Title: Medicinal
Fandom: Iron Fist (Marvel TV Universe)
Rating: G
Length: 800 wds
Content notes: n/a
Author notes: n/a
Summary: Trying to get Danny to take medicine hasn't really gotten any easier since he was six years old.


Ward had spent most of his life doing his best not to think about his childhood, or his life in general, but were times when he would suddenly, spontaneously remember some random detail from his and Joy and Danny's shared childhoods.

Such as that time when Danny and Joy were six, and both of them got the chicken pox at once because they caught it from each other, of course they did, and Ward, who had already had it, got stuck taking care of them.

What he remembered wasn't that, exactly (he had forgotten most of it; in fact he'd forgotten it almost entirely). It was a sudden, incredibly vivid memory of being ten or eleven, trying to force both of them to take the spoonfuls of liquid children's Tylenol that they both hated, because both of them were spiking fevers and he was convinced for some stupid reason that they were going to die and he'd get in trouble.

As an adult, Ward now recognized that they probably would have been fine regardless of what he did or didn't do, as evidenced by the fact that they were both energetic enough to refuse to swallow anything he tried to force on them. Joy ended up wearing hers, and Danny, who was sometimes the most easygoing kid in the world and sometimes an absolute little terror, climbed out of bed in his sweat-soaked pajamas and went and hid in the closet.

"Danny," Ward had snapped, wrestling with the closet door while six-year-old Danny had to be hanging off the handle on the inside. "Get out here. It's cherry flavor."

"I hate cherry!" Danny croaked from the other side of the closet door. "It tastes like poison!"

"Fine, I'll just leave you here to die in a closet!"

He couldn't actually remember if he had gotten Danny to take it or not (he had an uncomfortable, vague recollection that he might have ended up sitting on him and forcing it into him) but astonishingly, twenty years had changed absolutely nothing, at least as far as Danny was concerned; Ward liked to think his own bedside manner had improved a little. But Danny was still exactly as stubborn when he was sick, and still just as impossible to get medicine into.

"Okay, look, you're an adult," Ward said, sitting on the end of the bed with a clay bowl in his hands, while a feverish Danny looked at him with a recalcitrant scowl. "And I have no idea why this tea the old lady gave us is supposed to help anyway, but the last dose really did bring your fever down a little, and your color's better. It might be helping. At the very least it's not killing you, and it has ... leaves, and stuff. Healthy leaves."

"I'll drink it later," Danny said. "Just leave it there."

"You know I can tell when you're lying, right? Seriously, usually you're the one trying to inflict absolutely disgusting pseudo-scientific medicinal bullshit on me."

"When have I ever done that?"

"What?" Ward said in disbelief. "When have you not? What about that cleanse you tried to make me do, or that horrible stuff you kept trying to feed me when I had food poisoning—"

"You were dehydrated, Ward, you needed to drink something."

"Not that, though, whatever it was," Ward said. "No one is so dehydrated they need to drink that. Cartoon people crawling through the desert past cow skulls are not that dehydrated."

"Ward," Danny said with a sigh, and started coughing in the middle of it.

"Drink the damn tea," Ward said, shoving the clay cup into his hands. "And listen, this is me saying this, so you know it must be important. Or at least, I'm confident it's probably not going to kill you. Though I can't say if it's poisoning you with heavy metals or anything."

"You're really inspiring confidence, Ward." Danny took a cautious sip and made a face. "You know, this stuff isn't any less disgusting cold."

"Yeah, and whose fault is that? Look, if it helps any— I drank an entire bowl before I gave you any of it," Ward admitted, not quite looking at him. "It didn't do anything to me except make me a little lightheaded. And I agree with you, it's gross. But at least you have misery in company, right? Drink the stupid medicinal tea, Danny."

When he risked a glance back in Danny's general direction, Danny was grinning a little, sipping at the tea.

With the benefit of adult perspective, Ward now realized he could probably have gotten both kids to just swallow the damn cherry-flavored horror if he had simply taken a spoonful or two in front of them. Hooray for 20/20 hindsight.

It only occurred to him later that it worked both ways—these days, he could have just told Danny he drank a whole bowl of it and Danny would have believed him, without having to actually choke it down. But then again, he couldn't have been sure it was safe that way, so it wasn't like he'd had a choice.