sixthiterationlogs | 003 ⻰ EYE OF THE TIGER [OPEN]

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003 ⻰ EYE OF THE TIGER [OPEN]

WHO: Danny Rand

theimmortalweapon
WHERE: Between Inn & House 48 + @ House 48
WHEN: First Half of October
OPEN TO: EVERYONE
WARNINGS: N/A

DOJO; HOUSE 54 ⻰ Early Oct

Rose and Danny had spent a few weeks looking at all of the available houses before finding one that they both approved of; then they had to get Elena's approval. This led them to House 54. It had to be cleaned but that didn't take that long. Danny called in a few favors and he had the help of his two beautiful housemates. It was nice to live with people again, even if the Elena-Rose tag team was intimidating a times.

With the house mostly cleaned, Danny poured all of his remaining energy into getting the first floor set up as a Dojo. The kitchen would remain untouched and usable. The dining room connected to that will be left mostly untouched; with the couch from the family room pushed against the far wall to be used as a make-shift infirmary for anyone who manages to injure themselves. Danny didn't think it was going to happen but he figured it would appease anyone who was a doctor, i.e. Claire, to know that some precautions had been taken. The last two large rooms would be cleared; one room was to be used for sparring, meditation and Danny's lessons while the other room was to be set up with punching bags and practice dummies.

It's a very large undertaking and that didn't even include the obstacle course Rose wanted to put outside or the targets Danny wanted to set up so he, and anyone else, could learn archery. There was a lot to do but at least they had all the time in the world.

Danny could be found at different stages of his projects throughout the month: attempting to use the cushion from his bed to pad the sparring room floor, cleaning (which was a task that was never truly complete), staring at the area around the house to figure out how they were going to set things up outside, grumbling about wanting his I-pod back, swinging sticks to see if he can use them as practice swords, making an open & closed sign for the front door and a handful of other tasks where it was impossible to tell what Danny was trying to do.

A few days into the project, Danny sent out a text for help and would be on the lookout for anyone who was eager to lend a hand or interested in training.

TRICK OR TREAT; LIAR LIAR ⻰ Oct 12th

Danny was cutting a path from the inn to his house when he stumbled across a sizable green melon. It was perfectly grown and he couldn't pass up the chance for something delicious and fresh. Honey dew was common enough, or maybe a seed had dropped while people were working at the garden that was near the inn?

It made perfect sense for it to be there.

Except that it didn't.

The moment that Danny touched the melon it vanished in a puff of white smoke. He coughed and waved the offending air away before looking down at the empty ground. "What?" A block of ice settled in the pit of his stomach chilling him through. "This is awesome." He paused again, looking confused. It absolutely wasn't awesome, it was awful. Danny had no idea what he was saying.

"I'm perfectly fine. " His hand briefly pulled over his mouth. "Fuck." He swore loudly and kicked at the ground. He had no idea what was going on and for the next hour he was going to have a hard time communicating with people.

WILD CARD

[ooc: This is Danny's post for all of October so if you want anything for this month please let me know! I am totally doing the bingo with him so we can always select something fun from that too. Danny is Hunter Green Scrubs; which is very fitting. Hit me up though!

mizuyoko I am happy to write any starters too.

Equipment in the Dojo will be sparse and non-existent for a while, it will be reasonable and based on threads Danny has with people or handwaved talking. The list of all equipment will be on his Sixth Iteration information post HERE and it is important to note that he will not be making everything he thinks he's going to make because he doesn't know how to make most of these things. Please check the list if you'd like to write a thread in the Dojo, assume wooden floors and basic drywall unless noted.]

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It was just candy. It was also a potent reminder of Sam's Otherness. So, in a sense, it was a very creative and low-cost bit of torture. Again, Sam had to confront the fact that the social sciences might be more than just hokum.

But that could wait until she was lying awake in bed, staring at the cracks in her ceiling.

For the time being, she walked over to the counter and hopped up, sitting beside Danny, with one leg under her, the other dangling over the floor. The man was like a furnace and she could feel heat radiating off of his body. The fact that he was still shirtless didn't really help matters.

"Don't mention it," she said. "Seriously, to anyone. I have reputation as a misanthropic hermit to maintain."

Danny snorted and had to work to keep the candy in his mouth. "I don't think I'll be able to do anything about that reputation. Even if I told people that you were giving out candy, do you think anyone would believe me?" His eyebrow rose as he watched her take a seat next to him.

His legs remained cross beneath him while his jaw chewed at the candy.

The weird thing about taffy was that it made your mouth watery and took far too much energy to chew. Danny needed a moment to actually finish chewing and swallow the candy.

After not eating sweets for so long, it was kind of intense.

"Mmm, I think if you told people I was giving out candy, they'd probably just look at you and go...' She canted her head to one side, like a cat and dropped her voice a couple of octaves. "'Uh, Sam who?'"

Maybe not a few select individuals.

But Sam still considered herself a pretty large non-entity in this place.

Absently, she let her leg swing like a pendulum, looking out around the dojo. "This is really gonna be something once you get it up and running, Monkey Boy." There was admiration in her voice, mingled with the snark. "I think you're gonna help a lot of people."

A low chuckle rumbled through his chest as he leaned back and followed her gaze around the mostly open space. "Hopefully." This was all he really could do to help people. Fighting what what he knew and he was good at it.

"It'll help you too. You've already proved to be a stubborn student." Which was good.

She was also cute though Danny supposed he shouldn't be thinking about things like that.

"Thanks for your help. This is probably very boring."

She tossed her head back and laughed. Which was significantly easier to do without her fucking wig. If he thought she was stubborn now, just wait until they got back to training. He'd only had a little taste of what she was capable of.

Which wasn't to say she wanted to be difficult.

She just knew herself.

"Nah," she said. "I like hanging with you. For one thing, no one around here knows Star Wars." Which was incredibly important to her.

Sam glanced down at her hands. There was mold under her nails and dirt on her knuckles. And Danny was all shiny and sweaty. "We should probably wash up, though. Or else no one is going to want to be near either of us again."

"That's a shame. Star Wars were my top three favorite movies as a kid." He'd never seen the prequels because he hadn't been in New York when they were released. Danny honestly didn't even know they existed.

"Yeah. The shower works but the water is cold. Otherwise we'd have to walk to the inn or the springs." He grabbed a rag from the counter behind him and wiped it down his face and across his neck. He didn't bother with his chest.

"You have a preference. I do have towels here, somewhere. Rose and Elena were going to wash the sheets and towels I think." He didn't remember. They had been switching around the different cleaning chores to get the house up to snuff.

"Hot springs," Sam said, slipping down off the counter. "I share the Inn bathroom with a whole bunch of boys and they're all pretty gross." Although she was still working on Tony to install that shower. And they'd had a few potential ideas about heating the water. Her personal favorite was the H.H. Holmes-style kiln.

Minus all the murder.

Anyway, she was kind of walking on eggshells around Rose. Being a vampire had apparently left her in one of Rose's weird places. And Sam knew better than to poke and prod at someone's weird place.

Metaphorically speaking, anyway.

She clapped her hands behind her back, taking a few steps backward to the door. "You wanna join me, Monkey?"

Danny snorted and pushed himself to his feet. "Yeah, yeah. Let me grab a change of clothes." He jogged past her and disappeared upstairs before returning with a bundle of clothes that was tied to a thin piece of string. He tossed Sam a small bar of soap and then walked passed her out of the house.

"Figure you'd want this."

Girls like soap right? Danny didn't have a lot of soap but he had gotten that soap at that weird party a month or so ago and he hadn't used it. He figured that Sam might want to use it. It was shaped like a Popsicle and smelled sweet. "Just remember that I'm a gross boy too." Just so they're perfectly clear on that.

Sam caught the soap backhanded and gave Danny a crooked smile. "Is this your way of saying that I smell? Because I got news for you on that front..."

Of course, vampires didn't sweat.

She trotted along after him, smiling slightly at the comment. He wasn't a gross boy. Well. Yes, he was a gross boy. But also a gorgeous one.

So she'd let it slide.

Danny snorted. "It's my way of saying that I don't want to smell like something sweet." He never took the time to stop and smell Sam... that'd be weird, right?

He cleared his throat as he guided them towards the hot springs.

"I don't know if I told you this but I used to walk five miles every morning to fetch water for my bath. It was part of our training back at the monastery." He sometimes walked to the hot springs just to feel the familiar routine of walking to get a bath.

She walked along beside him, her thumbs hooked through her back beltloops. "See, now, I don't know if you're saying that because it's true or if you're trying to do one of those things that old people do. You know? 'When I was your hate, I had to walk thirteen miles to and from school, barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways.'"

Honestly, with Danny, was a little more inclined to believing him. Which was a funny thing, after all of her conditioning to never believe anyone.

Sam knocked her shoulder against his.

Danny turned to look at her as their shoulders bumped gently together. His expression was neutral but thoughtful, as if something was stewing at the back of his thoughts.

"Maybe both." It was a memory that he cherished, despite the fact that it was tinted with a certain level of discomfort.

"Things were simpler then." He had a goal and it had felt as if his life was set on a narrow path.

Sam shook her head. "Life is never simple. Believe me, having died, I can pretty much speak from the ultimate experience." She used to think her life was simple. Until she found out what was actually woven into the tapestry of her existence.

But she didn't want to get into it.

"Just think of it in terms of statistics. If there were around 750 trillion humans on the planet, the statistical probability existence of your genetic twin would be one in 1,000,000,000,000. Your genes are such an improbable combination, but they still managed to come together somehow."

Her eyes lit up a little, talking about genetics. At least there was something in this world she still understood. Or, in this multiverse, rather.

"And if you managed to overcome those statistics to be the person you are now, there's gotta be some complicated factors at play."

Edited 2018-10-26 15:55 (UTC)

Danny listens politely but there are definitely crickets chirping in the back of his head as Sam begins to dork out about Genetics. It wasn't really something he knew a lot about but he liked the way she lit up, so he wasn't going to interrupt her.

"Like what?"

He's really not following but still curious.

"I don't know how to put it, exactly," she admitted, her shoulders drawing in a little bit. "I mean, without it sounding like 'fate' or some shit. It's just that our very lives begin with an act of defying the odds. We don't stop at birth. Everything we do just complicates it. Every decision. Every choice."

She realized she was beginning to sound just a little too...idealistic. And that wasn't her brand at all.

So she shrugged. "You know what they say. A butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world can cause a hurricane on the other. If something as small as that can impact our lives, think about bigger things."

Mercifully, they reached the water, which gave Sam an excuse to shut up for a second, as she shucked off her scrub bottoms.

Danny was beginning to understand what she was talking about though he didn't entirely understand the context that she was putting it in. The last part, with a butterfly, made him smile down at her.

He almost didn't realize that they had made it to the hot springs.

He firmly looked away as she stripped and began to pull of his own pants. Danny was wearing underwear, so it was fine, at least that's what he's going to tell himself. "You know." He began as he stashed his clean clothes under a rock so that they didn't walk away. "If you think about it that way then there is no way to know what's going to happen next because too many things are happening."

Danny stepped over to the water and slowly wade inside, daring a glance back at Sam as the heat of the pool swirled around his waist and chased the ache from his bones.

"I'm not sure it would really be life if we knew everything that was gonna happen," she said. She followed him into the water. There was definitely something to be said for hot water. Not that she needed it for medicinal reasons. But the way it seeped into her skin. Well. It was stupid. But it made her feel...alive. She remembered sleep-warmed sheets and warm hugs. Mornings in the sun. Sex. Relics. Faded away from long-dead flesh.

For fuck's sake, she was getting maudlin.

Sam shook her head, trying to banish the depression back to the dark recesses of her mind, where it belonged. "We just learn to predict outcomes, based on the available data," she continued. "Or we don't bother trying and just...go with it."

Well. Some people just 'went with it.' Sam was decidedly not a go-with-the-flow person. Not any more.

She leaned over, lapping up some water onto her arms. "Mileage may vary..."

"That second one sounds like me." Danny took a seat at the edge of the pool and leaned his head back against the shore. He closed his eyes and let the warm currents of the water curl up his chest and relax his muscles.

He didn't feel ill or injured but he always felt better after taking a dip in the magical hot springs.

"I try and plan ahead or figure out what's going on but most of what I do is react to shit." There was a note of tension in his voice that faded as the water pierced his frustration.

"Every think that you think too much?"

There was really only one response to that. Sam swept her hand over the surface of the water and splashed Danny in the face. "Of course I think too much," she said, giving him a crooked smile. "It's usually the only thing I'm good at."

Well. That and making an ass of herself.

She was extraordinarily good at that shit.

"If you have a brilliant cure for thinking too much, I'm all ears, Monkey."

Danny snorted and curled forward as water shot up his nose. "The fuck." He rubbed at his nose and eyes and squinted at Sam as if she'd just started a war. "Relax Sam. We're in a hot springs for crying out loud."

He was going to get angry but then he looked at her and then he realized he was staring.

Her hair curled and clung to her jaw and neck as the water swirled around her frame. Danny felt his face warm and he hoped it looked like the hot water was just getting to his head.

"Just... relax." Danny had to work to keep his voice steady.

Relaxing wasn't much fun. And she was ready to make yet another joke. Something to the tune of how maybe she wanted to start a fight. Nah, nah, nah, nah. Nah, nah, nah. As P!nk put it.

But then Danny got all weird and quiet.

Sam wasn't good at reading body language, much less reading anything Danny-related, but she felt his gaze on her and instinctively raised a hand to the side of her face. And there it was. A bright, auburn curl had managed to escape from her kerchief. It was slick and coiled, like a wire that had sprung out of a dashboard.

Being in her underwear never fazed Sam.

But having her hair pop out like that felt...weird.

She cut her eyes over to the curl, gathering it up in her fingers. "Red," she said, almost apologetic. Why bother pretending? She looked up at Danny from beneath her lashes and offered him a vague smile. "Now you know my greatest secret."

Which was...totally a lie. But it felt like the right thing to say in the moment. The moment.

...was this a moment?

He can't help but act like a dolt. She's a pretty girl and he's... an idiot. Danny shifts uncomfortably in the water and the ripples of the hot springs echoed at an impossibly loud volume. He had to be imagining it. It wasn't any louder than it had been a few seconds before.

"Oh." He didn't understand what was so bad about having red hair or why she hid it. "It's very pretty." His voice was low and a little too thick. He coughed and brushed his hand over his face hoping the warm water might help him focus.

He shouldn't stare at her or leer like a creeper.

"Why do you hide it?"

Sam couldn't explain what she was feeling, exactly. Besides hopelessly confused. But she found herself drifting closer to Danny. Magnetic poles or something. She didn't even bother trying to analyze it.

"It's the real me," she said, shrugging slightly.

She didn't let people see the real her. For so, so many good reasons.

None of which mattered much here, she supposed. But still.

His brow furrowed together and for a moment, Danny forgot about the awkward rise of heat he felt or the careful distance he'd tried to keep between them. He couldn't afford to be distracted but it was so easy.

"Why do you hide it?"

She was beautiful and it didn't make sense for her to hide her true self. Then again, Danny didn't know the full extent of her world or what she'd been through.

"A lot of reasons," Sam said quietly. To protect the people she loved. And also to protect herself. Especially here. Here was definitely about protecting herself.

She stopped only a few inches away from him, looking at him differently from before. She was good at sizing up people. Measuring them. Examining them. It was all very clinical. But this was something else.

Sam was looking at him.

And she couldn't explain it. But she found her hand drift up to the kerchief. And she peeled it off. A thick, rope-like braid fell over her shoulder, accompanied by a tumble of messy, auburn curls that had fallen out of the braid.

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