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There was a large open field behind the farm where they were staying—technically, where they had paid the widow who ran the place to let them sleep in her hayshed for a couple of nights. They hadn't mentioned the possibility that there might be some heavy-duty muscle coming around looking for them. They'd argued about it beforehand, Danny insisting that they had no right to get other people involved in their problems, Ward snapping back that they were both exhausted and needed food and if he had to sleep under a tree for another night, he was going to walk right out of this jungle and back to New York.
("You don't even know which way the coast is, do you, Ward?"
"Of course I do," Ward shot back.
"Point to it."
At that point Ward threatened to walk off into the jungle until he found it, and Danny gave in.)
So: hayshed, and bowls of vegetables and rice they'd massively overpaid for—on purpose, at least on Danny's part; they had to do something to make up for possibly bringing danger to some innocent person's farm—and now he was out in the field in the clear gold light of dawn, practicing with the guns.
He still hadn't figured out exactly how they worked, but he had known the instant he touched them in a Jakarta dockside warehouse that they were significant. It might not be the answer he was looking for, the way back to the Iron Fist, but it was definitely closely connected to it. There was a pull to the guns, a hunger in them. When his hands closed over the guns' well-worn grips, it felt as if they were meant to be there, like some part of himself had clicked back into place. He had rebuffed Ward's every attempt to take them, or even one of them.
("I'm the gun guy, Danny. You're the kung fu guy."
"You already have a gun. These are my guns.")
Now, in the field, he drew first one gun and then the other, trying to get used to them. As much as he felt like the guns belonged with him, in a way he couldn't explain to Ward, actually holding them felt ... weird. Awkward. Ward wasn't wrong; Danny wasn't a gun guy. He never had been. He didn't like them, in general, and he'd never seen any reason to learn to use one once he was back in New York, even though there were people (Ward, Misty) who would have shown him if he'd asked.
Which made it all the weirder that he felt so drawn to these particular guns.
He stacked some rocks on top of a fence post, and tried pointing the guns at it. He wasn't planning to fire. Ward had said there was ammo in the guns, in the brief time he'd had to look at them before they ended up setting the warehouse on fire and running for their lives, but Danny had no idea what would happen if he pulled the trigger. He didn't even want to guess. The best-case scenario, he supposed, was that they'd make a lot of noise and maybe draw people to them. He didn't even want to think about what else might happen.
But it felt good, being out in the sun after a decent night's sleep, not exhausted and hunted and starving. He was hungry, but it was a normal morning kind of hunger. He could smell baking bread somewhere not too far away. Maybe the auntie who owned the farm would let them have some to take with them.
He drew the guns again and again, trying to get used to it. The old-fashioned gunbelts made him feel like some kind of gunslinger. He found himself smiling, starting to feel a little more relaxed and comfortable. All he needed now was a long cowboy coat instead of the denim jacket he was wearing. Actually ... why the heck not? He could totally get one, once they were back in town.
"You're going to shoot your foot off," Ward's dry voice said from behind him, and Danny nearly proved Ward's point by dropping both guns. Reflexes honed by years of training on entirely different weapons saved him; he managed to recover the fumble, and tried to look like he knew what he was doing as he holstered the guns. He completely failed to do it without having to look at both sides to locate the holsters relative to the muzzles of the guns.
"Uh-huh," Ward said.
He was leaning against a wooden fence, looking both out of place and out of his element in the white work shirt and slacks that he'd taken to wearing as a sort of compromise position between his usual suits and going entirely casual. It was a suit of sorts, but no tie or jacket, and he had the sleeves unbuttoned and rolled halfway up his arms. He hadn't shaved in a few days; he looked tired and scruffy. There was hay in his hair, and a bundle in his hand wrapped up in a piece of rough-spun cloth.
Danny smelled fresh bread. His stomach growled. Ward smiled slightly.
"Brought you breakfast." Ward unwrapped the bundle and held out a roll, dusted with spices. It was still warm to the touch when Danny took it. "The old lady is baking and gave me some of these. I think she thinks we're some kind of hoboes."
"I mean," Danny said, with a shrug. He bit into the bread. It was soft and warm and just as good as it smelled.
"But seriously," Ward said, his smile dropping away. "I know you took one look at those guns and decided to hoard them for some weird reason—"
"They're connected to the Iron Fist, Ward. I can feel it."
"—but if you're going to be running around with those, I think I need to run you through some elementary gun safety." He laid the rest of the bread in its towel on top of a post. "Can I look at one of those?"
Danny hesitated. It was pure instinct. He didn't want to give the guns up. And then he thought, What the heck. It was Ward. He trusted Ward with his life. Maybe there was something off about these things.
Ward rolled his eyes. "I'm not going to run off with your precious, Gollum. Jeez."
"I didn't think you were." Danny drew one of the guns and held it out. He only felt a slight twinge as Ward took it.
"Well, at least there's a safety," Ward muttered, examining it. He pointed it at the ground, cocked it, and then eased it off and snapped something that made one of the casings flick out. Danny jerked forward with a little noise. Ward caught it, the brass flashing in the sun; and Danny's hand flashed out, closed over Ward's wrist.
He felt Ward jerk, entire body seizing up, the way Ward reacted to a threat. Like he though the next thing was going to be Danny breaking his wrist.
They just looked at each other for a minute. And Danny let go, pulling back, embarrassed at the strength of his own reaction as much as he was startled at Ward's.
"Calm down," Ward said. He laughed a little, or tried to, but his movements were still a little too tense and jerky with adrenaline overreaction. "Your precious is fine."
"You can stop calling it that anytime." Danny found that his hand was flexing next to the grip of the other gun. What the hell were these things? There was no reason why he ought to react like that. And he'd scared Ward; he knew that he had, not on any conscious level, but some deep place where rational thought didn't enter into it.
Ward, in any case, wasn't paying much attention to him now. He held the casing up to the morning sun. "Huh," he muttered, and turned it around, holding it out between two fingers so Danny could get a look at it.
There were small patterns worked onto the brass casing, winding around and around. It looked like writing, so fine it was difficult to make out individual letters. It was hard to tell if it was painted on or burned into the brass.
"Can you read that?" Ward asked.
Danny squinted at it, and shook his head. "It's no script I know."
"But it's writing, isn't it?"
Danny nodded. "Looks a tiny bit like Newa to me."
"Which is."
"One of the scripts used in Nepal."
"Wow. Shocker."
"We're a long way from Nepal, Ward."
"Yeah, but it always comes back to the mountains in the end, doesn't it?"
Danny didn't answer. Ward nodded, after a moment. He snapped the safety back on, and handed the gun back to Danny. The ammo he put on top of the fence post with the bread.
"Hey—"
"It was chambered," Ward said. "I don't think you should run around with a round in the chamber, even with the safety on. It's too easy to accidentally shoot something you didn't mean to. Especially when you clearly have no idea what you're doing."
"I was practicing!"
"There's a lot more to shooting a gun than pulling it out of the holster." Ward, who had been leaning a hip on the fence, pushed off from it. He was wearing his gun in a clip holster on his belt. Since Jakarta, he'd always kept it on him. "Can we practice with this one? Because that one gives me the creeps."
Danny hesitated, then holstered the gun he was holding. He took the one that Ward handed to him instead. "This is lighter."
"Because it's not a hundred years old. Modern plastic. Bigger clip. Let me show you how to hold it." Ward grinned, a lopsided twist of his mouth. "It's the sort of thing you ought to be good at. Goes along with the whole Zen finding-your-center thing that's completely in your wheelhouse."
"Actually, Zen—"
"Danny, do not 'well, actually' me when I'm trying to show you something. Also—" Ward pushed the muzzle of the gun down, not gently, a short hard jerk. "Point that thing at the ground when you're not aiming it at something you want to kill."
Danny felt his muscles start to lock up in automatic resistance to being pushed around and made himself relax. It was Ward. And Ward was the expert here, the teacher.
"Okay, so mine's a Glock, and there's no safety like on yours," Ward said. His hands settled over Danny's, a little hesitant at first, but when Danny made no effort to toss him off, Ward tapped his thumb on a button behind the trigger. "Magazine release. Go on, push it."
Danny did. The entire rack of ammo slid out of the handle. Ward caught it.
"We'll do this with the gun empty. It won't hurt it to dry-fire it a few times. Clear the chamber by pulling the slide back—that's this top part—that lets you know there's no bullet in the chamber. When you pick up a strange gun, always do that first."
Danny found that he was watching Ward at least as much as what was happening with the gun. Ward's face was tight in profile, not just concentration, but something deeper and sharper-edged.
"You know a lot about this kind of thing. Do you mind if I ask—"
"Where I learned?" Ward said. There was a dry, cool weight to the words. "Take a guess, Danny. Who in my life do you think really wanted me to know how to use a gun? Worked out great for him in the end; I hope that's a life decision Harold regretted all the way down from the fiftieth floor of the Rand building."
"Ward—"
Ward handed him the ammo clip. "Put this back in, and do what I just showed you. Take the clip out, and clear the chamber."
Danny nodded, accepting the deflection, and emulated what Ward had done—a little clumsily, but Ward grinned slightly, in a way that didn't quite touch his eyes.
"I knew you'd get it on the first try," he murmured, and Danny thought he caught the ghost of other, harsher lessons in Ward's past. "It really is your kind of thing. It's all about practice and muscle memory."
"Muscle memory," Danny echoed. He raised the gun. Ward caught his hand, and this time Danny was prepared for it. Like being guided by your teacher in learning any new martial arts move. He just wasn't used to Ward being the teacher.
"Don't just go pointing it at things," Ward said. "Is that rock thing your target? Right. Stance first. Feet solid, knees a little bent ..."
"It really is like martial arts, isn't it?" Danny said, delighted.
Ward rolled his eyes, but he seemed to be relaxing a bit. He touched Danny lightly, a careful brush to the shoulder, and Danny had a strange sense of Ward—pulling punches, was the phrase that came to mind. Danny had learned enough of Harold, by the end, to guess that Ward's lessons had been nothing like this gentle.
It wasn't until Danny was looking down the gun toward the target that suddenly something clicked in him, not too different from the way it felt when he finally got a new form, the way he could feel it flowing through him.
"Squeeze the trigger," Ward said. "Don't pull." But Danny was already doing it; the gun clicked, hammer falling on an empty chamber. His hand held still, not jerking at all; he'd had far too many lessons that ended with a switching when he managed not to hold still through a new move.
"I can already tell you're going to be annoyingly good at this," Ward said, but he was grinning.
*
After the lesson, they sat on Danny's jacket in the field and ate the rest of the bread and some fruit Ward had brought along with it. Danny had taken off the gunbelts and they were in the grass next to him. He tried not to let his gaze keep drifting back in that direction. In a way, it felt good to have the damn things off. He didn't want to know what that spell winding around the brass casing was for. He didn't like the way it made him act. Didn't want to be defensive of the guns, not against Ward, of all people.
It was warm in the sun. Ward laughed easily, easier these days than ever before, and when Danny nudged his shoulder playfully in the middle of telling a story about stealing a goat with Davos, Ward didn't even flinch.
Muscle memory, Danny thought. It wasn't just about learning the things you wanted to learn. It was also things like tensing up when people touched you, because you were braced for it to hurt.
But you could change that, if you practiced.