It was time. It was time.

Wildwing sat with the body.

There was nothing to stand vigil against. The threat had passed. The wizard had burst into dust. The beasts of void had left their mark, but the creatures had not come back again. It had only been a few short hours, so it was perhaps too early to tell, but it seemed they would not be returning without a master to thin the webbing of reality.

There was no need for delay.

There were no mysterious circumstances. It wasn’t a matter of waiting for anyone else to come pay respects. It wasn’t tradition; tradition had fallen somewhere far behind them. He had no idea, had never thought to ask, what Canard would have wanted. They had always been wrapped up in the youthful veneer of invincibility. They were all still too young to be asking these questions of each other. 

In the end, though, it may not have mattered what Canard wanted, because there was a limited range of options.

They could not leave a body here, on Earth. Absolutely could not. There were too many people who had already overstepped the boundaries of privacy. There were a handful of humans who had never been told ‘no’ in their lives, and thought that simply by wanting something, that justified getting it. People that saw other humans as something less than, and saw outsiders as something below that.

The body had to go into cold storage with the others.

This bothered him far more than he thought it should have.

Wildwing had done the mourning before. But, that had come with a thread of hope before. He hadn’t understood the physics, but he understood well enough that if Dragaunus had escaped dimensional limbo, then there was a way to do so.

This time was different. This time it was definitive. Wildwing tried to ignore it, to not look at it, but in his peripheral vision at all times was the medical scan: the pattern of sliced bones and sheared organs. His mind’s insistence on imagining its infliction made him wince every time he saw it. Then followed boiling anger that he had not been able to do anything about it.

And there was still something in the back of his mind, something utterly absurd, that insisted that he wait, just a little bit longer. He did not know what ‘a little bit’ would end up being. Every time he thought maybe he was ready, he couldn’t make himself stand up. The little voice in his head that told him maybe he was wrong, there was a mistake, and they couldn’t freeze Canard. Could not. What if he woke up?

Wildwing felt childish, but he could not push the fear away. He spent hours, trying to overcome it, to tell the little voice. The body was cold. The scans were right there. Canard wasn’t breathing. He hadn’t moved. Everything rational and logical came to a consensus: It was time. It was time. It was time.

It was time.  It was time.

And still, Wildwing could not force himself to do it.

The rest of the team gave him space, but not too much. They checked in on him, periodically.  He would have done the same, with roles reversed. He couldn’t remember the majority of what was said. Someone had left him coffee that he didn’t touch. His stomach roiled when he looked at it. 

It went cold, too.

It was Mallory who finally decided to sit down and wait with him, for whatever it was that would finally convince him. She faced herself away from the body as she sat next to him, instead watching the doorway. He did not ask her to leave. She had known Canard for the months leading up to the mission, she had just as much right to sit there as he did.

She had pulled off her armor, and had perhaps been trying to sleep without success.

They sat in silence, though Wildwing did not know for how long. He had given up on checking the time.

 She finally asked, with great irritation, “Where the hell is Nosedive?”

Wildwing shrugged.

Grateful for a little momentary distraction, he thought about it, and could not recall if he had seen Nosedive at all since they had dispersed from the medical bay. Maybe it was Nosedive that had brought him the coffee. He didn’t remember.  

He felt no urge to press the issue. If Wildwing had trouble with acceptance of death, the invasion had been counter to Nosedive’s entire state of being. His younger brother was an enthusiastic optimist, and still managed to maintain that most days, but Nosedive’s reaction to disaster was to dissociate entirely. Some days in the camps were worse than others, but Nosedive had, as a matter of necessity, slid into a state of catatonics. He would march, he would work, and he would sometimes eat, and that was the full extent of being he could muster. It was not that Nosedive had broken, rather most of what he was had simply left, had decided to go somewhere else, and would come back when the circumstances allowed.

That was why Wildwing was never going to leave him behind. Why it was unacceptable. It did not matter if he was too young for a mission, they were all too young. If he left Nosedive behind, Wildwing would never have been able to find him again, he was sure, regardless of whether or not he had found the husk alive.

Wildwing would have to check in on him, in the morning. Or whenever he was finally able to do his duties. Wildwing could not spend all his time feeling sorry for himself. He was not the only one who had lost, who had lost something important, had lost someone important, and it was not appropriate for him to mourn endlessly on it. Wildwing could take a day or two, that was fair, no one would think poorly of him for it. After that, everything else would still be there, would still need his attention.

“I didn’t know him very well,” Mallory said, with a glance at the body, and then back to the doorway. “He, uh,”  she laughed a little, “he was very hard to say no to.”

“He said you helped him steal the Aerowing,” Wildwing recalled.

“That,” she said rather pointedly,  sitting up straighter in her chair, “is a matter of how you want to define steal.”

He managed a weak smile.

“There wasn’t much left of us, at that point,” she said, more softly. “He seemed so sure. He introduced me to Tanya, and she seemed so sure. If there’s no chain of command to reprimand you left, is it really disobeying orders?” She then looked sharply at Wildwing, and scowled,“What?”

“This is a stunning revelation, and I demand to know what you did with the real Mallory,” he said, with about as much humor as he could muster.

“If there’s anyone left that wants to hold me responsible for it, I guess they can,” she shrugged.  “I accept that. It was worth it.” As she imagined this, she smiled a little wickedly, one of those smiles he wasn’t supposed to see anymore, “Also, maybe they shouldn’t have left it sitting around like that, if they didn’t want to lose it.”

All he had in him was a soft laugh, that was little more than a cough but still too loud for the room, and he stopped abruptly. They both avoided eye contact, and avoided looking at the body they sat next to, their gazes come to rest on the only other remarkable thing in the room, the display of crushed bones and sliced organs, spiraling outward from a center point.

Wildwing looked away, the cycle of guilt and anger threatening again, but stopped mid-wince, gazing back at the display’s glow, and did not realize he said aloud: “Puckworld doesn’t have spiders.”

“What?” Mallory said, looking doubtfully at him.

“Canard said we were already stuck in a web,” Wildwing did not move from his spot, but with a finger traced out the uneasy lines of the fractures and slices that, sure enough, resembled the lines of an iconic spider’s web when drawn. “That’s a human metaphor. Where did he hear it?”

Mallory blinked, looking at the display herself, as if it held an answer, before shaking her head, “He was here long enough to have overheard it. Maybe Nosedive got to him.”