"Is the sword necessary?" Winterwing asked.

"Honestly? Nah. It's just sort of my thing," Duke likely did not need the blade at all and could have settled any challenge from his charge with bare hands.

Duke had been leading their journey through the Pond’s tunnels from behind. He had not decided yet where they should go, and was not too stressed about it, either. He could walk his new friend in circles for hours, and that would be enough to keep Winterwing out of trouble. How long would it take, Duke wondered, before his guest even began to realize that the seemingly identical walls and floors were actually identical?

Wildwing's double looked over his shoulder, and leveled Duke with a glare. "So, what are you supposed to be, a space pirate?"

Duke chuckled. "Well, that's the dream ain't it? But, it turns out there's no sick quite like space sick."

Winterwing was quiet for a moment, before stopping and sitting on the floor, his back against a wall.

"I didn't say you could stop walkin’."

"So, stab me," Winterwing responded, and when Duke did nothing, nodded contemptuously.

Duke clicked his tongue and put away the saber, more disappointed than annoyed. "What's the history with you and the chick?"

"Hist-"and then Winterwing stopped himself. "There's no ‘history’."

"Lot of shoutin’ for no history," Duke nodded over his shoulder, back the way they had come.

His companion was quiet, his eyes closed, but Duke could see on his face a tired annoyance that he had witnessed plenty of times before. Winterwing was a strange copy, poorly executed, an approximation that was almost right, but the forgery was not a master work.

"Would you like some advice?" Duke asked.

"Not especially, no."

"The longer you wait, the harder it's goin’ to be to apologize."

"Great, thanks."

They had not walked far, but it was far enough that the sounds of the medical bay had disappeared. They were swallowed by the maze and the walls, and what was left behind was the ever present hum of the shield generator. The hum wasn’t exactly a calming sound, and he was not fond of it, but it did have a quality that he had come to associate with ‘safe’.

Winterwing looked up at the ceiling, as though he could have seen through it and the layers of steel and earth above it. Finally, he said “What is this place?”

“A very long way from where you were,” was what Duke settled on.

Winterwing’s brow furrowed and he looked at Duke as if he had lost his mind, before relaxing and stating simply, with a hint of defeat: “Fuck.”

Duke thought maybe what would follow was more anger, but it did not come.

“And there’s Saurians,” Winterwing prompted.

Duke shrugged. “Shit’s messed up.”

“How does a wannabe space pirate fit into all that?”

“They scorched a planet. Killed a lot of my friends. A lot of other people too.”

For all his time spent on Earth with the team, Duke still could not help but look at conversation and trust as a game of psychology. Honesty could be matched, and lies could be strategically ignored, if it meant getting something out of it. He did not mind giving his new friend a bit of information, laced with the understanding that he would only give if he received in turn.

Infection and cure were nothing that Duke could help with, but intrigue and subterfuge and innuendo, that was far closer to his comfort zone. Winterwing did not act the way he would have expected an agent of Dragaunus to do. He gave exactly one piece of possibly actionable information with the book, that could have been a genuine suggestion, or could have been a misdirection. Neither made perfect sense, because he was now reluctant to pursue that investigation.

“You went to school,” Duke said, “What do you do?”

“I’m just a writer,” Winterwing said.

Duke pondered this for a moment. In the past, Dragaunus’ taste in captives or assets had been rather predictable. Scientists, mostly. People with knowledge far beyond Duke’s own understanding, usually on the fringe of research in their field. People with wild theories that Dragaunus saw potential in.

Maybe there was something in that tome that the Saurians themselves could not access, and needed the knowledge of a scholar. “What sort of things do you write?”

This seemed to have the opposite effect of what he wanted, though, because Winterwing became reluctant to share anything. “Nothing worth reading,” was all he was willing to say.

That was fine. In the last ten minutes, Duke had probably gotten further than the hours of Mallory’s impatient sighing.

“Well, if it makes any difference, no one’s ever said my previous careers were productive either,” Duke grinned smoothly, as if he had not noticed the conversation splutter, leaning against the opposing wall.

“Yeah, I kind of guessed that from the eye patch,” Winterwing observed, and then with his own glance down the hallway from which they had come, “Odd group of people.”

“Eh, they’re not so bad,” Duke shrugged. “Better when they’re not in existential crisis.”

“How often is that?”

“Never, but that’s mostly beyond their control.”

“I can relate.”

There was a long silence then, and Duke tried his best to appear disinterested. He was not a stranger to patience, though it had been quite some time since he had needed to exercise it this much. There would be processing time for their new arrivals, just as there had been for the rest of them before. Just as it was with the team, it was going to be cut short of what it needed to be. There was no help for that. Surviving necessitated action.

The patience eventually paid off, because it was Winterwing that broke the silence this time, with a little more sobriety, “She’s going do die, isn’t she?”

Duke decided to sidestep everything else that he could have answered with and ignore the subtext. “She doesn’t have to.”

Whether or not Winterwing actually heard was unclear. He was staring down the hallway, with brow furrowed and eyes focused on nothing. Duke tried his best to remain stoic, though a corner of his mouth twitched. Wildwing as prone to the same exhausted stare.

“I don’t know who she is,” Winterwing finally said, drifting back to the original question. “I thought I knew. She didn’t lie. I don’t think she ever lied. She just let me assume.”

Whether or not he knew it, Winterwing was describing the basic framework of a confidence game: Remain vague, and let those around you fill the spaces that you needed to fit. People were exceptionally willing to assume and fill in missing detail, so long as you’re friendly enough about it, and affirmed their assumptions without ever explicitly correcting them.

“I found her,” he looked back up at Duke, as if just realizing he was there. “I took her to somewhere that could help, and that should have been the end of it.”

“Should have,” Duke repeated.

“She found me again,” Winterwing scowled. “I can’t for the life of me figure out why I decided to keep helping. I just thought someone hurt her and left her out there. She never told me who, and I didn’t ask. I just thought I should help. I just wanted her to be safe.”

“This was all just you?” Duke interrupted.

He saw Duke’s thoughtful look. “Is it important?”

“I don’t know,” Duke admitted. “From my extensive experience of existential crisis, I would say it’s more likely than not that someone arranged these things on purpose.” He looked down the hallway, back in the general direction of the medical bay. “Or maybe there’s just something about you and Wildwing that attracts trouble.”

“If we could cure that, that would be great,” Winterwing snorted. “I have deadlines to meet.”

“Yeah, I would maybe not worry about those for the moment.”

Winterwing shook his head “What do I do now, then? I spent the better part of a year waiting for her to explain what happened, and she never did. I don’t know anything and I don’t have any way to...”

“Help,” Duke finished for him, and watched him run fingers through his hair in frustration. Looking back at his own twenties, all his bad decisions with his own list of mysterious and dangerous women, it was hard not to feel just a slight bit of compassion. It was a sort of saccharine over-sweet, to watch this play out from the outside. Winterwing would have to untangle for himself why he felt as frustrated he did, and hopefully come out the other side a little wiser for the experience.

“You recognized that writin’, in the book,” Duke offered.

“I recognized a poem,” he answered. “I can’t read it.”

“Well, how about we look at the rest, see if there’s anythin’ else in there you know?” He made sure to put a little emphasis on the word ‘we’, to phrase it as a proposal rather than a direction. He was no wordsmith, but he understood importance of language. Make it an invitation, rather than a demand.

Winterwing looked up at him, trying to gauge intent.

“I’m a guy with a sword. I’m not sure what to do either,” Duke admitted.

Winterwing got to his feet slowly, brushing imaginary dust from his pants, and sighed. “Okay.”