He actually finds it after Danny comes back. Well, technically, after Danny comes, and then leaves, skipping off with Colleen on a road trip of responsibility avoidance. Trust Danny to get out of work by any means possible.
It's in a box of things from the townhouse.
With Joy gone, and Dad, and Danny, Ward has no interest in hanging onto the place. He wants it gone, with all its associated baggage, as if he could unload every part of his past as easily as giving the townhouse keys to a real estate agent.
He originally meant to sell it all-inclusive—furniture, photos, keepsakes, the whole enchilada. But then he gets to thinking that there might be something that will come back to bite him in the ass someday. God knows what is in there; there could be anything from listening devices to Dad and Wendell's old patent paperwork from the early days of Rand.
In reality, there's not much worth keeping. They've never been a sentimental family, and Joy was always ruthless about purging unnecessary junk. Actually, he's surprised that she kept that stupid, ugly, all-important bowl of Danny's, come to think of it.
But in the bottom of a box of old papers that are mostly destined for the shredder, he finds the notebook.
It would be obviously Danny's even if it didn't have Danny's name written on it in the clumsy, careful printing of a child. It's plastered in stickers of Pokemon and Dragonball Z and dogs and dinosaurs and rainbows, and it's rumpled like it got wet and dried out a few times. A large blotch of some kind of old stain (grape juice, Coke, who knows) discolors the corner.
There's some kind of pressure in Ward's chest that is a little bit like grief, although it can't be grief because Danny isn't dead, he knows that now. But it's a strange feeling, holding a piece of their childhoods like this.
He flips open the first page. More stickers, all over the inside of the cover and most of the first page. On the part not completely papered in stickers, there is the same careful printing: PROPERY OF DANNY RAND. KEEP OUT WARD.
Ward's name is underlined a bunch of times and punctuated with an exclamation point that has a fucking flower for the dot.
He laughs; he can't help it. "You were such a weird kid," he mutters. Suppressing a bizarre urge to correct the spelling of property, he turns the page.
He's not sure exactly what this is, but it soon becomes clear that it's some sort of weird mix of scrapbook and schoolwork and diary and God only knows what else, a snapshot of Danny's ten-year-old ADHD brain on school-lined writing paper. There are leaves glued into it, approximately fifty billion stickers, pages of cursive writing practice, pasted pictures from magazines, unfinished and badly spelled limericks ("My best frend is Joy and she's neet/We are going to play in the street"), a list of all the birds he saw that day, another list titled MY FAVRIT NAMES FOR A DOG (Ward and Joy's names are both on the list, which Ward decides to take as the compliment it's probably meant to be), a lot of enthusiastic and terrible drawings in felt marker and crayon ...
It's strangely fun to look at. Ward doesn't feel nostalgic about his childhood, or at least he never thought he did, but sometimes nostalgia will catch him under the ribs at the weirdest times anyway, and this is one of those times.
It's also unbelievably Danny. It's like looking straight into Danny's mind, sunny and cheerful and incapable of keeping a coherent thought in his head for five minutes in a row.
In fact, it's a little too much that way. He's not even a quarter of the way into the notebook before he closes it.
It's not that he thinks Danny would mind; Danny doesn't have a single filter, and he would probably give Ward his cheerful and enthusiastic permission to look through it as much as he wants.
But ... it seems rude anyway. Like an invasion of privacy.
He puts it carefully in the small pile of things to keep, to give it back to Danny the next time he sees him. Maybe they could look through it together.
Iron Fist, post-season-one, Ward
It's in a box of things from the townhouse.
With Joy gone, and Dad, and Danny, Ward has no interest in hanging onto the place. He wants it gone, with all its associated baggage, as if he could unload every part of his past as easily as giving the townhouse keys to a real estate agent.
He originally meant to sell it all-inclusive—furniture, photos, keepsakes, the whole enchilada. But then he gets to thinking that there might be something that will come back to bite him in the ass someday. God knows what is in there; there could be anything from listening devices to Dad and Wendell's old patent paperwork from the early days of Rand.
In reality, there's not much worth keeping. They've never been a sentimental family, and Joy was always ruthless about purging unnecessary junk. Actually, he's surprised that she kept that stupid, ugly, all-important bowl of Danny's, come to think of it.
But in the bottom of a box of old papers that are mostly destined for the shredder, he finds the notebook.
It would be obviously Danny's even if it didn't have Danny's name written on it in the clumsy, careful printing of a child. It's plastered in stickers of Pokemon and Dragonball Z and dogs and dinosaurs and rainbows, and it's rumpled like it got wet and dried out a few times. A large blotch of some kind of old stain (grape juice, Coke, who knows) discolors the corner.
There's some kind of pressure in Ward's chest that is a little bit like grief, although it can't be grief because Danny isn't dead, he knows that now. But it's a strange feeling, holding a piece of their childhoods like this.
He flips open the first page. More stickers, all over the inside of the cover and most of the first page. On the part not completely papered in stickers, there is the same careful printing: PROPERY OF DANNY RAND. KEEP OUT WARD.
Ward's name is underlined a bunch of times and punctuated with an exclamation point that has a fucking flower for the dot.
He laughs; he can't help it. "You were such a weird kid," he mutters. Suppressing a bizarre urge to correct the spelling of property, he turns the page.
He's not sure exactly what this is, but it soon becomes clear that it's some sort of weird mix of scrapbook and schoolwork and diary and God only knows what else, a snapshot of Danny's ten-year-old ADHD brain on school-lined writing paper. There are leaves glued into it, approximately fifty billion stickers, pages of cursive writing practice, pasted pictures from magazines, unfinished and badly spelled limericks ("My best frend is Joy and she's neet/We are going to play in the street"), a list of all the birds he saw that day, another list titled MY FAVRIT NAMES FOR A DOG (Ward and Joy's names are both on the list, which Ward decides to take as the compliment it's probably meant to be), a lot of enthusiastic and terrible drawings in felt marker and crayon ...
It's strangely fun to look at. Ward doesn't feel nostalgic about his childhood, or at least he never thought he did, but sometimes nostalgia will catch him under the ribs at the weirdest times anyway, and this is one of those times.
It's also unbelievably Danny. It's like looking straight into Danny's mind, sunny and cheerful and incapable of keeping a coherent thought in his head for five minutes in a row.
In fact, it's a little too much that way. He's not even a quarter of the way into the notebook before he closes it.
It's not that he thinks Danny would mind; Danny doesn't have a single filter, and he would probably give Ward his cheerful and enthusiastic permission to look through it as much as he wants.
But ... it seems rude anyway. Like an invasion of privacy.
He puts it carefully in the small pile of things to keep, to give it back to Danny the next time he sees him. Maybe they could look through it together.