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Iron Fist fic: Negative Space
It's been so long since I posted fanfic here that I had to look back through my tags to see how I normally format the posts! I mean, I've still been writing stuff (a bunch of stuff), just not cross-posting it. Clearly I need to get back in the habit.
This one came about because of a discussion on the Iron Fist discord about Ward buying himself fancy pens for signing things, as a way of kind of semi-compensating for Harold making him give up art.
Title: Negative Space
Fandom: Iron Fist
Pairing: n/a
Word Count: 3700
Summary: In art, negative space is the area around an image. It can be thought of as everything that the image is not, but it also creates the image; they are two parts of the whole. (Or: Ward gets back in touch with his artist side. Sort of.)
Crossposted: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19100830
Ward was eleven years old when his dad made him take his sketchbook into Harold's home office, tear out each page, and feed it into the paper shredder.
"You're going to be a great man, Ward," Harold murmured into Ward's ear. "And great men don't waste their time on frivolous, pointless hobbies." He straightened up, one hand heavy on Ward's shoulder. "Pick a useful hobby, one that can advance you. Golf, for example -- it trains the body and is good for making connections. Or chess. Good teacher of strategy, chess. Or hunting, another excellent teacher of life skills. In fact, perhaps we'll go up to the cabin this weekend. Get in a little father-son bonding. What do you say, son?"
The only answer to that kind of question, Ward had long since learned, was yes. He nodded and blinked his hot, dry eyes viciously. Crying was not allowed. Boys never cried. Never.
His father clapped him on the back. "Good boy. I love you, son. Now go to it."
In silence, his jaw set, Ward tore out each page and watched the paper shredder reduce it to confetti.
*
"Ward!" Joy cried, turning around with a doll in her hand and a princess crown on her head. "Draw something for me! Draw Princess Moonbow riding a unicorn!"
Draw something for me! It used to be one of their favorite games.
"I don't do that anymore," Ward said shortly, looking at her over the top of his book.
"Why not?" she complained.
"Because Dad says it's a waste of time, and he's right," he said, and went back to his book.
*
The fountain pen was solid and heavy, comfortable in his hand. It left a strong black trail on creamy Rand stationery. Ward signed his name experimentally with it, keeping the line firm and devoid of flourishes -- a man's signature, Dad had said, years ago: standing over him as he signed his name over and over again, training his hand until the signature looked the way Dad wanted it to look.
A pen like this was an indulgence, but the kind of indulgence Dad encouraged. An expensive fountain pen looked good as a desk accessory. It was the sort of thing that a high-end executive was expected to have. It made the act of signing his name a little more impressive, a little more intimidating for a watching business rival. Remind them where they stand, son, his dad would say. Every little detail lets them know you're in charge.
It felt good in his hand, nice and smooth on the paper. Sometimes he'd doodle with it while he was on the phone, or in a meeting -- idle little drawings around the edges of a memo or a brochure, something that was going to end up in the trash anyway. The activity was strangely soothing, even if the drawings were clumsy and ridiculous: idle geometric shapes, the corners of filing cabinets, his coffee cup or the pattern on his tie or a cartoon version of his dad's head with devil horns. Everybody doodled sometimes; there was nothing wrong with it. He always crumpled them up and threw them away.
*
"Hey, Ward! Ready for lunch?"
Ward looked up from the latest R&D report on Rand's narcotic-antagonist drug, the most recent version of the Hand formula they'd been trying to reverse-engineer for the past year. Danny was hanging out in the office doorway, hands shoved in the pockets of his hoodie, looking wildly out of place as he always did in the Rand corporate headquarters.
"Lunch. Right." It was still a little weird that they were semi-regularly having lunch together now that Danny was back in town. It was even weirder that he wanted to. "Lost track of time. Sorry. Gimme a minute to finish this email."
"Yeah, sure." Danny wandered inside, looking around. Ward wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to what he was doing until Danny said suddenly, "Oh wow, did you draw this? It's great!"
Ward swiveled his chair around in blank shock. Danny was straightening up from the wastebasket, smoothing out a crumpled piece of paper. Ward recognized the creamy tone of the page; it had been torn from his memo pad. By him. This morning. He didn't even remember what clumsy scribble he'd drawn on it. Just a habit, nothing more. Self-soothing was probably what Bethany would call it. He called it something to do with his hands when he was on the phone.
"You drew this, right? I remember you used to draw when we were kids. Seriously, Ward, it's really --" Danny looked up, his lips framing the word "good", which died at the look on Ward's face.
"Give me that," Ward snapped. He grabbed the scrap of paper out of Danny's unresisting hand. "It's nothing. Just a useless way of wasting time when I'm on the phone." He tore it in half, then half again, crumpled the pieces into a ball, and threw it back in the wastebasket.
He wasn't looking at Danny, couldn't look at Danny, so he wasn't sure if Danny was looking at him with pity or anger or what.
There was a faint sound as if Danny had started to say something, then took a breath before starting over. "Do you -- want to go to that Vietnamese place on the corner? You like that one, and the wait for a table usually isn't long even at lunchtime."
"Yeah, okay, whatever." Ward grabbed for the coat draped over a chair and strode out of his office with Danny trailing along behind. He realized his hand was shaking when he had to try three times to push the button for the elevator. Danny leaned against the wall beside him, and started talking about the renovations he and Colleen were planning for the dojo, and when they got in the elevator, Danny kept talking about that while he reached past Ward and pushed the button for the ground floor.
And he went on talking about it on the walk to the restaurant, segueing into other inconsequential topics -- something to do with a new flavor of green tea he'd found that he liked ("You just can't get anything that tastes like that here, Ward, or at least it's the first one I've found; they don't do that subtle smoked flavor anywhere but K'un Lun") and people he'd met at his new, ridiculous, part-time furniture-moving job. And so on and so forth, talking about everything and nothing, with pauses to let Ward make agreeing noises: all through waiting for their food, through Ward picking up the drinks menu and staring at it for a long thoughtful moment and putting it aside, until Ward's hands stopped shaking and his heart stopped racing and he was able to eat.
He dreaded the conversation they would inevitably have about this, but somehow they didn't; days turned into weeks and eventually it seemed like Danny had forgotten all about it.
*
Danny only came into the Rand office maybe once every week or two, when things needed to be signed, or on those infrequent occasions when Ward managed to drag him to a board meeting to make sure the board had visual evidence that he was still alive and Ward hadn't murdered him for his 51% shares and buried him in an ornamental flowerbed out front.
And yet, for someone who was almost never here, he had a remarkable ability to move stuff around.
Grumbling, Ward went into Danny's office -- the big office that used to belong to Danny's dad, and now felt like a sort of shrine to Danny's nonexistent presence. It still had Wendell Rand's old desk, and the usual assortment of bookshelves and filing cabinets, but it also had the bits and pieces that Danny had brought in, over the months, that gave it a slightly less corporate and more personal, Danny-ish air. The little Zen-garden-in-a-box thing on the corner of his desk, for example (which Ward had learned he could use as an indicator to tell if Danny had been in the building; all he had to do was look and see if the rocks had been moved around and the sand raked into new patterns). New art on the walls to replace the bland corporate-R-us city skyline photos -- a blown-up picture of the Rands, another of Ward and Joy and Danny as kids, a print of ink-brush art with a mountain emerging from fog.
Ward poked at a rock in the Zen garden, stacked two pebbles (Danny hated that), and moved the little rake carefully to the other side of the tiny sandbox to mess up the feng shui or whatever. Then he went over to the bookshelves of binders, and yep, what he needed was probably here somewhere, but everything was out of order, again. What did Danny do, come in here and shuffle them around? And that was when Danny remembered to put things back at all. Ward eventually located the one he needed, the pre-audit copy of the 1991-92 fiscal year reports, but then he went ahead and put the rest back in order because it was fucking annoying looking at them like that. There were binders on top of filing cabinets or just stuffed into the shelves on top of other binders wherever Danny had decided to put them. And even after he got them in order, there was a gap where it jumped from 94-95 to 96-97 -- where was 95-96? Aha, on Danny's desk, why. Ward picked it up and started to slide it onto the shelf when something slipped from between the pages.
He leaned down and picked it up. It took him a minute to realize what he was looking at, a piece of Rand stationery with a scribbled squiggle that, when he turned it, resolved into a rough and unconvincing approximation of the floral arrangement that had been on his desk last week, courtesy of some pharmaceutical supplier or other courting Rand's favor. It was thoroughly rumpled, but every last wrinkle had been carefully smoothed out.
What the hell?
He stood there holding the binder with the edge sitting against the lip of the shelf, staring at the sketch in his hand, which he knew he'd drawn and crumpled up and thrown away, like he always did. As his grip loosened on the binder, another slip of paper slid out and fluttered to the floor. It landed face-up, showing a loose wobbly line that might have been Joy's profile and the wisps of hair over her forehead. He didn't remember drawing that one, but it was definitely his.
Ward sat down right where he was and laid the binder on the floor. As he flipped through the pages, he found more flattened-out drawings tucked inside. Some were just little geometric designs or shaded circles, random phone doodles, the kind everybody did. Others were more elaborate. He must have been on hold for awhile on this one, because he'd gotten through drawing about half of the entry walk of the Rand building. He looked at it critically; when had he forgotten everything he'd ever learned about perspective, anyway. He shook his head and picked up the next one, which ... was that supposed to be a bunny? He turned it sideways, studying it skeptically. God only knew what he'd been thinking when he drew that.
There must be dozens of them here. All of them had obviously been rescued from his office trash, with the coffee stains and crumples to show for it, and then smoothed out, taped back together if they'd been torn apart, and pressed between the pages of the binder to make them lie flat.
His first thought was Joy, but then ... "Danny," Ward murmured, holding the bunny drawing by one edge. It had to be. Joy was ... gone, and he couldn't imagine any of the series of interchangeable office assistants who'd followed Megan doing something like this. Danny was the only one who was in and out of Ward's office at random times, wandering around the building when he felt like it, doing things like ... this.
But why. That was what he couldn't figure out. What was the point? The drawings were terrible; his dad wasn't wrong about that, and anyway, all of them were clumsy and unfinished, the result of starting and stopping in between items on a meeting agenda, or crumpling and tossing a drawing at whatever point he finished being on hold on the phone.
It was overstating the matter, he felt, to even dignify them by calling them drawings. They were scribbles. Useless. Pointless. A waste of time.
And Danny had saved every single one and carefully pressed them like he might have pressed leaves or flowers. It made something lurch in Ward's chest, thinking about that.
It was a Danny thing, he decided. Just another Danny thing. God knew why Danny did anything. He thought about just crumpling them and throwing them all away like he'd tried to do the first time. Then he thought about Danny coming back and finding them all gone, and he sighed and smoothed them down and put them back between the pages, and the binder back on Danny's desk.
*
He didn't pack any expensive fountain pens for the trip to Hong Kong. He had a passport and a change of clothes, brought by Katie (one last misuse of a Whorton-educated office assistant, for old time's sake) and that was it. He didn't even have a toothbrush; he was going to have to buy basic toiletries when they landed.
It was the craziest, stupidest, most irresponsible thing he'd done as an adult, and possibly ever.
It just figured that Danny would have caused it.
Ward glanced over at the idiot in question. They were both in the Rand plane's small lounge area. Danny was sitting tailor-style on one of the couch-type seats that folded down into a bed, meditating or possibly sleeping in a sitting position. Ward had slipped down to sit on the carpeted floor of the plane, one elbow propped on the low plastic table where they'd been playing cards earlier, until they both got too tired to concentrate.
It was the middle of the night in New York. Ward was fuzzy with exhaustion, but too wound up to be sleepy, a vibrating gritty-eyed alertness that he wished he could tone down enough to sleep for awhile. There was nothing to do. The plane had in-flight internet, but all he could think of to do with it was log into the Rand system and work for awhile, and he was tired enough he'd probably make mistakes. Anyway, that was ... back there.
He reached for the ballpoint pen they'd been using to keep score on a handful of napkins from the plane's minibar. The napkin was a terrible surface to draw on, but he doodled idly until suddenly the plane jolted under him and Danny jerked out of his meditative pose with a little gasp.
Yep. Asleep. "Welcome back," Ward said dryly. He crumpled up the napkin and pushed it aside.
"I was awake," Danny said, then spoiled it by yawning. He climbed down onto the floor with Ward. "Whatcha doing?"
"Losing at solitaire."
Danny grinned and propped his head on his fist. He looked like he was falling asleep again. Ward tried laying out another game of solitaire, couldn't concentrate on that either, and reached for another napkin. He wasn't drawing anything specific this time, just letting the pen move, the way it sometimes did when he was on the phone, drawing little boxes and circles and things.
He looked up suddenly at movement, to find Danny smoothing out the other napkin and looking at it. Ward, with a sinking feeling, remembered what he'd been drawing: Danny, meditating. And drawing him badly, because he didn't even know how to draw people anymore, and hadn't been that good at it in the first place.
"Yes, I know, it's terrible." Ward reached for it, but Danny was too fast for him, pulling out of reach. "Knock it off. Give me that."
Danny just grinned with no trace of shame, folded the napkin carefully, and put it into his pocket.
"Come on. What are you going to do with that?"
Danny shrugged. "Keep it, I guess."
"Why?"
"I like your drawings," Danny said. "You used to draw me sometimes when we were kids -- remember?"
He didn't, specifically, though he did remember the little kids pestering him to draw things for them. Silly things, kid things -- cartoon characters, unicorns, superheroes. It was just a dumb kid game. And while he recognized now that his dad had been an ass about it, his dad also hadn't been entirely wrong, and having Danny save that clumsy, amateurish sketch was ... it was humiliating, was what it was. Unfortunately he couldn't think of any way to get it back except trying to take it away by force, and he knew exactly how that would work out for him.
"Fine," he said, and crumpled the napkin he was drawing on, then tore it up for good measure.
Danny watched him, and seemed to be thinking it over before saying, quietly, "Did Harold make you stop?"
"What do you think?" It came out nasty. Ward wouldn't mind a fight right now.
But Danny just nodded, like he'd had something confirmed that he'd suspected for awhile, and then he clenched his hand on the edge of the table as the plane jerked and dropped on an air pocket and leveled out again. He was pale, sweat beading his face.
Airsick? Ward thought. "You okay?" he asked, reluctantly. He didn't want to let go of the anger. It was better than anything else he might be feeling right now.
"Yeah, it's just ..." Danny took a breath. "You know. My parents. The plane."
Oh. Oh. Right.
The plane bucked again, and another spasm of incipient panic crossed Danny's face. He dug his hands into his hair.
Ward hesitated. But it was Danny, damn it. He reached out and tapped Danny's arm, feeling rigid, trembling muscles under the loose fabric of Danny's sleeve. "Hey. You and Joy used to ask me to draw things for you. You ... want me to draw something?"
There was a moment's pause before Danny said, "Draw me a dragon."
"What? I've never drawn a dragon. I have no idea how."
"It's what I want, though." Even pale and shivering, Danny was still his usual stubborn self.
"I can't draw a dragon. You draw a dragon." Ward tried to shove the pen into Danny's cold, trembling hand. Danny pushed it back at him.
"I'm not good at it."
"Neither am I!"
"Yeah, you are," Danny said with that goddamn bright faith in him that was so hard to push back against.
He would've kept resisting out of pure stubbornness, but just then the plane lurched again, and Danny flinched and bowed his head, and Ward said, "Okay, yeah, dragon, huh? All right, you tell me if this looks like a dragon."
So he drew a dragon, an absolutely fucking incompetent attempt at a dragon that looked more like a canoe with wings. But it made Danny grin.
"Wait," Ward said, and pulled another napkin toward himself. He could do better. He had an idea. This time he drew a coffee cup, which he was pretty good at because doodling his coffee cup was one of his go-to things for amusing himself in long, boring meetings. Then he drew a tiny dragon standing on the handle and dipping its snout into the cup, a fat silly-looking little dragon with absurdly tiny wings, kind of based on some Disney movie they'd watched when they were kids.
Danny laughed. "I like that one," he said, sliding the napkins toward himself so he could look at them. "I like them both."
Ward reached for another napkin. "Hold on, this is a good one." He still sucked at drawing people, especially people doing anything specific, but he'd drawn Danny meditating once already tonight, so he had a little bit of practice. He tried drawing a meditating dragon, with tiny smoke rings floating up cartoon-style from its snout.
Danny grinned delightedly through the whole process. He still clutched at the edge of the table every time the plane jerked under them, but he looked less like he was about to collapse into a panic attack at any moment. "Is that me?"
"Well, it's definitely something," Ward said, shoving the napkin at him. "I'm running out of dragon ideas. Oh, hmm, you might like this one." He tried drawing a dragon with a ponytail and a katana. This was even less of a success, because he was even worse at katanas than dragons, but Danny's helpless giggling was its own reward.
"I need to text that to Colleen," Danny said, and then, before Ward could desperately tell him not to (he didn't want to get stabbed the next time he set foot in New York), Danny looked crestfallen and Ward remembered the other thing they'd been talking around during the entire time they'd been on the plane. Shit. Drawing Colleen had probably been a bad idea.
"Wait, wait," Ward said, and then -- he sighed, but there was no help for it, he had to get that look off Danny's face -- he drew a little Ward-dragon with a cell phone clutched in its claws and a tie around its neck.
"Okay, this one's my favorite," Danny said, taking it by the edge to pull it to his side of the table.
"It's absolutely ridiculous."
"Still the best one," Danny said, and he added it to the pile and very gently smoothed out a slight crease in its corner.
This one came about because of a discussion on the Iron Fist discord about Ward buying himself fancy pens for signing things, as a way of kind of semi-compensating for Harold making him give up art.
Title: Negative Space
Fandom: Iron Fist
Pairing: n/a
Word Count: 3700
Summary: In art, negative space is the area around an image. It can be thought of as everything that the image is not, but it also creates the image; they are two parts of the whole. (Or: Ward gets back in touch with his artist side. Sort of.)
Crossposted: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19100830
Ward was eleven years old when his dad made him take his sketchbook into Harold's home office, tear out each page, and feed it into the paper shredder.
"You're going to be a great man, Ward," Harold murmured into Ward's ear. "And great men don't waste their time on frivolous, pointless hobbies." He straightened up, one hand heavy on Ward's shoulder. "Pick a useful hobby, one that can advance you. Golf, for example -- it trains the body and is good for making connections. Or chess. Good teacher of strategy, chess. Or hunting, another excellent teacher of life skills. In fact, perhaps we'll go up to the cabin this weekend. Get in a little father-son bonding. What do you say, son?"
The only answer to that kind of question, Ward had long since learned, was yes. He nodded and blinked his hot, dry eyes viciously. Crying was not allowed. Boys never cried. Never.
His father clapped him on the back. "Good boy. I love you, son. Now go to it."
In silence, his jaw set, Ward tore out each page and watched the paper shredder reduce it to confetti.
*
"Ward!" Joy cried, turning around with a doll in her hand and a princess crown on her head. "Draw something for me! Draw Princess Moonbow riding a unicorn!"
Draw something for me! It used to be one of their favorite games.
"I don't do that anymore," Ward said shortly, looking at her over the top of his book.
"Why not?" she complained.
"Because Dad says it's a waste of time, and he's right," he said, and went back to his book.
*
The fountain pen was solid and heavy, comfortable in his hand. It left a strong black trail on creamy Rand stationery. Ward signed his name experimentally with it, keeping the line firm and devoid of flourishes -- a man's signature, Dad had said, years ago: standing over him as he signed his name over and over again, training his hand until the signature looked the way Dad wanted it to look.
A pen like this was an indulgence, but the kind of indulgence Dad encouraged. An expensive fountain pen looked good as a desk accessory. It was the sort of thing that a high-end executive was expected to have. It made the act of signing his name a little more impressive, a little more intimidating for a watching business rival. Remind them where they stand, son, his dad would say. Every little detail lets them know you're in charge.
It felt good in his hand, nice and smooth on the paper. Sometimes he'd doodle with it while he was on the phone, or in a meeting -- idle little drawings around the edges of a memo or a brochure, something that was going to end up in the trash anyway. The activity was strangely soothing, even if the drawings were clumsy and ridiculous: idle geometric shapes, the corners of filing cabinets, his coffee cup or the pattern on his tie or a cartoon version of his dad's head with devil horns. Everybody doodled sometimes; there was nothing wrong with it. He always crumpled them up and threw them away.
*
"Hey, Ward! Ready for lunch?"
Ward looked up from the latest R&D report on Rand's narcotic-antagonist drug, the most recent version of the Hand formula they'd been trying to reverse-engineer for the past year. Danny was hanging out in the office doorway, hands shoved in the pockets of his hoodie, looking wildly out of place as he always did in the Rand corporate headquarters.
"Lunch. Right." It was still a little weird that they were semi-regularly having lunch together now that Danny was back in town. It was even weirder that he wanted to. "Lost track of time. Sorry. Gimme a minute to finish this email."
"Yeah, sure." Danny wandered inside, looking around. Ward wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to what he was doing until Danny said suddenly, "Oh wow, did you draw this? It's great!"
Ward swiveled his chair around in blank shock. Danny was straightening up from the wastebasket, smoothing out a crumpled piece of paper. Ward recognized the creamy tone of the page; it had been torn from his memo pad. By him. This morning. He didn't even remember what clumsy scribble he'd drawn on it. Just a habit, nothing more. Self-soothing was probably what Bethany would call it. He called it something to do with his hands when he was on the phone.
"You drew this, right? I remember you used to draw when we were kids. Seriously, Ward, it's really --" Danny looked up, his lips framing the word "good", which died at the look on Ward's face.
"Give me that," Ward snapped. He grabbed the scrap of paper out of Danny's unresisting hand. "It's nothing. Just a useless way of wasting time when I'm on the phone." He tore it in half, then half again, crumpled the pieces into a ball, and threw it back in the wastebasket.
He wasn't looking at Danny, couldn't look at Danny, so he wasn't sure if Danny was looking at him with pity or anger or what.
There was a faint sound as if Danny had started to say something, then took a breath before starting over. "Do you -- want to go to that Vietnamese place on the corner? You like that one, and the wait for a table usually isn't long even at lunchtime."
"Yeah, okay, whatever." Ward grabbed for the coat draped over a chair and strode out of his office with Danny trailing along behind. He realized his hand was shaking when he had to try three times to push the button for the elevator. Danny leaned against the wall beside him, and started talking about the renovations he and Colleen were planning for the dojo, and when they got in the elevator, Danny kept talking about that while he reached past Ward and pushed the button for the ground floor.
And he went on talking about it on the walk to the restaurant, segueing into other inconsequential topics -- something to do with a new flavor of green tea he'd found that he liked ("You just can't get anything that tastes like that here, Ward, or at least it's the first one I've found; they don't do that subtle smoked flavor anywhere but K'un Lun") and people he'd met at his new, ridiculous, part-time furniture-moving job. And so on and so forth, talking about everything and nothing, with pauses to let Ward make agreeing noises: all through waiting for their food, through Ward picking up the drinks menu and staring at it for a long thoughtful moment and putting it aside, until Ward's hands stopped shaking and his heart stopped racing and he was able to eat.
He dreaded the conversation they would inevitably have about this, but somehow they didn't; days turned into weeks and eventually it seemed like Danny had forgotten all about it.
*
Danny only came into the Rand office maybe once every week or two, when things needed to be signed, or on those infrequent occasions when Ward managed to drag him to a board meeting to make sure the board had visual evidence that he was still alive and Ward hadn't murdered him for his 51% shares and buried him in an ornamental flowerbed out front.
And yet, for someone who was almost never here, he had a remarkable ability to move stuff around.
Grumbling, Ward went into Danny's office -- the big office that used to belong to Danny's dad, and now felt like a sort of shrine to Danny's nonexistent presence. It still had Wendell Rand's old desk, and the usual assortment of bookshelves and filing cabinets, but it also had the bits and pieces that Danny had brought in, over the months, that gave it a slightly less corporate and more personal, Danny-ish air. The little Zen-garden-in-a-box thing on the corner of his desk, for example (which Ward had learned he could use as an indicator to tell if Danny had been in the building; all he had to do was look and see if the rocks had been moved around and the sand raked into new patterns). New art on the walls to replace the bland corporate-R-us city skyline photos -- a blown-up picture of the Rands, another of Ward and Joy and Danny as kids, a print of ink-brush art with a mountain emerging from fog.
Ward poked at a rock in the Zen garden, stacked two pebbles (Danny hated that), and moved the little rake carefully to the other side of the tiny sandbox to mess up the feng shui or whatever. Then he went over to the bookshelves of binders, and yep, what he needed was probably here somewhere, but everything was out of order, again. What did Danny do, come in here and shuffle them around? And that was when Danny remembered to put things back at all. Ward eventually located the one he needed, the pre-audit copy of the 1991-92 fiscal year reports, but then he went ahead and put the rest back in order because it was fucking annoying looking at them like that. There were binders on top of filing cabinets or just stuffed into the shelves on top of other binders wherever Danny had decided to put them. And even after he got them in order, there was a gap where it jumped from 94-95 to 96-97 -- where was 95-96? Aha, on Danny's desk, why. Ward picked it up and started to slide it onto the shelf when something slipped from between the pages.
He leaned down and picked it up. It took him a minute to realize what he was looking at, a piece of Rand stationery with a scribbled squiggle that, when he turned it, resolved into a rough and unconvincing approximation of the floral arrangement that had been on his desk last week, courtesy of some pharmaceutical supplier or other courting Rand's favor. It was thoroughly rumpled, but every last wrinkle had been carefully smoothed out.
What the hell?
He stood there holding the binder with the edge sitting against the lip of the shelf, staring at the sketch in his hand, which he knew he'd drawn and crumpled up and thrown away, like he always did. As his grip loosened on the binder, another slip of paper slid out and fluttered to the floor. It landed face-up, showing a loose wobbly line that might have been Joy's profile and the wisps of hair over her forehead. He didn't remember drawing that one, but it was definitely his.
Ward sat down right where he was and laid the binder on the floor. As he flipped through the pages, he found more flattened-out drawings tucked inside. Some were just little geometric designs or shaded circles, random phone doodles, the kind everybody did. Others were more elaborate. He must have been on hold for awhile on this one, because he'd gotten through drawing about half of the entry walk of the Rand building. He looked at it critically; when had he forgotten everything he'd ever learned about perspective, anyway. He shook his head and picked up the next one, which ... was that supposed to be a bunny? He turned it sideways, studying it skeptically. God only knew what he'd been thinking when he drew that.
There must be dozens of them here. All of them had obviously been rescued from his office trash, with the coffee stains and crumples to show for it, and then smoothed out, taped back together if they'd been torn apart, and pressed between the pages of the binder to make them lie flat.
His first thought was Joy, but then ... "Danny," Ward murmured, holding the bunny drawing by one edge. It had to be. Joy was ... gone, and he couldn't imagine any of the series of interchangeable office assistants who'd followed Megan doing something like this. Danny was the only one who was in and out of Ward's office at random times, wandering around the building when he felt like it, doing things like ... this.
But why. That was what he couldn't figure out. What was the point? The drawings were terrible; his dad wasn't wrong about that, and anyway, all of them were clumsy and unfinished, the result of starting and stopping in between items on a meeting agenda, or crumpling and tossing a drawing at whatever point he finished being on hold on the phone.
It was overstating the matter, he felt, to even dignify them by calling them drawings. They were scribbles. Useless. Pointless. A waste of time.
And Danny had saved every single one and carefully pressed them like he might have pressed leaves or flowers. It made something lurch in Ward's chest, thinking about that.
It was a Danny thing, he decided. Just another Danny thing. God knew why Danny did anything. He thought about just crumpling them and throwing them all away like he'd tried to do the first time. Then he thought about Danny coming back and finding them all gone, and he sighed and smoothed them down and put them back between the pages, and the binder back on Danny's desk.
*
He didn't pack any expensive fountain pens for the trip to Hong Kong. He had a passport and a change of clothes, brought by Katie (one last misuse of a Whorton-educated office assistant, for old time's sake) and that was it. He didn't even have a toothbrush; he was going to have to buy basic toiletries when they landed.
It was the craziest, stupidest, most irresponsible thing he'd done as an adult, and possibly ever.
It just figured that Danny would have caused it.
Ward glanced over at the idiot in question. They were both in the Rand plane's small lounge area. Danny was sitting tailor-style on one of the couch-type seats that folded down into a bed, meditating or possibly sleeping in a sitting position. Ward had slipped down to sit on the carpeted floor of the plane, one elbow propped on the low plastic table where they'd been playing cards earlier, until they both got too tired to concentrate.
It was the middle of the night in New York. Ward was fuzzy with exhaustion, but too wound up to be sleepy, a vibrating gritty-eyed alertness that he wished he could tone down enough to sleep for awhile. There was nothing to do. The plane had in-flight internet, but all he could think of to do with it was log into the Rand system and work for awhile, and he was tired enough he'd probably make mistakes. Anyway, that was ... back there.
He reached for the ballpoint pen they'd been using to keep score on a handful of napkins from the plane's minibar. The napkin was a terrible surface to draw on, but he doodled idly until suddenly the plane jolted under him and Danny jerked out of his meditative pose with a little gasp.
Yep. Asleep. "Welcome back," Ward said dryly. He crumpled up the napkin and pushed it aside.
"I was awake," Danny said, then spoiled it by yawning. He climbed down onto the floor with Ward. "Whatcha doing?"
"Losing at solitaire."
Danny grinned and propped his head on his fist. He looked like he was falling asleep again. Ward tried laying out another game of solitaire, couldn't concentrate on that either, and reached for another napkin. He wasn't drawing anything specific this time, just letting the pen move, the way it sometimes did when he was on the phone, drawing little boxes and circles and things.
He looked up suddenly at movement, to find Danny smoothing out the other napkin and looking at it. Ward, with a sinking feeling, remembered what he'd been drawing: Danny, meditating. And drawing him badly, because he didn't even know how to draw people anymore, and hadn't been that good at it in the first place.
"Yes, I know, it's terrible." Ward reached for it, but Danny was too fast for him, pulling out of reach. "Knock it off. Give me that."
Danny just grinned with no trace of shame, folded the napkin carefully, and put it into his pocket.
"Come on. What are you going to do with that?"
Danny shrugged. "Keep it, I guess."
"Why?"
"I like your drawings," Danny said. "You used to draw me sometimes when we were kids -- remember?"
He didn't, specifically, though he did remember the little kids pestering him to draw things for them. Silly things, kid things -- cartoon characters, unicorns, superheroes. It was just a dumb kid game. And while he recognized now that his dad had been an ass about it, his dad also hadn't been entirely wrong, and having Danny save that clumsy, amateurish sketch was ... it was humiliating, was what it was. Unfortunately he couldn't think of any way to get it back except trying to take it away by force, and he knew exactly how that would work out for him.
"Fine," he said, and crumpled the napkin he was drawing on, then tore it up for good measure.
Danny watched him, and seemed to be thinking it over before saying, quietly, "Did Harold make you stop?"
"What do you think?" It came out nasty. Ward wouldn't mind a fight right now.
But Danny just nodded, like he'd had something confirmed that he'd suspected for awhile, and then he clenched his hand on the edge of the table as the plane jerked and dropped on an air pocket and leveled out again. He was pale, sweat beading his face.
Airsick? Ward thought. "You okay?" he asked, reluctantly. He didn't want to let go of the anger. It was better than anything else he might be feeling right now.
"Yeah, it's just ..." Danny took a breath. "You know. My parents. The plane."
Oh. Oh. Right.
The plane bucked again, and another spasm of incipient panic crossed Danny's face. He dug his hands into his hair.
Ward hesitated. But it was Danny, damn it. He reached out and tapped Danny's arm, feeling rigid, trembling muscles under the loose fabric of Danny's sleeve. "Hey. You and Joy used to ask me to draw things for you. You ... want me to draw something?"
There was a moment's pause before Danny said, "Draw me a dragon."
"What? I've never drawn a dragon. I have no idea how."
"It's what I want, though." Even pale and shivering, Danny was still his usual stubborn self.
"I can't draw a dragon. You draw a dragon." Ward tried to shove the pen into Danny's cold, trembling hand. Danny pushed it back at him.
"I'm not good at it."
"Neither am I!"
"Yeah, you are," Danny said with that goddamn bright faith in him that was so hard to push back against.
He would've kept resisting out of pure stubbornness, but just then the plane lurched again, and Danny flinched and bowed his head, and Ward said, "Okay, yeah, dragon, huh? All right, you tell me if this looks like a dragon."
So he drew a dragon, an absolutely fucking incompetent attempt at a dragon that looked more like a canoe with wings. But it made Danny grin.
"Wait," Ward said, and pulled another napkin toward himself. He could do better. He had an idea. This time he drew a coffee cup, which he was pretty good at because doodling his coffee cup was one of his go-to things for amusing himself in long, boring meetings. Then he drew a tiny dragon standing on the handle and dipping its snout into the cup, a fat silly-looking little dragon with absurdly tiny wings, kind of based on some Disney movie they'd watched when they were kids.
Danny laughed. "I like that one," he said, sliding the napkins toward himself so he could look at them. "I like them both."
Ward reached for another napkin. "Hold on, this is a good one." He still sucked at drawing people, especially people doing anything specific, but he'd drawn Danny meditating once already tonight, so he had a little bit of practice. He tried drawing a meditating dragon, with tiny smoke rings floating up cartoon-style from its snout.
Danny grinned delightedly through the whole process. He still clutched at the edge of the table every time the plane jerked under them, but he looked less like he was about to collapse into a panic attack at any moment. "Is that me?"
"Well, it's definitely something," Ward said, shoving the napkin at him. "I'm running out of dragon ideas. Oh, hmm, you might like this one." He tried drawing a dragon with a ponytail and a katana. This was even less of a success, because he was even worse at katanas than dragons, but Danny's helpless giggling was its own reward.
"I need to text that to Colleen," Danny said, and then, before Ward could desperately tell him not to (he didn't want to get stabbed the next time he set foot in New York), Danny looked crestfallen and Ward remembered the other thing they'd been talking around during the entire time they'd been on the plane. Shit. Drawing Colleen had probably been a bad idea.
"Wait, wait," Ward said, and then -- he sighed, but there was no help for it, he had to get that look off Danny's face -- he drew a little Ward-dragon with a cell phone clutched in its claws and a tie around its neck.
"Okay, this one's my favorite," Danny said, taking it by the edge to pull it to his side of the table.
"It's absolutely ridiculous."
"Still the best one," Danny said, and he added it to the pile and very gently smoothed out a slight crease in its corner.
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I truly hope one of the excellent fanart people you know on the internet draws you Elliott the dragon drinking coffee, although I would more than settle for dragon!Ward with a tie.
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OH RIGHT YOU HAVE THIS ENTIRE WEBCOMIC DO IT.