Archive of Our Own ^beta

The night he killed Harold, he slept better than he had in years, but that still wasn’t saying much. Ward didn’t remember the last good night of sleep he’d had, really. Usually he hit one AM with his eyelids still wired open and just took something so he could finally go to bed.

But the night he killed Harold, the night he pushed his corpse into the lagoon at Pelham Bay Park where he’d left two other bodies earlier that same goddamn week, the night he scrubbed blood up off the floor with bleach—he didn’t need anything to knock him out. If he wanted inner peace, this was it. To hell with rehab. He’d gotten the only thing he needed: he’d gotten the best day of his life back again. Harold was dead, and Ward was—

He was sitting at his desk at Rand.

No, this wasn’t right. This wasn’t—he’d been home. He’d been looking in the mirror, shaving. He’d been thinking it was all over. Dad, Danny, even Rand. The past had been trimmed out of his life like dead wood. It was over. He and Joy could start fresh.

He’d been looking at his reflection, and now he wasn’t. He touched his cheek: smooth, clean-shaven. No sign that he’d had some kind of mental breakdown and wandered into work with the job only half-done.

Fine. This was manageable. He’d had a blackout, that was all. Some kind of… delayed stress reaction. And he’d walked back into Rand, which must have given Laurence a shit-fit. He’d have to get out of here, but: manageable.

And then Danny walked in—Danny, who’d regressed to his homeless hipster look right down to the no-shoes bullshit. Fantastic.

“I thought I told you—”

“Who are you?” Danny said. “Where’s Harold?”

“Where’s Harold?” Ward stood up, pushing his chair away. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

Joy took a few steps in and then pulled up short, looking at Danny like he was something utterly inexplicable, like some mangy stray that had wandered into Ward’s office by mistake.

As if she had no idea who he was at all.

Danny said, “Ward?” like he was squinting at a blurry picture, trying to identify it. “Joy? It’s Danny! Danny Rand.” He started towards Joy and she recoiled, and Ward rose to get in between them, and that—that was a reaction he’d had before. Joy didn’t scare easily, and on top of that, not a lot of people were stupid enough to go after her. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d seen her pull back that way, and he knew with grade-A steel certainty which time this was.

There was the assistant hovering in the doorway, trying to figure out whether or not she should call security, not knowing that Danny had already kicked six different kinds of shit out of security on his way up here.

But this was impossible.

“This can’t be happening,” he said.

“I know it’s hard to believe.” Danny basically collapsed into the chair in front of his desk, leaning so far towards Ward that it was a miracle he wasn’t falling over. “Trust me, I know. But if you’ll just get your dad, I can explain everything.”

“Oh, I really doubt that,” Ward said.

Joy cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, but Harold Meachum is dead. Twelve years ago. Cancer.”

Ward had to press his fist to his mouth to keep himself from laughing. Danny was saying something—if Ward remembered right, some bullshit consolation about how all their parents were gone now—and Joy was answering him or trying to. And he was losing his mind.

“You’re Danny Rand,” he said, breaking into whatever the hell they were talking about. “You’ve been living in a monastery learning kung fu, and your hand lights up like a glowstick. Yeah. The details were fascinating enough the first time around, I don’t really need to hear them again.”

Danny’s jaw dropped, and for a second, he looked exactly like he had when they were kids, and it made Ward’s stomach lurch.

“Ward,” Joy said quietly, “what are you talking about?”

“How do you know all that?” Danny said.

“Let’s just say I’ve been briefed on the fact that you might show up,” Ward said. He turned to Joy. “Give me some time alone with him and I promise I’ll explain everything later.” He wouldn’t—couldn’t—but he’d had to come up with lies to tell her before. But he’d been done with it—for a few hours, for a night, he’d been finished with all the lying, all the evasions. And now here he was, back—back with Danny, purveyor of mystical bullshit, Harold’s favorite son. If he thought about Harold right now, he’d go crazier than he was already. He said to the assistant, “Security’s going to call up and say our friend here tossed the guards around the lobby. Tell them I’m fine and I’m handling it. I’m taking him out through the back and we’re going for a walk.”

It took a little more negotiating than that, and Danny kept making interjections that were totally unhelpful, but ten minutes later, they were at least out on the sidewalk.

“Do they not have shoes in the Himalayas?” Ward said. “However the hell you got all the way back to New York, you couldn’t have up any shoes on the way?”

“I don’t understand any of this,” Danny said. He was still looking at Ward with that same confused puppy look. His voice was soft. “Did… did you know where I was the whole time?”

This might be the first time he’d ever needed to deny something because it really wasn’t true. “No. Danny, think about it for two seconds. I was fifteen when your plane crashed, it’s not like I was hiring a private eye.”

Then again, it wasn’t like the truth made any more sense.

“All right.” Danny was still looking at him in a way Ward didn’t even recognize: he looked almost wary, which was bizarre, because if anything, Ward had been nicer to him this time around. “Why did we have to go outside?”

“You broke into my office and I was supposed to just let you stay there? Besides, it’s bugged.” He found himself twitching the fingers on his left hand. His very unbruised, pain-free left hand. “So help me, Danny, if you know anything about this—”

“Anything about what?” Danny lowered his voice. “Is this some sort of test? Are you working with Lei Kung?”

“I don’t know who that is,” Ward said. He sighed and pressed his fingers against his forehead, like there was any chance in hell that he was going to stave off this particular headache. “Let’s go somewhere, all right? We’re attracting too much attention.”

He looked down at Danny’s bare feet, which honest-to-God looked cleaner than he would have guessed given that Danny had been walking all over the city. Somehow he didn’t expect that argument to hold any water with a hotel. He could pay them enough to ignore it, but they’d still notice. Danny was a walking publicity magnet.

Ward took a deep breath. “What size shoe do you wear?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know. How do you not—”

“There weren’t exactly a lot of Footlockers where I’ve been for the last twelve years. When we wore shoes, we made them by hand, out of yak hide.”

“Since I don’t see any yaks around here, I’m going to make an educated guess.” He called the Rand front desk and asked an assistant to run his gym bag down to him. “You can wear some of mine for right now. I’m booking a hotel room; we can talk there.” He didn’t trust his townhouse any more than he trusted the office. “Until then, just shut up. Trust me when I tell you that there’s nothing the two of us could possibly say to each other that we’d want anyone else to overhear.”

Danny’s circuits seemed overloaded enough to blow, at least if the way he squeezed his eyes shut was any indication. “I have to find my center. This isn’t anything like what I expected.”

“Yeah, join the club. What, are you having a panic attack?”

“I really need silence to concentrate.”

“Fine by me,” Ward muttered.

And it would have gone on being fine by him if his gym bag hadn’t arrived while Danny was still half-zonked. Ward wound up crouching down and basically shoving Danny’s feet into his gym shoes—anything to get them off this sidewalk—and when he pulled the laces tight, he looked up to see Danny gazing down at him with some kind of dipshit serenity that he apparently couldn’t have achieved two minutes earlier.

“What,” Ward said.

“Nothing, I just—I remember you doing this when we were kids. I mean, half the time you tied my laces together, but still.” He was smiling. “I guess some things don’t change.”

“What hasn’t changed is that I’m still having to do the crap that you should be able to do yourself.”

Good, that wiped that cozy we’re-all-family smile off Danny’s face.

They were halfway to the hotel when Danny said, “Did you even miss me?”

Had he missed Danny, the old Danny? Kid Danny?

You cry at the funeral, Ward, Harold had told him, when he’d caught Ward alone and wet-eyed, his hand curled around a pair of old sunglasses Danny had left at their place—that had been a month after all of it. You cry at the funeral, just a little. That’s only human. Anything else, well—what good does it do to sit around weeping for some people who weren’t even family? The Rands are gone, son. The last thing you want is to wallow.

I wasn’t that nice to him, Ward had said.

Harold had looked at him steadily for a moment and then gripped Ward’s shoulders hard enough to bruise. Only a pussy wastes time regretting the past. And that’s not how I remember it, anyway. Danny was your friend. Choose the simplest story, Ward: it plays better. He’d cupped his hand against Ward’s flushed cheek, holding him like that for what felt like an eternity before he wrinkled his nose at the dampness, the tear-stains, and pulled back, drying his fingers on a handkerchief. I’m just trying to help you become someone who can leave his own mark on the world, follow in my footsteps. God knows you make it hard—so stop bawling like a little girl. 

He hadn’t thought about that in years, really—that there’d been a window of time when he’d wanted Danny to walk through the door again, when he’d wished he’d done things differently.

“Yeah.” He’d broken his stride, but he picked it up again. “Yeah, I did.” Not that it mattered. Him missing Danny hadn’t brought Danny back.

And whatever Danny liked to think, they weren’t brothers. They never had been. All of Ward’s responsibilities were to Joy, not to Danny and especially not to the Danny those missing twelve years had produced, to the Danny who was a stranger to him and buddies with Harold.

But Danny was settled in his own skin again, like what Ward had said had really mattered to him. He moved in expansive, bouncy steps and said, “So why a hotel?”

“Because it’s private,” Ward said shortly. “We book rooms sometimes for extremely low-profile business meetings.”

“Do you remember when you and Joy and I ordered in all that room service at that hotel in LA? I ate, like, three brownie sundaes and you drank a bunch of those little bottles of whiskey out of the minibar? And Joy kept flicking my maraschino cherries at you?”

“This place doesn’t have a minibar.” He knew that wasn’t the point, but like hell was he getting dragged down Danny Rand’s memory lane.

“You caught one in your mouth,” Danny added. “One of the cherries.”

“Yay for me.” He pushed through the revolving door and let Danny trail along behind him, gaping at everything. Danny thought he was an asshole? Ward ought to tell him that he looked like a damn tourist with his mouth hanging open like that: it was the worst insult you could lay on any born-and-bred New Yorker, and Danny deserved it.

Whatever—for right now, it was probably for the best that Danny looked like either a tourist or an aimless stoner. The city was full of both. As long as he had shoes, at least, he wouldn’t attract too much attention.

Ward checked them in, and the second they were in the room, the second he had the door locked behind them, he said, “I seriously need to tell you if you know what’s happening here.”

“You booked us a hotel room because you think Rand is bugged,” Danny said. He poked at the bed, watching as the depression his finger had made in it filled back up again.

“The repeat, Danny.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Danny said. There was an edge in his voice now, and his jaw had tightened up. “I don’t know what the ‘repeat’ is, I don’t know how you knew about K’un-Lun, and I don’t know what’s going on with you that this is how you’re dealing with me being back home.”

“It’s not about you! None of this is about you, is that so hard to understand?” He pushed his hands through his hair. He was sweating; his nerves were all over the place. He needed a pill. He took a deep breath. “I’ve lived through this day before. All of it. It’s supposed to be weeks later than it is right now, and yet somehow, I’m back here. With you.” He glared at Danny, waiting for some kind of response.

Danny said, almost confidentially, “See, it sounds like you think it kind of does have something to do with me.”

Ward wanted to smash his face in.

Danny tucked his feet up underneath him on the bed, probably doing some kind of stealth yoga. His eyes looked chipmunk-bright. “First of all, I’m not the one who made you travel in time, so you have to accept that it doesn’t make any sense for you to get pissed at me for not knowing what’s going on with you.”

“It feels like it does.”

He should have known Danny would refuse to even react to that. “I can help you figure it out, I think, but…” He shrugged. “I just got back?” he added, a little hopefully, like he wanted Ward to drop everything and take him sightseeing. “You’re hitting me with a lot at once, Ward, and you’re being kind of a dick about it.”

It hadn’t actually occurred to him that Danny could fix the problem; he’d just thought there was a good chance that the problem was Danny’s fault. He hadn’t gotten to the point of imagining any kind of practical solution. He just wanted to get this out of his life.

Scream until the problem went away. No wonder he’d spent years needing Harold to hold his hand.

He didn’t trust Danny, not even close, but if Danny really didn’t remember anything that happened since he’d gotten back—the other time he’d gotten back—then Ward had the upper hand. Information was power.

He hadn’t thought about what he would have done differently if he’d known from the start that Danny was Danny, and he didn’t know now, not really. Danny was still a problem, and Ward still wanted him gone. But if he’d known this was Danny, the Danny he’d let himself miss for a while, all those years ago—if he’d known that before he’d known how much Danny was going to screw up his life—

Well, he hadn’t known, and he didn’t know it now, either. But he knew more than Danny did.

And he knew what had started this, or at least he had a damn good idea of it. If he thought about it too long, he’d lose what was left of his mind. He had to stay focused. He couldn’t break down, not in front of Danny.

He exhaled. “Yeah. This is hitting me all at once, so I’m hitting you all at once. Sorry.” Not a word he used a lot.

He wished this place did have a minibar. He could drink his way through it and see if he woke up back in his real life.

“What was it like this first time?” Danny said. “Me coming back.”

“I didn’t think you were you, for starters. Neither did Joy.” Until she’d proven it with kid Danny’s dumbass arts and crafts project—did he want to bring that into play yet? Did he want to make Danny’s reappearance official?

No. Not if he could avoid it. He had to keep Danny’s presence in New York low-key somehow, even though low-key was the last label anyone would stick on Danny.

But Harold couldn’t know about Danny, and Danny couldn’t know about Harold.

“Can you stay here for a few days?” Ward said, pulling out his wallet. He counted off bills, trying to think what Danny would need to get through a week or so.

“I kinda thought I might… come back for good,” Danny said awkwardly.

Ward sighed. “Here as in this hotel. Can you stay here for a few days while I try to get things sorted out?”

“I’ve been away for twelve years,” Danny said. “I don’t want to spend another week cooped up in a hotel room. I mean, I’ve barely talked to Joy.” A hint of sheepishness crossed his face. “I haven’t even had a bagel yet.”

It turned out the only thing more frustrating than Danny was trying to control Danny. “I can bring you a bagel. –Actually, no, you can go get your own. Go wherever you want. Just sleep here so I can reach you if I need to, stay away from Rand, and don’t cause any trouble. Don’t break into dojos. Don’t give any statements to the press.”

“Did I break into a dojo last time?”

“Just—act like a person,” Ward said, stressing the words. He held out the cash to Danny.

Danny took it. He looked a little bemused. “Haven’t seen money in a while.”

“Yeah. You’re adorably out-of-touch with our soulless corporate society, I get it.” He turned to go.

“Thanks for the shoes,” Danny said. “I know it’s been a while, but I don’t think they let you into the Stage Deli without them.”

“They wouldn’t have, but it’s closed. Go to Katz’s.”

“Thanks,” Danny said again, and Ward left him like that, sitting cross-legged on the clean hotel bed, looking down at the money in his hand.

Ward did remember the thing with the maraschino cherries, now that he thought about it. It was mostly a blur, a prelude to his first real hangover, but yeah, it rang a bell. Danny always used to give the cherries on his sundaes away. They’d been the one thing he wouldn’t eat. And Ward, thirteen, drunk, had caught one in his mouth and almost swallowed it stem and all, and Danny had fallen off the bed from laughing so hard.

***

He took a Percodan in the car, just enough to sand down the edges; he felt like his head was full of broken glass.

There was an easy, obvious proximate cause to whatever the hell was happening to him.

He’d killed Harold, and the universe had reset itself. He’d killed Harold, and time had upended itself to bring Harold back to life.

And if that was true, then—

Ward gripped the steering wheel tightly. He could hear the blood pounding in his ears.

If that was true, then Harold was forever. Ward would never get away from him. And he might as well slam his car straight into the parking garage wall, harder than Danny ever had.

“No,” he said out loud. “No, I’m not there yet.”

He hadn’t lived his whole goddamn life under Harold’s thumb only to die there. He hadn’t. He could—there had to be a way out of this. He didn’t care what he had to do.

“You don’t win.” He just mouthed the words, not even saying them out loud: the car was probably as bugged as the office. “You don’t.”

He shut off the car and sat there a minute, shaking, watching his breath fog up the windshield. He didn’t know whether or not he was going to throw up. Lucky him: he hadn’t eaten much today anyway. He got out of the car.

The walk to the penthouse was the longest of his life, more than long enough to sharpen all the glass edges up again and make him wish he’d taken another Percodan, at least another half of one.

Find out whether or not he knows. If he knows, I’m screwed. Find out whether or not he did this somehow; does he have any control over it? Does he know about Danny yet?

If he didn’t, it was only a matter of time. Danny had blurted his name out in the office. So that ship had sailed. 

If he remembered what Ward had done to him—

I’m not going to punish you for it, Harold had said to him, all benevolent indulgence, but he’d been talking about the embezzling, not anything before or afterwards. He’d still gotten sucker-punched for talking back: the only things Harold was willing to forgive were the things that happened to other people. If Ward let him down, if Ward screwed up, then he paid and paid and paid. There was a fucking repeat for you.

He pressed his hand against the lock panel and let himself in.

He didn’t even have a second’s luxury of pretending he’d find Harold dead on the floor. Instead, Harold was working over the punching bag, slamming into it in a way that made Ward’s chest tighten up. Right then he could feel every bruise he’d ever gotten in this place.

“Ward! To what do I owe the unexpected pleasure?”

You’re supposed to be dead, you’re supposed to be dead, I killed you, I saw the look on your face—

“You mean the uninvited pleasure,” Ward said, with as much ease as he could muster when he still felt like he was going to pass out.

“Well, it’s true that you’re interrupting my workout, but I can make the time.”

“Generous of you.”

Harold looked at him steadily and threw one last punch at the bag, sending it swinging. He pulled back, rolling his shoulders, and started unwrapping his hands. “What’s on your mind, son?”

“Some lunatic bashed his way through the building today claiming to be Danny Rand.” He watched Harold’s face closely. “He got all the way up to my office, believe it or not.”

“I hope you took care of him,” Harold said. Expression so completely smooth that he could have been the photo Ward had to see every day in the lobby.

“Don’t you know?” Ward said quietly.

Harold chuckled. “I don’t check in on you every minute of the day, Ward. I like to think that you can at least get yourself dressed in the mornings, for example. Though… I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of that tie.” He walked to the kitchen and took a pitcher out of the fridge. It was full of seaweed-colored sludge. “Smoothie,” he said, taking down two glasses. “Have one.”

“No thanks.”

“Help you live longer.”

“I’m fine with my life span being whatever doesn’t require me to drink that.”

Harold shrugged. “Suit yourself. Don’t complain when someday you look older than I do.” He poured and then drained the glass in several gulps. “A fake Danny Rand. That’s an interesting curveball.”

“Right when we’re about to announce the expansion. I thought of that. But our competition could pay enough to get a better actor.”

“An independent nutcase, then.”

Ward didn’t want to push it too far. Harold had taught him that: in a high-pressure negotiation, never make it too clear to what results you want. “Maybe.”

“If he resurfaces again, have Shannon take care of him. I don’t want him gumming up the works.”

“Consider it done.”

“I’m glad you stopped by,” Harold said. He looked down at the untouched glass on the counter, the one he’d set down for Ward, and something like a smile crossed his face. “Sometimes I feel like, oh, you’ll come when I call, but it’s never your idea. To know that you wanted to come to see me—that means something, Ward.”

He didn’t want to say anything. He wasn’t going to say anything. “It does?”

“Of course it does,” Harold said heartily. “And, hell, I know that you don’t drink this stuff. Let me me break out a bottle of bourbon for you. That’s your drink, isn’t it?”

“Uh, yeah.” He watched in silent amazement as Harold went to the liquor cabinet and found the bottle of bourbon; he even traded the unused smoothie glass for a lowball one made of heavy crystal.

“I could drink it out of the other one,” Ward said.

“Nonsense. Why even do something if you’re not going to do it properly?” He poured and held out the drink. “Here.”

“Thanks,” Ward said uncertainly. He came closer and reached out.

Harold grabbed his hand and pulled it down flat against the countertop; he slammed the lowball glass down hard on Ward’s fingers.

The heavy, leaded crystal didn’t break.

He couldn’t say the same for him. The pain sent him down to his knees on the kitchen floor, grabbing his wrist and holding it like he needed a tourniquet; it was like a stick of dynamite had gone off in his hand. I just got this back to normal, he thought dizzily, looking at the red and purple mottling already spreading across it. And this was worse than what he’d done to it with the car door. He was breathing fast, trying not to throw up.

“Oh, stop blubbering.” Harold dropped a dishrag down to him. “Here, you can wrap it up. I think it’s interesting that you were in such a rush to get over here and tell me about this Danny Rand impersonator—to keep me informed—but you didn’t even mention that you seemed to already know who he was.” He took a sip of Ward’s drink. “As a matter of fact, you ushered him out of Rand yourself… and, unless I’m mistaken, booked him into the Plaza.”

Ward pulled himself to his feet, his hand white-knuckled on the countertop. “Are you tracking my credit cards?” He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of that. He needed to just assume that there wasn’t a single part of his life that his father hadn’t snaked into somehow. And he’d forgotten that he’d said all that kung fu crap while he was still in the office. Great, he had a month’s head-start on Harold—maybe—and Harold was still winning. And he’d been stupid. So fucking stupid.

Harold hadn’t even bothered to answer his question about the credit cards. He refilled the lowball glass, extra generously this time, and slid it across the counter to Ward. He was studying him.

“You’re usually predictable,” Harold said. “Today’s an—intriguing exception.”

“Not one you seem to be encouraging,” Ward said. He wrapped his left hand around the glass and drank. He wasn’t just going to leave it sitting there, was he? And he needed whatever numbness he could get.

“It’s your dishonesty that bothers me, Ward, not your imitative. How many times do I have to tell you that you can trust me?”

He held on tight to the glass, like it was the only thing in the world. “I know.”

“I wouldn’t worry about your hand. I bang mine up worse than that all the time, just like I was when you came in here. I barely even notice it anymore.” He clapped Ward on the shoulder. “Now tell me all about this fake Danny Rand. I have to say I’m intrigued.”

“There’s not much to tell.” He wasn’t in the right shape for thinking, and he needed to think fast. “He’s a lunatic. I’ve run into him before, and he gave me his whole spiel then. He just doesn’t remember it.”

Harold seemed unconvinced by that, but all he said was, “And the reason you decided he was worth a room at the Plaza?”

“Running around town, he’s a loose cannon. At least this way, I keep him under control.”

Harold scoffed. “I didn’t think I raised you to be such a bleeding heart. What are you going to do next, find him a job?”

“Yeah,” Ward said. “Because God knows your biggest problem would be if I turned into the kind of person who helped the homeless. No, I’m not that nice. I just want him out of the way until we announce the expansion. Then he can go back to yelling on street corners.”

“If you ask me, it’s a waste of money. There are cheaper ways.”

“I didn’t ask you.”

Harold smiled. “No, you didn’t. But you did lie to me about it. Why was that, exactly? Because for everything that’s coming out of your mouth right now, I’m still not sure you’ve given me a real reason.”

Ward exhaled through his teeth. “I don’t have to tell you everything. I didn’t lie, I just didn’t mention it. Jesus, what do you want, a minute-by-minute rundown of my entire day? I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“All right.” Harold had had a lidless, attentive look, like a snake watching a mouse, but now he finally seemed to relax, his face softening, his voice turning indulgent. “And maybe I went too far with your hand—I’ll admit that. I just can’t stand the thought that after all these years, my son, the son I handpicked to follow in my footsteps, to carry my name… is still the scared little boy who didn’t want to tell me he broke the lamp in the foyer.” He squeezed Ward’s shoulders. “Can you understand that?”

“I’m not that kid anymore,” Ward said.

“When you stand up straight like that and look me in the eye, I can believe it.” He gave Ward a final squeeze and then let him go, smiling. “This is what I want for us, you know that.”

He didn’t know that, not remotely, but he’d like to. He thought of the muffled sound Harold had made when the knife had gone into him, and his stomach turned over.

He could change that. He could—manage this and see if there was another way. He could control Danny, he could control Dad, he could make sure everything went the way it was supposed to. If he just managed it right, he could win. He could get it right; he knew he could.

***

“What is going on with that guy claiming to be Danny—God, Ward, what happened to your hand? Did he do that to you?”

For a crazy second, he thought that Joy knew somehow, and it was like a complete whiteout in his brain. How irredeemably could he have already blown this for her to have found out about Harold? But she meant Danny.

“No,” Ward said, although he didn’t know why: it would probably be more efficient to have assault charges waiting in the wings for Danny if he decide to throw some epic tantrum about getting back into Rand. But it wasn’t like he hadn’t gotten in a lot of practice automatically lying about crap like this. “I closed it in a car door.” Hey, that was almost true. It had been true once, anyway.

“Okay,” Joy said slowly. “Then let me go back to my first question. What the hell was that?”

He told her more or less what he’d told Harold, with a little more delicacy dancing around the fact that supposedly he’d had a run-in with this guy that he’d never told her about.

“You had a hard time with Danny’s death,” he said. Such a hard time that she’d apparently kept his kindergarten artwork around, which he still couldn’t fathom. “I didn’t want to bring all those feelings up again just because some jackass decided that he wanted to cash in on the legend of the lost billionaire heir. He’s deranged, and I’m not overlooking the possibility that someone spun him up and aimed him at us right when it would be especially inconvenient.”

“He did look like Danny, though,” Joy said, biting her lower lip. “Didn’t he?”

“Come on, you saw him for maybe four seconds. Trust me, up close, with time to really look at him, there’s no real resemblance.”

“Yeah. You’re probably right.” She sat down, leaning back in a way that rumpled her blouse and left her looking unguarded: he didn’t know if anyone else ever saw her that way.

He wanted her to have that, to have a life where she could really relax sometimes, where she didn’t have to feel like she was constantly being weighed and measured and coming up short. He didn’t know what he would have done if she had known about Harold. Ward’s whole job was to stop that from happening.

“I just miss him, you know?” Joy said. “Danny was a good kid. Gentler than either one of us. Guess he got that from his parents.”

That gentleness hadn’t lasted, that was for sure. He heard himself saying, “He was, yeah. I was thinking about—about that time I looked after the two of you in the hotel while Dad and Mr. and Mrs. Rand were at that awards thing. We ordered in all that room service, and you took Danny’s cherries off those sundaes he kept getting—”

“I remember that.” She smiled. “You started getting pretty good at catching them.”

“Yeah, that’s like my one skill when I’m drunk.

“You couldn’t have been drunk. We were—you were only—”

“Trust me, I was drunk.”

“Huh. Well, that does explain why you were so mellow that night. A lot of the time, around Danny, you were like,” she waved her hand around, “a porcupine.”

“A porcupine,” Ward said.

“You’re the one who acted that way. I’m just describing it. He got under your skin.”

That much hadn’t changed. But he thought about Danny’s sunglasses in his hands, all those years ago, and Harold saying, Choose the simplest story. Thought about Danny accusing him of all kinds of childhood bullshit, and him saying flatly, None of that is true. He was tired and his hand was sore and all he had keeping him on his feet was a generous pour of his dead dad’s whiskey and a bunch of painkillers. He didn’t want to think about Danny or the nature of time, and he sure as shit didn’t want to think about both of them together.

He went home, toasted a bagel for dinner, and fell asleep.

***

When he woke up, he had to check his hand: yep, fingers splinted. He was still on round two. He rolled over and pressed his face into his pillow, seriously considering smothering himself.

Whatever optimism he’d had about changing his life felt like bullshit at six in the morning. He didn’t feel like he was in control of anything.

He sat up, his back against the headboard, and took stock.

Harold knew about his escape fund. Ward could try to transfer some of the money elsewhere, but it was disturbingly possible that Harold had screenshots of whatever the Rand accounts had looked like before he’d gone in and cleaned them up for the SEC. Ward could save a fraction of the money, sure, but if he tried to actually use it to get away, Harold probably had ammunition enough to get him arrested. And he’d use it.

Besides, that money was tainted now that he knew Harold had sat back and watched it accumulate, laughing at him the whole time. Even thinking about it nauseated him.

The fund was out. He’d have to funnel the money back into Rand somehow.

He had his own savings, obviously. It wasn’t enough to break away and live forever in the lap of luxury, but it would buy him some time. Same problem, though. Harold still had the evidence; he could tug that leash at any time.

Yeah, and why wouldn’t he. You gave it to him. If you hadn’t done it, he couldn’t have used it against you.

And if Harold hadn’t been a goddamn monster half the time, Ward wouldn’t have needed an escape fund in the first place. And he wouldn’t have killed Harold, and he wouldn’t have traveled in fucking time.

He couldn’t leave Dad alone in the same city as Joy, anyway. That wasn’t happening.

So he wasn’t leaving, period. He couldn’t make a stronger case for Joy leaving Rand than the one he’d already made. He was stuck.

If he pulled himself together, if he didn’t let Danny into their lives, if he didn’t fly off the handle—no claw-hammer, no smashed teeth. No severed heads on poles. Maybe then everything would stay manageable.

Who was he kidding? Having Danny in New York at all smashed that hope to smithereens. Danny was the opposite of manageable. He was probably off somewhere right now totally disregarding everything Ward had told him about keeping a low profile. He was probably giving on-camera, shoeless interviews talking about how now that he was home, he was going to dissolve Rand and use the proceeds to save kittens.

Maybe Ward could get him to leave. He could buy Danny a monastery somewhere and tell him to go meditate in it. Yeah, that sounded feasible.

He could—technically, he could—do what Harold had more or less recommended. What he’d already tried to do, before the universe had hit rewind on him. He could have Shannon take care of the problem. The whole reason Shannon even worked for them was that he was willing to do that: he’d been vetted for it by dear old Dad himself.

But it was Danny.

He had no clue why that made a difference, but it did. He’d told Shannon to target the Danny Rand lookalike.

He’d taught Danny how to play soccer. He hadn’t gone out of his way to do it, he’d just been trying to teach Joy, but Danny had gotten folded into it all somehow. Ward still remembered the first time Danny had blocked the ball by head-butting it, his face lighting up like he’d just discovered fire.

Ward, Joy, did you see me? I hit it with my face! And it didn’t go into the goal!

Ward had wound up laughing despite himself. Yeah, we saw you. Try to remember not to play baseball that way, okay?

He wanted Danny Rand out of his life, wanted him made into nothing more than a fading childhood memory. But he couldn’t justify—couldn’t live with—having a trigger pulled on him.

Which put him back on square one, which meant smothering himself in his pillow really would have been the right call.

He half-considered giving it a try, but he got out of bed instead. He’d go see Danny at the Plaza and—try to figure things out from there. Look at him being proactive. Not that he didn’t pause halfway through shaving his face to see if time would jerk him around again. It would be a hell of an advertisement for his razor.

When he got to the hotel, he almost just let himself in—he had the other key—but he knocked instead.

No answer.

Well, he wasn’t going to hammer on a hotel door and look like an asshole, so he let himself in after all—and immediately started reconsidering whether or not he had it in him to kill Danny.

Neither of the beds had been slept in, for one thing, which meant that wherever Danny had spent last night, it wasn’t here. He hadn’t even waited twenty-four hours before completely ignoring Ward’s instructions to lie low, and—

Danny opened the door. He had a paper bag in one hand and a crumpled flyer in the other. “Ward!” It was a seriously ridiculous level of excitement, like he thought Ward being there was the best thing ever. Then his brow wrinkled. “Why are you in my room? What happened to your hand?”

“I have a better question for you: why weren’t you in your room?”

Danny grinned and held up the bag. “Breakfast. Everything bagel.”

“God, you would get an everything bagel. You have no taste at all.”

“I was going to offer you half. Guess you don’t want it, though.”

Ward crossed his arms. “What’s the paper?”

Danny stuffed part of the bagel into his mouth and then said around it, “Flyer for a dojo,” and it was ridiculous that Ward could understand that. He held out the flyer—and like Danny was on some mystically determined schedule, it was, of course, the same damn dojo as before. Ward recognized the address. “I met the owner while she was hanging them up. She’s nice. Is this the same one you were saying I broke into?”

“Did you tell her who you were?” Ward said levelly, ignoring that last question.

“Not like you mean, not my last name. But Ward, I can’t just live under a rock forever.”

Why not? He had for fifteen years, hadn’t he? “Why don’t you just go back to K’un-Lun?”

It’d be a mistake to say that Danny flinched. It was more like he just went still, the constant sunny light of him dimming down. Ward recognized that tactic for what it was—the retreat that gave you time and space to regroup, the defensiveness that didn’t give away too much about what you were feeling. He knew it from the inside, but he’d never seen it from the outside. Not that he could remember, anyway. It made the back of his throat feel slick, like he was going to throw up.

“I’m not sure I want to go back yet,” Danny said.

“Yeah.” Ward sat down. “I know.”

Danny studied him. “You want to get out of whatever’s happening to you. Off the wheel.” He tore off another bite of bagel. “Why don’t you tell me what happened last time? Or—literally anything.”

“You can catch up on current events on your own time.”

“I mean about you. Joy. Your dad.”

“My dad.” He rested his head in his hands, and God, it was tempting to just stay like that. “He’s part of the problem.”

He had no idea how to spit all this out. He’d never told—he’d never told anyone; he’d barely talked about Harold in years, even when Joy wanted to. It was almost like he was having an allergic reaction, like his tongue was swelling up. He’d had so many secrets about Harold that he barely knew where to start, and every instinct he had said to keep his mouth shut. It was a family matter. He had even specifically told himself he wouldn’t do this.

But he couldn’t think of anything else. If Danny didn’t know what was going on, he’d go out into the world, stir shit up, and attract Harold’s attention, and Ward knew exactly how well that would go.

He looked up and immediately regretted it: Danny was leaning forward, eyes still fixed on him, looking so concerned it made Ward want to leave right then and there.

“Joy told you the truth,” Ward said. “Dad died twelve years ago.”

Danny bowed his head. “I mourn with you.”

“Don’t. He came back.”

Well, that was satisfying, at least: it was like someone had stuck Danny with a cattle prod.

“That was how I felt too.”

“Ward—”

“I’m not insane,” Ward said. “I know how it sounds. But you said it yourself, there’s no way that I could have known everything I did about you unless something strange was going on, and so it stands to reason that if people could—”

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” Danny said, holding up his hands. “I mean, I fought a dragon.”

“Got it. So you’re the one who’s crazy.”

Danny laughed, and Ward felt his own mouth twist a little, stretching out of shape.

“I believe you,” Danny said. His voice was reassuring, and Ward hated that he actually felt reassured. “It’s just that most resurrection magic isn’t something people should mess around with.”

“No, huffing spray paint isn’t something people should mess around with. Loaded firearms. Downed power lines. We’re talking about someone brought back from the dead and installed in a goddamn Art Deco penthouse on the Upper West Side. He hasn’t aged. He drinks chia seed smoothies and lies down under sunlamps. He has an assistant.” He was up and pacing now, like he could outrun what he was saying. His muscles were burning. “And he has me, his fucking puppet whipping boy. You want—”

You want to know what happened to my hand? That was what he’d been ready to say. You want to know what happened to my hand? Harold broke my fingers with a glass of whiskey and then drank out of it while my blood was still dripping off the bottom.

But he couldn’t do it. What was he going to do, tell Danny Rand, of all people, that he’d been letting his undead dad kick him around for years? That he kept coming back for more?

“He has me,” Ward said, steadying himself, “and he uses me to run Rand just like he used to. It’s a pain in the ass.”

“Does Joy know?”

“No. Just me. He wants it that way, and so do I. You ought to understand why in just a second.” Half of why, anyway. He’d have killed to keep Joy away from Harold even if the people who’d brought Harold back had been a bunch of orphans running a candy shop. “He made a deal. His life—in exchange for spending the rest of it tied to your buddies the Hand.”

He didn’t know exactly how Danny had looked before—figuring out what people were feeling wasn’t exactly in his wheelhouse—but he saw the instant Danny traded it all for steeliness, like he thought he was going to have to fight someone right then and there.

“Your father’s in league with the Hand?”

“Unwillingly,” Ward said. Why the hell was he defending Harold? It wasn’t like service to a bunch of globe-trotting ninjas has been the small print on some contract; Harold had known what he was getting into. “He wants to get out of it.”

“I can help him. I can help you, I’ll liberate the two of you—”

“I don’t want you to help him!” He hadn’t meant to raise his voice. Let alone his hands, which were out now like he was trying to ward Danny off. He made himself sound calmer even as he could feel his blood pounding, like his skin had gotten stretched tight and thin. “I don’t want you to help him. In the other timeline—God help me—you tried that, and it didn’t go well.” More like it had caused an endless shitstorm for Ward, one he didn’t want to repeat.

“If you tell me what I did last time, I can take a different approach now. We can’t leave your father under the Hand’s control, Ward. I’m sworn to destroy them—they’ve always been allied against K’un-Lun and the Iron Fist. If we’ve done this before, you have to know that.”

“I don’t care. I don’t care about the Hand, I don’t care about the Fist, I don’t care about any of it. I want me and Joy left alone. We’re not part of this. And I don’t want you to go within a mile of Harold. He’s not—he’s not a good person.”

He realized how weak that sounded. How weak he was, somehow, insanely, despite everything. All he’d done was give Danny reason to hang around their lives.

But Danny wasn’t swearing dramatic martial arts vengeance or anything, not yet. He was looking at Ward’s hand.

He said quietly, “What happened to your hand?”

“I got it caught in the car door.” He felt stiff, like anything he said or did right now wouldn’t convince Danny of anything.

This had been a mistake start to finish. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t explain himself this way. He’d never been able to work people like some kind of rigged slot machine, the way Harold and Joy could, he couldn’t make them spit out rows of cherries or straight sevens. He didn’t know what lever to pull for it. Didn’t know how to make Danny do what he wanted him to do.

“This was a mistake,” Ward said. And a humiliating one. He turned to go. “Do whatever you want.”

“Ward—”

He got to the door just fine, but then Danny blocked him, throwing one glowing hand in front of him. Ward stared at it.

“Wow,” he said, flatly unimpressed. “What did you do, find that at the bottom of a cereal box? You can’t stop me from leaving.”

“Technically I’m pretty sure I can.”

Ward raised his eyebrows, and Danny dropped his arm, looking sheepish.

“Okay, fine, I’m not going to do anything. But if you won’t let me help you—”

And what was that help supposed to cost him? He said, “Just tell me how to get back to where I came from. Or tell me I can’t, that I’m stuck here. I just want to know what I’m dealing with.”

“If you didn’t mean to come back here, if you’re just reliving time you’ve already experienced, and—you’re sure there’s not another Ward floating around out there?”

“Positive,” Ward said darkly, mostly because he didn’t even want to consider it.

“Then it’s a time wheel. It’s bad, Ward. It’s like a cosmic bear trap. You set it off, and it snaps closed and holds you in a single stretch of time until either the force that’s powering it dies out or… or you do.”

He didn’t know that he even wanted to understand all that. Actually, he was pretty sure he didn’t.

“It’s a security thing,” Danny said. “The monastery has a stone buried way down in its foundations; nobody’s even seen it for a hundred years. But if the Iron Fist fails, if K’un-Lun is destroyed, then the stone has the power to start the wheel and bring the culprit back to sometime before it happened. The only problem is that you don’t remember. I mean, only the people responsible get picked up by the wheel, only they get carried back into the past. So it’s—tricky.”

Ward had that broken-glass feeling again. He said, “How the fuck is that a good idea?”

“It’s not easy. Lei Kung taught us to always pay close attention to our surroundings, to try to recognize if someone was acting strangely, if they seemed to know what was about to happen.”

“And if they did, you killed them.”

“It never actually happened. It was just—a possibility. We were supposed to keep it in the back of our minds. But—yeah. If there really was a time wheel in place because the city was destroyed, and they didn’t find the person responsible, then eventually the power in the stone would wear out. And if it did, if the person who set the wheel spinning was still alive at the end of that, they’d find themselves right back where they started. Standing in the ashes of K’un-Lun.” He’d gone pale while he was explaining all of it, and then he added softly, “I shouldn’t have left. I left them unprotected.”

“Well, look on the bright side,” Ward said bitterly. “According to you, nothing you’ve done is going to count until I either die or outlive whatever’s doing this to me.”

“Do you know what you—”

“Yeah.” He was going to assume it just had a delayed start to it, because he was pretty sure he’d never set some magical temporal bear trap to go off if he cut himself shaving. “And you don’t need to know.”

“I need to know who I’m protecting you from,” Danny said.

Ward’s laugh sounded like a dry branch snapping. “No, you don’t, because you’re not.”

It made Danny step back a little. Enough, anyway, for Ward to get out the door.

***

Okay. He could work through this.

He’d assume, for right now, that Danny was right, that Danny was telling him the truth.

Harold—or the assholes who’d reanimated him—had invested in a security system; somewhere, he had one of these time wheel power stones, and Ward had made it start spinning. Danny had just said that the deal was that it landed you back sometime before the trigger was first pulled, but Ward had come weeks back—weeks back and to a pretty damn specific and noteworthy moment. If he needed another reason to be wary of Danny, there it was, gift-wrapped for him. This thing had dumped him on Danny’s doorstep.

And now either he would outlive whatever mystical power source they were talking about, or—

Or Harold would put the pieces together. It wasn’t like Ward hadn’t already handed them right to him.

Harold had a damn recording of Ward knowing things he shouldn’t have, and he had all the time in the world to sit around the penthouse replaying it over and over again. Ward had no idea whether or not Harold had bought his story.

He sure as hell didn’t have any illusions about what would happen if Harold worked it all out.

He wouldn’t even hesitate. The only reason he hasn’t done it yet is because it’ll be a hassle to replace me. It’s not like he wants to promote Kyle.

No. He’d bring Joy in instead.

Ward forgot about the throbbing in his hand. All he could think about was Joy walking into the penthouse and being swallowed up by it.

Dad wouldn’t hurt Joy. He never had.

But he’d gotten worse. Ward could count on one hand the number of times Harold had really hurt him when he was growing up—none of it even bad enough to merit a trip to the ER—and since then, it was lucky if he could even get through a month without something happening. It was still him, though: he was still the common denominator. Joy had always been sharper, braver, bolder. She wouldn’t set Dad off so much—but if she ever set him off at all, that was unacceptable. Completely.

Ward made it back to the Plaza around nightfall, and this time he found Danny actually in his room, sitting on the floor and eating peanut M&Ms. He looked weirdly small from that angle.

Ward said, “What happens if the person who kicked off the time wheel does the same thing all over again?”

“You mean—what if they just live through all the time again? If they don’t do anything to change their actions?”

“I mean what if they destroyed your monastery all over again. Does it break the damn time wheel?”

Danny shook his head. “No, it just ends that turn. The culprit would just start over again.”

“Fine.” He rubbed his hands over his face, feeling how much he was sweating. Do it again and then he’d get to do it again: fine. Kill his father again, and then he’d have a second—or third—chance at getting through these days yet again, and this time, he’d know enough to keep his mouth shut.

He hadn’t even realized Danny had stood up until he felt Danny’s hands on his arms, holding him still in a way Ward really, really didn’t like to be held.

“Let go of me.”

“Ward, what did you do?”

“I said let go.”

Danny did, but he still just stood there, waiting for an answer. It was that goddamn air of entitlement—the exact same way he’d been as a kid, like he could just exist and that was enough for him to be answered, listened to, loved. Ward had always hated him for that look, and he hated him for it now.

“Maybe I wiped out your monastery,” Ward said. “Maybe I burned it to the ground.”

Danny didn’t even flinch. “You wouldn’t do that.”

“You don’t even know me. You don’t know any of us. I don’t know why you can’t get that through your head.” He turned away and stumbled, tripping over nothing, and hit the door almost blindly. He grabbed the handle.

“Tell me about Harold,” Danny said.

Ward swung the door open. “Go fuck yourself,” he said. And if it was a bad, cliched exit line, well, he’d catch Danny next time, wouldn’t he? Unfortunately.

He could shoot with his left hand, as long as he used the splinted right one to steady his aim. He was a good shot, too—it was the one real thing he’d ever learned that his father hadn’t taught him. He could aim and fire the second he came in through the door, and then no matter what Harold knew, no matter what he suspected, he wouldn’t have the chance to act on it.

All the way to the penthouse, he knew Harold was listening to him. Listening to his ragged breathing, reading into it.

I’m never alone. Not really. I’ve barely had a split second’s worth of privacy since he came back—those talks with Danny were probably the closest I’ve come in years to having a personal life that he didn’t know about.

And now every time Ward escaped him, he fell right back into the same old trap. Well, if this worked the same way it had last time, he would have a night and morning’s worth of peace, at least, before the rubber band snapped back again. And now he knew he didn’t have to waste all that time with body disposal. He could just—rest.

***

This time, the last thing Harold said to him was, “So—”

He’d seen the gun in Ward’s hand. He sounded calm, even amused, and Ward knew what the rest of the sentence would have been, more or less: So I was right. So you just might be my son after all, Ward. So you really think this will make a difference.

So someone told you, because God knows you wouldn’t have worked this out on your own.

Ward shot him in the head, a little left of center, and then he drank what was left of Harold’s liquor cabinet and poured the smoothie mixtures down the drain.

***

“Who are you?” Danny said. “Where’s Harold?”

Not rotting away in the Pelham Bay Park lagoon, getting eaten away by snapping turtles. Unfortunately.

Normal.

“Who are you?” Ward said.

Danny stared at him. “Ward? Joy?” His face lit up, and this time around, Ward had the time and opportunity to wonder what exactly Danny had thought would happen here. They’d all swoop in for some dramatic group hug? “It’s Danny! Danny Rand.”

They replayed the same old choreography, and that was the one bit he didn’t have to try to remember: getting between Joy and whatever could hurt her was about the only decent instinct he had.

And—weirdly—he remembered that he’d had that same impulse with Danny, back when they were kids.

Once, one of the bigger kids on Danny and Joy’s soccer team had been trying all practice to get the ball past Danny and into the net, and Danny, scuffed and rumpled and sweaty and grass-stained and grinning like an idiot, just wasn’t letting it happen. He was just coming out on top, like he always did. Ward would have even been sympathetic to this kid getting his ass handed to him by a pipsqueak like Danny if the kid hadn’t then lunged at him and knocked Danny down. He’d been so much bigger that his body had covered Danny’s completely, so Ward couldn’t see Danny anymore at all.

He had been off the bleachers and streaking across the field in a split second. He grabbed the kid around the collar of his jersey and yanked him back, hard, sending him sprawling.

The coach had been blowing his whistle, the sound slicing through Ward’s head. He just hadn’t been fast enough. Not as fast as Ward.

He’d picked Danny up off the ground and shown him how to pinch his nose and tilt the head back to stop the bleeding.

Joy had been exuberant about it at all—“You were like a superhero!”—and Danny had just been quiet, looking at Ward the whole time with a kind of stunned love that Ward hadn’t known how to deal with.

Well, Danny had been his responsibility back then, sort of.

Now he wasn’t. And now he was just standing there—a problem Ward had to deal with.

He said, as calmly as he could, “I think you should leave.”

“I just want to talk to your dad.”

“That’s not possible,” Ward said. He wished he were telling the truth. “Harold Meachum died twelve years ago. If you’re trying to play on our grief, it’s in exceptionally poor taste.”

“I’m not,” Danny said earnestly. He did everything earnestly; he probably sat around Central Park playing an acoustic guitar. “I really didn’t know.” He pressed his hands together and bowed his head. “I’m truly sorry for your loss. I guess all our parents are gone now.”

“We don’t know you,” Ward said. “I don’t know who you are, but you’re not Danny Rand. That’s impossible.”

“Our plane crashed, but I survived—I was found by some monks in a city called K’un-Lun—”

Why did he think that would be convincing? It didn’t matter that it was true if it sounded like bullshit. There was no point in saying things people wouldn’t believe.

Except Danny, being Danny, always seemed to think that people would just trust him, no matter what was coming out of his mouth.

Even when he was being hauled away by security, he still looked like he thought they’d listen to him.

This time, Ward was going to play it as smart as possible. He wasn’t going to know anything more than he should know—but if he was stuck playing the same old hand all over again, he was at least going to play it a little better this time.

He downplayed it all to Joy—that wasn’t Danny, that couldn’t have been Danny, and really, when you thought about it, they were overdue for another Danny Rand impostor, weren’t they? At least this one was a little more convincing than the middle-aged Jersey Shore guy they’d had last time. He wasn’t so obviously insulting to their intelligence. Once he’d gotten her to laugh, he figured it was safe to clear out and go see Harold.

Double patricide now. That had to be a rare achievement.

And you always thought I wouldn’t amount to anything.

Now he just had to hope that when he walked back into the penthouse, the look on his face wouldn’t be a dead giveaway that he’d turned the place into a crime scene twice now.

Thank God for drugs. Now that he thought about it, fuck fuzzy-feelings rehab centers where people talked about their feelings. Ward didn’t need to talk about his feelings, he just needed fewer of them, he just needed the volume turned down. And there was no getting clean, not anymore. Not really. He’d lost his chance at that two murders ago. So to hell with it, right?

The important thing was keeping himself together just enough to eventually wind up back in a world where there was no Harold and Joy would be completely safe.

He let that propel him into the penthouse, and he started talking before he even saw Harold. “We have a big problem.”

Just once, Ward would have liked to have walked in and found Harold genuinely unprepared for him. In the bathroom, even. But Dad always wrongfooted him; it never happened the other way around.

And it didn’t happen today, either. Harold barely even looked up from his iPad. “Try not to escalate immediately to melodrama, Ward.”

Ward felt like he was clenching his jaw so tightly he might shatter a tooth. Don’t be too calm. You’ve disappointed him your whole life—if you start making him happy now, he’ll really know something is up.

“It fits the situation,” he said, attempting crispness. “Someone just turned up in our office claiming to be Danny Rand.”

Harold’s head jerked up just a little. So he hadn’t watched the footage yet, then. “Interesting.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

Harold shrugged. “You’ve dealt with that problem before. Don’t tell me you suddenly need me to hold your hand through another fake Danny Rand. File a restraining order through Jeri Hogarth and put an end to it.”

“It’s different this time.”

“And why is that?”

“Because this one might be the real thing.” He watched Harold’s face closely, but he saw nothing—same as usual. A lifetime of trying to read Dad’s moods, you’d think he’d be better at it. “He’s got the right look.”

“You mean he’s blond.”

“Yeah,” Ward said. “That’s all it takes for me to hand over half the company. Try to pretend like you have literally any respect for my judgment—”

“Son—”

“—and listen to me. He looks like Danny. Joy noticed it too. And he has some completely insane story about having been raised by monks in a city in the Himalayas, where apparently they taught him goddamn jujitsu, because he took out half our guards. Unarmed. Which is almost insane enough to make that monk story make sense, or at least as much sense as anything else.” He paused, pretending to think. “Where did he say it was? K’un-Lun. If he can dig up anyone from that place to verify some of this—”

But it had worked. This time, it had worked: he’d sunk a fish-hook right into Harold.

“K’un-Lun,” Harold said.

“Yeah. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Maybe.” The iPad screen went black under his fingers, falling asleep. It was like he was holding himself motionless, running through all the angles in his head. Not sharing any of them with Ward, of course. “Impossible to say for sure if it’s Danny or not, of course, but—well. Interesting.”

“You said that.”

Harold half-smiled, but his gaze wasn’t even on Ward at all. “I’ll want to meet him.”

That didn’t surprise him. At least he could make sure it happened under better circumstances this time—no bed in a psychiatric ward, no Harold looming out of the shadows like a ghost. He’d even go so far as to not push Danny out of a window.

He wasn’t supposed to understand any of this, though, so he just said, “Have you lost your mind? You want to reveal yourself, out a secret we’ve spent years hiding, to somebody who could be a nut or a conman?”

“What happened to telling me how much he looks like Danny?”

“According to you, I might just mean blond.”

“You’re feeling particularly smart-mouthed today, apparently.”

Ward felt his muscles draw tight, his body guarding itself. “I’m on edge. The timing’s suspicious.”

“Mm,” Harold agreed. “Still, I want to meet this Danny Rand. Set that up. If he is an imposter—” He shrugged. “There’s no need for him to get out of the building again. Oh, man up, Ward, and stop making that face. It’s just how business is done. From time to time you have to eliminate a threat.”

He hadn’t realized his expression had changed. He’d barely caught the feeling, the little flicker of pushback. That was what came from living the kind of life he had: when his conscience finally got stirred up by something, he hardly even recognized it. Maybe he should have held out for full-on Jiminy Cricket.

Maybe that was what Danny was. His Jiminy Cricket.

“My problem isn’t eliminating a threat,” Ward said. He’d eliminated his top one twice, at this point. Maybe he’d be a better person if he cared more about that, if he drew a hard line in the sand, but he lied to himself about enough crap without lying about that too. There were things he’d kill for. And for family, for Joy, he’d do it without even blinking. He could save the guilt for afterwards. “My problem is you making someone a threat and then shrugging that off because you can just put a bullet in his skull.”

“Don’t be so squeamish. No one ever got ahead in life without taking a few risks.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

“You’ll set up the meeting, Ward,” Harold said mildly.

Ward exhaled. “Yeah.”

He got out of there without any bruises. This was the longest he’d gone in a while with all ten fingers working, so that was something. He was on the upswing. Goddamn unstoppable.

***

Finding Danny again wasn’t hard. The carjacking helped.

“I just need you to listen to me for a minute,” Danny said, accelerating in circles through the garage. He might as well have been a kid doing donuts in a parking lot. “I think that if you just take a second to let this sink in—”

He’d swallow hook, line, and sinker the ridiculous, batshit truth of Danny’s monastery story? Come on. Plus, was he really going to have to sit through that explanation again? He started to cut Danny off—not that that necessarily would have been the best move with Danny practically threatening to go all Thelma and Louise on him—but then he remembered the bugs. They had to be there. No way the car was safe.

Danny was the one person he could tell all this to, the one person who would actually believe him. He felt a ridiculous catch in his throat, wanting to just explain himself, wanting to stop trying to keep his timelines straight. Stupid. Needy. He was sure dear old Dad would have plenty of other words to offer up.

“Ward?”

Danny had broken off. He didn’t look pissed, not exactly.

“Danny,” Ward said, with a sarcastic twist of the same tone.

“You look—” Danny made just the tiniest grimace. “Don’t shoot the messenger here, okay? But you look really sweaty and pale. Are you feeling okay?”

“Why are we stopped?” He looked at the motionless garage all around them, the garage that had gone from being a gray blur to its usual stable pillars of concrete. “Aren’t you kidnapping me? Clearly your monks never got around to teaching you how to be a decent criminal. I could just get out.”

Danny smiled. “It’s a pretty nice car, though. You probably don’t want to abandon it.”

“Yeah, you might be surprised,” Ward said under his breath. “Look, I need to talk to you too.” He could probably get away with that much of the truth, even if Harold was listening. He’d sound like he was just getting ready to set up that meeting. “I’ll buy you a drink. We can have a civilized discussion—except any bar that would let you in like you are now would be the kind of dive that would give us both a staph infection.” Should have remembered the gym shoes.

“Can’t we just go to your place?”

Only if he wanted to trade suspected bugs for confirmed ones. He said, “You think I want you to know where I live?”

Danny did that weird non-flinch again, the waiting stillness of somebody expecting a hit. Seeing it made something scrape along the inside of Ward’s chest. Look, this time he was being an asshole for a reason. It wasn’t his fault that Danny didn’t know that yet.

Danny said, “We could always go to mine.”

“Yours?” Had Jeri Hogarth gotten him fixed up that quickly? Had he even met up with her yet? “You found a place to live before you found a pair of loafers. I might have some questions about your priorities.”

“I don’t think I’m really a loafer kind of guy.” He opened the car door. “You should probably drive. My license qualifications are a little rusty—pretty much just my dad letting me steer. It wouldn’t really be fair to inflict that on random pedestrians.”

“As opposed to inflicting it on me.”

Danny seesawed one hand back and forth. “You did have me thrown out of the building, Ward.”

“You drop-kicked my security guards!”

He thought he heard Danny laugh as they circled around, switching places. This was so bizarrely friendly, in the grand scheme of things.

He drove, letting Danny give him directions that Danny couldn’t seem to resist peppering with stories about how he thought he remembered a particular hot dog truck or game store. Ward ignored the anecdotes and followed the turns, wondering how in the hell Danny had scrounged up a place near Central Park—

“This is it,” Danny said.

“This is it.”

“I can’t say it’s exactly what I imagined coming home to, but hey, you wouldn’t let us go to your place.”

“This is not a place,” Ward said. “This is Central Park. I thought you had an apartment.”

“I never said that.” His expression had taken on a slightly testy neutrality. “But if you feel that strongly about not having a conversation under a tree, you could try actually believing me when I say I’m not going to hurt you or steal your silverware or whatever it is you’re worried about. It’s me, Ward.”

“Under a tree it is.” He unbuckled his seatbelt. “And don’t try to play me. Do you have money for the meter? No, of course you don’t.”

Danny sighed, but he got out, too. The night air was a little cool—not freezing, not even cold, but maybe not what you’d want to sleep outside in. Not what you’d want to go barefoot in. He didn’t know why he was so irritated by it. All he had to do was wait for them to get a certain distance from the car.

How Danny chose to spend his time was none of Ward’s business.

Once they were out of sight of the car, Ward said, “Look, I know you’re the real Danny, okay? Danny Rand, the Iron Fist, whatever.”

Danny stopped short, his face suddenly pale even in the yellow light from the streetlamps. “What? Ward, how do you—”

“Time wheel. Remember when I said Harold was dead? He’s not. He died and then came back, years ago, and I know and Joy doesn’t, and she can’t. He made a deal with your archenemies the Hand—great, glowstick powers right on cue—for immortality. And apparently he has a time wheel rigged so that no one can change that, which is why I’m here, yet again, dealing with your little homecoming. This is the third time now, for the record. So I know you’re Danny. I just can’t talk about it anywhere that’s—” He looked around at all the trees throwing long shadows in the dark. “Anywhere that’s anywhere. My apartment, my car, Rand—it’s all bugged.”

He was like a cat sicking up a hairball, all of it coming up at once like that, a mass of what had to sound like insanity and paranoia, even to Danny, who palled around with mystical kung fu monks and who had told him half this stuff in the first place.

But Danny wasn’t running for the hills. Not yet, anyway. He said slowly, “If the time wheel was set up to keep Harold from dying, and you’ve lived through all this before, then you…” He trailed off.

Ward held up two fingers. Twice.

“Why?”

Because I couldn’t take it anymore.

What was he supposed to say? That he’d had one hope, one single thing in his life that was his, and Harold had made him see that it had been a joke the whole time? That every particle of Ward had always belonged to him?

“Does it matter?”

“Yes. It matters a lot, Ward.”

He guessed he could see how it would. He was a stranger to Danny now, basically, and for all he knew, Danny’s memories of Harold were as rose-tinted as his memories of hot dog stands. Ward should never have told him anything. He shouldn’t have started a conversation he couldn’t walk away from.

“Because he gave me two bodies to toss into the lagoon,” Ward said finally, “after he smashed out their teeth with a clawhammer. And doing it didn’t leave a mark on him. He was practically whistling. And I did it, I got rid of the bodies, and then I tried to leave town. I tried to get away from him, and he yanked me back like I was a dog on a leash.” He could hear his breath heaving, like he was running in place.

It was a version of the truth that at least left him a little dignity. He didn’t have to get into the bruises and the broken bones and the lifetime of being at Dad’s beck and call and all the wanting, the wanting some kind of recognition, some kind of acknowledgment, something between them besides the neat exercise of a lever, time and time again.

And it left out the pension fund and the rehab, which he was fine with. Danny would have plenty more time to find out that he was a shitty person.

“I know how that feels,” Danny said quietly.

No, he didn’t. Danny’s parents had adored him.

“I didn’t think I could get away from K’un-Lun, either. I wasn’t supposed to. I just—left. I don’t know what I would have done if someone had tried to stop me.” Danny closed the distance between them, wrapping one warm hand around Ward’s bicep.

He kept doing that. Ward would generally rather chew his own leg off than be held in place. He didn’t do touchy-feely.

But he didn’t pull away this time, and he wasn’t completely sure why. Maybe something down in the fight-or-flight cellar of his brain remembered that Danny had done the same thing back in the hotel room and that Danny had let go when Ward had told him to.

“So I get it,” Danny said. “Do you know who they were? The men your dad killed?”

That was it? Danny was just going to literally let him get away with murder?

“They were with the Hand.”

“But you said Harold was with the Hand too—never mind. It’s no surprise that the Hand’s not trustworthy. It sounds like your dad isn’t either.”

Ward kept looking at him, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Finally, he said, “You believe me. Not just about the time wheel, I mean. About Harold.”

“It’s been a long time, but you’re still my brother.”

He couldn’t process that. He needed Danny to at least follow that with some kind of actual reason, like Harold counted as part of the Hand and the enemy of Danny’s enemy was his friend. Or maybe just that clawhammer detail was too disturbingly specific for Ward to have made it up.

But Danny didn’t say any of that. He just seemed to think Ward wouldn’t lie to him, which was so wildly inaccurate that Ward didn’t even know where to start with it. He felt like something inside him had just cracked.

He looked down at the ground, at Danny’s annoyingly bare feet. “Thanks.” Time to talk about literally anything else. “He wants me to bring you over there. Harold.”

“You told him I’m back?”

“I told him a Danny Rand lookalike had popped up again. We get them from time to time, you know, it’s like playing whack-a-mole. Obvious frauds, usually. I told him you were convincing.” He felt one corner of his mouth twist up and heard Danny chuckle. “Very convincing. You need to understand, I have to play it absolutely straight with him. If he even gets a hint of what’s going on, of what I know—” He shook his head. “If I’m dead, he’ll reach out to Joy. And I can let that happen.”

“We won’t,” Danny said. He gave Ward’s arm one last reassuring squeeze before he stepped back, letting in a chillier breeze between them. “Why does he want to meet me? Is he planning on turning me over to the Hand?”

“Jesus, Danny, I’m not setting you up to be murdered. No, he’s not turning you over to anyone. He wants what you want, actually, more or less—‘destroy the Hand.’”

“I don’t think the air-quotes are necessary.”

“Agree to disagree. He wants you to wipe out the Hand so he doesn’t have them breathing down his neck. He’ll throw out all the stops acting like you’re the son he never had, and he’ll give you everything you want to keep you happy, so: sky’s the limit. You should probably ask for a foothold in Rand. That’s what you were interested in the first time.”

“Did I get it? Did we work together?” He looked almost puppyish with excitement. “You and me and Joy?”

“We worked in the same building,” Ward said.

Danny smiled. “You haven’t changed that much. You used to say you weren’t playing with me and Joy, you were playing near us.”

“You remember our childhoods a lot better than I do.”

Then again, there was a reason for that, wasn’t there? He hadn’t quite been able to make himself choose the simpler story, but he’d been able to make himself forget. He kept his whole life in water-tight compartments, with no unfortunate spillover.

“Anyway, I’ll have to play near you tonight, too,” Ward said. “Ground rules: if we’re in Rand, if we’re in my car—or yours, if you get one—or in my apartment, we can’t talk about any of this. I have to seem like I’m going through all this for the first time, and you have to seem like you trust Harold.”

“Couldn’t you still have warned me about him even if you weren’t caught in the time wheel? The way you were talking, it sounded like you already knew he was dangerous.”

Dangerous. That was one word for it. “I knew. But I didn’t tell you, and I wouldn’t have. He’d know that. He—” He tasted something bitter in the back of his mouth. “Knows me.”

“But you told me now.”

“Now’s not then,” Ward said. “Aside from the obvious.”

“I guess you should tell me about what we did the first time, then,” Danny said. “Broad strokes, anyway, so I know what you’re doing and what Harold’s going to expect from me.”

Story time. That should be fun.

***

He had to lay it all out for Danny right there in Central Park, since they still couldn’t get back in the car, and halfway through it all, Ward got tired of seeing Danny shiver; he broke off talking, stalked over to an obviously stoned-out-of-his-mind college student, and paid him seven hundred dollars for his shoes. Officially the dumbest, least justifiable impulse purchase of his life, but what the hell: this universe was a soap bubble, anyway. If he outlived Harold’s time wheel, he’d get his seven hundred bucks back, and if he didn’t, he’d be too dead to care.

He came back and dropped the tennis shoes at Danny’s feet, glaring at Danny until Danny put them on.

“Anyway,” he said, picking the story back up again, “you kept forgetting that we’re a company, not a charity, and—”

“I think I get the gist of your complaints about my management style.”

“Your management style was showing up looking like Ellen DeGeneres and then leaving me and Joy to deal with the fallout of you thinking you could act like the world was made of cotton candy and rainbows.”

“But what was going on with the Hand?”

“I don’t know all the details. We found a severed head in a truck.”

“Thanks, Ward. Half an hour’s worth of monologuing on capitalism and ‘I don’t know all the details’ about the severed head. Why weren’t we working together?”

“I didn’t trust you.”

“Even after you knew I wasn’t an impostor?”

“You probably didn’t trust me either.”

But that was weak. Danny had been an open book since he’d come home: each and every time, he’d told Ward everything if Ward bothered to ask him.

Danny didn’t have any secrets, and Ward didn’t have anything true.

“I’m not used to telling people about things like this,” he said. He felt like he owed Danny a better explanation than the half-assed one he’d just given. “I can’t even talk to Joy, not really. She’s my sister, and I would do anything for her. But I have to lie to her all the time, and it’s gotten so it’s as easy as breathing. It’s not me and Joy against the world. She’s alone—I left her alone—and I’m alone. She told me not that long ago that if you scratch the surface, she and I barely even know each other. I used to think that if she’d agree to leave Rand, it would do something for us. Maybe even fix everything. But Harold was never going to let that happen. So this is just the way it is. I didn’t trust anyone else, either.”

And every part of his life—Joy, Rand, even, God help him, Dad—had preferred Danny and chosen Danny over him. Danny was the hero CEO. The good friend and sweetheart surrogate brother, the one Joy would slip key evidence to over Ward’s objections.

The favorite son, the one Harold actually needed, the one he’d never laid a hand on. The one he couldn’t have laid a hand on, because Danny wouldn’t take it. Danny would be stronger.

“I’m sorry,” Danny said. There was a deep sincerity in his voice; everything about him might as well have been calculated to wriggle under Ward’s skin and confuse him. “I never thought about anything like that happening with you and Joy. I think I expected everything here to be the same. You were home, and home was okay, so… I wish I could have done something.”

“Like what?” Ward said irritably. “You were just a kid.” He checked his watch. “We’ve been out here way too long. Come on, I’ll drive you over to Dad’s.”

He took two steps back in the direction of the car, and the stupidity of all this smacked him in the face like a tree branch.

“How good an actor are you?”

“I don’t know,” Danny said. He sounded like the question had taken him off-guard but he was gamely trying to go along with it. “Davos and I used to try to put on plays together, but it never really went anywhere. I don’t think his mom liked it.”

“You’re going to have to pretend like it’s a huge surprise to you that Harold’s alive, you realize that, right? You’re going to have to act like you buy what he’s selling.”

“I picked up on that,” Danny said. “You’ve said it like seven times already.”

“You think you’re sick of hearing the same thing over and over? Try being stuck in the Groundhog Day from hell. My point is, I feel like you’re probably a terrible liar.”

“I’m a great liar.”

“That was already unconvincing.”

“Come on, Ward. I was raised by monks. Do you seriously think I spent the last thirteen years telling the total, absolute truth about what I did with my time? Davos and I would—”

“Enough with the Davos.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. Still ten functioning fingers; there was that. “Okay. Fuck it. Let’s go.”

“It’s late,” Danny said uncertainly.

“That’s fine. I don’t think he sleeps.”

***

Watching closely now, Ward could see the moment when self-interest lit up in Harold’s eyes like bright dollar signs.

“Oh God, Danny,” he said, his voice warm and throaty, like he was choked up with tears. “We all thought you were dead.”

He hugged Danny close, cradling the back of Danny’s head in the palm of his hand like he was holding a baby. He had hugged Ward like that before, once or twice, on the rarest of rare occasions, the ones that had driven a rusty hook through Ward’s heart. He guessed now he knew what he’d always suspected: the gesture, the tenderness of it, was as contrived and conscious as everything else.

Ward tried to turn his attention away from the two of them. He started pouring himself a bourbon.

“Ward, where are your manners? Get Danny a drink, too, and we can celebrate his homecoming.”

“I’m fine, really,” Danny said at once.

“Nonsense. Ward and I want to hear everything about what’s happened to you.”

He resigned himself to playing bartender. “What’s your drink,” he said flatly to Danny.

“Seriously, just water. Alcohol can interfere with my chi.”

Fine. He’d just have a double and drink for them both. He brought Danny’s water over and tried to ignore the fact that he was maybe drinking out of the same lowball glass that had smashed his fingers bloody a timeline ago. It was squeaky clean now.

“I want to know about you too,” Danny said. He was leaning forward in his seat. “Ward and Joy said you were dead.”

He had that same earnest throb in his voice that Harold had—and that was nothing like the way he’d sounded before. He was mirroring Harold’s play back at him, surprise for surprise, affection for affection.

Danny was so Danny that his only way to be different was this monkey-see, monkey-do imitation. It wasn’t as bad as Ward would have guessed, frankly.

It wouldn’t last, of course. Eventually Harold would want a reaction, would want more out of Danny than he’d put in; he was happy enough right now to just have a mirror, but eventually he’d need the glass front of a vending machine instead. Push a button, get a prize.

He guessed that in the grand scheme of things, that made Harold dying at his hands the practical moral equivalent of a Darwin Award death, some dumbass criminal shaking a Coke machine until it fell on him. That would let him off the hook, anyway. But he wasn’t sure he wanted off it, not if it meant saying he’d done nothing and been nothing. That he hadn’t made a single goddamn choice, even then; that Harold had made him topple, even if he’d done it accidentally. Fuck it. He took another sip of his bourbon and gave serious consideration to the idea that he was losing his mind.

“You’ll need a place to stay,” Harold was saying. “Ward can make those arrangements for you—”

“He can stay with me,” Ward said.

Good, there was the confirmation that he’d definitely lost his mind.

“I think we can do a little better than that, surely,” Harold said. His gaze was nickel-plated now, and it made Ward’s fingers ache, made every old bruise flare up with a kind of ghostly pain.

He was going to pay for this. It didn’t give away any part of the truth, though, not that he could tell, so the punishment would be survivable, if nothing else.

He met Harold’s eyes. “What’s better than family? Dad.”

“I’d like to stay with Ward,” Danny said. He was still on the couch, but just barely—he was tensed so far forward that most of his weight seemed to be on his toes, like he was primed to shove himself between them. “It’ll give us a chance to catch up.”

“I would have thought you had long enough for that already. Ward’s never been accused of being the world’s best conversationalist—not that that’s his fault. God knows I know how dull it can be to run a company. No real time for a life of your own.” He turned just a degree towards Ward. “I’m sure you’re hardly ever home, son.”

There were about five veiled messages and/or threats there that Ward decided not to parse right now. “It’s not a sleepover. It’s a sofa. That okay with you, Danny?”

“Perfect.” Danny’s voice was cheerful. Well, it was squeaky. That would have to be good enough.

Harold smiled. Totally cheerful. Totally convincing, to anybody but Ward. “Well, who am I to argue with two men who have already made up their minds? It’s nice to see the two of you on the same page for once. It wasn’t always that easy when you were kids. Ward, I’d just like a moment with you before the two of you go.”

He wrapped one hand around Ward’s upper arm—the way Danny had held him, but somehow not like that at all—and propelled him forward, around the corner and into the bedroom.

He’d known something was going to happen, obviously, but there was never any way to be a hundred percent ready. He wasn’t ready now, not as Harold sucker-punched him hard in the stomach and left him gasping for air. He had to lean against the wall to keep himself upright.

“What’s your game here, Ward?” Harold said softly, pleasantly. “Because as thick-headed as you can be sometimes, I don’t really think you missed your cues back there.”

The advantage of having the wind knocked out of him was he had time to think. When he could talk, he said, “Careful. I think Danny might be a little confused if his sleepover buddy suddenly came back with some broken ribs.”

“The second someone stronger than you comes along, you run and hide behind them.” Harold shook his head, like he was disappointed, and for some goddamn reason Ward couldn’t figure out, it still stung.

“If that were true, I’d have hired some kung fu bodyguard years ago, don’t you think?”

“Stronger here.” Harold touched his chest. “Oh, you spend those hours at the gym, Ward, but you’re weak where it counts. You don’t have the heart or the guts.” He turned away. “So go cower behind Danny while you can.”

He wanted to stay and argue, but he knew Harold too well—and he’d paid way too much for the knowledge—to not take an out while he had it. But he still only made it as far as the door; then he wrapped his hand around the doorframe and said, “What do you men, ‘while I can’?”

Harold shrugged. The expression on his face was bland. “He’s not family. You, me, and Joy—that’s what it always comes down to. Nothing else stays. You should remember that. Sooner or later, Danny will be gone—and you really shouldn’t burn your bridges.”

Ward stayed still. He was pretty sure he did, anyway: he didn’t think there was any twitch of a shiver to give him away.

***

“You remember the rules, right?” he said to Danny once they were safely between the car and his building, out on the sidewalk.

The streetlights made Danny’s hair yellower than ever. “Assume somebody’s always listening—or watching—so don’t say anything that could give away that you’re part of a time wheel. That’s really only one rule.”

“And act like you trust Harold.”

“Right.” He shot a sideways glance at Ward. “When he pulled you off at the end there, what did—”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Ward said, and he headed into his building, taking long enough strides that soon they hit the lobby so he couldn’t talk about it; he was good at being a dick.

They rode the elevator in silence until Danny said, “Does Joy live here too?”

“No. Jesus, we’re not that codependent. She has a brownstone—” He recalculated, wishing he could rewind all that. This wasn’t exactly his area of expertise. He didn’t know how to do things gently—he had to just settle for lowering his voice and hoping that quietly was close to being the same thing. “She bought your parents’ old place. She wanted to, um, keep it in the family, I guess.”

“Oh.” It was the first time he’d heard this particular silence out of Danny—not smugly meditative, not confused, not even hurt. Just stunned, like he’d gotten knocked on the head. “That’s good. She always liked visiting us, I think.”

“Yeah, she did.”

Ward hadn’t. Being around the Rands had been a problem for him, like getting just enough blood back into a limb that had fallen asleep—just enough to make it hurt before it turned useless and cold and rubbery again.

He unlocked the door to his apartment and let Danny in.

“Huh,” Danny said, tilting his head back, like he was taking it all in.

Ward had no clue what there even was to take in. It was barely decorated because he was barely there. It was a monstrous, minimalist hybrid of a Sharper Image catalog and the regular Rand decorator, who usually only did offices, and an office was more or less what it felt like. Lots of sleek black leather, chairs made out of stretchy webbing. Polished tables with nothing on them. Dark wood. No guest room, just a spare workspace. He’d put more work into the liquor cabinet than anything else.

This wasn’t home. It was just a place to be when he wasn’t at work.

“I’ll make up the sofa for you,” Ward said.

Danny poked one cushion, watching his finger sink in and leave a dent in the leather. Ward had no clue what he was thinking.

The only sheets he had were king-sized, picked to fit his own bed, so it took a lot of tucking before they didn’t just swamp the couch in Egyptian cotton.

“Do you get cold? I can find a blanket.”

This was asinine. But he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d had a woman stay the night, let alone just—someone, someone he wasn’t even sleeping with. He didn’t know how to be a host, for God’s sake. This was exactly why he hadn’t that decorator put in a guest room. It had been a mistake to even offer this in the first place.

Danny seemed to be thinking the same thing. He said awkwardly, “Uh, sure,” and the corner of his mouth twitched a little when Ward came back with something cashmere.

“What,” Ward said flatly.

“It’s just a big change from the monastery, that’s all. If Lei Kung had ever caught any of us with silk sheets and cashmere blankets—”

“They’re not silk. They’re just a high thread-count. And you’re not at the monastery.”

Danny gave him a look. “I know. That’s what I was saying.”

Well, he had him there. Ward rubbed at one temple.

“Sorry,” he said after a minute. “I’m not used to—” He waved his hand around. “This. Being friendly.”

“Wow,” Danny said.

“I know. You never would have guessed.”

Danny grinned.

It wasn’t just Harold’s smiles Ward didn’t trust; for years, it had been smiles in general. Corporate shark smiles, fake friendliness from TV journalists. He and Joy weren’t that expressive—not with happiness, anyway. Danny was. And it wasn’t a front, either, because God knew Danny didn’t hide the fact that he could be dangerous, given that he seemed to try to solve every problem by either punching it or throwing money at it. Danny was just—open.

Ward half-turned away, fluffing up the pillow with the flat of his hand. “Anyway,” he said. “You can stay here as long as that works for you. Do you have a problem with getting up early?”

Danny shook his head. “We used to get up at dawn.” He looked out the window. “It’s almost dawn now, but that’s not a problem either. I can go a while without sleep.”

It irked him that Danny knew that. What was the point of crash-landing at a monastery in the Chinese boondocks if you couldn’t even get a decent night’s sleep out of it? There couldn’t have been anything to do there. What were they doing with him, dragging him out of bed to read ancient scrolls?

“I want to explain the situation—as much of the situation as I can, anyway—to Joy before it’s us strolling into Rand in the morning and giving you a key to a corner office.”

“We don’t have to do it that fast,” Danny said. He looked mildly alarmed, which was new.

“I thought that was what you wanted.”

“I just wanted to come home. I mean, yeah, I want to be a part of Rand, I want to hold onto our families’ legacy, but… if it’d make Joy feel better, we can slow things down.”

Where the hell had all that calm understanding been when Ward had been the one wanting all this to come to a screeching halt?

He wanted to just get all this over with, like ripping off a Band-Aid, but maybe Danny had a point. They could pace themselves, just a little.

Especially since Harold pretty much had his hands tied behind his back for the time being. Okay, maybe he was hiding behind Danny after all.

“All right,” Ward said, testing the words. Agreeing with Danny about what their plan should be: he’d officially entered a new, incredibly bizarre universe. “Sleep in, then. I’ll go in a couple of hours late.”

But he couldn’t sleep, he found out quickly enough, he was still too buzzed, for all the obvious reasons. After an hour of tossing and turning, he resigned himself to just getting up. He might as well go into the office now after all; he sure as hell didn’t have anything else to do. The really sad, shitty part of living your life over and over again was you realized how little was in it to start with.

He didn’t have to take even two steps out of his bedroom door before he saw that the sofa was empty.

Danny.

It was like an allergic reaction, closing his throat up, and he stumbled forward, almost falling flat on his face—

Only to see Danny after all. He was sacked out on the floor. No cashmere blanket, no high thread-count sheets. Just the pillow and the area rug.

So that was why the bed back at the hotel hadn’t looked slept in, last time around. Danny had probably spent the night on the floor there too. He hadn’t actually screwed Ward over there.

For some reason, it made Ward turn around and go back to bed. He looked at the ceiling in the dark, wondering what the hell he was thinking and what he was going to do about Danny, and when he got tired of not having any of the answers, he fell asleep.

***

It was a weird, rocky couple of weeks.

“You said there was no way he was Danny,” Joy said. Ward heard the jumble of emotions in her voice, half-accusatory and half-hurt. And entirely amazed, which wasn’t a Meachum family trait. “And now you have one night, what, out having drinks with him, and you want to tell the media that he’s Danny Rand?”

“I talked to him,” Ward said. “He knows things no outsider could possibly fake.”

She crossed her arms, hugging herself. “Like what?”

He didn’t see any point in not leading with a coup de grace. “Like how he broke his arm when we were kids.”

“What? Danny didn’t—”

“Yeah, he did. I ought to know, I was the only other person there.” And I pushed him, he meant to say, but God, the way Joy looked at him would change completely with that, and he didn’t know if he could do it.

Just get off me, he remembered saying, shoving Danny as hard as he could. He didn’t remember why he hadn’t wanted Danny pawing all over him that day, bouncing around the place like a little sugar-high monster. Maybe he’d had some sliver of a good reason, an early precursor to the bruises that were decorating him this morning. Or maybe he’d just thought Danny’s hands were sticky with candy. Maybe Danny had just bugged him.

“Other stuff, too,” he said, moving swiftly on past the broken arm. “But you don’t have to believe me. Talk to him yourself.”

“The board isn’t going to accept a new fifty-one percent stakeholder without real, concrete proof,” Joy said slowly, “no matter how much you and I vouch for him. And Danny doesn’t have anyone who could provide him with a family DNA match.”

“No.” This turning of the tables was almost surreal: he couldn’t believe he was standing here arguing that they really should turn over half the company to a kung fu champ. “But you kept that dish he made for you, didn’t you? You can testify to its provenance, and it should have fingerprints in the paint or the clay or whatever.”

Joy looked at him, surprised, and then one corner of her mouth twitched. “When did you start watching CSI?”

“I get insomnia.”

“That’s pretty brilliant,” she said thoughtfully, looking off past him into space. “If he’s Danny.”

She was always giving him credit for things that had nothing to do with him. This. Dad’s business acumen. It made something inside him shrivel up.

Everything about him worth admiring wasn’t part of him at all. It was just imitation, borrowed from somebody else. And he kept having the cosmic connections to get away with it.

“Ward?”

He made himself look at her again. “He’s Danny. Think about how much I didn’t want to believe that and then think about how sure I am now. I’m not messing around here, Joy. He’s the real thing. But like I said, take some time to talk to him. I’m not trying to just argue you into it. We don’t have to rush this. Just—for whatever it’s worth, that’s where I stand on all of it.”

“It’s worth a lot.” She studied him, and as usual, he felt like he needed to hide from that, needed to wrench himself away. “You know that, don’t you? Your opinion, your judgment—Ward, that matters more to me than anyone else’s. I might even trust it above my own.”

“Don’t,” he said sharply.

Maybe that caution stuck, because according to Danny, she did grill him a little, asking him some questions he didn’t think anyone else would have known the answer to. And she did take his fingerprints to compare with the bowl. After that, they turned everything over to Jeri Hogarth—Danny’s pick—and waited for the legalities to go through and the media shitstorm to hit.

“Danny needs to get his own place,” Jeri said, during one of their little check-ins.

Ward shrugged. “So tell that to Danny.”

“I have. Multiple times. He’s reluctant for reasons that escape me, but they clearly have something to do with you.” She crossed her legs; her hard, dark eyes evaluating him. “You’re not sleeping together, are you? Because I’m not sure if that would make things simpler or more of a headache than ever.”

“We’re not sleeping together,” Ward said dryly. “I gave him the couch and he doesn’t even sleep on that. He likes the floor better.”

“The media should eat that up with a spoon. The ascetic billionaire.”

The media ate everything Danny-related up with a spoon. Ward had to keep himself from rolling his eyes. “If Danny doesn’t want to move out, then he doesn’t want to. What do you want me to do, evict him?”

“I want you to convince him that it’s in his best interests. And Rand’s. Danny’s ‘quirkiness’ only goes so far—if people are going to trust him, they’ll want to know he’s normal, too.”

“He’s not.”

“Do what you want,” Jeri said. “But it’s my professional opinion that Danny should get his own address.” She stood up and then looked down at him; it was an angle that she always seemed completely, irritatingly comfortable with. So whatever slight hesitation had snagged her now, it had to be something unusual. “And it’s my personal opinion that Danny thinks that he’s protecting you. If you need a bodyguard, for whatever reason, I’d recommend someone with a gun, not a tai chi routine.”

There wasn’t an NDA in the world that would cover any bodyguard who would do him a damn bit of good. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

He couldn’t say he’d known before now that Jeri Hogarth cared about him one way or the other. She hadn’t worked for Rand in years, and working for Danny wasn’t exactly the same thing.

J-Money, Danny called her. Who the hell knew where that had come from.

“You remember Danny from when he was a kid,” Ward said.

She leveled that glare at him. “What’s your point?”

“You must remember me too.”

“I do. You were a jackass.”

“It’s good to know that you always had this kind of compassionate view of humanity.”

“You’re not stupid, Ward. You’re old enough to understand exactly what you were back then. You were jealous, volatile, rude.”

“Thanks for all the sugarcoating.”

She gathered up her bag. “I work for Danny, not you. These consultations are at his request. So construe the lack of sugarcoating as loyalty to my client—who’s probably too nice to tell you any of this himself.” She said the word nice like she was handling it with tweezers at arm’s length, and then she looked down at him: the prince of not-nice. Her face turned appraising. He was a case she was deciding whether or not to handle. “I’ll say this for you, though. You were always loyal.”

Ward raised his eyebrows. “Like a dog?”

“Loyalty is an underrated virtue. Trust me, I should know.”

She didn’t append anything to that—nothing about how that was why she knew he’d do the right thing with Danny—she just let it lie, a shadow flickering over her face.

Loyalty. It had been a long time since he’d considered that any kind of strength. Mostly it was just the rope that kept him tied to New York, to Harold, when he could have tried to get out a long time ago.

He did talk to Danny, though, in one of their little Central Park conversations.

“You need to start living something in the vicinity of a normal life.”

Danny shrugged and tore off a bit of soft pretzel. “Why?”

“Because it’s what people do.”

“Yeah, but everything here is going to be erased the next time you reset. The only version of events that’s going to matter is the one you lived through the first time.”

He wasn’t sure he’d really grasped that before, even though he’d gotten the idea technically. He should have liked it, but he didn’t. There was too much he’d gotten right this time, and now he was just going to lose it, like he’d dropped all these days and hours in quicksand.

“Unless I die,” he said. “Then this reality wins out. Harold wins. That’s what you said, right?”

Danny turned, catching him by the shoulders. It was a gesture Ward had almost gotten used to by now, except for how it was always followed by Danny locking eyes with him, bludgeoning him with earnestness.

“You’re not going to die, Ward.”

“I know that.” Ward shook him off. “I’m just talking logistics. If I did die, all of this would stay, right?” He swept his arms around, taking in Central Park on an irritatingly sunny afternoon, everything drenched in yellow-green and the smell of hot dogs sizzling at a vendor cart. Two tourists walked by them, craning their necks to look at everything—him and Danny included, like they’d come with the park. Your complimentary New York public rant-and-ravers.

Danny looked unhappy about it, but he at least answered the damn question. “Yeah. This would be the timeline that stuck.”

“Then you need to act like that’s a possibility. On the off-chance that something happens, you’re going to be the only person left who has even an inkling about what Harold is capable of, and it would be great if you looked like a stable, functioning adult.”

And buy some actual shoes, he almost added, but he’d mostly given up on that one by now. Danny apparently didn’t want to acknowledge anything outside of a sneakers-barefoot binary.

“I don’t know everything he’s capable of,” Danny said quietly. “You keep a lot of that to yourself.”

Ward looked over Danny’s shoulder, watching the leaves stir in the breeze. He said, “Are you going to do this or not?”

“I could ask Colleen if I could stay with her, maybe.”

“You’re a billionaire. You don’t have to sublet.”

Colleen Wing. Ward hadn’t tipped Danny off about the dojo this time—he’d honestly forgotten about it—but Danny had gravitated to it, to her, anyhow.

It was the kind of thing that could throw you off-balance. Destiny was bullshit, it had to be—there had to be something that was as idiotically fake as he’d always thought, even in this world of zombies and magic and time loops—and yet Colleen Wing had turned up again, randomly, a joker spilling out of the deck.

Ward didn’t trust her. And Danny had zero survival instincts.

“You need your own place,” Ward said, stressing the words.

“That’s a really Western way to look at things.”

“We’re in the West.”

The problem with Danny—one of the myriad problems with Danny—was that it was impossible to argue him into something. He just planted his heels. Ward had, by this time, accidentally and unwillingly taken in the whole story of how Danny had gotten that bug-zapper Fist, and it was, unsurprisingly, mostly just because he was the embodiment of a cheesy motivational poster.

“Fine,” Ward said. What had he decided a long time ago, with Harold? Caving was expedient. “Ask Little Miss Dojo if you can move in with her.”

If she was smart—and Ward’s brief run-in with her had convinced him she was—then she would rightly think this was insane; why should she keep living in this falling-down, piece-of-shit dojo, now with bonus boyfriend-tenant, when Danny could just move the two of them into a brownstone that was the duplicate of his parents’? Colleen would insist on Danny getting them a new place, free of roof leaks and nightly sirens, and Ward’s problem would be half-solved. He still wouldn’t trust her, but at least he’d have made Danny look… comprehensible.

Except, as it turned out, Colleen apparently just said, “Sure, take the top dresser drawer.”

So then he was alone again, which was ostensibly better. He didn’t have to deal with Danny trying to make egg fried rice in his kitchen at one in the morning, duct tape sealing a cut on his forehead; he didn’t have to hear any stories about people whose names he was defiantly trying not to remember. He celebrated his liberation from company by getting blackout drunk, and the day after that, Harold celebrated the absence of Ward’s babysitter by dislocating his shoulder for him. Officially, that was because of Danny’s idiotic apology video, but Ward imagined it would have happened anyway—it or something like it. The time wheel was all about fate, and whatever the hell else fate was, it was the shit you ran into over and over again.

“You wanted him back in Rand,” Ward said through his teeth. “You couldn’t have worked out that a guy raised by kung fu monks wouldn’t have the best business sense?”

Harold looked down at him with real interest, like he was a pet that had done an unexpected trick.

Years ago, Ward had thought that expression was better than contempt, that anything was better than contempt. But it wasn’t. It was just the other side of the same old story. It was still an affront, this surprise that he should be capable of doing anything Harold hadn’t counted on.

Harold said, “Why would I want Danny in control of Rand?” He sounded nonchalant. “I want him doing what he does best—tracking down the Hand, taking them on.”

He’d gotten himself in a danger zone. Harold was Harold, Jesus, Ward couldn’t keep track of what this one wanted vs. the one he’d had two loops ago.

“I’m not an idiot,” he said. “It’s not like Rand doesn’t have Gao’s fingerprints all over it. He can get a sense of what he’s up against, and it keeps him close. It also keeps him attached to us, and presumably you want that, since you’re hoping he’ll do you a favor.” He knew you weren’t supposed to try to pop a dislocated shoulder back in by yourself, but he did it anyway—on a list of the bad decisions he made, especially where his body was concerned, that was pretty far down. He breathed in and out through the nausea, waiting.

If this went south, he was going to need both hands.

“Still,” Harold said, turning away, apparently accepting this explanation—Ward exhaled—“I never said to turn over fifty-one percent of the company to him.”

“I didn’t have a choice. I’m not the one who signed the original paperwork with Wendell and missed out on getting my name on the corporation.”

“Hmm. You’re feeling feisty.” Harold turned back, quick as a rattlesnake, and took Ward’s chin in his hand. “If you think I have some upper limit of what I’d do to correct your mistakes, Ward, you’re sorely mistaken.”

“Just sore.” He smiled.

A backhand around then would have actually been a relief—it would have meant they were back on familiar turf. And to be honest, he didn’t have too high an opinion of him letting that apology happen either—seriously, he hadn’t been enough on the ball to stop that even with advanced warning?—so he’d even agree that much was deserved.

But Harold went on studying him. “It’s not just today.” He sounded like he was talking to himself. “You’ve been different since Danny came back.”

“Wow, I wonder what could have possibly provoked that.”

Harold’s thumb bore bruisingly into Ward’s lower lip, making his gums ache. “Try to can the smartass act for a minute. I’m thinking.”

If it came down to a physical fight between them right now, Ward knew he’d lose. Harold had nothing to do all day except diabolically plot and hone his strength. He took his whole penthouse-prison act too literally.

Ward had to take it on faith that, for right now at least, Harold wouldn’t hit on the right answer to all this. What intel did he have, after all?

All he knows is that I’ve been smarter lately. He wouldn’t risk it all on just that. That doesn’t prove anything.

“You’re wondering what’s going to happen once Danny succeeds,” Harold said, his voice creamy. He moved his hand, stroking Ward’s cheek with too-hot fingers. He always ran feverish like that, like he wasn’t just alive again but more alive than everyone else—more alive than Ward and rubbing his face in it. “What will happen if I’m able to walk back into the world. Maybe it doesn’t matter to you if there’s even a Rand left for me to return to. Is that it?”

No, that was giving him way too much credit for foresight he’d never bothered having. Outside of the escape fund, the long game had never been his priority.

“I wouldn’t do that to Joy,” he said.

“No, I guess you wouldn’t. You’re a good brother, Ward.”

The praise was, unbelievably, genuine, and it seemed to take root somewhere in his chest, warm and aching.

“And you’ve been a good son,” Harold said. He let go of Ward and went and fixed himself a drink. “I wonder sometimes if I’ve been too hard on you, not told you that enough.”

“You’ve never told me that at all.”

“Oh, you’re exaggerating. No, I’ve invested so much in you, son. You’re my life’s work, you know, far more than Rand. And when you’re not here, I think to myself that I wish I could fix things with us. Make it so you don’t feel so—obligated. So you don’t push back at every little thing.” He drank. “Is it too late to change that?”

Yes. Years too late.

But he said, “Maybe not,” and he heard something in his voice he hated. Some fundamental gullibility.

Why did he keep falling for this? Why did he keep letting himself believe he could make Harold happy?

Maybe that was why Dad had never liked him, really. He got suckered in every time, and it was impossible to respect someone who fell like that, over and over again; God knew Ward didn’t respect himself.

Something else occurred to him. If they were already at the point where Danny had bought into that woman’s sob story, had kicked off his little apology tour, then they were close to the reset.

What did Harold want? Ward had spent his whole life twisting himself up trying to answer that, trying to fulfill those imagined expectations and hating him for it. He wasn’t unaware of the messed-up psychology behind it all. He knew who he was.

And he knew, by now, that it was pointless. No matter what Ward did, there was no way out of that night with the missing money and the knife and the lagoon. Not unless he was willing to die himself, and leave Joy all alone, with Harold waiting, vulture-like, in the wings.

Then again, she’d have Danny. Danny knew what Harold was—maybe not the whole picture, but enough. Danny could look out for her.

But there was a difference. He knew this Danny was the Danny, sure. He even believed that Danny meant well and had some vestigial loyalty to them. Ward trusted him as much as he could trust anybody who wasn’t Joy.

But how far could that really go? Danny’s whole sacred responsibility shtick was that he had to destroy the Hand, and maybe his alliance with Ward hinged on the fact that Ward had convinced him that Harold was part of it—unwillingly, sure, but corrupted, contaminated. What if Danny decided the same thing was true of Joy?

It came down to that: he couldn’t count on Danny quite that much. It would be insane to pin his hopes on someone he barely knew and sure as hell didn’t understand.

And even besides all that, Ward wanted whatever was on the other side of that night at the lagoon; he wanted the freedom he’d barely gotten a chance to taste before this fucking time wheel had started spinning. And he wanted that more than he wanted some longshot repaired relationship with Harold, no matter how much Harold dangled that prospect to mess with him.

There was no starting over. Not for them. At the end of all of this, Harold would be dead, and Ward would be free, and that was it.

Ward looked at him. Good old Dad, doomed once again. Drinking his Scotch.

I have to stop, he thought dimly. I can’t keep trying to get his approval. I can’t keep fooling myself, thinking that this time I’ve found whatever set of numbers spins his fucked-up combination lock.

Yeah, right. He’d been waiting for himself to wise up and stop giving a damn about Harold for years now. He hadn’t gotten it right yet, and he was starting to think he wasn’t going to. Anyway, the important thing was to just keep his mouth shut. Keep his mouth shut and let the clock tick down towards doomsday.

Almost there.

He tried to ignore the way Harold was watching him: the appraisal in his eyes.

***

Before the end, or before what he was pretty sure was the end—he thought he probably had it together enough to know what day he’d killed his father, if nothing else—he asked Danny out for drinks. His shoulder was still sore, aching like a bad tooth, but what the hell, all he really needed his arm for tonight was tipping his glass to knock out drink after drink, and that wasn’t exactly strenuous. Just a lot of repetition.

He’d picked a shitty sports bar, the kind of place where he would never have gone under normal circumstances, and it was weird to see NFL footage and Danny Rand in the same room.

“What?” Danny said, smiling. The Christmas lights hung around the bar shone red and green on his teeth.

“You’re just really weird,” Ward said.

“Thanks.”

“I mean, think about your life. Monk, ninjas, undead assholes hanging around, me. Think about being the world’s only likable billionaire. And then—” He spread his arms out, taking in the scratched wooden booth they were sitting in. “You’re here.”

“I’m here,” Danny agreed. “And I’m pretty sure you’re drunk.”

“I am. I’m extraordinarily drunk, and I’ll tell you why. I just realized that I am fresh out of consequences. Unless I get killed in the next, oh, four hours or so—and I figure you’ll stop that from happening, being my kung fu bodyguard and all—then I’m home free. I won’t have a hangover. I won’t have an anything. You see what I mean?”

“You worked out the reset point.”

“That’s it.” He downed the rest of his drink and regarded Danny blearily. “And you thought this wouldn’t happen. You thought I’d mess it up and die.”

“I didn’t think that.”

“Yeah, well, agree to disagree.”

“Pretty sure I’ve got the final say on what I actually thought.”

“Not according to Freud.” He pointed at Danny. “You agreed to get your own place because you thought I might be a screw up.”

“Ward.” It was hilarious to irritate Danny, or at least to do it tonight: his nostrils flared out like he was a horse. Joy had been the one who’d had the horseback riding lessons when they were kids—that kind of thing was supposed to be for girls—but Ward had been allowed to go with her to the stables sometimes. That was an actual good childhood memory, rubbed smooth from constant handling.

“You look like a horse,” he said to Danny.

“You’re the one who wanted me to move out.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You argued about it with me!”

“Well. Freud.” He shrugged. “You want another drink? I think I’m going to get another.”

“They should stop serving you,” Danny said, but he at least didn’t tail Ward to the bar like an anxious sheepdog, glaring at any bartender who dared to top him off.

Because really, he didn’t even remotely need to stop drinking. Not tonight. He wanted to take advantage, for once, of the fact that all this wouldn’t stick; he wanted to talk to Danny. He just had to—lubricate his way there.

No matter how drunk he was, he wasn’t stupid enough to not know that he could have been having this conversation with Joy instead. He should have been having this conversation with her. She was his sister, and Danny was just—Danny was just someone he’d been friends with as a kid, sort of. And his temporary houseguest. Joy was the only person he loved and was actually fine with loving, and if this were his last night on earth, he should be with her. He ought to be settling up their tab right now and taking an Uber to her place. He should be telling her everything he’d had to keep secret over the last few years.

But instead he was here with Danny, eating godawful nachos he’d ordered off a menu that had been covered in plastic.

He came back with his drink and raised his eyebrows at Danny still nursing his last beer. Danny raised his back, like he was challenging Ward to make something of it.

“You must really have it bad for that Wing woman,” Ward said abruptly. “You ended up with her last time, too.”

Danny perked up, as wholesome as Leave It to Beaver. “Really?”

Ward had meant to follow that up with some uneasy speculation about what it meant that Colleen Wing kept attaching herself to Danny, even when he’d gotten off to a wildly different start in New York this time. But it would have been like punching a Labradoodle. He shrugged instead.

He said, “Is there anything you want me to tell you, next time? If there’s a next time?”

“Colleen,” Danny said.

“Anything else? Any shortcut I should give you to get you to trust me?”

“I trust you.”

“But from the beginning,” Ward said. “From when you get here.” But it was pointless, because Danny was, idiotically, right; he hadn’t needed some secret password or spectacular demonstration to prove himself to Danny this time, and he wouldn’t need it next time, either. He would just say what was happening and Danny would believe him. He changed the subject. “So, do you think there’s going to be a next time?”

“Do I think you’re going to die in the next four hours, you mean? Not if I can help it.”

“No, I mean—the whole wheel-powering thing. It could run out. This could be it.”

Danny looked down at the tabletop for a moment, and then, meeting Ward’s eyes, he said quietly, “If this is it, then the magic’s pretty weak. And if he had to bet his life on something, he probably made it stronger than that. I don’t think this is the last time for you, Ward.” He pressed his lips together for a second, like whatever the next part was, he didn’t want to say it, but he said it anyway. “The last time might not be for a long time. And you can tell me that too, you know? Every time, you can tell me how fed up you are with all of this. I can—maybe I can’t really empathize. But I can imagine.”

Ward’s mouth was suddenly dry. How many times were they talking about here? Or did he really, really not want to know that? He thought about the stiff, frozen line of Danny’s mouth as he’d almost held himself back and decided that no, he probably didn’t want to know. Not right now. Not in this now, anyway.

“Screw it,” he said. He tossed back the rest of his drink. “I wanted to tell you something.”

Danny waited.

Ward looked at his watch. “The problem with this whole countdown thing is it that your wheel’s on a lag. I mean, now is when something should happen. But the first time—nothing. Not until morning.”

“Magic gets really unpredictable.”

“I can’t believe you can talk about all this with a straight face.”

“You have kind of a straight face right now too,” Danny said, smiling a little. “The weirdness is sneaking up on you.”

Ward rolled his eyes and marked his slide into drunkenness by the way it felt like it made him momentarily dizzy. So: probably drunk enough for this, then.

“I had a pair of your sunglasses. These shitty, plastic-framed Disney World things that you’d left at our place. When you were a kid,” he added unnecessarily, like Danny might have put on a pair of Mickey ears since he’d gotten back. “So after you died—after I thought you were dead—I still had this, you know, thing. That was yours.”

That hadn’t been what he’d been planning on saying. Harold—he’d meant to tell Danny about Harold, meant to say, finally, how sick-scared he was of him all the time. But this was what had come out instead, like it was something else he was ashamed of, something else he’d held white-knuckled at the heart of himself for all these years. That he had missed Danny. Cried for him.

He hadn’t kept the sunglasses. Joy had been the one who had kept things, kept her little coin-dish.

“I think I need some air.” He staggered upright and tossed his wallet to Danny. “Can you settle up for me? My, what, eighteen drinks and your two? I need to get outside.”

“Sure,” Danny said softly. His hand grazed Ward’s as he picked the wallet up off the table. “Don’t go too far.”

“I’ll go wherever I want,” Ward said reflexively, but where he wanted to go didn’t amount to more than just outside, so it didn’t matter anyway. He wound up right by the door, leaning against the slightly grimy bricks, breathing in the smells of a New York summer, which were—not exactly appetizing. But not exactly sobering, either, so that was something.

Danny took him home, not to Ward’s place but back to that dojo, where he had some whispered conversation with Colleen Wing about why he was dragging a drunk business partner home to sleep on their spare gym mat or whatever.

Ward could have told her that it didn’t matter, since the world was going to end in a couple of hours anyway, but then it occurred to him that, one, the dojo could easily be as bugged as his apartment by now, and two, maybe she wasn’t the kind of person to take the end of the world as a perfectly good excuse to blow everything off. She seemed uncannily productive; it was kind of disconcerting.

In the end, though, she let him sleep over, and in the morning he was brushing his teeth in their bathroom—some toothpaste squeezed onto his fingertip—when time opened up under him like a sinkhole.

He wasn’t exactly sure why he’d been brushing his teeth, either. It was like that kind of attitude—that you should just keep on acting like there was a reason to do things—had rubbed off on him.

***

After that, it got a little blurry.

Danny hadn’t been kidding about it taking a long time.

***

Once it was Danny, not Joy, who found him high out of his mind, collapsed on his office couch and drooling on it.

One constant across all the little curlicues of time loops: the Hand put out some really great synthetic heroin. Ward had no idea why Danny kept trying to interfere with their clearly stellar business model.

“Ward? God, Ward, are you okay?” Danny helped him sit up, handling him so softly and carefully it was like he thought Ward would bruise like overripe fruit if he didn’t. He tucked his arm around Ward’s shoulders. “I think you’re sick—you feel feverish—”

“How naïve are you?” He turned his arm out as a kind of answer, baring his inner forearm and the sticky laminate of the heroin patch. He heard Danny suck his breath in noisily through his teeth.

“This stuff is dangerous,” Danny said finally, and Ward was almost impressed by how restrained that bit of afterschool special was for the kung fu Boy Scout. He didn’t sound scolding—more neutral, like he was assessing some kind of threat. “How long ago did you put that on?”

“I don’t know. How long have I been here?”

“I don’t know,” Danny said.

“Well, I don’t know either.” Ward didn’t like it, but he had to admit he was basically giggling now. “You know what you should do, you should call Dad and ask him. And he can just,” he made a sharp noise, like he was slurping up a long strand of spaghetti, “rewind his zillion little cameras and tell you. He’s probably watching right now, probably going to call and tell me to stop making such an ass out of myself.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “But I put my phone in my desk drawer, and I unplugged the jack on the landline, so what’s he going to do? Nothing. Not until I have to see him again face to face.”

Danny was just letting him ramble. His hand, in Ward’s peripheral vision, kept flickering briefly with little traces of gold.

“You think Harold has cameras here?”

“He has them everywhere. Believe me, I’ve worked it out by now.” He bit his tongue on that one, tasting a sudden surge of blood. Even high, he was good at keeping his mouth shut on the things that were really, really important. “I’m surprised he doesn’t call me up to berate my technique on the rare occasion I actually get to sleep with someone.”

“No wonder you’re doing drugs, then,” Danny said.

“I can’t believe you call it ‘doing drugs.’” He could, though. He let his head loll against Danny’s shoulder.

He didn’t want to ruin what was left of his high by just talking about Harold: he spent all his time either talking about Harold or specifically not talking about him, and he was exhausted from it. He was exhausted from looking at the same office walls over and over again, exhausted with meeting newly-returned Danny for the first time, exhausted with fucking pier deals and medicine at cost and blah-blah-blah.

“You should tell me something,” Ward said, ignoring the curl of nausea in his stomach. Every time he’d taken this heroin, so far, he’d thrown up at some point, it was kind of a given, so he was just going to ignore it until it got here. “Tell me something about K’un-Lun. Or Davos or Lei Kung or whoever.”

He had picked up on a really unfortunate amount of Danny’s personal history by now. He had, purely by accident, memorized about eighteen different variations on “Lei Kung always said…”

He’d never actually asked Danny about any of it, though. Danny just tended to tell him stuff.

Danny was hesitating for longer now than he ever had before. The gold had receded from his fingertips.

“Danny?”

“The masters there wanted to toughen us up. In a fight, you can’t pause to react every time you feel pain. Usually, the adrenaline helps you with that, floods out your system so you keep going even if something hurts. But if you can ignore pain even when your blood is cold and even when the voices in your head are quiet, when there’s no anger or distraction, then that’s when the pain doesn’t own you anymore. You can control it.”

“Control it,” Ward repeated.

“They used staffs. Training staffs, across our shoulders.”

He tried to picture Danny, little kid Danny the way Ward could sometimes only dimly and sometimes all-too-clearly remember him; little kid Danny getting whacked across the shoulders with some martial arts staff. He staggered up—“Ward!”—and over to the trash can, where he gagged everything up. He’d known it was going to happen, but not like this.

Danny’s hand was on his back suddenly, steadying him. Ward wiped his mouth.

“That’s bullshit,” he said hoarsely. “You were always a tough kid anyway. You had to be, if I was already kicking you in the balls all the time. You didn’t need anyone to teach you not to flinch.”

“It’s not about flinching. It’s about just—not feeling it.”

“It’s bullshit.”

“I asked to do the training,” Danny said. “No one made me choose the path I did.”

No one made him choose the path he did. Well, someone had decided that they should take an orphaned American kid and and keep him in the mountains for years training him to become some kind of mystical warrior who’d have to go a decade without getting a single new song on his damn iPod. It was insane to say that Danny’s free will had, at twelve or thirteen, walked him into a life of people hitting him, insane to say that he’d known what he was getting into. They should have sent him home again.

Danny seemed to take his incredulous silence as agreement. He said, “I just mean—I know what it’s like to feel like someone’s watching every reaction you have. That someone’s weighing everything you do to decide if you’re good enough.”

“You’re good, okay? You’re the Iron Fist. You’re a human night light.”

“I’m talking about you,” Danny said.

He didn’t get Danny to leave until he’d started sobering up, and even then, Danny insisted on driving him home and personally unloading Ward into his apartment. Ward could practically hear the cameras clicking as the lenses refocused on him. He flipped them off and collapsed into bed.

***

After that, he cleaned up a little on the heroin. He still needed pills and he still wasn’t going to try to get through any of this sober, but he drew a line in the sand.

***

He’d worked out a stable loop, a way to get from A to Z and back to A again, but somewhere along the line—the knotted, endlessly recursive line—he’d started mixing things up just for the hell of it. Maybe he couldn’t go full-on Bill Murray and detour through town improving everyone’s day, but he had a little wiggle room around the edges, little things he could shake up that wouldn’t immediately tip Harold off to the fact that something in his head had gone crucially, meaningfully awry.

Danny said, “We’ll sell the drug at cost,” and everyone around the conference table gaped, openmouthed.

Ward had watched this scene unfurl what felt like a million times by now. He had to keep himself from yawning. But then it occurred to him that maybe he didn’t have to keep making the forever-unworkable argument that this was just how business was done.

He’d had built up differently textured relationships with Danny by this time, every time, and this was one of the moments where it was sometimes vaguely interesting to see what those variables had done to the same-old, same-old. Usually it worked out one of three ways. Danny either rejected it flat-out, playing the fifty-one percent card, or he looked pained and said that he did intend to let Ward and Joy handle most of the business stuff but he was serious about this, or he tried—at irritating length—to argue Ward into agreeing with him.

Once, Danny had just said shortly, “Fine, then we’ll give it away for free.”

That was in the same stretch of days where Ward had been trying to get Danny completely out of Harold’s orbit, and he’d smashed Joy’s coin dish before Danny could get a hold of it.

Danny hadn’t liked him much that loop. Ward didn’t repeat his mistakes from that one. For the most part, that talked him out of trying to change anything too big.

It’d never really occurred to him until now that there was probably a wide, wide range of shit he could get away with if Harold just assumed he was sulking and throwing a hissy fit. Then it hit him all of a sudden, and he leaned back in his chair, lacing his hands behind his head.

“Yeah,” he said. “Why not? Like Danny says, people’s lives are depending on this.”

Danny lit up like a Fourth of July sparkler. “Yes! And if we can help—”

“If we can help, then isn’t it our responsibility as an ethical, caring company to make sure that we do?” Ward glanced around the boardroom. “And, as a plus, the media will give us more publicity than we could ever possibly buy. We’d be the company who cares.”

“At what price?” Laurence said.

“You’ve got a calculator on your phone, Laurence. Figure it out.” He stood up. “I vote with Danny, not that I need to bother. Fifty-one percent is fifty-one percent, ladies and gentlemen.”

Danny followed him out into the hall, looking like he was going to grow a tail just to wag it. “Ward, that was great. I knew you—”

“Have coffee with me,” Ward said. He flattened his palm against the elevator button. “Or tea. Or a wheatgrass smoothie or whatever it is you drink.”

He knew what Danny liked, actually. This wasn’t one of the loops where Ward had confided in him—he’d tried to do that as little as possible, only when he felt like his sanity was scratching around at the inside of his skull and about to escape him completely. It wasn’t a hard and fast rule, just something he felt like he should hold onto. He shouldn’t be leaning on Danny. That kind of need was a weakness he couldn’t afford.

But despite that, he still knew Danny’s preferred tea order. Just like he still knew weird K’un-Lun sayings about how the man who wished to learn patience should study the stone.

Just like he knew how the oh-so-enlightened Lei Kung had decided it was okay to beat the crap out of a kid he was supposed to be taking care of.

Slipping. You’re slipping. You’re getting too involved.

He was. He’d gotten a kick out of making Danny happy, even when he’d known exactly how much trouble it would mean for him later on.

“I really need to—”

“Make time,” Ward said shortly. “I just did you a huge favor, didn’t I?”

He took Danny to an out-of-the-way coffeeshop that he’d never been to in this particular lifetime, a place there was no way Harold could have bugged in advance, and he laid it all out for Danny all over again. Time wheel spiel redux.

“I knew what you were going to say, about the steep discount on the drugs,” he said, wrapping up. “You do it every time, even though it’s a spectacularly poor business decision. We might gain in publicity, but that doesn’t even begin to offset the loss—”

“Then you don’t think I’m right.” Danny’s face had stiffened.

“I know you’re not right. I just also know it doesn’t matter, and, what the hell, it was fun to do something a little different for once.”

It had been a while since he’d actually seen Danny get angry with him. “So get a hobby, Ward. Learn a new language.”

“I never had a good ear for them.”

“Take some classes with Colleen! You can tell her what’s going on—you can trust her, I promise.”

Colleen. Ward had lived up to his promise to tell Danny to go look for her, at least in all the loops where he told Danny anything at all. Half the time, Danny had already found her anyway. Ward had given up worrying about the whole fate angle; he was too tired to resist it anymore.

“You don’t have to toy with people like they’re—like they’re cards and you’re playing Solitaire.” Danny exhaled and rolled his shoulders back, like he was trying to “center himself” or whatever it was he did. He took an angry little sip of his tea, like he was biting at it. His voice was a little calmer when he said, “But I guess it doesn’t really matter. If what I’m feeling right now is real, then what those people will feel when they know the medicine is coming to them is real too. Even if it doesn’t last. What you do in these loops counts, Ward, even if it doesn’t feel like it. You can’t lose hope.”

“I’m not losing hope,” Ward said, but the words just kind of hung in the air, so baldly stupid that he was almost ashamed of them. Of course he was losing hope, and he’d never even had much of it to start with. For some reason, he added, “In my time, in the timeline that I need to get back to, after all this is over—they’re still getting the discount, you know. You pushed it through there too. I hated it, but you did it. It’s going to last.”

Danny looked at him for a second, and then a smile sort of crumbled across his face, like a wave of good nature breaking down some flimsy bulwark of one hundred percent justified resentment. It made something in Ward feel needle-sharp and painful and needy, like all he wanted was to let that Danny-wave knock him flat and wash him down smooth until there just wasn’t all of this anymore. His throat hurt.

He wasn’t accomplishing what he’d set out to accomplish here at all. He poured some more sugar into his coffee and, staring out the window, said, “Fine. I’ll start taking some classes with your girlfriend.”

***

Ward stuck by his word—a relatively recent phenomenon—even though a few more turns of the wheel made it obvious that there was no Groundhog Day cheat code to get Colleen Wing to warm to him right away.

“She likes you,” Ward said to Danny. “Maybe not from the word go, every time, but pretty quickly.”

“I’m more polite than you are,” Danny said, almost confidentially.

Colleen swung her staff around, like she was testing the sound it made as it whipped through the air. Ward thought about Danny and all the beatings in K’un-Lun and wondered how the hell Danny could manage to watch that without flinching—watch it with a little smile on his face, even.

“It’s not just that,” she said. “By now—if I can believe you—”

“You can,” Danny said quickly.

“—you’re telling me about the time wheel every time we do this. There are plenty of people in the world who’d think you were crazy just for that. I’m not one of them, but it puts me on edge. If you’re right, then you’re the reason nothing I’m doing right now is going to matter. Except to you, so get your ass back out into the middle of the floor.”

“Yes, sensei.”

“If you could say that even one time without it coming out through a smirk, that’d be start.” She knocked his legs out from under him immediately.

“Yeah, I’d like you a lot better if you weren’t hitting me,” Ward said from the floor. “Not a huge fan of that.”

There was something sharp in her eyes as she pulled him up, and he wondered what she thought she saw in him. She watched him about the same way he watched her, like he was a puzzle and a grenade all at the same time.

***

Almost every time now, he fixed it so that Danny stayed with him.

That he had to say almost bothered him. He should have had everything running like clockwork by now, but he didn’t: the world outside him stayed the same, sure, but he was getting buggy, fucked-up. It was like each turn of the wheel made his internal wiring spit out more sparks, more smoke. He wasn’t consistent even when he meant to be.

He was starting to have trouble concentrating, and losing his concentration was the one thing he couldn’t afford. And he knew goddamn well that it wasn’t anything physical. He was just—losing it. He’d been in all these days maybe a hundred times by now, and exhaustion had punctured them and sent all the color running out. Half the time, he was just going through the motions, tired and lonely and bored out of his mind.

He even tried cocaine a few times, and that had never been his drug of choice—he’d never had trouble being up before. It gave him nosebleeds and scared Joy—evidently manic him was a sight to behold—so he put a stop to it.

“I had some trouble getting it anyway,” he said to Danny, back in Central Park, eating some kind of fruit salad spiked with chili and lime. He’d given up resisting Danny’s apparent need to feed him. “It’s not like it’s the eighties.”

“You don’t need any of that,” Danny said—with all the adverbs that went along with Danny: intensely, earnestly, self-righteously, way too optimistically. He took a dripping section of watermelon out of Ward’s fruit salad. “You can talk to me. Or I can—I mean, you said the problem is partly that you’re bored, right? I can do something I haven’t done before.” His smile was brilliant, his mouth shining with watermelon juice. “Here.” He lowered himself down onto the springy Central Park grass and bounced upside down, holding himself in a perfect handstand.

He stayed in position for a minute before lowering his feet and popping back up.

Only Danny would think that a goofy handstand could fill the same void cocaine did. And he did think that, clearly—he had to, because he’d done this every time Ward had brought the cocaine thing up. This was at least the sixth Central Park handstand Ward had gotten out of him.

Ward kept repeating the circumstances so this would happen. Evidently the handstand was doing something for him. He ate another slice of pineapple and felt the tart sweetness sink into his tongue.

“See?” Danny said. “Something new. Something unique.” His face was flushed from all the blood having run to his head. “Did it help?”

“Yeah,” Ward said, like he’d said every other time. Anyway, it was still true. He passed Danny the fruit salad and the little plastic fork. He added for no apparent reason, “You know, I have you living with me basically every time now.”

“That makes sense.”

“Maybe to you, since you’re like a cosmic freeloader at this point.”

Danny grinned. “I mean because I’m one of the only people you can talk to about all this. And because, no offense, I don’t think Colleen would really move in with you.”

“No kidding.”

“Why—” Danny hesitated, and for the first time in what felt like forever, Ward had no idea what he was going to say. He’d never told Danny how many times they’d lived together, and he’d expected Danny to be more surprised by it. Since Danny hadn’t been, he had no clue what Danny was thinking.

“Why what?”

“Why didn’t Harold like it? Me moving in with you, I mean. You said that he wants to keep me close, right, so why wouldn’t it just make him happy to have me living with you?”

It was amazing that they’d gotten through it all this many times without opening up this particular can of worms—or maybe they’d come this close before and he’d always backpedaled effectively enough that he’d even forgotten all about it.

Maybe by now he was too worn out to give a shit. Maybe, he thought with a kind of academic interest, like he was observing himself from the outside, maybe this time he’d do it.

He didn’t. In some immensely fucked up way, he still owed Harold loyalty and secrecy more than he owed Danny honesty.

You’re always whining. I don’t know what it is about you that makes you want people to pity you.

I don’t, he thought, reflexively a little wounded by his own parroting of the Meachum family party line. I don’t want him to pity me; that’s not why.

He just twitched his shoulders in what wasn’t quite a shrug. “He wants a wall or two between us. He’s afraid I’ll break his happy undead Daddy Warbucks image for you when he’s selling it as hard as humanly possible.”

That was the truth, anyway. He just wasn’t getting into the details like he hates it because he knows it’s riskier to make me piss blood with you hanging around all the time.

“Anyway,” he said, “it’s mostly a moot point on the whole ‘talking to you about it’ thing. As far as having you in the apartment goes, I mean, since we can’t talk there anyway. Instead, here we are, for the umpteenth time.” He stole the fruit salad back from Danny and threw a little wedge of kiwi out to a squirrel, “This is what you’ve done to me, you realize that.”

“I made you feed that squirrel?”

“You incrementally forced me to become someone who notices wildlife, yeah.”

Alternately, he’d just fed the squirrel because it was something new, and Danny had nothing to do with it. Danny was just like some kind of bizarre human kudzu, growing all over everything in his life, so it was hard to tell the difference.

And that was why Ward tried to keep him around, really. Kudzu-Danny twined around and held together the parts of Ward’s psyche that were falling to pieces.

Ward said, “I’m just tired,” and even to him, his voice sounded like it had been rubbed raw. “If it weren’t for leaving Joy and y—everything in Harold’s hands if I died, I would have taken the easy way out of his this a long time ago.”

Danny put his hand on Ward’s shoulder; Ward failed to come up with the motivation necessary to move away from him. He was failing at that a lot lately.

“What’s something you still haven’t done?” Danny said.

“That, obviously.”

“Besides what you’re not going to do.” All intensity again. It had to get tiring being Danny and just caring that much about everything.

“Nothing that’s an actual option. You don’t understand how—predictable I am. Was. And how goddamn paranoid Harold is. Now that I think about it, of course he managed to suck all the fucking fun out of Groundhog Day.”

“It doesn’t have to be something big. Just like the handstand—just something new.”

The handstand wasn’t new, but apparently he still wasn’t going to say that and watch all the life drain out of Danny’s face like he was a punctured tire. He’d seen that look too many times.

“A restaurant,” Danny said, wheedling him. “Music.”

“The last time I was in this kind of mood, you made me start taking kenjutsu lessons. Because those come in handy all the time”

“Kempo. You could take kempo, too, Colleen teaches both—”

“Great, then I can have two ways for your girlfriend to kick my ass.”

“She’s not really my girlfriend, you know,” Danny said. His gaze had drifted down like he’d decided to find the toes of his sneakers really interesting, and while that probably would have been valid—given the amount of trouble Ward always had getting him into shoes at the start of a new loop—Ward figured that wasn’t really it. “I like her a lot, though. Is she—do we actually date where you come from? The original timeline?”

“Yeah. I think so, anyway.”

Danny’s mouth twitched. “Probably not, then. I kind of think I would have told you.”

No, he wouldn’t have. They hadn’t been like that, and he didn’t know how to explain that to Danny now. It made a sour taste rise up in his mouth to think of saying, I tried to have you killed; it kind of put a damper on our relationship. I tried to trip you up every way I possibly could.

Danny went on, oblivious to all this: “Because I’ve never, you know. Done anything.”

He had to be missing something here. He looked over and saw how flushed Danny’s ears had gotten.

Okay. This was legitimately new.

Ward said slowly, “You’ve never had sex before.”

“I was raised in a monastery, okay? And the masters believed in a kind of purity of spirit.”

“Believe me, your spirit doesn’t have to enter into it. My spirit’s never entered into anything.”

“It’s important to me,” Danny said, looking up. He was still a little pink, but he was more serious now: embarrassed, maybe, but sure of himself all the same. “I don’t like holding part of myself back.”

No kidding. Danny was practically the poster boy for some “always give 110% percent” slogan.

“But you think you’d be with this one woman forever?” He was trying to sound sarcastic, but he wasn’t really pulling it off: at this point, it felt to him like Danny and Colleen had been together forever.

Danny said, “Lei Kung said the future is not written in stone or even water; it’s made from every grain of sand we dislodge as we move forward.”

“Lei Kung is, for the record, exactly the kind of guy you don’t want to be seated next to on an airplane.”

“We have a private plane,” Danny said. “You never sit next to anybody on airplanes.”

“In theory. What does the sand have to do with Colleen?”

“I don’t know about forever. But it would matter, and that means I want to take the step, and let the future make itself as we go along.”

Ward had never done anything that consciously in his life—not as far as single decisions went, anyway. He just wound up in these courses, these paths that he never got off of, either because he couldn’t—Dad—or he didn’t really want to—Joy. And now there was this, which felt like it was really driving the point home to an irritating extent.

Was he seriously standing here thinking that he wanted to be more like Danny? Virgin Danny?

One more sign that he was slipping, maybe.

“Anyway, it’s pointless,” he said out loud.

“Going to go ahead and assume you don’t mean sex.”

He laughed shortly. “No, not sex. The future. Your little sands of time idea. Right now, it’s all going to get washed away anyway.”

Danny gave him the speech that Ward had heard over and over again by now. He liked it less than the handstand. You’ll get back to your timeline, Ward. It’ll all go back to mattering again. You just have to hang there—just tell me what you need, and I’ll try to help you.

Why? Ward had said to him, a dozen or so loops back. He’d interrupted Danny to ask it; the question, even in his mouth, had the taste of dried blood about it, like this was something he was using to hurt himself. Why bother trying to help me? It’s not like you really have a dog in this fight, right?

You’d do the same for me.  

No, I wouldn’t, Ward had said bluntly. I didn’t. And he’d needled Danny then, throwing every awful thing he could think of at him: I sent men to kill you. If you’d been a little slower or a little worse at your shimmery hand bullshit, you would be dead in that timeline you’re trying to get me back to, all right? I pulled strings to have you buried in a mental hospital. And I did every goddamn thing I could think of to keep you away from Rand. Harold’s a monster, but you know what? So am I. Maybe you should throw in with him instead.

He still didn’t know what he would have done if Danny had looked at him then and said sure, okay; sure, you make a compelling case. What he would have done if Danny had ditched him and warned Harold.

Danny hadn’t. He’d just said, You’re still my brother.

No, Ward said, feeling like he’d just taken a punch to the gut, all the air whooshing out of him. I’m not.

He’d really thought that would do it.

But Danny—his eyes darker right then, older somehow, like Ward had ripped some lingering bit of childhood away from him—hadn’t missed a beat.

Then you’re still Joy’s brother. And that still matters to me.

It had taken a long time, but by now, Ward believed that.

“Are you even listening to me?” Danny said now.

Ward was listening to a version of him, anyway. Listening—and thinking.

***

Sometime later, in another damn dojo lesson, Colleen said, “There’s a limit you’re not going to get past, you know. All that new flexibility, all those muscle memories—they’re just going to get lost at the end of each cycle. But then, you’re not very good yet, so unless you’re just a slow learner, I don’t think you’ve been doing this for very long.”

Ouch. Longer than he’d like to admit, at least now. He shrugged, half like he was too mysterious to give a straight answer and half like he’d just lost count.

Danny leaned forward, his chin on his hand. “How many times have you been through it all total, anyway?”

Ward laughed at that, and it sounded brittle and crazy even to him. “Guess,” he said.

Colleen looked at him sharply, and Ward saw the tip of her tongue flick out against her lips, wetting them as she thought. Then she took a breath and said, “You could try looking for the lodestone. The odds are good that he’d keep it close by. I would.”

“That’s the, what, the power source for the time wheel? How would I even know what it looks like?”

“It’s a lodestone. It looks like a stone.”

“Always?” Danny said. He leaned towards her now, fascinated: there was a telescoped look in his eyes, like he’d zoomed in on nothing but Colleen. “I know it did at K’un-Lun, supposedly, but—”

“Always,” Colleen said briskly. “It’s not a metaphor. They’re always magnetized stones. Someone can identify one with a paperclip if they know what they’re doing.”

“But he doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Danny said.

“Thanks.”

“You don’t, Ward. And Harold’s not just going to sit back and let you run around the penthouse with a paperclip, looking for a lodestone.”

No kidding. But he knew a way around that, even if Danny didn’t. If he killed Harold—again—he had that little bit of overnight wiggle room. That could give him enough time to tear apart the penthouse and find his magical magnetized rock. And if it didn’t, if the time wheel just rolled him back to the start, then he could always just… do it again. And again. And again. If he was willing to make patricide his brand new hobby.

“Assuming I found it,” he said carefully, “what would I have to do to destroy it?”

“You don’t have to destroy it. You just have to touch it.”

“With something other than a paperclip, I’m guessing,” Ward said.

“With your hands. And they have to be yours, this isn’t something you can shove off onto a bodyguard. Only the hands that put the wheel into motion can put a stop to it.”

Danny said to Colleen, “How do you know so much about this?” He just sounded curious, nothing else, but Ward saw a kind of shadow pass over the face: her muscles tightened up just enough to change the way the light fell across her features.

“My sensei told me,” she said. Her voice was so crisp and matter-of-fact that Ward didn’t even think she was lying. “Just like Ward’s has told him now—because if he’s really been my student this many times, I have a duty to him. So the next time you say yes, sensei,” she said to Ward, her words cutting through the air, “say it like you mean it.”

***

The next loop, Ward did things differently. For the first time in what seemed like forever, he felt energized and clearheaded.

He got Danny out of the building. He told Joy there was nothing to worry about. And he didn’t call his father.

Instead, he left work early. He dodged—by long, long habit now—the places where Danny tended to lurk to try to accost him with wide-eyed nostalgia, and he went to an office supply store.

He hadn’t been inside one of these places since college, and when he breathed in the clean smell of paper and looked with vague curiosity at the rainbow of Sharpie colors, he remembered what Danny had said about small new things. New songs, new restaurants. He guessed this was another time when he apparently could have done worse than taking Danny’s advice. Go figure.

But it wasn’t newness he was looking for now. He was after something more specific. Manilla envelope, legal pad, pen. All fresh and new, with no lingering Rand legacy to them. Harold had never seen them. They were just his.

He went to a bar, ordered a Scotch, and wrote.

Dear Danny,

First of all, yes, I know you’re the actual Danny Rand. If you have trouble proving your identity, you can use either the X-ray records on file or your thumbprint in that sculpture you made for Joy. She still has it.

The reason I know this is because I accidentally set off something you’re familiar with: a time wheel…

He went on in detail, laying out as much about the next few weeks that he thought Danny could use, including what all they’d gleaned about the Hand.

He paused then to stretch his literal hand, cracking his knuckles and massaging the muscles at the base of his palm. He hadn’t done this much writing in years. It hurt, but it felt strangely good at the same time. He was finally saying everything.

The noise in the bar was quiet and backgrounded: he could hear the beer on tap splashing against the glasses, the bartender’s cloth whipping over the bar, someone crunching peanuts, distant TV. This wasn’t new at all—God knew he’d been in just about every bar in New York at one time or another, and that was saying something—but it was nice. Peaceful. Not a bad place to spend what could be some of his last few hours.

He wrote the address of the penthouse and underlined it twice: dark black slashes across the page.

This is what I really have to tell you. That address? That’s where Harold lives. Joy—and Google—will tell you that that’s crazy, because he’s been dead for years. He should have been, but he made a deal with your old friends the Hand: immortality in exchange for full access to Rand and servitude for life. Before you start feeling sorry for him, though, you should know

Ward stopped. The background noise seemed louder now, more intrusive, like it was elbowing him, asking if he was really going to write this.

So much for catharsis and the thrill of letting the words finally come.

Sand. Grains of sand. He picked up his pen again.

that you can’t trust him. In my own timeline, before the loop started, I’ve seen him kill men and mutilate them with a claw hammer. He got me to dispose of the bodies. I did a lot of things for him, but one thing I did especially well was take a punch. He’s had some boxing training, for the record: he mostly works the body. Gut, kidneys. A few broken ribs, over the years. He needed me to jump when he said to, he needed somebody on the outside to be his puppet so he could still control Rand. And when I’m gone, that’s what he’ll do to Joy.

I don’t know for sure that he’d put her through everything he put me through. He’s always been proud of her—that’s the one thing we’ve always agreed on. And Joy’s smarter, sharper, tougher. So maybe it’d be different, but that’s not a chance I can take, and I don’t think it’s one you will either. I know Joy means enough to you for you to look out for her, and I’m going to try to give her enough warning so she’ll look out for herself too.  

I just can’t keep doing this over and over again. The crazier I get, the closer Harold gets to winning. I have to try something a little riskier than just staying alive. In your idiotic terms, I have to kick over some sand. I just don’t know what’s going to happen because of it or what timeline you’re going to be stuck with.

So whatever it takes, protect Joy. Protect yourself too.

Ward

He slid the whole legal pad into the manila envelope and sealed it.

He checked his phone. Missed call from Frank Stein, no big surprise there. Ward redialed.

“You picked quite the time to go AWOL, son.”

“I picked a time to have a drink,” Ward said, knowing that was the one thing Harold would never try too hard to keep him from. He’d drained the accounts specifically when Ward had wanted rehab. He liked his puppet boozed-up and drugged into perfect compliance. “I assume you know about that little surprise we had earlier.”

“I can’t see how that translates into you needing to leave work to crawl into some hole in the wall.”

“He looked like him,” Ward said shortly. “And Danny’s my friend, remember?”

“Not particularly.” And he didn’t sound particularly interested in it, either. Evidently the simplest lie of Danny and Ward’s beautiful childhood friendship had only mattered as long as Harold had been trying to sell the media on a tragedy—with that years in the past, he just didn’t have time for any of it.

Ward promised him a few things—yeah, he’d go there, yeah, he’d do that—and then hung up. He hoped he’d sold it. Harold had started sounding thoughtful by the end, and that was never a good sign.

He went to see Jeri Hogarth.

J-Money, Danny said in his head. Helpful.

“I don’t actually work for your company anymore, Ward,” she said crisply.

“I’m aware of that, shockingly. For one thing, I had to come to a different building. What would it take for you to handle something for me?”

She leaned back in her chair. “You mean what do I bill per hour?”

“I mean,” Ward said, putting the manila envelope down on her desk, “what would it take for you to wait twenty-four hours and then give this to the man claiming to be Danny Rand. Who is Danny Rand, for the record.”

Jeri raised her eyebrows. “Someone’s appeared claiming to be Danny Rand?”

“Yeah. It’ll get out sooner or later—and I’m pretty sure he’ll come to you anyway.”

“If he’s going to get press attention, I assume he’ll make his way to Rand at some point. I don’t know why you couldn’t give this to him yourself.”

“I’m not going to be around.”

“You’re not going to be around.” She looked at the envelope without touching it. “Should I even ask what’s in there? No, I’ll answer my own question there. I don’t want anything to do with this.”

“If you’re still hung up on why I’m coming to you—”

“If I were going to take this, I’d want to know where you think you’re going to be in twenty-four hours.”

“Does it matter?”

“No,” Jeri said dryly. “I made it a stipulation of you hiring me because I don’t actually give a damn about it. If you say you’re going to be in a country where America has no extradition treaty, then that’s one thing. But I have a hunch that you meant something else. And I’ve had enough trafficking in death and self-destruction for a lifetime.”

“I’m not going to kill myself. I’m going to do something risky, and I’m not sure what the outcome will be. There’s a difference.”

“Yet I’m still concerned that you’re hinging all this on a technicality.”

“Will you do it or not?”

She studied him, and right when he was about to just pick up the envelope and leave, she rested her fingers on it lightly. “Yes. I’ll send you a billing statement.”

He exhaled. “Great. Thanks.” He’d already turned to leave when he thought of the obvious thing that he couldn’t believe he’d forgotten. “And I need to borrow a paperclip. You can bill me for that too.”

***

He’d killed Harold twice already. Third time was supposed to be the charm, right?

He had his gun again, tucked into the inner pocket of his jacket where it felt heavy against his chest. The gun had to be better than the knife, since this was far from the heat of the moment. He couldn’t get that same frenzied rage back again. He’d needed a flashpoint—and nothing Harold did could really surprise him anymore. Every shitty, belittling, painful thing he could do, he’d already done.

Short of killing him, anyway, and Ward supposed he might wind up doing that tonight, if this whole thing didn’t go as planned.

But if Harold killed him, at least this would all be over. And Jeri would get Danny the letter, and Danny would take care of everything—as long as Ward stuck to nebulously defining that everything as making sure Dad didn’t get anywhere near Joy. Or anywhere near Danny himself, for that matter.

Go in, shoot Harold, tear apart the penthouse, and test everything with his trusty paperclip. Yeah. Piece of cake.

He rolled his shoulders back as he walked through the lobby, trying to limber up before he even hit the elevators. There was something bugging him, and that felt like the understatement of the century. How was he supposed to parse out one little nagging feeling when everything about this was fucked up? But there was something. He took a couple deep breaths to relax—in through the nose, out through the mouth. Colleen had taught him that, like he was in Lamaze. But the feeling only got worse. He should point that out to her if he lived. Her techniques needed work.

Yeah, he wasn’t going to point that out to her.

He stepped into the penthouse. He could feel his heart pounding.

Get it together, Ward told himself. The gun should be in your hand already. What are you doing?

He just couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. Something aside from him being about to kill his undead dad for the third time.

He couldn’t see Harold. Tanning bed, maybe? He was just used to seeing Harold the moment the elevator doors slid open, especially on night one.

He’d turned into a creature of habit, apparently. Unsurprisingly.

“Anyone home?” he called out, slipping his hand inside his jacket, resting his finger against the trigger guard. “I didn’t realize you had such a busy social life—”

He went around the corner.

Something hit him in the head—his forehead, but so high up that it felt like it was going to rip his scalp off. He fell backwards, his vision suddenly full of black sparks. He was still conscious, but barely: it was like he was clinging to something slippery with just his fingertips to hold him up. He couldn’t seem to understand what he was looking at, how the lighter shape moving over him related to the darkness around him. He didn’t know what was dripping on his hand. Person. Somebody—it was somebody. It resolved, slowly, into some kind of picture, even if he still felt like he couldn’t understand it. The words for all of this were just on the tip of his tongue.

“Dad,” he whispered.

Harold was kneeling down in front of him, bloodied claw hammer in one hand. That was what was dripping onto his hand—his own blood, hot little drops running off the burnished steel head.

Harold said conversationally, “You said, ‘Danny’s my friend.’” He thumbed a line of blood off Ward’s forehead, catching it before it fell into his eyes. “Present tense. And Danny’s been dead for thirteen years, son—or at least we all thought so, before today—and yet you slipped right back into talking like he’d never even been gone. When honestly, the two of you weren’t that close. So I thought, why is it that Ward suddenly cares? Cares so much that he gets sloppy?” He batted away Ward’s hand as it still flapped loosely at his jacket; he reached inside for him and produced the gun. “Ah. Well, good to know I didn’t make a mistake. I was prepared to, obviously—better safe than sorry, at least when it comes to this kind of thing.”

“You hit me… because I said is.”

“Well, like I said, I realized I ran the risk of being a little too hasty.” He leaned back against the wall. It took his face out of Ward’s dimming line of sight, and he was hazily grateful for that. “Now, let me see if I can get the timeline right here.”

Ward sputtered out a laugh, uncontrollably. Fucking timelines. Fucking—fucking everything.

His father had hit him in the head with a claw hammer because he’d used the wrong tense. It was barely even a mistake, and now it was getting him killed.

There’d never, ever been a way for him to be good enough for Harold. He’d thought before that Harold operated him like a vending machine, pushing his buttons to get the results he wanted, but the truth was, Harold was the machine, and he was a broken one. No matter what Ward did, he got the same results. Blood. Fear.

At least now he wasn’t afraid. He was floating.

Harold ignored him. “You stumble across my security system—I’m sorry to know our relationship somehow comes to that, where you’re from—and now you’re forcing another reset. Someone must have explained the process to you; you never would have figured it out on your own. Gao? No, she gets more from me than she could ever get out of you, it’s in her best interests to keep me alive, at least for now. I think our mysteriously returned Danny Rand has something to do with all of this. That could be useful, potentially.”

I’m going to die just to deprive you of an audience, Ward thought. The imaginary hold he had slipped a little further. His eyelids fluttered, making the grayness surrounding him ebb and flow.

Harold wasn’t going to be able to use Danny. Not even if Jeri never turned over the letter. All the lies, all the manipulation—Danny would see through it. Not right away, but eventually.

Danny never did anything he didn’t want to do.

Ward did. All the time. Like now: dying. Case in point.

Then the world snapped out of grayness and went through some kind of muffled explosion. Something cool and sharp flicked against Ward’s cheek.

Glass. It was broken glass.

“Speak of the devil,” Harold murmured. “Your friend certainly knows how to make an entrance.”

He stood up, passing in and out of Ward’s vision. And he—

Ward heaved himself over, throwing his arm out. His fingers latched desperately around Harold’s pants leg, curling into the fabric—too clumsy, too slow, too weak to stop him. “Danny, he’s got a gun!”

He heard the shot more clearly than he’d heard the window breaking. He forced his gaze up, his vision muddied by the blood and sweat caking his eyelashes now, and—

Danny had caught the bullet in one glowing golden hand.

Right. Iron Fist. He’d probably had it covered the whole time.

He sagged back down to the floor, not really watching the fight he could barely make out anyway. He didn’t need to see it to know what would happen. Danny would win.

Danny had come blazing in like some kind of action hero, and Ward was happy to leave it to him. It was easier to let go with Danny here. It was like—finally knowing everything was taken care of. He’d never had anything like that before. He could just… float.

Almost to the point where he was a little annoyed when Danny crouched down, putting his worried face in Ward’s even-fuzzier, even-more-telescoped field of vision. Great, now he had to pay attention again.

But he didn’t want Danny to worry about him. He wanted Danny to know that it was okay that this was the end, that it would all be all right.

“Ward?”

Danny’s hand on his cheek was shockingly warm, which probably said something about how much blood he’d lost.

“It’s okay,” Ward said. He could barely hear himself. “Can’t believe you managed to follow me here. Anyway, I left you a letter. Hogarth.” He tried to spin one finger around, but he wasn’t sure it he moved. “Time wheel.”

“Time—” Danny’s eyes looked impossibly wide, like they were swallowing up the rest of his face. It was kind of funny. He’d made that face a lot as a kid, too, all constantly surprised by everything.

“Don’t worry. It’ll stop now.” He swallowed. “Once I… it’ll stop. Harold?”

“Tied up.”

“Can’t trust him.”

Danny still hadn’t moved his hand. Ward felt like more and more of him was somehow resting on it, like Danny was holding him instead of just touching him. He had things he needed to tell Danny. Joy and Colleen and the Hand and the Stage Deli being closed down, about Danny finding his perfect, shitty everything bagel in a place on Third Avenue, about the sunglasses and the time Danny had kicked that kid’s ass all over the soccer field.

But Danny, as it turned out, wasn’t letting him say any of it. He said something too fast for Ward to hear it and then darted away and came back with a pillow, very gently levering Ward’s head up on it. Like he was going to sleep on the floor, like Danny.

Danny leaned over him. Concentration crackled off him, and something seemed to almost pull at Ward, like something in Danny was wrapping around him and securing him in place.

“What set off the time wheel?”

“I killed him.”

“You killed Harold?”

Ward closed his eyes, and Danny seemed to somehow—correctly—get that that was a yes.

Danny said urgently, “How long does it take you to reset if he dies again?”

He opened his eyes. What the hell? “Is he dead?” Danny had just said he was tied up, so unless Chinese monasteries taught you to make off-the-wall Arnold Schwarzenegger puns and say, “He’s all tied up,” about somebody looped in a noose or something…

“No. He’s alive.” Danny’s face had gone white. “But if he lives, and you don’t—”

Then the loop wouldn’t reset. He knew that. He tried to twitch his head in some kind of nod, but nothing—especially nothing up there—was working right. He was slurring his words, too. “It’s okay,” he said again, but it came out as one word. “I know.”

Danny sat back, his ass hitting the floor. He looked like a little kid, one who’d just lost something important to him, and all of a sudden, Ward could see him up there in the mountains, sitting like this in the snow near the plane crash.

Then Danny wetted his lips and said, “I can’t.”

You can’t what, Ward thought, looking at him. He was too tired to add the question mark even in his head.

“I can’t let you die.”

It almost made him laugh, except right now, his laugh was nothing but a slightly strangled, wet sound that mostly just stayed behind his lips. Danny could let him die, seriously. He could make a whole argument for it. Danny didn’t even know him anymore—he knew Danny, now, but that didn’t count. That wasn’t the same thing. Danny hadn’t even been back in New York for twenty-four hours; Ward couldn’t possibly mean anything to him right now.

Except it always seemed like he did. Danny always went out of his way for him, always trusted him. Which, okay, it was Danny, he’d go out of his way for anybody, he’d trust anyone.

But it was over, and he didn’t know why Danny couldn’t see that.

Danny put his hand back on Ward’s face, his fingers in Ward’s hair. He went back to his question from before: “Ward, how long does it take the loop to reset if Harold dies?”

Everything felt grainy, like the light had a texture that was rubbing harshly against his eyes. “Overnight.” He didn’t see why it mattered.

“Okay.” Danny swallowed; Ward heard it without seeing it. “I—”

And then he went away, passing out of the range of Ward’s failing vision so quickly that Ward started to question whether he’d even been there in the first place. What made more sense, really? That Danny had somehow tailed him and broken in just in time to stay with him while he was dying? Or that he’d dreamed it up to make himself feel better? He’d always wanted some kind of cavalry to come. Like Harold had said, he’d always wanted to run and hide behind somebody. And Danny… Danny was the only somebody like that there’d ever been, as weird as that was.

“Hey, I want Joy too,” he said. The words were unintelligible even to him. “If I’m seeing people, I want Joy too.”

For a second, he thought he was catching the scent of her perfume.

Then there was just Danny again—but this time Danny looked like he was going to be sick. He was way beyond pale now—he’d gone straight to gray.

Something lanced through Ward’s head, something other than pain. “Danny.” It wasn’t really a word, just a kind of Danny-shaped noise, but Danny seemed to understand him anyway.

He even managed some kind of awful smile, one that looked so wrong on his face, when Ward had seen him smile so many times now and mean it. “It’s okay,” he said, like they’d switched places. “It’s okay, Ward. I’m just going to call an ambulance for you. You need to hang on until the wheel spins back.”

But the only way the wheel was going to spin back tonight was if—was if Harold was already dead.

“I don’t know what happens if he dies and then you die too,” Danny said. His voice broke a little. “So let’s not find out, all right?”

You killed him. Ward’s eyelashes were sticking together. Everything was dark. You killed him, but you—you don’t do things like that. I know you. You let everything go.

Danny would die for a lot of people. Danny would probably die to save a pigeon in the middle of a street. But Danny was good, and Danny didn’t—

But he had. Just by looking at him, Ward could see that he had, and that it had fucked him up to do it. To do it in cold-blood, to kill someone who’d been like an uncle to him, someone who was tied up and helpless.

Danny. He didn’t know what to say.

He’d figured out—what felt like a long time ago now—who Danny really was, the kind of person he was. He hadn’t known until now who he was to Danny. Not like this. Even though Danny had told him maybe a thousand times. You’re my brother, Ward.

He’d been ready to tell Danny to forget about the ambulance. Just let this be the end of all of it. Not like he couldn’t give tips on how to dispose of his own dead body, really.

Just keep all the Meachum family secrets in the dark where they belonged. Don’t make a problem for Joy.

But that only worked if this timeline managed to override the first one. And suddenly, even though he’d left everything about as organized as he could, he didn’t want it to.

It wasn’t even that he didn’t want to die, especially. He just didn’t want Danny to have to live with this. He didn’t want Danny to have to look like this.

Fuck it. He was going to do all this again. He wasn’t dying here, whatever it took. He forced himself to open his eyes: to cling to the light, to the feel of the solid floor beneath him, to the rise and fall of Danny’s voice on the phone. Danny saying, “Please, there’s an emergency. We need help, we need an ambulance.”

Untie him, Ward wanted to say. Or whatever. You can’t make it look like you tied him up, Danny, come on. If I fuck this up, this can’t end with you going to prison.

But he didn’t make it to the point of being able to see if Danny knew how to cover up a murder. He only made it to the paramedics arriving.

“Never seen anything like this,” one of them was saying. They were fixing some kind of plastic neck-and-head brace on him, to keep him from getting jostled while they moved him. “Okay, buddy, we’re lifting you, we’re lifting you—”

“Danny.” It was the first coherent word he’d managed to get out in a while. “Danny, I want Danny.”

One of the paramedics glanced up and over, past him. “Are you Danny?”

Ward heard Danny say, “Yeah. I can come with him?”

“Don’t come with me,” Ward said, and he didn’t even have it in him right then to feel guilty about the look on Danny’s face at that. “Take a paperclip. There’s a paperclip in my pocket.” He couldn’t feel Danny fumbling at his clothes, but he could see it. “No, my jacket pocket. Yeah. Poke it around here and see if sticks to anything.”

“Sticks to anything?”

“Pain makes people crazy sometimes,” one of the paramedics said.

“Lodestone,” Ward said.

He saw Danny’s eyes widen with sudden comprehension, and then the paramedics hoisted him up, the pain wrenched, and Ward blacked out.

He woke up only a few times after that, always with a kind of groggy relief that he was still alive. He kept asking what time it was, but there wasn’t always someone there to answer him. People in scrubs moved through the room like ghosts, checking his IV line. They had questions for their own for him. Did he know what day it was? Yeah, it was the day Danny came back, it always started on the day Danny came back, what were they, new? Did he know his name? Ward Meachum. Did he know what had happened to him?

“My undead father hit me in the face with a hammer,” he said. Let them figure that one out. Just in case he did die, he added, “Danny saved my life. Danny Rand. Where’s Danny?”

They wouldn’t tell him where Danny was. But he got Joy, her eyes red-rimmed and her face wet—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her cry. She told him it was seven o’clock in the morning and yeah, it was the morning after Danny had come back. She held his hand so tightly that Ward could feel himself starting to bruise.

“Ward, my God. They’re saying that Dad—”

This was normally the time he’d be shaving, getting ready for work. The time of the switchback, if that was coming, and it had to come, it had to.

“I’m sorry,” he said, because this might be the one time when he could say it and she’d really know what he was talking about. At least some of it. “I’m sorry, Joy—for the lies, the secrets, all of it. I just had to keep him away from you. But you’re safe now.”

“I’m safe?” Her voice cracked, just like Danny’s hand. “Safe from what? Safe from my own father? From my brother in a hospital bed? Ward, what the hell is happening?”

He could feel time shifting beneath him. It was like a little shudder before an earthquake.

“Danny. Did Danny say anything about the lodestone?”

“I need answers,” Joy said sharply. “Not more questions.”

“I want to give them to you.” He chickened out, and right after telling her he was sorry about the lies, he lied to her again: “I’ll tell you the rest after I get some sleep, okay? Just tell me if you heard from Danny, if he said anything about a lodestone or a paperclip or…”

He thought of a second that she was going to refuse to tell him, and he couldn’t even have blamed her: it was insane, and he would have wanted to walk away from it too. But she said, “He said it’s in the aquarium. In the front right corner. And I’ll tell you what I told him, which is that that means exactly nothing to me, Ward. What am I supposed to do what that information, exactly? What am I supposed to do with any of this?”

I’ll fix it, he wanted to say—more naïve right then, he was pretty sure, than he’d ever even accused Danny of being. Some things weren’t fixable. But they’d never been an I love you kind of family, and he didn’t know what else to say except I’ll help you, I’ll make it better, I promise.

The hole opened up. The wheel turned. And for the first time, he was grateful for it, grateful for the spin that undid Danny’s guilt and Joy’s horror.

He was back in his office again, left with just that promise echoing in his head. I’ll fix it.

He had less than a minute before Danny was due to walk in, and he was fighting through what felt like some kind of internal jet lag: probably whatever happened to you when your soul, if he even had one of those, got sucked out his scrambled-brain head in one timeline and dropped back down into this one.

He looked down at his hands where they were resting on his desk, his gaze fixing on his trigger finger. It had done the job only once—once, out of the three times he’d either killed Harold or tried to kill him. Not exactly his most efficient work, was it? Then again, efficiency wasn’t really his strong suit. Endurance, that was more like it. He should have known better than to think he could just waltz in there and deactivate the lodestone without breaking a sweat. He was made to sweat, to wait it out—it was the one thing he was really naturally good at.

And he’d tried to break away from that, and Danny had paid the price. Had done something he knew perfectly well Danny didn’t want to do.

Danny had done that for him. No one had ever—crossed the lines of their own personality like that, not for him. No one he’d met, ever, except for Danny. He would have said it wasn’t even possible.

Ward’s mouth was dry. He had a mild hangover, he realized, not really anything worse than unpleasant, but weirdly enough, nothing he’d ever noticed before, not even in all these loops.

He’d just gotten used to the feeling a long time ago. He’d taken it for granted that feeling like shit was just part of life.

Danny walked in.

For the first time Ward could remember, he stood up before Danny said anything. He didn’t have to fake the look of bewildered recognition. It just came to him out of nowhere, that sense of how vastly, unbelievably improbable it was that Danny should have come home, that Danny should have been Danny at all.

He spoke first. “God. Danny?” and watched Danny practically melt with relief.

Danny had fought his way through a building’s worth of guards to get to them. Ward had never really thought about that before. He’d made a scene, when Danny had always been fanatically polite as a kid.

“Ward,” Danny said. He started towards him—and wow, Ward had noticed this part every time, but it was insane how Danny’s traveling conditions had somehow managed to give him this bizarrely distinct fug of livestock and sardine oil; it filled up the office—and then veered off as Joy came in. “Joy?”

Joy planted herself in the doorway, arms going akimbo, like she was ready to jab an elbow forward if Danny turned out to be trouble. Her face was locked up in a kind of defensive reserve Ward thought had maybe become as constant a part of her as his hangover was of him. That tore at something inside him.

“What’s going on?” Joy said, carefully neutral.

“You don’t recognize me?” Danny seemed to be trying to sound playful, apparently unaware that from somebody dressed like a latter-day hippie, that came across less friendly and more psychotic. “I mean, I know I’m taller—”

“No, I don’t recognize you, and I don’t know what you’re doing here.” She turned to Ward, and he was at least a little relieved to see some of that cool, perfectly maintained caution slip away. At least she still gave him a little bit of the real Joy, even when she kept herself locked away from everyone else. “Ward, do you know this guy? Is he your—” She only paused for a fraction of a second before she said friend, but he’d already heard what she wasn’t saying. Mostly because she’d said it before, under way different circumstances.

Who’s Frank Stein? Is he your dealer?

A little bit of a nicer universe implied there, maybe, because he couldn’t imagine even renegade hippie drug dealer Danny selling him anything stronger than pot. Ward hadn’t smoked pot in years.

“Kind of, I guess,” Ward said, more careful with his words now that he knew there was a goddamn hammer waiting for him if he got too carried away and used the wrong tense or something. “Yours too. Just… from a long, long time ago.”

Joy gave Danny a slightly softer, more searching look, and Danny stayed still for it, like he thought she was painting him, and then she said, “Oh my God.”

“Yeah,” Ward deadpanned. “That’s what I said too.”

“You can’t be Danny.”

“I am, though,” Danny said. He was grinning ear-to-ear now. It was regrettably cute, if Ward was actually going to use that word about another human being.

He let Joy and Danny hash out their childhood memories, trying to look like he was nodding along when he was really flipping frantically through some internal book of options.

The question was simple, and it was one he’d asked before, but never quite like this:

What could he get away with? What could he do for Danny before he went to the penthouse, before he grabbed hold of the lodestone? What would be nice? He needed to know what he could do without setting off Harold’s suspicions, which apparently had even more of a hair trigger than he’d imagined.

He wanted to make these next few hours count for something, even if Danny wouldn’t remember them. Wanted Danny to have something nice even if it was transitory. And even if—even though—he could never really make up for plunging Danny back into a universe where everything had gone to shit.

Well, everything except for Harold being dead. Harold had tried to kill Danny; Ward was getting pretty comfortable with him having dumped his body in the lagoon.

Security finally got off their asses enough to arrive, and Ward waved them off—very important, very lucrative business interests involved here, sorry about the trouble and misunderstandings, look for a bonus on your next direct deposit, Rand likes to reward discretion. Yeah, they’d like to award competence, too, if he could actually find some. Though he guessed he couldn’t blame them for getting their asses handed to them by a literal mystical warrior. Blaming them, in fact, wasn’t nice, which showed the kind of problem he’d be having here.

He focused on what he knew he could take care of. “First thing’s first,” he said, when there was a pause in Joy and Danny’s game of remember-when. “We have to get you some shoes.”

***

He got Danny shoes. He got him an everything bagel. For the first time, he learned what flavor of cream cheese Danny put on his abomination bagels.

“Pineapple,” Ward said, disgusted. “I can’t believe you’re even from New York.”

Danny grinned at him and licked a blob of pineapple cream cheese off his finger. He said, “Your phone keeps ringing, by the way. I can see it lighting up in your pocket.”

“I know. I’m ignoring it, obviously.” Nice, remember? “It’s not every day someone comes back from the dead. I think I can miss a call or two.”

He had his own bagel, an actual bagel with lox because he was a normal human being, but every time he tried to take a bite of it, he felt like his stomach was closing up like a fist.

When they’d been weirdly cohabitating with each other, he’d seen Danny trap spiders in cups to release them outside. And now he’d seen Danny kill for him.

And he was getting ready to plunge them both back into a universe where he’d tried to have Danny killed, where he’d told Danny to stay the hell out of his life.

Danny deserved a better present than the one Ward could give him right now, and he sure as shit deserved a better past than the one Ward needed to stick him with. If he were sure he’d actually get away with it, he would try to give Danny the last part of Groundhog Day, basically: he’d give the thumbs up to closing down the Staten Island plant, he’d give their damn drugs away himself if Danny wanted him to, he’d let Colleen Wing kick his ass all over her dojo. But the one time he’d actually gone full Bill Murray, Danny hadn’t actually liked it, not once he knew that it wouldn’t last, that it wasn’t real.

So shoes and a bagel were about the best he could do. Shoes, bagels, and honesty.

He took a deep breath. “Besides, I need to talk to you.”

There must have been some clue in his voice, because Danny looked at him sharply and set his bagel down on his knees, on the spread-out wax paper. He was sitting on the stone park table they’d found, his feet on the bench. He’d refused the Italian loafers Ward had tried to buy him and gone with Converses instead, because of course he had.

“I’m listening.”

Ward told him all of it. At first he just told him everything he’d told him before—time wheel, lodestone, Harold, Hand, Colleen, Joy—and then he told him more of it, until he felt like he was scraping down to the bottom of himself.

“He’s not my biggest fan,” he said, and he laughed shortly: understatement of the fucking century. “I mean, he never was, even before he died, but he didn’t get—he hardly ever actually did anything back then. Now, though—if I fuck something up…” He couldn’t say he hits me, even now. It made him sound like a Lifetime movie. He had no fucking clue how to talk about this, but it was too late to shut up.

It was his goddamn responsibility to pry this up, to tell Danny exactly how pathetic he’d been, so Danny would know that it wouldn’t exactly be the world’s biggest loss if all that got written out. If he got written out. And he’d already told him about the attempted hit, with Shannon, and Danny’s expression had barely changed: he was just all intense stillness and nothing else.

He sucked in a noisy breath. “If I fuck up something really big, something that makes him lose his mind, you know what I tell Joy? Car accident.”

Danny’s head jerked a little then, his jaw tightening up. His hand did that spooky Day-Glo trick, light playing around his knuckles.

“Usually it’s not that bad. It’s not like it’s in his best interests to keep his little puppet off the stage, right? But he took away my out.” He could hear the rawness of his voice, like after even all this time, the loss of that hope was still fresh. Then again, it wasn’t like he was great at getting over things. Not in general.

But it hadn’t really been his money, had it? And apparently he hadn’t needed it, not the way he’d thought he had.

He’d thought his only resources were whatever he could take under the table. Whatever he could get away with.

But he’d had Danny. He would have had Danny, anyway.

He only had himself to blame if he got back to his timeline and didn’t have Danny anymore.

“I should have told you what was going on,” he said quietly, calmer now. “But I couldn’t have, then.” He looked down at his hands. “It’s like saying I should have walked on the moon. I needed to get to know you better first, I guess.”

“You know me.” It was the first thing Danny had said in a while, and, being Danny, he said it with a seriously bizarre amount of confidence.

“I do now. I didn’t. And—” He needed Danny to understand this part. “And you didn’t really know me either. You don’t. I’ve had all these loops, all this time to actually find out who you are, but you don’t know me, Danny. You don’t know the kind of person I am.”

“Yeah, I do.” Danny’s eyes were dark and serious. “You’ve just spent like an hour telling me.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Ward couldn’t believe this was making him laugh. He wiped his hand across his eyes and tried not to think about whether or not he’d just gotten his fingers wet. “I give up.”

“Good, because I have no idea what you were getting at there.”

“What I was getting at—”

“I’m not sure I want to know, either.”

“—is that none of that’s happened yet. You can still have the kind of future here that you should have.”

“Like what?”

“Like—” Ward groped for examples, but nothing came up right away. “Like things like slashing our drug prices and closing the Staten Island plant.”

“Kind of sounds like I did those things anyway.”

That was unfortunately accurate. It was like he’d thought before: when it got right down to it, he’d never stopped Danny from doing anything Danny had really wanted to do. At worst, he’d been a temporary inconvenience, like a speed bump Danny had just flown over without slowing down. God, how depressing was that? Handy, obviously, considering everything, but yeah, depressing.

But—he’d screwed Danny over, endlessly, but he really hadn’t screwed him up. Danny had just gone on being Danny, even if Ward hadn’t been smart enough then to realize what that really meant.

Which meant that there was nothing he could offer Danny right now. He felt a kind of vertigo set in. There was nothing about this reality that would make Danny ask him to choose it over the old, shitty one. Danny would just always choose the one where Ward was alive.

All because Danny had always been Danny and Ward—had always, inexplicably, been someone Danny cared about.

“In my timeline—” He cleared his throat. Nothing got any easier. “I told you. I told you everything that happened with us. Things aren’t good between us, Danny. The last time I saw you, I did everything I could to make it so you’d stay the hell away from me and Joy. I didn’t care that I was the one who killed Harold and you were the one who was actually sad about it. I wanted you to blame yourself, because it made you walk away.” He leaned forward and realized that he’d grabbed Danny’s arm. He could see his fingers curled in Danny’s sweatshirt, like a kid holding on for sheer comfort, but he couldn’t make himself let go. “If this is it, if I stop the timeline here, then maybe I still have this. Maybe I haven’t burned everything down.”

“You haven’t burned anything down.” Danny covered Ward’s hands with his. He felt warm. “Go back, Ward. Go home. And just find the other me and tell me all this there. I’ll listen.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yeah, I do.” To his surprise, Danny actually chuckled. “I should have known the second you were so huggy when I walked in, by the way. You were always a lot pricklier than that.”

“Like a porcupine, Joy says.” He had a lot to make up to her, too. He didn't even know where to start there.

“Yeah, exactly like a porcupine. I don’t need you to not be a porcupine, you know. I just need you to be my brother. And, like, ideally not a dick.”

“Ideally.” Ward rubbed at his eyes again. “I’ll do my best.”

“Are you going to eat the rest of your bagel?”

He let Danny have the rest of his bagel.

He thought that he’d have to remember to tell the other Danny, his Danny, that Danny had eventually claimed the lox was better (obviously) than the pineapple-everything monstrosity. It was at the bottom of the list of things to tell him, but it was there.

***

“Was there a reason you kept ignoring me all afternoon?” Harold said.

“Yeah. Danny Rand is alive.”

He’d actually never told him like that before, straight out with no lead-up, and it was perversely satisfying to watch him try to decide, in a millisecond, whether he was going to act smug about knowing it already or act surprised to hide some of his cards. Surprise won out, apparently. Manipulation over pride; that was interesting.

“That’s impossible,” Harold said coolly.

“You just have to look at him and talk to him to know that it’s not.”

“That’s sentiment talking.”

“That’s reality talking. If you saw him, you’d say the same thing. I’ve seen that lobby portrait of Wendell every day for the last ten years, I think I’m qualified to recognize a Rand when I see one.”

“A distant cousin, then.”

“It’s Danny. Joy and I talked to him, he knows things—”

Harold’s voice was soft. “Some lunatic walks in off the streets and you let him talk to Joy? You let the two of them be in the room together?”

“I could handle it.”

He’d known exactly what that would get him, of course. He’d never made a habit out of provoking Harold; that would never have made sense, until now. He’d thought, for a long time, that they were just a perfect storm of Meachum family shittiness, that Harold was an asshole and he was a fuck-up, that it would have been better if he’d been better.

But by now, even if he wasn’t better, he knew better. He knew what Harold was like, and he knew how to use that.

He took the blow to his gut and staggered around, gripping the aquarium for support.

Harold usually turned away afterwards. Not because he was ashamed, obviously, but because he was so serenely confident.

He was sure he knew Ward too, that was the thing. And maybe he did know what he’d made him.

But then there’d been Danny. There’d been time to notice what him being who Dad had made him had done to Joy.

And there’d been time for him to make himself into someone, too.

You don’t know me anymore, Ward thought, looking at Harold’s back. He felt calmer than he’d ever been in his entire life. You don’t, but I do. I roll with the punches.

He slipped his hand into the aquarium, and he did it so smoothly that it didn’t even make a sound.

Front right corner.

The last word he said before he went back wasn’t even to Harold. As his hand closed around the lodestone and he felt the wheel he was on finally, finally stop spinning, Ward wasn’t actually thinking about Harold at all.

He was just thinking how the lodestone was right where Joy and Danny had told him it would be.

“Thanks,” Ward said.

***

***

No matter what was going on with the board, Danny could still commandeer one of Rand’s private planes when he needed to. Either that, or their pilot just thought of a last-minute trip to Anzhou as the kind of challenge that just couldn’t be passed up; Danny got that feeling from him, a little. But no matter how willing everyone was, they still needed time to do all the necessary mechanical checks to, as Claire put it, make sure the engine didn’t fall out halfway across the North Pole. There was no way around waiting for that. And it was taking hours.

Danny had been pacing around the hangar so much that he’d been driving Colleen and Claire out of their minds, but he just couldn't sit still. Too wired on caffeine and too tired from being up all night yet again.

In the end, he'd broken away from them and gone outside so he wouldn’t be so much of a distraction—a distraught companion is worse than a broken bone and worse than an insect buzzing in your ear, Lei Kung had said. You have to master whatever would overwhelm you, or you won’t just fail yourself. You will fail all those who depend on you.

Danny exhaled, trying to gather himself. He was sitting lotus-style up against the corrugated steel out of the hangar’s outer wall, and his meditation, as usual, wasn’t exactly going well. He was too aware of his surroundings. Cold ground beneath him. Cold metal at his back.

Too aware of his memories. Harold’s blood in an empty penthouse. Ward telling him to stay the hell out of all of their lives.

The last time he’d been on a plane. That, more than anything else.

He curled his hands into fists and felt nothing, no answering pulse from whatever power was inside him. He couldn’t channel anything right now. All he was doing was digging little half-moon marks into his palms.

He didn’t know what he was going to do. Colleen and Claire had questions about where to take Gao, and he didn’t have any answers for them. He didn’t have a plan. He didn’t have anything.

“Danny!”

Danny opened his eyes. Of everything he might have expected to see right then, Ward hadn’t been on the list.

Let alone looking like this: gray-faced with worry, his usually carefully groomed hair disheveled, his clothes casual. His socks didn’t match.

“What happened?” Danny said. Fear pressed up against his chest, heavy and icy. “Is it Joy?”

Ward shook his head, still so dazed-looking that it was like he’d answered on reflex, and then he just stood there, staring at Danny. He swallowed.

“Ward?”

Ward said, “You look like shit,” and there was something funny in his voice, some mixture of strain and surprise and worry that Danny didn’t understand. “You’re flying somewhere? Where are you going?”

“I know you want to stay away from all this—”

“I don’t want to stay away from anything,” Ward said. “I just can’t believe I almost missed you. You’re not—you’re not going back to K’un-Lun, are you?”

Was it the first time Ward had actually said that name out loud? It was definitely the first time he’d said it without sounding like he was putting it in air-quotes.

“No,” Danny said, ignoring the rush of guilt that went through at him at that. “No, Anzhou. Gao said something about my father, about the Hand. And that’s where my parents were going when our plane—” His throat tightened up, and he couldn’t finish.

Ward put a hand on his shoulder. “I know,” he said quietly. “I remember. Look—do you want some company?”

“I’ve got some.”

“Do you want some more? Me?”

Danny turned his head enough to look at Ward’s hand still resting there against his shoulder. He couldn’t remember the last time Ward had voluntarily touched him except to get him away from something, and now Ward didn’t even look like he realized it was a big deal. And he was just standing there, sincerely—apparently—offering to drop everything and fly to China.

“You want to come to Anzhou with me. On no notice.”

“I wouldn’t say want.”

That sounded a little more like Ward.

“I just have to talk to you,” Ward said. “And I don’t think it can wait until you come back. Danny, I’m sorry.”

About what he’d said earlier? Danny shook his head. “You were right. I’ve been poison to you and Joy since I came back, I stirred up the Hand and didn’t even think about how it could come back on Harold—”

“No. None of that’s true. I was lying, all right? Or confused. You’re not poison, Danny. You are—the furthest thing from poison that I can think of. I promise you that.”

Danny felt like he’d been hit in the head somehow and some key part of reality had gone wonky on him, like reds and greens had switched around. Ward didn’t like him. He said, finally, “What happened to you?”

Ward waved around his other hand, almost dismissively. “Time wheel. I just broke it or stopped it or, I don’t know, whatever the terminology is.”

“You were on a time wheel?”

“On, in, yeah.” He looked at Danny, and there was something in his eyes that Danny didn’t think he’d seen there since they were kids: some kind of ache, some muddled sense of wishing. He hadn’t realized until now that he hadn’t seen that kind of hope in Ward since he’d come back. Not even all mixed-up and desperate. Ward said, “I’ve been an asshole, especially to you. But I told you all of that, on the last turn of the wheel, and you told me…” He swallowed. “You told me to come and find you and tell you all of it now.”

Colleen strode out of the hangar. “The pilot says we’re ready to—” She froze when she saw Ward.

“Hi,” Ward said a little awkwardly, lifting his hand. “Um, sensei.” He added to Danny, “She was teaching me kendo in a bunch of different timelines.”

He was starting to feel that it wasn’t that the reds and greens had switched around; it was more like all the colors had gotten deeper, truer. Confusing as hell, but: nice.

Danny made a snap decision. “Ward’s coming to Anzhou with us.”

“Danny, are you really sure that’s a good idea?” Colleen said at the same time as Ward said, “You seriously want me to do that? I basically just showed up here and started ranting about being in a time loop.”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” Danny said to Colleen. “And yeah, I do,” he said to Ward. “For one thing, I’ve always been really curious about how those things worked.”

Ward made a noise that it took Danny a second to realize was laughter, which was another thing he’d forgotten about Ward: that Ward could actually think something was funny, and not just in a sarcastic way. “Yeah. I should have remembered that.”

Colleen looked at the two of them, sizing them up somehow, and then nodded crisply, walking back into the hangar to tell the pilot they’d have one more passenger.

“With everything I have to tell you, you might regret this,” Ward said.

He didn’t think he would. “On the bright side, time wheel stories sound like a pretty good distraction. I haven’t flown since—you know.”

Ward nodded. Clumsily, he rubbed Danny’s shoulder a little, chafing him there like he was trying to keep him warm and that was the only kind of comfort he could think of. “I know.”

“Whatever you have to tell me, it’s okay.” He still had Gao’s words about his dad ringing in his ears. “It can’t be any worse than anything else I’ve heard in the last twenty-four hours.”

Ward frowned. “Why? What’s going on?” The wind whipped around him, stirring his hair up even more, and he looked sort of silly, standing there in his leather jacket and mismatched socks, like the kind of big brother Danny would have drawn back in kindergarten if someone had asked him to make a picture of his family.

Whatever Ward had to tell him, whatever had gotten him to rush over here, he was apparently willing to wait on it and let Danny talk first.

Danny stood up, clapping Ward on the shoulder too. He felt lighter suddenly, lighter and more whole, like some distortion in his chi, in his soul, had just corrected itself.

“Come on,” he said. He started back towards the hangar doors. “We’ll eat some of those little airline pretzels and we can talk on the plane. Both of us. All of us.”

“We don’t stock those pretzels anymore,” Ward said, reflexively following him—and when was that a reflex Ward had developed? “It’s biscotti now.”

“Then we’ll have biscotti,” Danny said. So he guessed he had a plan after all. That was the important thing, and it was the one he wanted to convince Ward of. Whatever had happened in the past, and whatever they’d learn about it in Anzhou, there was a future. Their future. He could see the sudden curve of Ward’s mouth as he smiled, like Ward was starting to actually believe him.