When Peter wakes up on Sunday morning, he feels nice and refreshed, and ready to actually work on the damn project. Even with the incredibly shitty past few days he's had, there's no way in hell he's just going to leave MJ and Ned to pick up his slack on the project. He still has vivid memories of staying up till midnight in junior high to finish group projects, ones that his deadbeat partners hadn't contributed a single word to.
They decide to meet up at Ned's place this time, just so there's little to no chance of Tony Stark showing up and making Peter have another panic attack. All in all, the work is easy, if time-consuming. They decide to go with a fairly basic design, consisting of bubble wrap, straws, and plastic bags. It works pretty well, so they decide it'll do for class. There was some talk about using Peter's webs to construct something, but that idea was vetoed since 1) they dissolve after two hours, which is less helpful when constructing it beforehand, and 2) that might give away Peter's identity just the tiniest bit. Honestly, Peter's just happy to be spending time with his friends and doing normal teenager things. He loves being Spider-Man, but he has to admit that it doesn't give him a lot of chances to have the typical teen experience. Not that he regrets that, he thinks.
When he finally heads back home around five-thirty, he pulls out his phone and sees a few texts from Matt who is, once again, being forcibly held under house arrest by someone; this time it's Karen doing the babysitting. There's a series of messages complaining about being under surveillance. Then he says something about Karen being worse than the nuns at the orphanage which: what? Orphanage? Nuns? Peter's gonna have to start a damn notes document on his phone to keep up with all these strange, sad details of Matt's life. Or just ask him for a rundown of his life story like a normal person. Well, no, that's not really normal either. Maybe he just needs to have some non-superhero-centric conversations with Matt to learn more about him. He ignores these texts, having gotten used to Matt's angst over not leaving his house.
As Peter's reading through the series of texts that are complaining about being treated like he's going to jump out the window to beat up a mugger at any second, another message comes through with much more relevant, although slightly less entertaining, information.
'My friend can meet with you tomorrow night at 9 in Chinatown. Does that work for you?' the message reads.
Peter considers whether or not he's going to have any tests on Tuesday. The answer to that is no, so he's definitely going to be available to meet with Matt's mysterious friend. After he sends a text affirming that he can make the meeting, two more texts come through. The first one is an address that when copied and pasted into Google shows up as Chikara Dojo. The second one is a little bit more odd.
'Great. His name is Danny Rand and he's a little bit strange but he's a good guy. He's going to say some weird shit for sure though.'
Peter responds to that with 'thanks for the heads up' before shoving his phone back into his pocket and resuming the walk home.
May's in the kitchen, probably burning something horribly when Peter walks in. She's too distracted to do anything more than say a quick hello, before focusing all of her attention back on whatever is lightly smoking in the pan. Peter heads straight to his room, where he tosses his backpack down on the floor before sitting down in his desk chair. The name Danny Rand sounds uncomfortably familiar, and after a few minutes of spinning around in the chair Peter finally gives up on his brain and instead opens up the search engine on his computer, typing in Danny Rand.
The results for the most part just talk about his miraculous reappearance after 15 years of being missing after his plane crashed somewhere in the mountains of eastern Asia, but there are a few more articles deeper down the rabbit hole that talk about Danny causing trouble with the police. There's even a video, buried in the third page of Google, that looks like it might be security footage that shows Danny knocking the shit out of a couple of guards at Rand Enterprises, the corporation that he owns 51% of. Peter's pretty damn sure that Matt wants him to meet this guy to learn from his frankly incredible martial arts capabilities, and he's so completely on board with that. It's always been a dream of his to do one of those spinning kicks to the head that knocks a guy flat out- well, it's been his dream since he saw Daredevil do it a few weeks ago.
Peter's pretty much lost himself in daydreaming when he notices the smell of smoke in the apartment and goes back into the kitchen to see May frantically trying to put out the chicken that she's managed to catch on fire. He sighs and grabs the takeout menus from where they're lying on the countertop.
On paper, Danny Rand should be more like Tony than anyone else Peter knows, but in practice, he's a hell of a lot more comparable to a labrador puppy. Sure, the guy definitely has issues— as Matt so helpfully pointed out one time, nobody does what they do without having issues, but he seems to hide them pretty well under a veneer of cheerful attitude and childlike wonder about a world that isn't in the mountains of Tibet, or wherever he came from.
Peter learns this precisely when he shows up at Chikara Dojo right at nine the next evening, to find Danny sitting on the floor and eating Poptarts while blasting the Hamilton soundtrack at damn near full volume on an incredibly fancy looking speaker that doesn't match the rest of the dojo at all.
Danny bounces up to his feet with a bright grin when he sees Peter in the doorway. He turns down the music significantly and beckons Peter in with a gesture and a somehow even bigger smile than the one he was already rocking.
"Hi, I'm Peter," he introduces, holding out his hand for Danny to shake. Danny gives him a high five instead.
"Nice to meet you! I'm Danny, and that's Colleen," he replies, pointing over to where a woman who Peter hadn't noticed at first is sitting on the floor with a laptop in front of her.
She waves at Peter without looking up from the computer, more focused on it and the files spread around her in a circle.
"She's doing taxes, don't mind her," Danny explains.
"Not all of us have a team of accountants who exist solely to deal with our finances, Danny," she replies with a sigh.
"I told you I could hire you an accountant."
"And I told you I'd let that happen over my dead body."
"So," Peter interrupts, trying to drag Danny's attention away from Colleen, who looks increasingly ready to murder Danny if he doesn't shut up and let her do her finances, "how do you know Matt?"
"I'm the Immortal Iron Fist," is the cheerful response Peter receives.
Peter thinks he hears Colleen mutter, "Here we go again," under her breath, but it's so quiet that he can't be sure.
"What's that?"
"I'm the protector of K'un-Lun."
"Sorry," Peter replies. He has no idea what that is.
"Sworn enemy of the Hand?" Danny tries hopefully.
Peter just shakes his head.
"Matt didn't tell you?" Danny looks sad, then disappointed, then just sighs and looks up at the ceiling. "God, he's a good guy, but he's all punching, no history about where that punching came from. K'un-Lun is a mystical city that can only be accessed by a magic passageway that opens once every 15 years, give or take. It's where I did my training, but it's gone now, and I'd rather not talk about why that is. Through my training there I gained the power of the Iron Fist by fighting Shou Lao the Undying, a dragon. The Hand is the enemy of K'un-Lun, and whoever has the power of the Iron Fist is sworn to fight them. Matt was trained to be part of a… companion organization of sorts to K'un-Lun but chose not to join them. Instead, he uses the skills he learned to be Daredevil."
"And that's what you missed on Glee," Colleen deadpans from behind her computer, earning a snort from Peter.
Danny gives her a sad look because he doesn't understand the reference she just made, but Peter's still stuck on this scrawny, adorable guy having fought a dragon .
"Dragons are real?" Peter asks. "Also, um, what exactly is the Iron Fist?"
"Do you wanna see?" Danny asks excitedly, his sadness about Colleen's exclusionary reference immediately forgotten.
"Sure, I guess."
Danny closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, raising his hand in front of him in a fist.
Matt was right, this dude is weird.
Danny's hand starts glowing yellow, and he opens his eyes, looking to Peter expectantly for some sort of reaction.
"What the hell?"
"It's chi!" Danny explains unhelpfully. "I'm going to be showing you how to focus your chi today. I'm sure Matt's gonna want you to learn punching his way, and honestly, I want you to learn it his way too. He's an incredible fighter—the best I've ever seen in my life."
As it turns out, the way one learns to focus their chi is through a combination of sitting completely still and breathing a certain way for hours. It's incredibly boring, but Peter pushes through it even if he kinda would rather be doing taxes with Colleen. That's a life skill; this is… impractical. Peter frowns a little bit at himself when he thinks it. Chi's a pretty big thing for a lot of cultures, and clearly, it works judging off of Danny's glowing hand, so he shouldn't be so quick to write it off just because it doesn't conform to the ideas he's familiar with. He tries his best to focus, after that thought.
After three hours of focusing his chi, Peter's finally allowed to move onto harnessing it. That process is slightly more interesting, considering one harnesses their chi through a lot of Tai Chi and Qigong poses and moves. Honestly, it's all pretty relaxing. They do that for about an hour before Colleen interrupts them.
"Not that I'm not glad you've decided to pass on your knowledge, Danny," she says, "but he is in fact, a child, and it is in fact, midnight on a Monday—technically it's Tuesday now. He should probably be going home."
Danny looks a little embarrassed as he glances at the clock to confirm that it's just after twelve. "Sorry, I didn't realize we'd been doing that for so long," he apologizes with a smile, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly.
"It's okay," Peter assures even though he does really need to get home. "This was… interesting. Maybe we could do it again sometime."
Danny looks just about ready to explode from excitement at the prospect of having a New York teenager who actually wants to learn about life energy and such from him. "Yeah! Here, put your number in," he says, handing Peter his phone while trying not to vibrate out of his damn skin.
Peter carefully creates a contact for himself on Danny's phone, and Danny sends a message consisting solely of a typed smiley face wearing a party hat so that Peter will have his number as well.
After saying his goodbyes and heading out, Peter pulls out his phone to send Danny a smiley face of his own. The conversation now reads
'*:-D'
' (ﾉ ◕ ヮ ◕ )ﾉ*:・ ﾟ ✧ '
Danny starts typing immediately after the message is received.
'HOW DID YOU DO THAT?!'
Peter sends him a link to .
Over the next twenty minutes he gets about thirty different faces from Danny, and a text from Matt that reads 'I don't know what the fuck it is that Danny keeps sending me but I'm going to blame you for it since it was all preceded by a text saying 'look what your child showed me!'.'
Peter has never been more proud of himself, probably ever. He goes to sleep with a huge grin on his face.