Title: Nightsilver
Fandom: Iron Fist
Rating: PG
Length: 2900 wds
Content notes: n/a
Author notes: n/a
Summary: Camping out in a cave in the rain. Post-season-two.



"If you say anything," Ward began, as they both slouched, dripping, through the mouth of the cave, "anything at all about looking on the bright side, Danny ..."

"We found shelter, didn't we?" Danny asked, unslinging his pack and dropping it on the sandy floor of the cave. It was nearly dark in here, with the gray, leaden daylight half blocked by ferns and vines.

"After six hours of running around in a rainstorm." He knew exactly how long it had been because he'd been checking his watch every five minutes, in between trying to help Danny use the compass to navigate with, which neither of them knew how to do. Ward hadn't thought it would be hard. It was a compass, right? And compasses point north, right? What could be simpler? Except it wasn't a lot of help knowing which way north was, if you didn't know where you were.

"Well, we can get dry now." Danny crouched down and started pulling things out of his pack.

Ward sighed and sat on his. It squished. He took off his hat, tried to shake the water off it, and ended up giving up and dropping it on the floor. He was wet to the skin, and he was pretty sure everything in the pack was wet too, or at least damp enough to be clammy.

"We need a fire," Danny said. "Help me gather up some of those dead leaves."

"I think I'll just sit here and let you do it, since you got us lost in the first place."

It was petty and he knew it, especially since Danny huffed a sigh and didn't complain and just started gathering leaves, because Danny. Ward could only take a couple minutes of that before he got up and wordlessly started collecting leaves and other trash. Also, now that he was no longer moving, he'd started to shiver. Unfortunately moving around in the cave meant that he was constantly making contact with new wet, cold, clammy parts of his sodden clothing. It didn't help that the ceiling of the cave was so low that he was in danger of banging his head on it when he stood up straight, and actually did hit his head a couple of times farther back in the cave, where the ceiling got lower and it was too dim to see.

Danny didn't seem to be having the same problem. It was only a couple inches of height difference between them, but apparently a crucial couple of inches in cases like this.

"Can you actually make a fire out of trash?" he asked, not meaning to be sarcastic in this instance, or at least trying not to. But the pile of fuel they were collecting didn't look very flammable. Then again, nothing outside could possibly be flammable in the dripping, bright green forest.

"Sure," Danny said, with the same bright confidence that had led to them being somewhere in the middle of the jungle, lost, with no ability to navigate.

Ten minutes later, he'd burned up half their supply of matches trying to get any part of the heap of dead leaves to burn. Ward had managed, with superhuman patience, to keep his sarcastic comments to a minimum (only one or two, which he felt under the circumstances should qualify him for the Patience Olympics), and anyway, he hadn't done any better when Danny let him take a turn.

"Do you still have that Kuala Lumpur guidebook?" Danny said finally. "It's paper. It might burn."

"It's going to be as wet as everything else, you know."

"Ward, could you please just get it."

It turned out to be in the very bottom of his pack, which meant he had to pull out every single possession he owned on this side of the world, but it seemed to have been reasonably sheltered from the downpour. At least, it only took half the remaining matches and a handful of pages before Danny finally had a small fire crackling in the heap of leaves.

"We're going to need bigger pieces of wood to keep this going," Danny said. "I can go out and collect some, while you get changed."

Ward was not even remotely prepared to be the bigger person on this. By the time Danny had come back with a few armloads of not-completely-soaked wood, Ward had changed into his least-wet clothes (which still didn't mean precisely dry) ... and had managed to put the fire out by putting a large wet branch on top of it.

"... Ward," Danny said, standing there dripping and looking down at the smoking pile of leaves that Ward was desperately trying to coax back to life, although all he really knew how to do was blow on it in the hopes that it would help somehow. And all that had done was scatter slightly charred leaves on the cave floor.

"Like I know anything about camping!" Ward snapped, desperate and miserable. "You know, my entire experience with the outdoors before I met you consisted of Dad taking me hunting in upstate New York, which was exactly as much fun as you'd expect. And also, we had a tastefully appointed hunting lodge to stay in, not a cave."

Danny let out a long breath and half-laughed and dropped his armload of wet brush on top of the rest of the firewood. "Get out that guidebook. We got it started once. We can do it again."

"Why are you like this," Ward muttered, but he went and got the guidebook, or what was left of it.

Maybe it was practice, maybe pure luck, but this time Danny managed to get the fire burning again on the first try. Ward stared at Danny across the fire and wished it was possible to hate him at times like this. Danny was absolutely soaked; he kept swiping the back of his hand across his forehead to brush dripping hair out of his eyes, but he was doing little more than moving water around.

"Here," Ward muttered, shoving a damp shirt at him. "We don't have any towels but this is mine and I'm not wearing it, so you can dry off on it. Want me to look through your pack for something kind of dry-ish? At least I'm not going to get everything wetter just by touching it."

"Yeah. Thanks. That'd be great." Danny sat back on his heels and toweled his hair vigorously with the shirt.

"You look like a damp poodle, by the way."

Danny laughed. "Hand me that camp pan, and I'll set it out to collect water. We can save what's in our canteens and use rainwater for cooking. At the rate it's coming down, we should have enough for tea soon."

"Yay," Ward mumbled, unwilling to admit that he was actually sort of developing a taste for tea due to forced proximity to Danny and his tea-drinking ways. Though he still preferred coffee when he could get his hands on the good stuff ... which did not include instant coffee made over a campfire.

But it wasn't actually that bad once they'd built the fire up, gotten into dry clothes and wrapped up in blankets. Danny spread out the ground cloth for their tent on the floor and then their sleeping bags on top of that, to sit on, and made some noises about wrapping up in the same blanket to share body heat that Ward ignored, and then started heating water for tea and soup.

It was growing dark outside the cave. Firelight flickered across the walls, and rainwater dripped off the leaves outside. Ward's face was too hot and his back was too cold, in the general way of campfires; his underwear was damp and he felt like he'd developed a few new blisters today. Hiking and wet shoes didn't mix well.

But he wrapped his hands around the tin cup of lukewarm soup that Danny handed him, and the thought occurred to him that as uncomfortable as this was, it was still an improvement over 90% of his life up to this point, and how depressing was that, anyway?

"I think I figured out where we took a wrong turn," Danny said, poring over their map by the light of the campfire, occasionally augmented with a small flashlight. Ward, somewhat reluctantly, leaned over to have a look. "See, this cave has got to be somewhere along the southwest side of this ridge." Danny ran a finger across a series of isoclines on the map. "Which means if we head straight south from here in the morning, we should hit this railroad cut after just a few minutes of walking, and that'll take us straight back to the road."

"Unless we're on the other side of the ridge, in which case we'll end up in a swamp."

"Yes, but we'll know pretty quickly, won't we?"

"Says the guy who didn't step up to his knees in a swamp earlier today," Ward said. At least the rain had washed off most of the mud, and he felt better about the whole thing now that he had dry(ish) socks and had made sure he hadn't picked up any leeches.

"Well, if you have a better idea ..."

Which he didn't, so Ward just grunted and drank his soup. The noodles were still slightly crunchy, but he was hungry enough not to care.

"Hey, Ward," Danny said.

Ward looked up. It was almost completely dark now, the only light the flickering gold of the fire. Danny's hair had dried in a variety of directions. He really did look like a poodle.

"Yeah, what?"

"Thanks," Danny said. "For coming with me on this. It ... means a lot, to me, that you're here. I know it hasn't been that fun, I mean, parts of it have been fun, but there's also been a lot of ... this kind of thing." He waved a hand at the cave and then reached for his own cup of soup. "So anyway ... thanks. And I'm sorry for getting us lost."

He wasn't wrong, but Ward looked at him in the firelight and thought of all the things that Danny had rescued him from, and all the things Danny had forgiven, and all the ways his life was better now than it had been at almost any point in the past. Of course, thanks to a lifetime of never actually having sincere conversations with anyone, this was exactly the sort of thing he had trouble finding words for.

So what came out was, "You led me into that swamp hole on purpose, didn't you? As payback for losing our room keys the other day."

"What? No!" Danny said, horrified, and then he noticed Ward was grinning, and threw a wadded-up soup packet at him.

Ward wanted to leave it at that, but sincerity came with practice. He stretched out on the sleeping bag, propped up on his elbow, and flipped the end of it over his legs. He was kind of almost starting to warm up. "It's okay," he said, to the fire more than Danny. "It's not -- well, I'd say it's not your fault, but actually it is your fault, but the point is, you're a lot more fun to camp out with than Dad was."

"Wow, that's a ringing endorsement, Ward."

"The point is, I can't think of anybody I'd rather fall into a swamp with. I can think of a few people I wouldn't mind pushing into a swamp, mind you ..."

Danny laughed, and looked a little lighter and happier. "Do you want tea?"

"Sure," Ward said said. "Why not."

The tea was non-terrible, if slightly smoke-flavored, and he lounged by the fire and thought about things like second chances, and shelter of both the literal and metaphorical kind, and whether or not they would be able to find Danny's railroad-cut shortcut in the morning.

"Do you know any campfire stories?" Danny asked, stirring him out of the drifting, weary haze he'd fallen into.

"Once upon a time there was a martial artist who got lost in a jungle ..."

"Hey, there's something familiar about this story."

Ward smiled and rolled onto his back and rested the cup of tea on his chest. The firelight made patterns on the cave's low ceiling. "What about you? Know any?"

"I know some ghost stories from K'un Lun. Most of which I now realize are cautionary tales about misbehaving students who sneak out of the monastery at night, but they're pretty creepy."

"Misbehaving students who sneak out and steal donkey carts, say."

"Yes. That kind."

Ward had never really been into ghost stories; he'd thought they were stupid when he was a kid, and now they just reminded him too much of certain past aspects of his life. But ... hell. He'd never heard a K'un Lun ghost story before. Maybe it would put him to sleep. "Tell me one."

So Danny told him about a desecrated temple filled with hungry ghosts, and Ward reciprocated with the hook-hand urban legend story which Danny, amazingly, had never heard before (the inevitable result, Ward supposed, of ending up at mystic kung fu school instead of summer camp).

Which opened up whole new realms of possibility for messing with Danny. Or at least an entire world of creepy stories Danny hadn't heard. Ward began mentally assembling more urban legends, and he wondered if the reason why he hadn't enjoyed this kind of thing as a kid was because he was too busy trying to be cool and grown up to actually have fun at it. Maybe, like a lot of things, it was the company that mattered -- the company, and the amount of enthusiasm you put into it.

"Your turn," he said, and Danny told him about an owl who turned into a woman to lure young novices away from the monastery ("I wonder what that one's a metaphor for." "It's a story, Ward.") and Ward told the vanishing hitchhiker story, which Danny apparently had heard, dammit. And so on, back and forth. The fire had burned down to coals and Ward was half asleep when Danny suddenly sat up in his sleeping bag.

"What is it, what?" Ward fumbled for the machete he'd been using to hack his way through the jungle undergrowth.

"Calm down. It's just the rain stopped and the moon's come out. I think we're going to have clear weather tomorrow."

"Good god," Ward muttered, and rolled over. Then rolled back over when he heard quiet rustling and saw that Danny had gotten up. "What are you doing? Maybe it's not raining, but it'll still be wet as hell out there."

"I know," Danny said. "I'm not going outside. I just wanted to see if I could see the moon."

Ward groaned under his breath, but a moment later he was up too. In sock feet, with a blanket draped around his shoulders, he joined Danny at the mouth of the cave.

It was impossible to see the sky; the trees were too dense. But moonlight drowned the world in silver, turning every bead of rainwater to liquid metal, casting shadows black as ink.

"That's beautiful," Danny whispered.

It was. And quiet, a sort of quiet that Ward had never known. With the roaring of the downpour, the crackling fire, and even their voices in the dark, he hadn't realized how utterly silent it was out here. Individual raindrops, falling from leaves, pattered gently somewhere out of sight.

Appreciating the beauty of the natural world was much more Danny's thing than his. But there was something about this -- the utter quiet, the moonlight, the warmth of the dying fire at their backs, and perhaps most of all, Danny's steady presence beside him -- that pooled inside him, filled him with stillness and calm.

Before he could lose the feeling, he put an arm around Danny and drew him into a quick sideways hug. "Okay, fine, I forgive you for leading me into a swamp and getting me lost in the jungle."

Danny hugged him back and then dodged Ward's attempt to scruff his hair. "I thought you already did."

"No, that was me being nice about it. This is me genuinely not minding."

"Well, in that case, I forgive you for putting out a fire that it took me half an hour to get started, by dumping wet leaves on top of it."

"Hey!" Ward said, but he was laughing. "I thought you weren't mad about that."

"I'm not mad now."

"Fair enough," Ward admitted. "If both of us have nightmares, by the way, I'm blaming you and your ghost stories."

It was tossed off as a joke, and it wasn't until he was wrapped up in his sleeping bag again that it occurred to him that joking about nightmares, his near-constant nighttime companions for a very long time now, wasn't something he would have been able to do just a few months ago.

But he didn't have nightmares, he didn't dream at all, until sunlight woke him in gold-patterned strokes on the wall of the cave.