[center][img]http://s29.postimg.org/6xz582dif/RTJDanny_copy.png[/img][/center]

[center][i]"Don't fret, little man, don't cry,
They could never take the energy inside you were born with.
Knowing that, understand you could never be poor,
You already won the war, you were born rich."[/i] - EL-P[/center]

[b]Rand Industries
Manhattan[/b]

Danny Rand sat alone in his office with a pair of headphones over his ears and his feet planted atop his desk. It had been nearly two years since Danny had visited the Rand Industries building and eighteen months since he’d left for the Eighth City of Heaven. There alongside his fellow Immortal Weapons he’d been met with horrors unimaginable and been forced to fight for his life against all manner of malevolent being. Deep beneath the Earth in the bowels of the Eighth City it had felt like decades had passed but upon his escape he had learned he had been imprisoned for less than two years. His body a broken, beaten mess and his mind tortured he returned to New York to find Rand Industries in shambles. One long careful shower later he found himself in his dusty office playing the CEO again. 

In truth though Danny was a changed man. He wore the headphones to drown out the noise that echoed endlessly around his mind. The screams of the damned. The heavy bass line drowned them out and allowed Danny’s fractured mind some semblance of quiet. He kept his eyes firmly shut and swayed his head along with the music serenely until his peace was interrupted by a pair of hands yanking his headphones cleanly from his head.
 
“What the hell are you doing?”

Standing over Danny was Jeryn Hogarth in his crinkled brown suit. The stuffy, brown-haired man frowned at Danny from behind a pair of thick-rimmed glasses and Rand could tell from the look on Hogarth’s face that he was in trouble. All the same he tried his best to be disarming.

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“It looks like you’re doing nothing,” Hogarth muttered through clenched teeth as he threw the headphones down on the table in front of Danny. “But I know you couldn’t [i]possibly[/i] be doing nothing because you promised me you’d look over your speech to the shareholder’s meeting this afternoon. I know you couldn’t [i]possibly[/i] be doing nothing because I quit lecturing at Brown to help you salvage what little is left of Rand Industries after that idiot Brubaker nearly ran it into the ground. So tell me, am I wrong? Because I really, really hope I’m wrong, Danny.”

Danny searched for an excuse and found himself stammering before settling on the truth. “I… I haven’t had a minute to myself since I got back, Jeryn.”

Hogarth pushed Danny’s feet from atop the desk and they landed on the ground with a thud. Rand winced as he felt a wave of pain pass through them. The beatings he’d taken in the Eighth City were still taking their toll on him. Jeryn seemed none the wiser as he perched on Danny’s desk.

“Yeah, well maybe you’ll think about that next time you decide to take an eighteen-month sojourn to some magical city in the clouds without telling anyone.”

Again Danny searched for the right words over the sound of the tinny bass coming from his discarded headphones. 

“I explained that.”

Jeryn’s scornful look softened and he sighed sympathetically at Danny and pushed his glasses further up his nose.

“Look, I don’t know what happened whilst you were away and you [i]certainly[/i] don’t seem like you want to talk about it but I need your mind here with me. Do you understand me?”

The television screen on the wall behind Jeryn’s head caught Danny’s eye and he tuned Hogarth out for a moment as he tried to make out what was happening. There was footage of a man by the name of Thomas Drayton on screen followed by images of a burning car somewhere in Harlem. Danny reached for the remote on the table and moved to turn the television up before Hogarth snapped in his direction.

“Are you listening to me?”

Danny gestured towards the television screen with concern. “What’s going on?”

Jeryn snatched the remote control from Danny’s hand and turned the television off with a frown.

“Clearly you don’t understand the seriousness of the position we are in. The shareholders are out for your blood, kid. They’ve been making moves behind our back trying to get the board to force you out. They blame that mess with Brubaker on you and to be frank with you I can’t say that I blame them. We’re one bad month, one bad fortnight even, away from being bought out.”

The look of concern on Danny’s face passed as Jeryn spoke and the unfairness of having the company his father had built up from nothing taken away from him set in. Danny had walked in his father’s footsteps in many ways. Had Wendell Rand not died on that mountainside [i]he[/i] would have been the Iron Fist and Danny Rand would have been anything else. He had seen one of his father’s dreams fulfilled. He’d be damned if he’d see the one his father fulfilled himself erased from history.

“They can’t do that.”

“Oh, they can,” Jeryn said as he rooted around in his jacket. “They can and they will unless you get your head in the game and show them that we have things under control. You need to show them that your name is on the outside of that building for a reason.”

From inside he produced a piece of paper that he threw into Danny’s lap. Rand lifted it to eyesight and skimmed the paper’s contents. It was a leaked memo from one of Rand Industries minority owners discussing making a “change” at the top table. How Jeryn had got his hands on it was beyond Danny but he knew it was the real deal. Once he was done reading it he set it down and a steely look crossed the young man’s face.

“Alright, alright, show me the goddamn speech.”

Jeryn smiled contentedly and pulled out a pen and a copy of Danny’s speech.

“That’s more like it.”