With tasks delegated, there was little else to do but wait. That came hard. Tanya would not tolerate them all hovering over her and demanding constant updates, so Wildwing tried his best to not be a pest. Instead, constant vigilance was to be held over their guests, which meant at least one other person watching Tanya’s back while she worked in close quarters with them. With their search for him complete and the immediate danger something they could not simply shoot at, this gave opportunity for at least some of his team to recover from the last couple days.

In the dark and confusion of the Raptor, Wildwing’s first thought, or even his hundredth, had not been to monitor the health of the people around him. Hindsight was a devil as always, insisting to him that he was negligent, that fault could lay with no one else. Yet, he could not do everything, could not be responsible for every single aspect of survival. That was the point of having a team–those things were supposed to be distributed among everyone.

If only he had managed to do something differently, Wildwing could have contained this sickness better. He didn’t know what that could have been, after being stripped of everything but shoes and spandex, but that nagging voice in his head would never be quiet.

It told him, in a way that he knew was selfish, that his failure had not just exposed everyone, but Nosedive in particular. That thought he knew to squash, because Nosedive was not more important than anyone else, but it kept leaping up just the same. Nosedive was the only family he had left, to his knowledge. It was hard to crush the urge to keep that relation especially precious.

Nosedive himself would have called him an idiot, despite being plenty guilty of the same erroneous decision making.

Wildwing took a shower, which he had not realized he had wanted so badly until he was standing in the water. It solved none of his problems, but he still found his mood improved when he exited. It was not a perfect remedy, nothing ever made the anxiety go completely away, or just the general miasma of intrusive thoughts, but it was all a little less biting. It was enough to get him through the day, which was all that he could ever really ask for.

Nosedive ambushed him directly outside his own room, holding up the entirety of an already baked frozen pizza, and when Wildwing scowled at it, a plain bagel with cream cheese and salmon, and a thermos of coffee. There was not a word said between them, but Wildwing took both of the latter with feigned annoyance. He could not remember his last meal, but was fairly sure for all its blandness, this one was far, far better.

They both ate in silence in his room, and if there was a conversation afterward that ended in either of them misty-eyed, this was a closely guarded secret that neither would ever reveal to the outside world. It was very similar to a moment they had shared before, a long time ago, and somehow not that long ago at all: A loud fight between their parents, though he was too young at the time to know what about, when the two brothers had sat out of range on the front steps, passing snacks quietly between the two of them and waiting for it to end.

That must have been ten years ago, at least.

In the end, Nosedive was the only one the Wildwing ever directly told what happened to the Mask in any detail. None of the others ever asked, never comfortable enough to do so, and it made no difference if they knew the exact mechanism of its destruction or not. It was gone, and there was no real reason to belabor the point.

The moment passed and Nosedive, being himself, became restless, and they could only deny for so long that they were in the middle of an ongoing crisis. Wildwing had no task for him, in all honesty he had no task for himself beyond checking in with each member of the team in turn, but there was no shortage of things that could be done while they were trapped in the underground. Perhaps, once he had passed around assurances and caught up with everyone, he would have to do that inventory of the armory that had not happened in months. It seemed, should they survive the next couple of days, that they were going to have need of it again.

Nosedive would not have been much help, would have gotten bored immediately, but he had enough entertainment squirreled away in the depths of their living quarters that he should have been fine left to his own devices.

Well, maybe left to his own devices with periodic supervision.

“What about the other guy?” Nosedive asked.

Wildwing knew exactly what he was referring to, and scowled again. There was no way to avoid this conversation, he had known it was coming, that was inevitable. Winterwing, the other guy.

“What about him?” Wildwing asked.

“What’s his deal?”

“His deal,” Wildwing repeated.

“He’s you, right? What’s up with that?”

“You know as much as I do, because it got shouted in the med bay.”

“No, that was about the mission, I mean did you ask about like, anything else.”

“What else is there?”

“What did he think of that girl you didn’t ask out in school. The one with the sparkly shoes? I don’t remember her name, but-”

“I do not have the time to ask that.”

“That’s a liiiiiie,” Nosedive teased in a sing-song voice, “You have nothing but time.”

Wildwing said nothing, and let the implied threat on his face suffice.

“You’re like the one person in the universe that was not blessed with the gift of curiosity,” Nosedive said in exasperation. “You have a chance to talk to you if things were normal and you don’t even care.”

“No, I don’t care, because it doesn’t matter.” Wildwing sighed and straightened his spine, trying to find the appropriate posture to look somewhat authoritative again. “Normal is a fantasy.”

“How do you know if you didn’t ask,” Nosedive countered.

“Because normal doesn’t exist for him either anymore, he’s just starting to realize,” Wildwing said. “If you need to be given something to do, I can supply it. There’s an entire section of the third sub-floor that no one’s assessed in a while.”

“Ah, yes, my favorite hangout, the third sub-floor,” Nosedive said with fake enthusiasm. “Do you think that maybe it’s a bit on the bill to be literally burying your problems?’ He leaned in and lowered his voice. “These are the super important questions that you can now ask yourself.”

There was a ping on his comm from Tanya, and Wildwing was grateful for the interruption. “I need to go to the medical bay. You stay out of trouble.”

“Define-”

“‘Trouble’ means something that I’ll have to bail you out of later.”

“You have not seen the last of me,” Nosedive waved him off with a grin, shaking his fist just a little in mock defeat, and disappeared around a corner into the labyrinth of the Pond.