over, wrenching his shoulders and wrists, and as he panted through the pain, he heard her say, "Of course you are. We know all about you. You're Harold Meachum's son. His entire family --"

"Wasn't Hand," Ward gasped out. His stomach felt like it was on fire; another thing he'd never managed to learn to do, with Harold, was brace for a blow. "We're not. Harold wasn't either, not really. We were just ..."

Caught up in their fucking business, tied to the Hand even after Harold's death, apparently.

The woman stepped back and stared at him, apparently lost for words. Her face was a picture of dismay, and he revised his estimate of her age a few years downward; she might only be in her early twenties, late teens even.

"What now, Deva?" one of the ninjas asked, and that voice was youthful enough that Ward took another look at his captors. It was hard to tell in the ninja outfits, but he was pretty sure they were all kids -- not little kids, but younger than her. Teenagers. The Hand was recruiting kids now? Well, little Hand had to come from somewhere ... and he clenched his teeth on another slightly hysterical laugh. What the everloving fuck had his life turned into.

"Shut up!" the ringleader -- Deva, apparently -- snapped. "He's lying, he's got to be. He must know something. What about the Iron Fist? Do you know where the Iron Fist is?"

"No," Ward said. It was technically true; he didn't know where Danny was at that exact moment.

Deva's eyes burned with a cold hard light, and it began to dawn on Ward that he had done ... well, exactly what he shouldn't have done, for a minute there. He'd seen them as kids. He'd forgotten they were Hand.

But he still didn't see it coming -- he never saw it coming -- before she grabbed his left hand and twisted one of his fingers with a pop that he felt all the way up his arm.

Ward gasped, jerking against the cuffs; his vision blurred. Deva took a quick step backward. She tucked her hands under her arms -- surprised, it seemed, by her own capacity for violence. At the moment, she looked nothing like an experienced Hand torturer, and very much like a young adult completely out of her depth.

You're no Harold, kid, Ward thought, as hot and cold waves of pain rolled up his arm; he bit his lip against a wave of nausea. And you're definitely no Gao.

But in a way, she was worse. He had absolutely no idea what she was going to do next, and he had a bad feeling she didn't either.

The worst part was, he could relate all too well to what she wanted. Hadn't he been thinking the same thing not too long ago? That yearning to not be in charge, to find an adult to look up to ... this little ragtag group of kid-Hand must have thought he had the answers.

But he didn't. For him, or for them.

"Just for the record," Ward panted, trying painfully to straighten up, "if you're planning on doing that again, you might want to let me use a bathroom first. I'm just saying."

Deva tilted her head back, her moment of shock evaporating, looking at him coldly. "You're not in charge," she told him. "Maybe we'll let you have that. Later. But first, sit here and think about how cooperative you want to be." She jerked her head at her kid ninjas.

They closed the door and left him alone with his pain and his broken hand and his cold bare feet.

Ward slid carefully down the wall. He took a cautious look at his hand. She'd broken the ring finger -- he hadn't even been able to tell; the entire hand was a throbbing mass of pain -- and it now jutted out at an awkward angle. It hadn't begun to swell yet.

Well, at least this wasn't entirely unfamiliar, either. And the last time he'd done it to himself. Ward dropped his head back against the wall and laughed again: at her, at himself, at the entire stupid situation.

"You idiot, Deva," he said out loud. "Are you listening? I did this to myself not so long ago, and I did it to score drugs, so you can just knock off the posturing. I've had worse than you can dish out. I've done worse to myself and I've been tortured by the best, so just ... knock it off."

His voice cracked a little at the end. He was starting to shiver as the shock of the broken finger set in. He tried to warm up his feet, tucking the left one under his right thigh.

And now that he knew the Hand had him (and not even the normal Hand, but some teenage splinter group) he had little hope of ever being found, because he could be god-damn-anywhere, and it wasn't like the police would be checking cellars and warehouses for a missing billionaire. Not yet, anyway.

It was nice to think Danny might look for him, but he really doubted it. Especially since he had, in a sense, gotten himself into this.

Hours went by, or so he assumed; he had no way to gauge the passage of time, but it started to get dark outside the dingy little window. He tried writhing his way out of the handcuffs, but that worked much better in the movies than in real life; all he did was scrape the skin off his wrists. Also, the finger on the left hand was starting to swell up and turn colors, just as he expected from the last time he fucked up his hand. There was no way he could bring himself to pull that through a handcuff.

If he tried to tune out the discomfort, it was surprisingly easy to just kind of ... float along. He hadn't had much real sleep lately -- tranking himself with overdoses of Ambien and booze wasn't really cutting it -- and the distinction between "awake" and "asleep" could become kind of a hazy one. Being in pain wasn't that novel either; thanks, Harold.

He found himself thinking about Danny. Wondering what Danny was doing, if he'd noticed Ward was missing, if he cared. By now, his employees at Rand would definitely have noticed that he hadn't come into the office. Where his scenario broke down was trying to figure out what they would have done about it, and how long it would take them to figure out that something was really wrong.

Maybe nothing was wrong, he thought hazily, half-asleep with his arms curled awkwardly behind him. Maybe this was a really shitty nightmare, and he was going to wake up from it, just like he woke up from the dreams of elevators full of blood and restraints digging into his wrists and Harold carefully, gently, lovingly carving him open with a butcher knife.

Maybe Danny would find him.

Danny had come before. He'd come at the penthouse, when all that lay between them was betrayal and the strained ghost of a long-ago childhood -- though he'd come for Joy and Harold, primarily, if Ward was going to be honest with himself. And he'd come at the Rand building, but he'd come for revenge on Harold; Ward didn't fool himself into thinking that rescuing him was much of a factor in that.

But he had come.

It was almost completely dark outside the window, and pitch-dark within, when he became aware of a whispered conversation, or more like an argument, going on outside the door. He couldn't make out what they were talking about, though he could guess he was the topic of it.

He'd been kidnapped by bickering teenage ninjas. His life continued to be a bad joke. Also, he was cold, ragingly thirsty, and by now he really needed to use a bathroom.

The door opened, and light flooded the dark room. Ward squinted as it washed his vision to white, then closed his eyes entirely when they turned on a light in the room itself; he hadn't even realized it had one. He cautiously squinted again, and discovered that the light was coming from a bare bulb dangling from the ceiling, and Deva and her Hand-lite were staring down at him.

"Yeah, fine, I get it," he said. He didn't bother trying to stand up; since he couldn't fully straighten up anyway due to the cuffs, it wasn't like it would make him more intimidating. "Leave the prisoner isolated and in need of creature comforts, I know how this works. Look, I can pay you. I can pay you anything you want. You can move out of this condemned building or whatever it is --" Straight to jail, if possible.

"We don't want your filthy money, corporate dog," Deva said, crouching down. "What do you know of your father's dealings with the Hand? Where have they gone?"

Ward uncoiled slowly from his protective curl. She hadn't hit him yet, but it didn't mean she wasn't going to. "They're dead. Come on, you know that. Most of them died under Midland Circle. I didn't know about any others, in fact I didn't know about you either, but I will bring the full force of Rand's resources to bear on looking for them if you want me to, I swear I will. Just let me out of here."

She backhanded him; he'd figured it was coming, though it didn't really help. "I don't trust a word you say," she snapped, while Ward worked his tongue around the cut-up inside of his mouth. "Maybe the Hand are gone completely, and maybe they're not. I do believe you when you say you aren't one of us, because no one of honor would whore themselves out to your world of money and greed."

"Did you come in here just to insult me, or do you actually want my help? Because I can help you. Money can really come in handy for finding people, you know." He straightened up and tried to look like he was in control, like he was the guy who ran a multinational corporation and was the oldest and most competent persons in the room -- and not what he knew he was: a shivering prisoner in his pajamas with blood on his face and nobody looking for him. (Probably.)

Deva sat back on her heels. "What about the Iron Fist?"

"What about him?"

"Give us the Iron Fist and we can make you more comfortable."

Ward snorted. "You think I've got him in my pocket, or what?"

She punched him, a kidney sucker-punch that would've done Harold proud. For an endless minute or two, all he could do was wheeze for air, with every gasp a new stab of agony. That punch might've cracked a rib or two. It wasn't until he'd managed to get some air back that he realized visiting a bathroom was no longer that much of an issue; humiliatingly, horribly, he'd lost bladder control in that last blaze of pain.

At least Deva looked disgusted. Ward grinned at her, tasting blood on his teeth. He tried to swallow the humiliation and fear and misery of it all, and fall back on the one thing he was really good at: sarcasm. "What's the matter, keeping a prisoner isn't as much fun as you thought it would be? Kind of a mess, huh? You're bad at this. Uncuff me, give me a computer and some clean clothes and a shower, and I'll help you get whatever you want."

"We -- we don't make deals with the weak and debased," Deva said. She looked shaken.

"So what are you gonna do? Kill me?" He yanked at the cuffs, and found that he really wasn't as scared as he probably ought to be. They could hurt him, but hell, Harold had done that for years. Even the humiliation wasn't new. Or the isolation; he'd always been alone. There was no one coming to save him. Just him and his smart mouth and these amateur kidnappers. "Go on, then, get it over with. But you'd be squandering a valuable resource. Gao wouldn't be stupid enough to do that; Bakuto wouldn't either. My company worked with the Hand for years. Whatever bullshit they fed you about not making deals, apparently your bosses didn't believe it."

Deva sucked in her breath and scrambled to her feet. "Does the Iron Fist value you?"

"Not ... really." It wasn't entirely a lie. Or, to be accurate, he wasn't sure.

"Hmm. We will see. Maybe you can help after all."

She took out her phone. It took Ward a moment to realize what she was doing, and then he found out that he hadn't truly known what humiliation was until he realized she was filming him, chained to the wall in his own filth.

"Stop it!" he yelled at her, writhing against the handcuffs. It hurt -- wrists, broken finger, possibly-broken ribs -- but even that didn't seem to matter as much as whatever the hell she meant to do with that video. He'd thought he didn't have much left to lose, but he was wrong; the idea of Danny seeing that, of anyone seeing that, cut him straight down the middle.

"The great Hand collaborator," Deva murmured as she circled around him. "The great traitor. Witness this, Iron Fist."

"What are you going to do with that?" Ward yelled at her. "I'll pay you -- I'll give you the fucking company, it's rotten with Hand anyway --"

"You are scum," Deva said. She sounded satisfied, and lowered the phone with a flick of her wrist. "I'm going to upload this everywhere. We will trap the Iron Fist, as even Master Bakuto could not, and you'll be the bait."

"He won't come," Ward said, caught in a tangled knot of horror -- they couldn't show that to Danny, they couldn't use him against Danny, again -- it wasn't fair, he'd tried to be better, it wasn't right that everything just kept circling right back around to the same fucking place.

Because -- fuck -- Danny might come. Even if there was nothing in it for him: nobody else to save, no revenge, no incentives. He'd do it not because of Ward, but because he was Danny.

"Please," Ward said. His voice shook; his entire body shook. "I'm begging you, I will give you anything you want, just please don't do this."

She turned out the light and left him in darkness.

"Fuck you then!" Ward yelled after her. "I hope Danny Iron Fists you into next week!"

He turned his face against the wall, pressing his cheek against the cold concrete. Right now every option was equally terrible: Danny would see that damn video; Danny would see the video and wouldn't care enough to come; Danny wouldn't see it but also wouldn't know where to find him and probably didn't even know he was missing yet ...

It occurred to him bleakly that he might have been better off with Harold.

There were definitely better ways to recover from a hangover than dehydrating slowly in a dark, cold room, wearing wet clothes, with what he was increasingly sure were broken ribs. His shoulders were a solid sheet of pain now, no matter how he tried to squirm to relieve them, and he'd lost the feeling in his right hand but not, unfortunately, in his left, because he could still feel the broken finger. He was shivering constantly now, tugging on the cuffs.

He was going to murder those Hand punks. He didn't care if they were kids.

At least one thing he was pretty sure he didn't have to worry about was the bunch of them murdering Danny. He had a feeling that Deva and her crew weren't even in the running on the general scale of people Danny had kicked the shit out of lately.

Then again ... they were kids. At least some of them. Maybe Danny would figure that out and let them kick the shit out of him. Because Danny.

Fuck.

Shivering and alone in the dark, he thought back to the last time he'd seen Danny, at lunch two days ago ... or was it three days? Anyway, they'd started having regular lunch meetings -- at least, "meetings" was how Ward had been justifying it on his work calendar. It only made sense for Rand Industries' two heirs and majority shareholders to get together regularly to go over company business.

But that wasn't what they'd talked about. He didn't even recall that it had come up. They'd talked about Danny and Colleen's renovation plans to the dojo, which had involved Danny showing Ward pictures on his phone and asking his advice -- like Ward had the first clue how to go about knocking out interior walls and restructuring a space, jeez, Danny. And Danny'd said he was going through the entire Harry Potter movie series, and Ward had told him about Joy wanting a wand for her eleventh birthday ...

It hadn't even really hurt to talk about her, at least not in the same way. Joy leaving still ripped his heart out of his chest when he really thought about it, but there was something almost cathartic about being able to talk over those old childhood memories with the one person left in his life who remembered them too, who knew who Joy was, who cared.

Because Danny did care, didn't he? He had from the beginning. Ward smiled bitterly into the dark, remembered the feeling of Danny's hand pressed warm and solid between his shoulder blades as he'd faked grief for Harold in the penthouse -- right before driving Danny out with the cruelest words he could think of to throw at him --

It hadn't really mattered; he'd just needed to get Danny the fuck out of there so he could get the blood cleaned up.

Now he was sitting here in the dark thinking that of everyone in his life, everyone who had ever been in his life, Danny was the one person who might come for him. Even if he hadn't ever given Danny any reason to.

And then there was that damn video. Danny was going to see it, was going to --

Was going to what? Blame him for it? Danny wasn't like that.

But it would change things. He'd look at Ward differently, after. He'd have to. Joy had loved Ward, admired him, as long as he'd been able to present the image of the big brother who was smart and strong and infallible, all the things she'd always thought he was, the things he'd never been.

(Yeah, though maybe it had to do a little bit with lying to her about Dad for all those years ...)

The point was, he had an opportunity for a fresh start with Danny, something he'd never gotten before. He wasn't going to blow it up like this. He couldn't. They were still on too-shaky ground for him to risk Danny being treated to a full dose of Ward the total mess; there was no way whatever tentative relationship they had would survive that.

... and yeah, okay, still being the usual sort of selfish bastard here, because the point was, he needed to get out of this fucking cell and do something before Danny walked into whatever trap Deva and the Devettes were planning for him.

He twisted his hands in the cuffs, but only succeeded in hurting his shoulders. Sharp pains ran up the forearm of his good hand -- or what had been his good hand, anyway. No telling what kind of nerve damage the cuffs were doing.

Paralyzed hands. That'd be just his luck. No more typing. Well, he could hire someone to dictate to ...

There was a sudden loud bang from elsewhere in the building, followed by a ringing series of clatters that echoed through the walls. Ward's head snapped up.

That was ... suspiciously evocative of the kind of property destruction that tended to follow Danny around.

He actually came.

There was a moment of pure, overwhelming delight and relief -- and then he started struggling in earnest, trying to get the cuffs off, even if he had to break his wrists to do it. He could, at the very least, get the cuffs off and be found in the process of rescuing himself. Or maybe he could actually get out there and help, yeah, that'd be nice --

He was still struggling with the cuffs when the door slammed open. Light from the room outside half-blinded him, and then there were rough hands dragging him up. Definitely not Danny.

"Don't come any closer or I'll break his neck!" Deva yelled from just above his head. She had him in a headlock with her other arm wrapped around the handcuff chains, wrenching both his arms agonizingly up behind his back.

He couldn't actually see Danny (though, he had to face it, the odds of this being anyone other than Danny were slight) but he heard a soft gasp and then Danny's voice -- Ward crumpled a little bit at the sound of it -- said anxiously, "Look, you don't have to do this. We're willing to just let you walk away if you give him to us."

"Liar!" Deva spat. "Traitor! Enemy!"

"I used to believe like you do," Danny said. From the sound of things, he was coming closer, one soft step at a time. Great. Sonuvabitch was going to get Ward's neck broken by trying to play hostage negotiator. it just figured. "I used to believe in absolutes. But life's more complicated than that --"

"Shut up!"

"Yeah, Danny," Ward croaked around the muscular arm holding his head pinned. "Shut up and just Fist us both before she rips my head off." Great. He had actually said that, literally out loud.

"You can't attack me before I snap his neck," Deva spat back.

There was the softest of sounds high up against the wall, at the window. Ward looked up -- that angle he could actually see -- and saw the window ease open, and Colleen, all dressed in black, began to eel through the impossibly narrow opening as if her entire body was a liquid.

There was no way Deva wasn't going to notice that. All she had to do was take her attention off Danny for an instant.

There wasn't much of his body he could still move. She had his legs pinned against the wall and his arms immobilized with the cuffs. However, he could, it turned out, twist his head to the side to sink his teeth into the fleshy part of her thumb.

In retrospect, perhaps not the best move from the standpoint of not getting his neck broken. But satisfying.

Deva shrieked in mingled pain and fury, and the arm around his neck flexed and his air was cut off and then, in the hazy twilight world in which he suddenly found himself, something -- possibly Danny, possibly Colleen -- slammed both him and Deva into the wall, and that really hurt. A lot.

He didn't pass out, exactly. He did slither down the wall to the floor while something fast and loud and violent went on nearby. And then someone's hands were on him, pulling him up. There was a quick soft snap at his wrist, a bolt of pain, and he looked down, dazed, to see Danny do the other cuff: light rippled under Danny's skin, and the metal of the cuff crumpled and it fell away from Ward's abraded skin.

"That's a nice trick," he said fuzzily.

"Isn't it? All you gotta do is fight a dragon and win. Ward ... hey ..." Danny cupped Ward's chin in gentle fingers, turned his face toward the light, and Ward got his first good look at Danny's face, all frantic worry. Over Danny's shoulder, Colleen was looking at him with a weird expression, not sympathetic exactly, but definitely ... something.

Ward managed to get his face composed, sort of, and he got out, through chattering teeth, "I'm ... kind of a mess. Sorry. You -- give me a minute, I can ..."

He trailed off because he wasn't sure what he could do, exactly, other than lie here with Danny holding him up, while feeling came back to his hands and arms in agonizing pins and needles.

"Colleen," Danny said over his shoulder, "could you please go check on the ones we took down earlier?"

"... yeah, on it." Colleen's voice was decisive; she vanished from Ward's field of view.

Danny moved too, but not to go; he was already down on his knees, and now he dropped to one hip so he could get an arm around Ward and support him a little better. Ward wrapped his half-numb hand in Danny's sleeve and then realized Danny was kneeling in a puddle of -- well, yeah, the floor was not a great place right now.

"Danny," Ward said, "it's filthy in here, I'm filthy, just -- go with her, I'll be out in a minute. You don't have to ..." He wasn't even sure how to finish that sentence.

"Like I care about that, Ward?" Danny's tone was incredulous. He stripped off his jacket and wrapped it around Ward's shoulders. It was warm from Danny's body heat, and Ward, despite his best intentions, huddled gratefully into it. "Can you walk? Did she hurt you?" Danny gave a strangled sort of laugh. "I mean ... obviously she did, that's a stupid question. What's hurt, where? Oh ..." He'd just discovered Ward's broken finger.

"I think it looks worse than it is," Ward said, embarrassed, as Danny curled his fingers lightly around Ward's discolored and swollen hand, and brushed a thumb very gently over the bleeding handcuff abrasions on his wrist.

"I think I can heal this," Danny said. "If you don't mind me trying ...?"

"You can, uh ... heal? Seriously?"

Danny nodded, and closed his eyes.

Ward stared; he couldn't look away. The light came up under Danny's skin, between his bones, illuminating his veins like an arcane map.

And then heat seeped into Ward's aching hand, sinking down through the bones, soothing as it went. It was like the warm syrupy relief of narcotics, he couldn't help thinking of that ... but it was clean, burning through Ward's flesh and leaving a soft muffling relief behind.

He managed to tear his gaze away from the soft glow painting their joined hands to Danny's face, eyes closed and deep in concentration. One of the things Ward had noticed about Danny was the way he concentrated utterly on what he was doing. It was something Ward remembered from when they were kids too, except then it had been ... well ... irritating, and also very much a five-year-old sort of thing. Kids were like that. But unlike most people, Danny had somehow retained that single-minded focus into adulthood. And now he was concentrated wholly on Ward, as if his focus was pouring down his hand and washing under Ward's skin and sweeping the pain away.

Danny's eyes snapped abruptly open. "That's ... better, at least," he said. "I ... whoa ..."

And with that, he tilted sideways into Ward, who caught him by pure instinct.

"What's wrong with you?" Ward asked, suddenly worried.

"Chi drop," Danny muttered, pressing his hand to his forehead.

"Please don't say that." Ward noticed, belatedly, that he'd used his bad hand, in fact still had it tangled up in Danny's sweatshirt. The finger was -- not completely healed, it still ached, but it wasn't the incoherent wall of pain it had been until a moment ago. His wrist felt better too.

"It's true, though. Gimme a minute." Danny breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth a few times, and then opened his eyes. His color was visibly better. "Okay, that'll do me for a little while. I ... should probably have waited to do that 'til we're out of here."

"Out of here. My favorite phrase in the English language."

Danny laughed lightly. "Let's do that."

He got up, caught himself on the wall, then gave Ward a hand up -- or tried to. By this point Ward had stiffened up so thoroughly that Danny had to almost pick him up.

"Your wrists, Ward," he murmured, curling his fingers gently around the abraded and bleeding skin on Ward's right wrist where the cuffs had cut in.

Ward jerked his hand back and pulled it into the sleeve of Danny's slightly-too-small jacket. He didn't want any more of Danny's sympathy or the insidious warmth of that soft, healing light -- not here, not with everything still too close and too sharp.

He didn't want to ask, but ... "Did you see a -- a video? Was that how you found me?"

"No," Danny said, baffled, and relief shuddered through him. "We've been looking for you since --"

"Where's Deva?"

"... Who's Deva?"

She was crumpled in the doorway, tied up securely by Colleen. Danny knelt and checked her pulse. Ward was more interested in digging through her pockets until he found her phone. He tried a couple of unlock codes, shook his head and shoved it at Danny.

"Destroy this."

Danny didn't ask questions. His hand brightened and flexed and the mangled remains of the phone fell to the floor.

And if she'd already uploaded it? Well ... he took a breath. It was a risk. He'd have to live with it.

"Ward?" Danny's arm was around him, helping him up. "Can you walk?"

"Yeah." Ward tried to shake him off. Danny shifted it to a supportive grip on his arm.

With Danny holding onto him, he limped out of that damn little room, and finally got a look at the rest of the place they had him in. It was some kind of warehouse; he hadn't been wrong about that. Big, abandoned, mostly empty. The concrete floor was cold and rough on his bare feet.

Colleen had the rest of the prisoners in a huddle against the wall. Most of them had been stripped of their ninja headwraps, and Ward hadn't been wrong -- they were all young, mid to late teens. They huddled quietly, watching their captors with wary, nervous eyes. Most were bruised; a couple were unconscious. Some of them flinched and looked away when they saw Ward.

"You know them?" Danny asked Colleen quietly, keeping a light grip on Ward's arm. Ward didn't feel like he needed the help -- he was walking okay now -- but it was more trouble than it was worth to shake him off.

"Some of them." Colleen looked grim. "I trained some of them. Can you handle getting him to the hospital? I'll stay here and deal with this."

"I don't need a hospital," Ward said. They both ignored him.

Danny reached for Colleen with his free hand, brushed it down her arm. "Need help?"

She shook her head grimly. "It's all right. I think they'll be more receptive if it's just me, honestly. Call you later."

As Danny took him outside, Ward repeated, "I don't need a hospital."

"Yeah you do. Look, we can just hit the ER, you don't have to stay. But I can see by the way you're standing you've got some cracked ribs -- take it from an expert in blunt-force trauma. And," Danny added, "I don't think you realize what your face looks like, Ward."

"Thanks, not self-conscious at all now."

"Let me take you to the hospital, Ward."

Ward dragged a hand over his face, wincing as it scraped across bruises and a split lip. Okay, yes, he probably did look like hell.

"Look, there are gonna be questions, okay? Questions I don't think you're prepared to answer, either," he added, and Danny looked embarrassed. "Even if I do have broken ribs, you think it's the first time? They can't actually do anything for it. Everything I need to do, I can do at home. Most of what I need is just a hot shower and maybe something to eat. And drink. I don't suppose you have a bottle of water in your car?" he asked plaintively.

"I don't know. We came here in your car."

"You stole my car?"

"We didn't steal it!" Danny protested, unlocking the car. ".... much. All your keys and everything were still at your place, your wallet and everything. And Colleen and I don't have --"

"Please stop explaining," Ward groaned, getting in with great care. "You still haven't told me how you found me."

"Oh that. Right. Well, Misty had some leads --" Ward decided not to bother asking who Misty was. Danny seemed to know several hundred people in New York by name already. "And we knew the Hand was involved because ... well ... they weren't subtle."

"What's that mean?" Ward asked, looking over at him sharply, because Danny's voice had changed, darkened, in that way he used to get when he talked about his parents.

"They left a handprint on the door, Ward," Danny said, staring off into the darkness outside the windshield, and started the car.

Danny drove Ward back to his place without further argument, but Ward might have guessed it was too good to be true because Danny came up to the condo with him. And yeah, big white handprint on the door. Condo association was going to love that. He realized he didn't have keys just as Danny unlocked it. Right. Because Danny had them.

It had been a fucking day.

"You can go, you know," Ward said, limping inside. Every part of him hurt, and he was starting to regret turning down a hospital. Also, he was so desperately thirsty that if he didn't drink something he was going to die. Danny had stopped along the way at a gas station to get a bottle of water, and he'd sucked that down like it was nothing. He filled a water glass at the sink, and carefully tried not to think about drinking anything stronger.

"I'll stay for a while," Danny said as he laid Ward's keys carefully on the counter. "I can see if I can scrub that handprint off ... and, uh, the other one."

"What other -- oh." He'd just lurched into the bedroom to grab something clean. There was another one on the window. "Whatever. Knock yourself out. I don't care. Just figures we got a bunch of Hand over-achievers."

"You'd have preferred the actual Hand?" Danny sounded slightly strangled.

Ward glanced up -- he wasn't bothering to do more than grab anything that was clean and looked like it wouldn't be too hard to put on. Danny was leaning against the doorframe, hands in the pockets of his jeans. He looked exhausted and miserable, which Ward thought was really too much considering that he was the one who'd been chained in a storeroom for the better part of 24 hours.

"What is the matter with you?"

This produced a flare of anger, which was a little more familiar, or at least easier to deal with. "What do you mean, what's the matter with me? We thought the Hand took you!"

"They did!" Ward said.

"I mean the actual Hand. They're ... it's ..." Danny took his hands out of his pockets, then didn't seem to know what to do with them, so he just gestured wildly. "People don't come back from that, Ward!"

Ward looked at him, and he felt like he was groping around the edges of something he was simply too tired to grasp. "I'm taking a shower," he said. "Do what you want." And he fled into the bathroom with an armful of clothes.

The water stung, but he showered and showered anyway, with it turned up as hot as it would go. On some level he knew -- was self-aware enough to know -- that what he was trying to shower off wouldn't come off; it was the filth and humiliation of that room, it was the knowledge that Deva and her little group of wanna Hand had just walked into his bedroom and walked off with him, it was Danny seeing him like that and Danny still being here and just ...

It was the look on Danny's face in the bedroom, a full day's worth of desperation and misery and panic and fear, all wrapped up and directed at Ward.

But at the very least, he could get physically clean, and the hot water helped with the aches and stiffness somewhat. He still looked like shit. His ribs had blackened into a mottled bruise across half his side, his face was bruised and swollen, and his wrists looked like someone had been chewing on them. The one thing that didn't really hurt as much as it should have was his broken finger, which was still slightly bruised, but he could move it as long as he was careful.

He drank several more cups of water from the sink while he carefully dabbed antibiotic ointment onto his wrists and got dressed in the gym sweats he'd brought in with him, and then ran out of excuses not to go back out and find out if Danny had (hopefully) left.

Danny had not left. He was in Ward's nearly unused kitchen, frying something.

"Hi Ward!" he called as soon as Ward lurched out of the bathroom. "Do you want pancakes?"

Ward's stomach clawed painfully at his insides; it did want pancakes very much. Or something. Anything. He hadn't been this hungry in ages, but then again he also hadn't gone a full day without eating for anything other than strictly drug-related reasons when he really didn't feel like eating anyway.

"... yeah, guess so," he said, and Danny beamed. Ward picked up the mostly empty box of pancake mix on the counter. He was pretty sure he'd never seen it before, unless he'd gone on some kind of drug-induced pancake shopping spree at some point, which wasn't out of the question.

Equally unfamiliar was the griddle Danny was cooking them on, the big mixing bowl, and the carton of eggs beside the sink, when Ward was fairly sure his refrigerator had contained nothing except some aging takeout boxes.

"Is all of this mine?" he asked, eventually.

"No," Danny said cheerfully. "I borrowed this stuff from your neighbor. I told her I wanted to make pancakes."

His ... neighbor? Ward didn't even know who his neighbors were. "Her?" he ventured cautiously.

"Yeah, you know, Irina two doors down? She came out to find out what I was doing while I was cleaning off your door, and we talked about you a little bit --" Oh God, Ward thought; that was exactly what he wanted to hear. "-- and I said I was going to go buy stuff to make pancakes after I was done, because pancakes are one of the things I learned to make when I was a kid; that and eggs are just about the only things I can cook --" He flipped the pancake deftly off the griddle onto a plate, while Ward just stared at him. "And she said she had some mix, and went and got that, and it said on the box you're supposed to add an egg so I asked if she had eggs too because I figured you didn't, and she gave us not only eggs but a thing of real maple syrup too. Wasn't that nice of her? You need to do something really nice for her back, Ward."

"... yeah, sure, why not," Ward said finally, and limped very carefully to sit at the kitchen island, since he didn't have a table in here, as such.

Amazing. He'd lived here for years, and Danny had been here for all of half an hour and had already gotten on a first-name basis with at least one of the neighbors he hadn't even met.

This was exactly the kind of thing that could make the old resentment come surging back. Except ...

Except he'd been around Danny by now enough to see why it was like that for him. It was because Danny talked to people. Listened to people. He knew their names because he asked and remembered.

And, okay, Ward was never going to be that person. But it wasn't some kind of magic that surrounded Danny, drawing love and warmth and affection to him like iron filings to a magnet, the way it had felt when they were kids.

And if it wasn't for Danny being like that, Ward would still be handcuffed to the wall of a freezing storeroom. Or -- no -- he would have died in the penthouse at Bakuto's hands, after Danny failed to come for them as any reasonable person would have.

A plate of pancakes landed in front of him, drowned in syrup. "How do you like your eggs?" Danny asked.

"Uh ... over medium, I guess."

So he ate pancakes -- he really was starving -- and Danny deposited a couple of eggs on the edge of his plate, and came to join him with a tower of pancakes that made Ward give him a sideways look.

"Can you actually eat all of those?"

"Using chi makes me hungry."

Ward refused to rise to the bait this time. "So, what ... like, your tank's out of gas, or something?"

"Kind of like that," Danny said, and stuffed half a pancake in his mouth.

They ate in silence for a little while, and then Danny said, "How are you feeling? I could probably do a little more, um, healing. If you want."

"No!" It probably came out a little too fast and vehement for politeness's sake. "No, thanks," he amended, and flexed his finger, felt a few twinges like a ghostly echo of that white-hot pain. "But, uh, thanks. For this. And, you know ... the rescuing. That's appreciated too."

Danny smiled, quick and sunny. Then he bit his lip. "You know, I was thinking about something. While you were ... gone. A lot of things, actually." His voice had gone quiet again.

"Yeah?" Ward said, braced to claim exhaustion and retreat if this was going to turn into Danny Having Too Many Feelings at him.

Danny poked at the remaining pancakes on his plate. He'd managed to do an astonishing job of demolishing the stack. "You know, awhile back I said to you ... I used to think of you as some kind of -- of older brother or something when we were kids. You know?"

"I think the exact word you used was 'jackass.' Which I think," Ward said, smiling slightly, "was pretty accurate, honestly."

"Yeah, maybe ... well, probably, but ... you know, I got back from traveling with Colleen, and I haven't really -- I mean, you and me, since I got back, we've kind of just been ... relearning each other, you know? But -- Ward --" Danny took a quick breath, and stabbed a pancake with his fork as if it had offended him. "They took you. I thought you were gone. I've seen what the Hand can do." He darted a quick sideways glance at Ward, his face open and vulnerable. Young-looking, like those kids in the damn warehouse. "I don't think it had really hit me before, not quite in that way ... that I do still think of you like that. You're family to me, Ward. And I've lost way too much family."

Ward had to take a couple of breaths to make sure his voice was steady. "I'm okay, Danny."

"They broke your fingers and tortured you and they did it because of me."

Ward's eyes opened wide; it hadn't even occurred to him that Danny might be beating himself up about this. "Because of Harold, actually."

"Huh?"

"Danny. Hey." He nudged Danny's arm. "They took me because they thought I was Hand. Because I'm Harold Meachum's son. It's everything to do with Dad, and nothing to do with you." Yeah, sure, it had drifted in that direction -- but he didn't want Danny blaming himself for it. That was ridiculous.

"Well, yeah, but ..."

"But nothing. Let's just blame Dad for this one. He's dead; it's not like he's around to defend himself."

"Okay," Danny said with a weak little smile. "Okay." He wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand. "I was scared out of my mind, Ward, you know?"

Ward hadn't known, and had no idea how to deal with any of this. "I'm all right, Danny. Really. I appreciate the pancakes, and now I'm going to bed while there's still some night left."

Danny wiped his eyes again and laughed shakily. "I think you're out of luck," he said, glancing toward the living room windows, where the gray veil of night had been pierced by pink and gold light.

"Great," Ward sighed. "Okay, first I'm calling in sick to work, and then I'm going to sleep."

"I could ... stay?" Danny offered. "Sleep on the couch, maybe. Just to make sure they don't come back."

Ward might have fought it if he wasn't so tired, but right now he didn't have a fight in him, especially after what Danny had just admitted. And honestly, since they'd literally kidnapped him out of his bed, having someone else in the place who knew how to fight didn't sound like a bad idea. "There's a second bedroom. Feel free to use it; I don't think I ever have. Linens in the hall closet. I'm going to bed."

Danny caught his arm, and then Ward found himself in an unexpected and (given the state of his ribs) very painful hug. Danny eased up immediately at his pained squeak, but didn't let go immediately; he rested his chin on Ward's shoulder for a minute.

"I'm glad you're okay, Ward," Danny said, and let him go before he could figure out what to say back.

"I, uh, me too," he managed. Danny grinned at him, that infectious grin of his that had the corners of Ward's mouth twitching up too.

He escaped to the bedroom, sent a quick text to his PA telling her to reschedule his appointments because he had the flu, and then crashed into bed.

And didn't fall asleep. As usual.

Instead he drifted in a state of aching, bone-deep weariness and gritty-eyed exhaustion, and listened to the sound of Danny moving around: clinking and clattering in the kitchen, water running in the bathroom, and then a quiet one-sided conversation that was probably with Colleen.

The last time he'd had someone else in his space like this was ... Joy, probably. A long time ago. Well, not counting Dad, but ... yeah, just leave Dad out of this.

He felt -- not quite safe, exactly. He hadn't felt safe in a long, long time. But there was something a little more secure about knowing that Danny was out there, prepared to fight tooth and nail if someone else tried to break in.

The window in the bedroom had also been cleaned, he noticed.

And for some reason that was what made him smile -- that little bit of caring, that Danny didn't have to have done, any more than he'd had to do any of it.

Danny had come.

Maybe it wasn't unreasonable to think that he'd always come.

He wanted a drink, and he wanted pills, but right now ... he was okay without them.

Ward curled his arm under the pillow and turned his face to the wall. Fresh start, he thought. Clean sweep. Maybe he'd start going to those damn NA meetings, see if that could keep him on the straight and narrow. If nothing else, the threat of being kidnapped by the Hand while in a drunken stupor was a pretty good deterrent.

He expected nightmares, but this time, rather than the horror show his brain wanted to play for him, there was Danny to focus on -- the little clinking sounds, the soft cadence of his voice as he chatted with Colleen -- until sleep finally came.