The return to the Pond was excruciating.

It was conducted in near complete silence, which carried on afterward. No one was willing to break it.

They were all subjected to the medicom in turn, as space was available. Most of them were unharmed beyond wounded pride. The torn and seeping flesh on Winterwing’s chest was mended, with explicit instructions not to itch at it while feathers grew back in. Nosedive had minor burns that were not unexpected for the effort. Emily’s hands required no follow up.

The internal damage that Canard had sustained looked impossible, in that way that everything recently was impossible. Actual cause of death was difficult to discern, but its confirmation were lines of damage. Deep, clean and complete, they carried straight through bone and organ alike, but did not break the skin. It was, for lack of a better explanation, as if he had been sliced repeatedly from the inside.

 “You have one chance to make this right,”  Wildwing said, leveling his gaze at Emily, voice low and unquestionable, “one.”

At first, Emily seemed stunned, and as the words sunk in, she looked at the rest of them in turn, and realized that no one was going to come to her defense. She didn’t give a response, but visibly drifted into her own fury. She turned on her heel and left the room wordlessly.

 Winterwing pushed away from the wall he was leaning against, unfolding his arms and sighing with a little more flourish than was probably appropriate, and followed. There would be no one else willing to chase after her. There would always be no one else, he realized, trying his best to remember the twists of the corridors. No one was going to contradict Wildwing. Whether or not they agreed with his assessment of the situation was immaterial, they were never going to side with a stranger over him. Whatever else they claimed, whatever else they thought they aspired to, the Mighty Ducks were always going to prioritize maintaining their status quo over helping him—helping either of them.

Emily had tentatively joined them because they offered some vague promise that they could bring a stop to the increasing madness around them. They were going to punish her for that small bit of trust.

He traced the route that would take him to the main elevator, and eventually out of the Pond.  There had only been a few seconds between when they left the medical bay, yet she seemed to have gotten impossibly far ahead of him.

Winterwing turned a corner, unsure if it were the correct one, and was relieved to finally find her. There was no way she didn’t hear him as his heavy footfalls clanged on the steel flooring, but she made no acknowledgment.

“Wait!” he cried out, sprinting after her down the blue, dull hallway.  She did not.

“Where are you even going?”  he called after her as he ran.

She didn’t turn, instead shouting back at him, “Anywhere but here!”

He caught up with her, reaching out and grasping her wrist as he came to a stop. “Will you please just wait a second?” he coughed out, before she whirled around to face him, trying to wrench her arm free.

“Let go of me.”

The hand encircling her wrist started to sting. The feathers under his fingers were glowing blue, writhing as the parasite roiled under her skin.

He tried to speak gently, rather than issuing a challenge: “I’m not afraid of you.”

“Maybe you should be,” Emily threatened, and there was a strange burbling sound the slipped into her voice. The stinging under his hand intensified, and he made a point of not looking down at it or letting go. If she walked out, he was sure he was never going to see her again.

“Come on, Emily, it’s me,” he pleaded.

She looked away from him, to where the wall joined the floor, and the moment passed. The stinging sensation under his hand stopped, and he felt the muscles in his shoulder relax.

“Think this through,” Winterwing said, “don’t do anything impulsive.”

“Impulsive!” she snapped, her eyes wide. “He threatened me!” She gestured with her free hand back in the direction they had come from.

“I know,” he agreed, “I know. What’s the alternative? There’s no where you can go outside this building that the saurians can’t get to.”

“So, what? Is being dissected down here better than up there?”

“We can explain this, we can show them you didn’t do anything,” Winterwing insisted. "He’s upset, he’s being stupid because it’s personal to him." 

 Emily opened her bill to say something, and stopped. She stared at him for a searching moment, before saying what he had been saying to everyone else for weeks: "You're not Wildwing."

 "Oh, I'm aware."

"That's not what I mean," she said. "You're better than him."

“I’m not anyone,” Winterwing countered. “It’s all just gone. Everything I had got left behind. You’re the only proof that I even existed before this.”

Emily shook her head, “That’s true for all of us. The difference is you might have something to go back to when you go back.”

Winterwing made a noise of frustration, “You’re still not listening to me.” 

He took a step forward, and she flinched back, raising her free hand as if she expected to have to defend herself. His free hand grasped her shoulder, and he pressed the flat of his bill against her neck, and she stood, frozen in confusion. She smelled faintly of grime and iron. She stood still for a tense moment, and then exhaled.

He was supposed to be a writer, the one with vocabulary and skill for language, and for all that effort and study he could not find the right combination of words, no matter how many times he tried at it. The best he could do was an antiquated gesture, invented by some avian ancestor long before language.

“Winter,” she said into his ear, a halfhearted scold.

“I never would have told you to leave,” he finally admitted. “Never.”

Emily leaned against him without retort or argument. They stood there for so long that he was sure someone else would come upon them. No one did. All there was was the steady sound of her breathing, and the satisfying ruffle of her feathers as he ran his bill along them. Her free hand rested on his shoulder.

Every part of him felt bruised or sore, from his head to his pride, and more keenly than any of it there was that ache again, the one that twisted like a knife when he focused on it a little too hard. The one that he kept telling himself wasn’t there under his sternum, because it wasn’t supposed to be. Because its existence meant that he had done exactly what he had been telling himself for the last year that he hadn’t. It would mean that he wasn’t a blameless victim of circumstance, and every decision he made had been selfless. That his heart rate hadn’t suddenly jumped at that little touch of her fingers at his collar. That his leg wasn’t pressing between her thighs as he pulled her into a tighter embrace.

That it wasn’t all just because

he wanted

her.

Winterwing let go of Emily’s wrist at last, instead threaded his fingers through hers, and wordlessly ushered her along down the hallway. She walked alongside him to the elevator, and instead of upward, toward the surface, they went down. Through the residential block.

He lead her through his open door, locked it behind him, and when he turned to face her, standing in the middle of his room, she was looking up at him with a sort of kind appraisal that he had not seen before. Every other person in this place made the inevitable comparison to the person that looked like him. She was looking at him for him, and it twisted that knife again, just a little bit.

She said nothing as he walked toward her, did not break eye contact as he grasped her shoulders in his hands. She finally did close those strange eyes when he traced along her collarbone, along the curve of her face. Through that first hesitant kiss, the more confident one that followed it. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“For what?” she touched his brow.

“Everything, I guess.”

“Okay,” she said, leaning against him with an amused smile. Surely she could hear his heart pounding, and he could not will it to quiet. She unfastened her armor and let it fall off her shoulders, stripped away all the tech and annoyances, and slid back into his embrace easily. Under all that bristling fury and plating, she was soft to the touch.

 He listened to her quiet affirmations, the repetition of his name, and the sounds that were not words as his hands grasped her shoulders, her waist, and then her thighs.