#not even claire vs his responsibility and time management and the restaurant

[yangsharperavery]

ALSO…

the writers are absolutely JOKING about carmy’s panic attack cycling through everything about his entire life and him immediately calming on sydney entering it.

LIKE????????

PLEASE??????

[yutaya]

Discord was all, “what would Danny be like in an AU where he was CEO instead of the Iron Fist?” and then they were like “What would WARD be like if he was the Iron Fist instead of CEO?”, and I was like “wow interesting question and I kind of want to answer but also I have to go to work ttyl” - and then I didn’t reply for like, a week and a half, but - here we go.

So. A role reversal AU where Danny is the CEO of Rand Enterprises and Ward is the Iron Fist.

So maybe in this universe, it wasn’t Madame Gao who approached Harold with an offer to save him. Maybe it was Harold, desperately searching for any way to prolong his own life, who hears whispers about shadows who don’t die, that there’s an organization, and Harold doesn’t even hesitate to offer them a deal in exchange for immortality. It’s nothing to Harold to dip his company into criminal enterprises, after all. He even suggests a solution to the possibility of his straight-laced business partner hindering their business - a plane crash related solution.

But the Hand likes to believe they control everything, and in this universe, it was not their idea to approach Harold Meachum and acquire Rand as a resource. The audacity! This man thinks he can come and use them, an outsider, using their substance, and doesn’t even have the honor to offer a true sacrifice in return, only that which he wouldn’t mind giving up and which he may even be planning on doing with his company and his business partner anyway?

So the Hand says, interesting proposition, meet us in one of our upcoming base locations where we may be able to discuss terms and your supplying the building for our next facility there, and then just as Harold so eagerly suggested a plane crash for his business partner, he finds his own travel to Anzou cut short.

A plane crash may be too showy for the Hand’s usual tastes, but Madame Gao does appreciate the poetic-ism of it.

In another world, Wendall took Heather and Danny with him on his trip to investigate the Anzou facility. In this world, Harold took Ward, for another “lesson” on “being an effective business man”.

Did he bring Joy as well? Spin it as some family vacation time in China after daddy’s business meeting is through? Intend to have Ward watch her while he conducted the more unsavory parts of his business?

If Joy and Ward are both on the plane:

-A: Joy, like Heather, dies in the plane crash, leaving Ward as sole survivor. This would absolutely devastate Ward, and not really work, I think - maybe it would be convenient to create a whole “fueled solely by revenge and with nothing left to lose, Ward channels all his energy and stubbornness and drive into destroying the Hand who took his baby sister” plot line, but… that’s like, Darkest Timeline content, and it makes me sad to think about, and also Ward is at his core more of a “protector of those he loves” guy than a “dark and vengeful” guy, so.

-B: Both children survive the crash. Their father does not. Joy is devastated, and ten years old, and Ward’s first priority is to prevent his little sister from freezing to death on a snowy mountain top in the fucking Himalayas. So how does this go? Ward and Joy both grow up in K'un Lun. Joy wants to go home to Danny and Heather and Wendall and their company, so when the pass opens fifteen years later, she takes off, and Ward goes with her, because of course he does. 

Maybe in this world they’re closer, still brought together by living through their father’s death and by having to present a united front against the sharks in the water, even if those sharks are monks sneering at the foreigners this time instead of businessmen looking to tear down the children running a company, but without Ward isolating himself, going down a path of drug abuse and mysterious injuries. Without Joy going to college and law school and struggling to prove herself next to her “prodigy” big brother.

These Meachum siblings go back to New York and to a Danny Rand who lost both of his siblings and his uncle in one fell swoop, who was left alone but for his parents. Wendall and Heather, to their credit, are kind and loving parents who hug him and do their best to support their child through the entire family’s grief and talk to him about death and such, but they are still adults with jobs and responsibilities and a whole lot of workload dropped onto their plates in the fallout of the entire Meachum family’s tragic demises.

How does Danny fare, left all alone? He grieves. He’s lonely. He’s angry at the circumstances, at faulty planes, at the shoddy craftsmanship that must have gone into it because it’s easier to rail against that than the idea that sometimes these things just… happen. He’s even guiltily angry with the Meachums, for leaving him. But he’s also Danny Rand, who came out of tragedy and abuse a kung-fu master ball of hope and light.

So Danny makes the best of things. Maybe when he gets a little older, hits his teenager years, he starts going out. Gets really good at slipping away from his security guards - learns to be light on his feet. Goes to skate parks, marvels at some of the tricks the other kids can do, and starts learning a bit of parkour, just because it’s cool. Maybe he explores the city he only really saw before from penthouse balconies - makes friends with hole-in-the-wall restaurant owners and moving company workers and homeless dudes in the park. Maybe he visits Chinatown, Harlem, Hell’s Kitchen.

Maybe Danny ends up with connections all across the city, and in this universe, all those Rand Enterprises ads about being “for the family” and “there to support people” are a little more true than in another universe where the Hand was pulling Harold’s was pulling Ward’s strings. Wendall and Heather and business school teach Danny not to just give away all their products at cost when he takes over after Wendall either decides to retire early or just steps down into a lower position as part of a planned, gradual transition for the company, but maybe Danny helps set up programs to help get their product to disadvantaged groups without immediately inviting the board to oust him. 

Maybe Rand is heavily involved in philanthropy. Maybe a certain portion of those funds go to research on aircraft safety, and to families of plane crash victims. Maybe Danny still always separates out brown m&ms.

And then, one day, two adults show up claiming to be the long dead Joy and Ward Meachum, with a fantastical tale about surviving the plane crash and being raised in a monastery, and coming back now to reconnect with their old friend. They do not say that the monastery was part of a village that only connects to the rest of the world every fifteen years, or that the people there are all part of a cult dedicated to fighting a shadow organization of undead ninja criminals, or that, by the way, Ward punched a dragon in the heart and his fist glows now, because they are not idiots, but it still seems a little too good to be true. Danny wants to believe, but his parents caution him, and Danny’s fingerprint in an old ceramic gift won’t necessarily help ID Joy and Ward Meachum. Still, let’s say the Rands are a lot more willing to civilly work to gain proof one way or the other, and Joy and Ward don’t take offense to the need for verification, and somehow they figure it out and commence awkwardly trying to reconnect now that they’re all adults with different life experiences and nothing turned out how they’d expected it would as children.

And maybe the Meachum siblings get wind of the Hand in New York, or the Hand gets wind of the Iron Fist in New York, and they kind of try to keep Danny out of it but HA like that was ever going to work; they finish fending off a group of attackers in their new penthouse living room and once the ninjas disappear through the top-of-a-skyscraper-window they turn to find Danny standing in the doorway with an army’s worth of Chinese take-out in his arms and his mouth gaping.

They try to play it off. Danny points out that he literally just saw them fighting off fucking ninjas who left through the penthouse window and also Ward’s hand was GLOWING. They hesitantly explain, already formulating a backup plan to insist ‘no officer, Danny was super drunk last night, really,’ in case he calls the mental hospital on them. Danny, to their astonishment, listens seriously to their story, nods, and announces that there are some people he thinks they should meet.

CUE DEFENDERS. How does Danny know them in this AU? Probably through Claire, let’s be honest. He probably keeps bringing random bystanders he finds in trouble on the streets to the hospital and paying all their medical bills, managed to make friends with half the nurses in the city, and was super concerned when one of the hospitals was attacked by ninjas and one of his nurse friends died and another abruptly quit and all the officials were being very hush-hush about it, but Danny has connections with the part of the city that people like to ignore, and there were witnesses that night in the homeless and the street kids and the struggling immigrants working night shift across the street, and he tracks down nurse Claire in Harlem to make sure she’s alright (and to gush about her mother’s cooking, wow, Claire, I didn’t know your family owned a restaurant, that’s so cool!)

…and maybe a few days in to the whole “wow some people claiming to be my childhood friends back from the dead have appeared” business he goes to visit his girlfriend at her struggling dojo that she refuses to let him help with and finds! Claire! learning martial arts! Cool!!

And some other shenanigans, idk, how do timelines work, somehow Danny’s protagonist luck and sunshine power means he manages to meet all the other Defenders at least once somewhere in-between starting to sneak out when he’s fifteen and getting himself adopted by the entire city by the time he’s twenty-five, and then all this Meachum-vs-the-Hand stuff is happening and the city’s favorite billionaire is in the thick of it, and lol guess what Danny your girlfriend has secretly been a member of the Hand this entire time, yeah she didn’t have the “Danny hates the Hand” thing as a reason to hesitate on telling him this time but also their relationship was moving a lot slower when he wasn’t hiding in her dojo from hitmen, so forgive her if she hadn’t quite gotten to the family conversation yet -

- but that’s all part of a lovely universe where K'un Lun makes Ward and Joy more of a unit, and Danny was forced to make other friends with a whole city to choose from rather than just an abusive monastery cult and Davos. Let’s rewind.

Fifteen-year-old Ward is on the plane with Harold. Ten-year-old Joy is at home, staying with the Rands for the duration of Daddy’s boring business trip.

The plane goes down.

Ward finds the pilots with black creeping up their veins. He finds Dad, dead in the snow. He’s at a loss, and a little sad, but also, guiltily, relieved.

He’s free.

He’s also stranded on a snowy mountaintop and likely to freeze to death, cold and alone and without ever seeing Joy again.

Ward is stubborn beyond belief. He has an iron core of contrary asshole-ness that got him through 30 years of abuse. He never gives up without a fight. He never gives up, period.

He picks a direction, and starts walking.

There are monks. Maybe he didn’t find his own salvation. Maybe the monks saw the crash and came to investigate, and found a teenager trudging through the snow. But he wasn’t collapsed in the ice. He stubbornly insists that he might have made it on his own, that they didn’t rescue him. He’s not helpless. He’s not.

This one has fight, the monks murmur to each other. There is fire in his spirit.

They take him back to the village, where there is warmth, and food, and dry clothing, and a tree that smells like brown sugar. Ward wants a phone, so he can call the Rands. Explain what happened. Talk to Joy.

We don’t have phones here.

Fair enough, it is a monastery on top of a mountain in the Himalayas. Ward doesn’t know why anyone would want to live in a monastery on top of a mountain in the Himalayas, but he doesn’t really care. There must be a way they get down the mountain, for supplies and stuff. There must be a way people get up the mountain, to visit the monastery. Ward wants to go home.

The pass is closed. K'un Lun sits on another plane of existence. The pass only opens once every fifteen years, and then it is guarded by the Iron Fist, to protect us from the Hand. You can not leave.

Ward has managed to walk himself right into the clutches of a new enemy. These people intend to imprison him.

Ward has never been a planner, but he has tenacity in spades. Over the next month he makes 21 escape attempts.

“There’s no point,” says one of the bratty monk children that’s taken to following him around. Ward knows this one is the child of the head monk here. His father taught him to look out for political details like that. He doesn’t know the kid’s name, and he doesn’t care. David or something. (His father was always disappointed in Ward for failing those lessons too.)

Ward ignores him. He takes off into the snowy wind - walks and walks and nearly freezes in the cold and when he finally spots lights in the distance and makes his way to salvation, it’s just fucking K'un Lun again.

He doesn’t give up. He doesn’t. But. It might be smart to recuperate. Conserve his resources. Break into the monks’ plum wine barrels. Serves them right if their captives steal their stupid wine. Stupid monks.

Some asshole makes a remark about his foreigner status. Ward swings a punch at them. They take him down in two seconds, and laugh about it. They sneer at him, mock him.

He’ll show them.

Ward trains in their stupid kung-fu cult school. The teachers are harsher on him than all of their students, he can tell. They’re trying to break him. Jokes on them, Ward has survived Harold Meachum for fifteen years. In another life, he makes it for thirty, kills the bastard, and thrives. This is nothing.

The harder they try to break him, the stronger the steel in Ward’s spine holds him up. Fuck them, and their fucking pass, and their kung-fu cult, and their pretty little prison. Ward claws his way to the top on pure spite.

He becomes the Iron Fist.

The monks have grown complacent, after fifteen years. They send him outside, into the pass, alone and away from the village even as he’s expected to guard it. The Hand could travel between the outside world and K'un Lun. Anyone could.

Idiots.

A bird flies overhead, and Ward feels triumph.

He’s finally going back to New York.

In New York, at Rand Enterprises, there are Danny and Joy. After the tragic death of her remaining family, Joy is adopted by the Rands. She keeps her last name. She acknowledges Heather and Wendall as her parents, but still calls them by their first names. They all go to visit Harold’s and Ward’s graves every year, on the anniversary, and also on their birthdays, on Father’s Day, sometimes just when they’re passing by or having a bad day, or have life milestone news to share, like when Joy gets into law school, or when Danny is thinking he might want to let Joy and his parents handle the business and become a nurse. 

Both times Joy and Danny get older than Ward ever got to be, they hole up in one of their rooms together and go through 3 bottles of wine, and their parents don’t ground them in the morning. Danny visits Joy on campus, and she rolls her eyes but grins as she introduces him to her friends. Joy holds Danny’s hand while he comes out to his parents as bi. Danny and Joy put all the brown m&ms in a dish in front of an empty seat, for Ward, even though he was never a part of that game with them. When they play monopoly, no one ever uses “Ward’s piece”. In this universe, Joy and Danny are the close siblings - not codependent, like Joy and Ward were, but best friends, in a way that Joy and Ward weren’t.

Joy did not have to fight tooth and claw to prove to herself that she could live up to her father’s legacy or her brother’s reputation. She becomes a cutthroat business woman with a strategic mind, but she also knows how to put away the shark teeth in her personal life. Danny grows up on neither the hope of seeing the rest of his family again nor with the weight of having to start over and make new friends. He, Joy, and Ward were isolated kids, and he and Joy stay fairly isolated once Ward is gone, since they still have each other.

Danny has a sunshine nature, and he still learns the names and faces of all the Rand employees. He still chats cheerfully with all the delivery people and waiters and checkout clerks that cross his path. But - he’s not as lonely, here. He’s more content in his upper-class world, schmoozing at the charity galas even if he’d much rather be camped at the refreshment table, and he talks to the catering staff just as much as the bigwigs he’s supposed to be networking with. He puts on his tuxedo and accompanies Joy to orchestral concerts, and he is absolutely the big gun his family breaks out when they need to show a client someone earnest and hopeful and who truly believes in the good of their company.

When Ward comes back, he may lose his temper on the security team at Rand. Just a little. He’s come so far, and he’s waited so long, and he’s SO CLOSE to seeing his baby sister again, and these idiots think they can stop him?

So maybe he breaks past them. It’s not the smartest move, but. Dad always said Ward didn’t think things through. And Joy is right there, only a few floors away. He won’t be stopped now.

He busts into her office. Joy threatens to call security. Danny rushes in, and they stand side-by-side, a united front, examining this stranger claiming to be their dead brother.

Ward’s goal, all these years, has mostly been about getting back to Joy. But he can’t deny that when he thought about her, sometimes he’d think about Danny, too. It was unavoidable - they share so many memories, after all. It’s always been Joy-and-Danny, and big-brother-Ward, their whole lives. Joy-and-Danny-and-babysitter-Ward. Joy-and-Danny playing make believe and Ward, being an asshole.

So Ward stands frozen in the doorway, and just as he’d exclaimed “Joy!” when he burst in, he now breathes “Danny?”

And Danny and Joy have always been the more hopeful of the three siblings, the two who want to believe, who can look at a package of m&ms and think ’it’s a dream come true.’

They look at the way the stranger hasn’t made any move to hurt them, and the way he looks like Ward, and the way he can’t keep his eyes off of Joy, but not in a creepy way like so many businessmen they’ve had to deal with: in a way that seems so relieved and hopeful - and they run a DNA test. Joy is right there, after all, and there’s no question about her identity. They’re literally standing in their pharmaceutical company. They pop down to one of the labs and Danny asks Eva if she could do him a favor, pretty please with a cherry on top, and Eva laughs and says “you got it, Mr. Rand,” and Danny whines “Eva, I keep telling you, it’s Danny,” and Eva grins and says “whatever you say, Mr. Rand,” and basically Ward is Ward and they’re in for some complications what with all the telling Wendall and Heather they have to do and the reviving Ward legally they have to do, and the getting to know him again after fifteen years of thinking he was dead, and Joy definitely snaps at some point down the line and screams at Ward and cries and hits his chest going “you left, you left, you left,” and Danny had gotten used to telling Ward’s ghost all his woes and relying on an idealized version of him and is now suddenly remembering with trepidation what an asshole Ward actually was, and. it’s gonna be a rough time. It’s gonna be a rough time, but they’ll get through it, because they all refuse not to.

….And maybe we still have to deal with the part where Ward is the Iron Fist, and the Hand are in New York, and maybe Ward doesn’t actually give a flying fuck about stopping the Hand or anything that fucking monk cult kept going on about, but the Hand sure does care about manipulating the Iron Fist into doing its bidding. And Ward may not care about K'un Lun, but like HELL is he going to sit back and twiddle his thumbs when those assholes inevitably threaten his family.

“You will not touch them,” Ward seethes, and suddenly his fist is glowing and he’s beating the assailants up, and his fist is glowing and is that a tattoo, and Ward’s FIST IS GLOWING.

“What the fuck, Ward.”

“Right,” Ward says, pushing back his hair. “There’s something else I should tell you.”