immortal iron fist.

(✉ → dan dan the churro man): that’s the same words as last time, but i still feel like i’m having a stroke (✉ → dan dan the churro man): no, it’s fine it’s just – surprising, i guess (✉ → dan dan the churro man): UNSENT yet another reason i want to punch ward in the face, how quaint (✉ → dan dan the churro man): do you need FRIDAY to check you out for one? (✉ → dan dan the churro man): no, don’t change it (✉ → dan dan the churro man): it means a lot to me, that you’d trust me with that (✉ → dan dan the churro man): just don’t call me if you’re in jail. i’ll let you rot 

five minutes later (✉ → dan dan the churro man): i was joking. please call me if you’re in jail

(✉️ ➡️ Tony): You’re having a stroke? Should I call Steve? Or an ambulance? I know a nurse. Should I call a nurse? Please stop having a stroke. (✉️ ➡️ Tony): Bad surprising? I could change it. If you want me to, I could change it. I could put Jessica? Or Sharon? It’s just that Colleen is usually /with me/ when things happen, so I don’t think she’d be good. But I can change it! I can totally change it.  (✉️ ➡️ Tony): No, I’m pretty sure I don’t have a head injury. Someone would have told me! (✉️ ➡️ Tony): Okay. Okay, I’ll keep it, then. Thanks, Tony. (✉️ ➡️ Tony): I trust you with pretty much everything. (✉️ ➡️ Tony): Oh. Okay. 

(✉ → iron fisting): They’re /too/ nice. They give me the willies. (✉ → iron fisting): I don’t know why it keeps recommending them when all I watch are whale documentaries and weird murder mysteries, though.

(✉️ ➡️ D. Rand): Technically (✉️ ➡️ D. Rand): who do you think I was trying to send the photo to?

(✉ → Danny R. ): Okay, okay, just call me and tell me that my cousin is on the hospital. Be glad for that, because it sucks when we have to do that, I usually don’t do it, but that was a big ass red flag.

(✉ → Danny R. ): She kept putting herself in dangerous situations, so he could save her, because apparently, he was the love of her life.

Meeting people who knew his father was always strange in a way that Tony tried to explain many times in the past, tried to unpack with Sharon who had also known him, but was never entirely successful in. Maybe it was because they looked at him like a ghost, like they were searching for something that they weren’t entirely convinced they would find, but of course, that was probably how Tony was looking at Wendell right now too. FRIDAY would come back to him with any information she could find, but Tony was briefly regretting blocking out most of the words his father said over the dinner table as an act of rebellion.

“What do you think our universe sounds like to them?” Tony asked, halfway between joking and serious, which seemed to be his sweet spot. Wendell turned to him and Tony shook his hand, though it went on for a beat too long. As his grip tightened, Tony couldn’t help but flash back to standing on that red carpet in front of the gala, Obadiah’s fingers squeezing his shoulder as he said I filed that injunction against you … And apparently Obadiah was in the air, because Wendell said the name, and Tony gave a light cough. “Well, I would just keep an eye on him when you get back,” Tony said breezily. “Crushing goes around when it comes to good old Obie.” The room lapsed into silence, and Tony looked between Wendell and Danny. “Uh … should we get something to drink?” Tony asked, raising an eyebrow. “I think I need a drink. Mimosa, mostly champagne.”

Tony made a good point, and Danny huffed a quiet laugh and shrugged a shoulder. “I guess ours isn’t great either, but at least here I’m not...” He trailed off, casting an uncertain glance to Wendell and letting the sentence hang. Was it inconsiderate to joke about worlds where he was dead when he was standing next to a man who’d lost him in one of them? Nobody seemed to know what was appropriate when it came to dealing with the multiversal catastrophe. It certainly wasn’t something anyone had much experience with. But... Danny figured they were doing all right, all things considered. 

❛ i think the life i want is the life i have , but how can i be sure ? ❜

NOT HERE SENTENCE MEME || ALWAYS ACCEPTING || @kunlunsironfist

Sharon had invited Danny over for dinner at the compound mostly because she wanted to see the assorted people who were living here how, interact with Danny, and see how they treated him. (And find out if she needed to threaten anyone.) But then Danny spoke and Sharon almost dropped the knife she was using. That was… a lot heavier of a conversation than she was expecting. Twirling the knife in her hand, Sharon tried to steady her mind before looking Danny in the eyes. 

“Is there… a reason you’re doubting what you have?” Danny had lived with monks most of his life – was that the type of life he wanted long term? Sharon couldn’t imagine Colleen being drawn to a lifestyle like that. “Did something happen?” 

It was always nice to spend time with Sharon, always nice to be invited over to hang out with her. Any other day, Danny would have been bouncing with unspent energy, ecstatic at the mere concept of hanging out with one of his favorite people. But today he was more... reserved. After everything that went down with his father, Danny was withdrawn and uncertain and he knew it showed. He hadn’t been able to shake Wendell’s words, hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that came with them. He knew it showed, knew Sharon could tell. Saying it aloud was just confirming her suspicions. 

Looking down at his hands, Danny wrung them together absently and shrugged his shoulders. “My dad was here,” he said quietly. “And he wanted --- He wanted me to be someone else. I thought I was doing... What I’m meant to be doing. But what if I’m not?” 

Ward killed him. All Tony could think about when Danny said those words was the second Pepper dropped that USB pen onto his desk, and Tony realised the full extent of Obadiah’s betrayal. He had a pretty good insight when the man ripped his heart out and tried to murder him, but to know that it went back even beyond that, that Obadiah was perfectly content to let his best friend’s son die in the middle of a desert, be tortured beforehand, that was something else entirely. Knowing that Danny’s family had been through similar … complications (he couldn’t use the word betrayal, because he didn’t know the situation, could guess if Danny wasn’t pushing Ward out it was justified to a certain extent) didn’t comfort him, either. It didn’t make him feel as if he wasn’t alone. It just made him angry that yet again, this was something that he’d been unable to prevent, something that he hadn’t foreseen.

“Grief isn’t always clean cut,” Tony said lowly. “Joy knows he deserved it, knows what he was, but that doesn’t … that isn’t always enough.” He thought of his own father, how he glorified and despised him in equal measure, how he never got that closure he needed because he was taken from the world too soon for Tony to reach that point. “Harold … Harold was like Dad, right?” Sometimes Tony wondered what would’ve happened if he stood up against Howard, if he’d stayed in the mansion instead of going off to boarding school. Chances are they would’ve killed each other, and then Maria would be the last Stark standing. Maybe that was the way it was meant to happen.

Hero was a word that always carried a massive weight. He took it on board in that press conference when Christine Everhart looked at him like it could never apply to him, but the more years that passed, the less Tony looked at it as a shiny medal and realised that it was a heavy weight to carry. “I’m an Avenger,” Tony corrected. “It’s my job.” Hero was something that he was close to, maybe, but that would mean he needed a lot more years to even up the scales for the hurt that he had caused already. “You–” He sounded like Nat, now. He sounded like Bruce, claiming he was only a monster designed for chaos. He sounded like Steve, on the days when Tony walked in and the only word the other man could use to describe himself with was soldier. “It isn’t meant to be anybody’s call. It’s not easy to carry. It’s not – it’s not something that’s normal, you know?” Tony took a breath, looking away from him for just a beat before meeting his eyes again. “If I didn’t have the team when I did, I would’ve lost it. It’s not an easy choice, but you have friends. You have family. And I’ll … I’ll deal with it. We’ll get this cleaned up, we’ll learn from it. That’s all we can do, okay? You make your mistakes, you stop yourself from making them again.”

Harold was always a complicated subject. Danny remembered the elation he’d felt when he realized his godfather was still alive, remembered Ward standing beside him on that elevator and eyeing him warily. He’s not a replacement for your dad, Ward had said and at the time, Danny assumed Ward was jealous. He’d thought Ward was simply angry that he was no longer the only one who knew Harold was alive, angry that Danny, of all people, knew his secret. He knew better now. Those words had been Ward’s first real attempt to protect him. They hadn’t been the last. Harold was the first monster Ward tried to fight for Danny, the first thing he tried to end so that Danny wouldn’t have to. Some part of Danny would always hate himself for that, because it shouldn’t have been Ward. Ward shouldn’t have been forced to kill his own father, but Danny hadn’t been able to do it himself. He wondered if things with Joy would be any different if he had.

“Yeah,” he said quietly, thinking of how Joy had looked at him the first time he saw her again after. She’d been so angry. She’d hated him so much. Maybe she still did. Danny wasn’t sure he’d blame her. “He... beat Ward. Talked down to him. Made him feel like he was nothing, for a long time. He didn’t do that to Joy. He was good to her.” That had always complicated things. Harold Meachum tore his son to pieces, but he was a good father to his daughter. He’d wanted to protect her, even when the Hand twisted him up more than he’d already been. “He tried to kill me, you know. That’s why Ward did what he did. Harold was trying to --- He would have killed me. Ward stopped him.” Joy hadn’t been there for that part... but would it have mattered? Would she hate him any less if she knew her father was dead because Ward had wanted Danny to live instead? 

Danny immediately started rambling and Sofia grinned at him. It might have only been a few months but it had felt like years since she had last spoken to Danny, and seeing just as energetic as she left him felt good. Even if there was a cast on his leg. Should she ask about that? A good friend would ask… right? A momentary blip of doubt in her heart stopped her though, she didn’t want to interrupt the smiling or the rambling with talk of whatever might have caused that. (Sofia always found herself several shades of awkward around friends – even Danny who had put no expectations at all on her.) 

“Did you live here when it was a dojo? “ Sofia followed up with. Not that she was in any place to judge. There had been a time when she was living in the backroom of the hex shop because that was the only safe place for her — Dinah had changed that (and her slowly extending network of friends had proven that she had people to call on if she ever found herself without a roof). Sofia let the smile on her smile fade slightly, “Sorry I up and vanished – a lot of…” How could she describe what happened with Jeremy without sounding like an idiot — or a monster? It was too complicated to simplify into a few short words. “It got bad and Tony gave me an out that was… good. I’ve been at school.” The smile came back to her face, but it was much softer this time, “I missed you.”

Sofia was grinning, and that was probably a sign that Danny’s endless rambling wasn’t bothering her. Somehow, that didn’t surprise him much. He had always felt as though Sofia understood him in a way some other people didn’t, and she’d always had a way of making him feel as if he wasn’t annoying even when he knew Ward would have told him exactly the opposite. It made him glad to have her back now, and the relief in seeing her only increased when her eyes flickered to his leg without asking about it. That definitely wasn’t a story he wanted to kill the mood with. 

“When has my tone ever been anything but sarcastic?” she shot back. Her gaze focused for the moment on Danny’s dad. Wendell. The hell kind of name was Wendell? Rich people were so goddamn weird. If that was the only thing, she might’ve made the joke aloud. But judging from the clipped way Wendell greeted her, the sharp, cold glint in his eye, Jessica’s suspicions were growing deeper and deeper.

“Yeah, right back at you,” Jessica said dismissively. Looking at Danny, it was all too obvious that sarcastic texts weren’t the only thing he was oblivious to. “Jury’s still out on that,” she said flatly, frowning at her friend. She might not have liked saying the word out loud, but that’s what Danny was. And she didn’t like the way this guy, his father, was looking at him. 

Dani ran towards her namesake, and Jessica sighed. “Apparently so,” she said. “Alternate universe me probably went crazy from pregnancy hormones or something,” she muttered. “But judging from the fact that Luke is her dad, I’m gonna blame it on him,” she said. Dani was content trying to climb up Danny’s leg like the goddamn tree he was, so Jessica focused her attention on Wendell. “Hey, Danny, I think I left her blanket in the taxi. You wanna go see if it’s still out there for me?” she asked. “You can take her with you – good practice,” she added, smirking lightly at him. Dani didn’t have a blanket, mostly she just wanted a minute alone with this Wendell asshole. 

“Sometimes you’re pissed off instead of sarcastic,” Danny offered with a grin, though they both knew there was more to it than that. He remembered the way she’d spoken to him in his penthouse after the Reaper’s death, the way she’d spoken to him in the hospital after Davos. As much as she might like to pretend otherwise, Jessica Jones cared about people. She cared about Danny. He was smart enough not to mention it aloud. 

His brow furrowed at her response, and he glanced down at the toddler at their feet. He imagined it was scary, meeting a baby who thought you were its parent. It would have freaked him out, too. Looking back to Jessica, he offered her a smile. “Yeah, but you let him. Alternate you named a baby after me.” There was a hint of wonder in his tone, and he wondered briefly if the him that this baby’s mother knew was better than the him of this world. He didn’t have time to dwell on it before Jessica was saying his name again, asking him to take Dani down to find her blanket. Danny grinned at the suggestion, scooping Dani up into his arms. “How about a field trip, Dani? Wow, it’s weird calling somebody else my name.” He glanced back to Wendell, waiting until the other man nodded before looking to Jessica and shifting Dani in his grip enough to offer her a brief thumbs up before walking out the door to fetch the blanket.

Sora snorted from further down the alley, and even Ra’s couldn’t keep an amused smile off his lips despite the man’s state.  “I imagine so, yes.  It’s somewhat easier to be a knight in shining armor, one should think, when your armor is not a cast around a broken bone.”  

He reached out to take the man by the bicep, pulling him up into a fully upright position against the brick.  “You are very fortunate they did not engage you with weapons, in this state.”  Otherwise they would probably be dealing with a corpse rather than a man who looked like he’d much rather be one.   

Sora returned to his side, satisfied that the alleyway was clear, and pursed her lips slightly as she looked down at Danny.  “We need somewhere cleaner, if you’d like us to help patch you up.  We are not familiar with this city–where would you like us to take you?  Is there a medical facility you would prefer?”  Between her and Ra’s there was no question they’d be able to support him wherever he needed to go.  

The woman snorted in a way that reminded Danny a little of Claire, and he offered the man a faint smile and a shrug. “I guess I thought being interrupted would scare them enough to make them run off. I didn’t think they’d actually fight me.” Which, of course, was his mistake. Danny had learned early in his life that he should always be expecting a fight. Things usually went that way when he was involved, after all. 

He grunted as the man pulled him up, clenching his teeth to keep the pain from showing on his face. “Yeah, I don’t think they were armed.” Danny was, of course. He was always armed, had a weapon built right into his fist, but... he couldn’t exactly use it against average street criminals. Not unless he wanted an unfortunate repeat of the Reaper’s death. “I got lucky. I guess they probably saw you guys coming, too. That might be why they left.” This whole thing could have ended a lot worse, and Danny knew that even if he did feel dumber than usual that the altercation had happened at all. 

❛ all i’ve ever wanted to be was useful ❜

NOT HERE SENTENCE MEME || ALWAYS ACCEPTING || @kunlunsironfist

Danny was still recovering. That was what Colleen kept telling herself after she snapped at him for trying to fetch something from the cupboard – but in reality, she was feeling just as useless as him. Danny was still recovering, and Colleen was trying to figure out how to cope. And now she was looking at Danny’s pained expression like he had just been slapped across the face and she knew she had screwed up. But she didn’t realize how deeply she had hit him until they were sitting silently at the dining table. Colleen was looking at him from across the table, feeling an overwhelming amount of guilt in the pit of her stomach. 

She kept telling herself that neither of them were good with words, but she couldn’t even form the sound of an apology. (Was she incapable? Or did she just want to hear what Danny had to say before she said something else she’d regret?) 

It felt like they had been sitting there an hour before Danny finally spoke. And then he said that and Colleen’s eyes fell to the table. Had she made him feel useless? Or was he still feeling that drive that the monks of K’un-Lun had beat into him? He was the Iron Fist. The Immortal Weapon. When he was that he had purpose, he was useful, and Danny had assigned all his worth to that for so long. Colleen opened her mouth and then shook her head. Sorry didn’t feel like enough here – and this was clearly about more than just the tea on the top shelf she couldn’t reach. “Is that… what you want to be to me?” Colleen’s voice was small and the question was heavy. And Colleen was scared of what his answer might be. 

He was getting better. That was what Danny told himself, that was how he kept his chest from tightening and his throat from closing up. He could stand on his own two feet without hurting, walk from room to room without Ward or Colleen yelling at him, kick the practice dummies they’d moved to the corner of the spare room to make space for Ward’s air mattress. He was getting better, but he still couldn’t fight. He still couldn’t go out on the streets and keep the promise he’d made to Matt Murdock, still couldn’t be the person he was meant to be. He felt useless, and it had him on edge. He’d only been trying to help when he’d stretched over Colleen’s head to help her reach the plates on the top shelf, but it was clear that he’d overstepped somehow. He didn’t mean to flinch back when she’d snapped at him, but he had. He couldn’t hide the way his eyes widened, couldn’t stop the brief display of hurt that flashed across his features, and he knew she saw it.

It hung over them for what felt like an eternity, like a powder keg centimeters away from a lit match. They both knew an explosion was coming --- the only questions were when it would hit and how bad it would be. The silence was thick and uncomfortable, and when Danny finally broke it, he sounded small. He felt small, too. 

There had never been any easy parts to their relationship, there were moments that were gentle and soft and gave them a taste of what it’d be like to have a normal life – but they’d never have that. Their lives were one trial after another. A responsibility they both felt towards the community to make it better after seeing people they care about be the ones to destroy it. For Colleen, it was the Hand recruiting those kids and taking what was left of their childhood before turning them into warriors. And Danny? She was sure that the violence that Davos expensed with the Iron Fist felt like something he needed to make right. And while they were trying to make amends, trying to wipe the red out of their pasts, they were never going to know peace. Ghosts were following them around and demanding that they make amends for their failures. (But they’d both deny it if confronted about it.) But Colleen knew – and she wondered if Danny knew and understood. They were both trying to make up for their pasts, to make things better so that no child would have to deal with the same shit they did. 

They were trying to set up the next generation for a better chance – for better opportunities than they had. And that was hard enough on their own – but when they weren’t talking about things like this, it only made things that much harder. 

And she could see it in his expression when he started speaking again. He wanted to lie to her. Wanted to push this away and move on like this had never happened and Colleen wasn’t sure what she would do if that was the path he decided to take. (Despite knowing that he was lying – it was rare that Colleen could actually pry the truth from him when he really didn’t want to share. Much like that night where he made pancakes at three in the morning.) And he already felt a thousand miles away from her – further away than he had been when he had been halfway across the world. And after what happened with Davos, she was worried that it would happen again. That this was just the start of another crack in their relationship. He had told her once already that it wasn’t like that – but it felt like it. No amount of words would tear that fear away from Colleen. 

Watching him now, she followed his eyes to the shelves in their room. She didn’t call him out on it – but she wondered what was happening inside his head. Wondered how much he was trying to push away. Her eyes snapped back towards Danny, her mouth falling open slightly. “Did — when you told Claire and I that you were going there and you demanded to go alone — did you see him before that conversation or after?” Colleen went silent. Taking her hand off of Danny’s shoulder, Colleen put both hands on her knees and tried to catch her breath. 

“Which time, Danny?” Colleen asked in a quiet voice. “In the alley when you took that bullet for me or — or at the warehouses?” She had seen the way he looked right after the Reaper had died, the way he didn’t look at Colleen or the body, she had thought at the time that he simply couldn’t look her in the eyes after what had happened… but now? Now she was sure he was haunted in an entirely different way. 

Danny wondered, sometimes, just how much the two of them could take. How much weight could they carry on their shoulders before their backs broke under the strain of it? There were days when Danny woke up and feared the dam holding him together was too fractured to continue, days when he lay in bed and stared up at the ceiling and tried desperately to remember how to breathe. On those days, Colleen was always there. She was right beside him, the steady rise and fall of her chest giving him a demonstration and reminding him how to mimic her. She could hold him together in her sleep, without knowing she was doing it at all, and Danny liked to think he helped hold her together, too. Ever since that night outside the Hand compound, ever since he gathered her into his arms and begged her to stop destroying things with him. They’d become a unit then, and they were one again now. 

Danny and Colleen were good at holding each other up, but... he couldn’t help but wonder how long it was feasible. As much as he tried to deny it, he knew that they were both broken. They were both shattered in places that could never be fully repaired, both held together with tape and glue that did a poor job of keeping their pieces in place. One day, one of them was going to break... and Danny was terrified it would be him. He was terrified it had already happened, afraid that these broken, irreparable pieces were all he had to offer her now. Colleen deserved the world, and Danny couldn’t even give her a man who could keep his head focused on what was real. 

(Maybe, some dark part of his mind whispered, he should have stayed in Birch. Maybe he’d belonged there, earned his spot among the man who was arrested screaming at nothing in Times Square or the one who swore there was a ghost in the corner of the hallway that spoke to him when no one else was around. Maybe this was a break that had been a long time coming.)

He knew Colleen didn’t miss the way his eyes scanned the room, knew what she must have thought of him, but she didn’t say anything. She didn’t mention the way his hands shook even as he pushed them against the mattress to hide it, didn’t mention how ragged his breathing was. She was just there. She was always there. Danny didn’t think he’d ever stop loving her for that. “After,” he said quietly, remembering the first time he’d seen Lei Kung in the dojo. “But... Not very long after. Claire, she... She heard me talking to him once.” He remembered the unmistakable concern on her face when she’d asked who he was talking to, remembered side-stepping her question quickly because even then, he’d known it wasn’t normal. He’d known it wasn’t right. 

Colleen was filled with nervous energy. She hadn’t felt this way since the moment she was standing in Bakuto’s office and he was telling her that lying to Danny was the right thing to do. And that very feeling that dug at her in that moment was what lead her to betray Bakuto in the first place, what lead her back to Danny on Claire’s rooftop, what lead her to the hospital where she tried to get antibiotics for Danny’s wound — following that feeling had destroyed everything she thought was solid in her life. It tore apart every relationship she had, from the Hand to her friendships with Claire and Danny. She had been so loyal to Bakuto and the Hand that she hadn’t considered that maybe she had mixed feelings about what was going on for a reason. Feeling that again terrified her, and she wanted to push it away, pretend that she didn’t feel this overwhelming dread building in the pit of her stomach. 

But she couldn’t. And she wondered if Danny could feel it too. Sitting on the edge of their bed, Colleen gripped the edge of the bed and tried to catch her breath despite feeling like she was being suffocated. But the main question was – what did she want? A relationship with a man who was ultimately just visiting? Did she owe it to herself to have a conversation with him? Or was she better off just ignoring that she had ever discovered that relationship between them? He was her father and despite everything he had done, she wanted to know what it was like to have one. To have someone look at her like she was a daughter – their family. (And sometimes she got that from glances from Danny and Ward, but it wasn’t the same.) 

“Yeah?” Colleen asked, her voice weak. Maybe Danny’s father was the family member they had been waiting for. The flesh and blood that didn’t want to hurt him or abuse him for the power he held. (Tony and Peggy were like that too – good to him in a way that Colleen hadn’t seen in the Meachums.) “I hope so, he seems nice — and you deserve it.” A real family. A break. Everything. They fought so many battles recently, it would have been nice to not have to face another one now… but would they be so lucky? Or would were the odds forever going to be against them? 

(And for a brief moment, Colleen was okay with that. Even if the world was falling apart. At least they had each other. They could handle whatever happened – together.)

With Danny sitting next to her, Colleen leaned into his side, placing a hand on his leg, just above his knee as she tried to collect her thoughts. Danny had a point. Maybe Bakuto was different in the universe he came from – but that also opened the door to him not being her father and that… made her feel mixed up again. “Maybe, but… do you really believe that?” Colleen asked in a hushed whisper. She could practically hear the doubt in his voice, but she wanted him to say it out loud – to tell her that he wasn’t comfortable, or that he needed her to take Bakuto out of the dojo – because Colleen was too lost in her own head to make any decisions… too lost to trust her own judgments. “I don’t know how to feel… about any of it. I know what I want but—” Colleen shook her head. “I’m not sure I’m seeing it clearly,” Colleen confessed. Following his gaze towards the fire escape, Colleen couldn’t help but smile. “You asking me to run away with you, Danny?” She asked lightly, wishing that it would be enough to cut through the tension they were both feeling. But it wasn’t. Not really. “Can we try dinner? Give it… a chance?” 

Family was complicated. Danny knew that, felt that twinge in his leg at the thought. His family had always been something of a mess, even before the plane crash that fragmented it beyond repair. Ward had been an absolute ass of an older brother, and while Danny knew now that the circumstances had been more complex than he’d known back then, that knowledge did little for the eight year old kid who didn’t understand why the boy he followed around like a lost puppy dog took so much pleasure in beating the crap out of him. Joy had been a good sister until she wasn’t, Harold the coolest uncle a kid could ask for until he was signing Danny’s death warrant over and over again. Davos was a mess of complications that Danny knew he’d never fully sort out, and while things with Tony and Sharon were good, they were no less complex. Tony was sick, and the secret of the Iron Fist hung between Danny and Sharon like a bomb with a ticking clock. Family was complicated, but for one shining moment, he’d seen his father on the other side of his door and thought it might not have to be.

Then it all came crashing down, because of course it did. Of course Wendell Rand wasn’t the only person who’d come back to life with the help of a portal from another world, and of course Bakuto was one of the people who’d come through. Danny might have been able to forgive the man for most of what he’d done. If it had only been him Bakuto had hurt, if that knife sliding between his ribs and breaking off at the hilt was the only scar he’d left, Danny probably wouldn’t have a problem with him at all. But that wasn’t the case. This was the man who had shot Joy to prove a point, the man who’d cut into Colleen, the man who’d sliced Misty’s arm clean off. This was the man who’d left Colleen looking so hopeless and desolate outside the Hand compound that all she could think to do was ask Danny to destroy her.

This was that man... but it wasn’t.

As far as Danny knew, this Bakuto had done none of that. He couldn’t know what things were like in the world that this version of Bakuto hailed from. He couldn’t know if this version of Bakuto was the sort of man who would shoot Joy or slice through Misty or hurt Colleen. All Danny knew about this Bakuto was that Colleen looked like she’d seen a ghost at the sight of him, and all he could do was defer to her judgement on the matter. It was Colleen’s choice, what they did here. It didn’t matter how hard Danny’s heart was pounding, it didn’t matter if the scar on his stomach itched in a way that didn’t make sense, it didn’t matter if his leg twinged for reasons he didn’t understand. This was Colleen’s father. This was her choice. She’d offer him the same.

He smiled faintly when she spoke, nodding hesitantly. It was important to remember that Bakuto wasn’t the only one in their kitchen. Danny’s father was out there, too. The man he’d wondered about for years now, the face in his memories that he’d almost forgotten. “I --- I think he is nice. He seems nice.” That was a strange thing to say about your father, wasn’t it? He seems nice. Like he’d never met the man before. Like it was a stranger in his kitchen and not the man he’d been mourning since he was ten years old.