Title: Do-Over
Fandom: Iron Fist
Rating: general audiences
Length: 1900 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: for the Variation challenge. Hey, I haven't written kidfic in this fandom yet ...
Summary: Danny gets de-aged; Ward gets a chance to be a better big brother this time around.


It was completely unfair that Danny as a child was so god damn adorable. He looked like a kid from a baby food commercial, with a tousled halo of curls and big blue eyes. Ward figured he was probably about four or five, based on Ward's memories of what he used to look like.

Ward hadn't really thought of him as cute when they were that age the first time. Danny was a nuisance, constantly hanging around and wanting to do things with him, when all Ward wanted was to be left alone.

He also hadn't realized Danny was such an incredibly well-behaved child. Had he been this agreeable as an actual child, or was this a side effect of whatever-the-hell had turned him into this? Ward decided to assume the latter, despite a guilty inward suspicion that Danny had probably always been this way and most of Danny's brattiness was nothing but the filter of Ward's own childhood jealousy.

Either way, it was hard not to be charmed by the way Danny snuggled up against him, swimming in an adult-sized T-shirt that was the only thing Ward had for him to wear, and stayed quiet while Ward called Colleen for what promised to be an incredibly uncomfortable conversation. It involved switching to Facetime so he could show Danny to her and prove that this wasn't some kind of bizarre practical joke.

"Colleen!" Danny squealed when he saw her on the screen, and Ward got to see Colleen's face do about twelve different, equally amazing expressions.

In raptures of delight at the sight of Colleen, Danny tried to grab the phone. Ward held it out of his reach and Danny's face screwed up like he was going to cry, so Ward figured what the hell and let Danny have the phone. "Hold it gently," he ordered.

"Colleen, hi," Danny declared, holding the phone close to his face. "Hi, Colleen! Hi! I'm with Ward!"

"Yes, I can see that," Colleen's tinny voice said, sounding desperately freaked out. "Can I talk to Ward again, please?"

"I love you, Colleen!"

"I love you too," Colleen said. She cleared her throat. "Ward."

After Ward repeated about fifteen times that no, he didn't know how this happened, no, they hadn't touched anything weird lately, no, Danny hadn't eaten anything weird beyond all the weird things he normally ate, and so forth, Colleen promised to talk to her contacts in Chinatown and hung up after exchanging another round of I-love-yous with Danny and telling Danny she thought he was adorable, which made him giggle.

"That was Colleen," Danny said, looking bright-eyed and delighted, which was pretty much how grown-up Danny looked after talking to Colleen too. "Colleen is awesome."

"Yes, well, hopefully she'll figure this out before I actually have to take you outside like this." Ward looked down at the top of Danny's head, because Danny had suddenly gotten very quiet and a lot less squirmy than usual. "Hey, everything okay?"

Danny looked up, and his eyes, to Ward's horror, were swimming with tears. "Mom and Dad," Danny said, very quietly, and his small face crumpled, and Ward discovered a brand new circle of hell: getting to watch a five-year-old deal with an entire lifetime's worth of grief hitting him all at once.

It just figured, didn't it, that he'd kept his adult memories when it would have been so much easier on him not to have them.

"Hey. Kid. Come here." Ward gathered him up and Danny clung to him, bawling. "It's ..." It's okay, he'd started to say, but of course it wasn't; what the hell did you say to a five-year-old who had just discovered he was an orphan? What on Earth could make that even a little bit better?

"Mom and Dad are dead," Danny hiccupped against Ward's neck, "and Joy hates me," more sniffling; he was almost incomprehensible now, "and Davos hates me ..."

God.

"Well, I don't hate you, and I'm here." It was all he could think of to say. He stroked Danny's sweat-damp curls and wished he was better at this. "I'm here and I love you and I'm going to take care of you, okay?" Now he just hoped like hell that the aspects of their relationship Danny remembered best were the last few months and not, say, all those times Ward tried to kill him.

He kept repeating it, and Danny eventually cried himself into a limp and relatively calm state. Ward made him drink a glass of water and got him to smile by showing him a game on the phone, which Ward left him playing while he nuked some leftovers from the hotel room's minifridge. He wasn't about to go out looking for food while carrying a five-year-old whose presence he couldn't explain, with no papers, in a foreign country, wearing nothing but a T-shirt. Yeah, nothing even remotely suspicious about that.

Tomorrow he wasn't really going to have a choice, unless he could trust Danny alone in the room for an hour or two while he picked up supplies. Hopefully it wouldn't come to that. Hopefully this was very, very temporary.

On the bright side, a childhood of babysitting his younger sister and surrogate brother had made him pretty good at taking care of kids, at least when he bothered to try. Danny was still feeling sad and clingy, and mostly just wanted to drape on him. Ward found a cartoon in Mandarin on the TV, which Danny apparently still understood because it made him laugh a lot while he sat on Ward's lap on the bed and ate reheated tandoori chicken skewers. Ward kind of really hoped Danny didn't remember any of this when (definitely when, not if) he got back to normal. This was going to be under the heading of "things we never talk about".

Still, he couldn't help thinking of the times he used to sit like this with Joy when she had been about Danny's current (apparent) age or maybe a little younger. With only a few years' difference in their ages, they'd been a lot closer in size than he was to Danny now, which really made her too big to sit on his lap once she got this large, but he'd let her do it anyway. He'd liked the trusting way she used to wilt on him, falling asleep while they watched TV together.

Danny had clearly wanted to do it too, back then, but there was no way in hell Ward was going to let him, so he'd usually ended up melting onto Ward from the side, until Ward ended up buried under two sleepy, puddled kids who tended to twitch and squirm in their sleep. This typically lasted 'til Ward got fed up with it and pinched Danny awake to tell him to get off, which usually made Joy wake up and start crying ...

I was such a shithead of a brother to you, Danny, he thought, looking down at the top of Danny's head. Danny was starting to droop, having cried himself to exhaustion and then gotten some food into him, wilting with sleepy, childish trust onto Ward's chest.

"You ready to go to sleep?" Ward asked him.

Danny made a noise vaguely like "nnngghhh" and twitched as he started to fall asleep, then lashed out one foot in a twitch that was more like a half-asleep karate kick, which gave Ward an unfortunate preview of what sharing a bed with him was probably going to be like. (It had been a lot the same when they were kids, except Danny didn't know martial arts yet. It had still been like having a sleepover with a hyperactive cricket.)

Ward resigned himself to not getting much sleep tonight.

"Yeah, c'mon, let's sleep in the bed, that's what it's for." Ward removed the half-eaten skewer from Danny's sticky fist, decided cleaning him up properly could wait for tomorrow, and pulled back the covers one-handed with a half-asleep Danny draped over his other arm. Danny could share the bed with him and sleep in the T-shirt; that'd work. Tomorrow they could ... well ... figure out what to do next, if Danny didn't revert back to his adult size.

Danny woke up abruptly when Ward got up to use the bathroom and turn out the lights. "Ward!" he wailed.

"Over here. Calm down." Separation anxiety 'r' us, he thought, but it made sense for a kid who'd just discovered that most of his family was either dead or estranged, and anyone else he was on good terms with was literally on the other side of the world. Ward was all he had.

Danny was still sniffling quietly when Ward shut off the light and got back into bed. He'd also brought a damp washcloth with him to wash off the worst of the results of Danny eating with his hands. Danny tried to squirm away, but Ward hung on until he got him clean-ish and tossed the washcloth onto the nightstand. As soon as the washcloth was no longer an issue, Danny rolled over and clung to him, limpet-like.

"You ready for bed?" Ward asked, and felt the fluffy curls nod. "Yeah, okay, so if you need anything, anything at all, wake me up, okay? Bathroom's right over there."

Danny nodded again, and clung, burying his face in Ward's chest. He was clearly trying not to start crying again.

Ward's dad used to smack the tears right out of him. He wasn't really sure what to do in a situation like this, but all he could do was ... well, what felt right. He bent his head and buried his face in Danny's head of curls and wrapped his arm tightly around the kid's back. "You're gonna be okay, all right? I'll take care of you. It's a round-the-world road trip with the brothers Rand-Meachum, and we're a team."

Danny giggled wetly, muffled against his chest. "But I'm not a grownup anymore," he protested.

"Doesn't matter. We're still a team, okay? I got you. I'm gonna take care of you."

"I love you, Ward," Danny said into his chest.

"Love you too," Ward said, tousling Danny's curls, and he thought of that night back in New York, months ago, when he'd told Danny that he wasn't sure if he'd ever actually said those words. He'd probably said it a dozen times tonight, trying to reassure Danny.

He didn't know how Danny, the kid or the adult version, had come to trust him this much after everything Ward had done to him. All he knew was that he understood -- finally -- what kind of a gift he'd been given, and he was going to try to take care of it.

And if anyone wanted to hurt this kid, they were going to have to go through Ward to do it. Anybody who tried was going on his shit list forever. Including his younger self.

"Night, kid," Ward murmured.

"Night, Ward," Danny said, and jerked in a little spasm of sleep a few seconds later. How the hell did kids fall asleep that fast?

(Danny kicked Ward about 200 times that night. Ward found out that he didn't really care a whole lot ... well, okay, he did care, and his bruised ribs especially cared, but he cared about it a lot less than he cared about Danny getting a solid night's sleep without having to think about his dead parents and all the other things a five-year-old didn't deserve to deal with. It was the least he could do.)