Nosedive knew he should have said something.

Anything that happened now was going to be his fault, if he didn’t. 

Wildwing had only been truly angry a handful times that Nosedive had witnessed. He did not like having to see it, even though it had never once been directed at him. It was a side of his brother that seemed ill fitted for the rest. 

There was that thing Wildwing did to be in charge. That was different, a detachment or determination, and even Dragaunus himself had only personally managed to bring Wildwing to a frenzy a handful of times, and that had been so momentary, so fleeting, that it could be pretended that it had not happened. It was a reasonable fury, one that never clouded his morals.

The longer Nosedive didn’t say anything, the worse it was going to get. He knew that. Wildwing was not going to let it go, Nosedive had said it himself.

There was no fixing, no walking back the events of the last few days. Losing Canard the first time had been one of those old scars that ached at odd times. Healed, supposedly, until there was something someone said, an old memory resurfaced, and that did not reopen the wound, but was a reminder of the ache.

The second loss was more than a reopening, it was a whole new wound, that had opened somewhere else and obliterated the occasional ache of the original. It was not just losing a friend, it was the repetition, the false start between. Wildwing had carried the first loss on his shoulder all this time, as if it had been his responsibility, but the second time, this time, this time there was enough grief in him it had to overflow to someone else, too.

Nosedive knew he should have spoken on Emily’s behalf. She complained, she was irritating, she did not integrate well with the team, but none of those were things that warranted anything beyond annoyance. She had had an opportunity to abandon them, and him specifically, to the mercy of Asteroth, and had chosen not to. Whatever else the outcome, he was certain that if he had walked into that particular hellscape on his own, he would not half walked out victorious, or likely at all. He had asked for help, and she had at the very least provided enough assistance that they weren't all dead. She had never done anything like it before, and the lack of experience showed, but she had not flinched away from the occasion, as someone else may have.

More importantly, he knew she wasn’t responsible. As she had insisted, she had done nothing wrong, and he knew it, but found himself too terrified to say anything. No matter how many times he made up his mind to stand up and walk to his brother in the medical bay to say it, Nosedive’s legs never moved. Instead, he continued to sit, feeling more and more despair come over him, because each passing moment made the lie worse.

Because he had seen that look in Wildwing’s eyes. That blossoming hatred that was terrible enough when pointed at someone else, and Nosedive could not voluntarily walk into it himself.

He sat in his bunk, for long hours after the rest of the Pond went to sleep, and while he occasionally got pings and messages from the others, he never responded to any of them. 

He could not make himself stand up.

Emily had not done anything, but as the odd one out, the suspicious and irritable patient, the one who had been hiding and withholding information, plausibility of guilt had been laid directly on her. Of course she crushed Canard. She was a spy, or a pawn, or maybe she was just inept at controlling whatever thing hid in that secretive guise.

Except Nosedive had carried home with him the evidence that she hadn’t. Sometimes he looked at the object in his hands, working it over again and again, trying to convince himself he was wrong, he was imagining it. Every time, his imagined innocence was disproved by the thing. The little necklace that Canard had brought with him, supposedly, from limbo. The one that Duke had dismissed as glass, its pendent was not entirely destroyed, rather it had simply cracked under the butt of his blaster, with enough force to break whatever was holding the ancient form of the sorcerer together.

He had told no one he still had the jewelry, and in the confusion and arguing no one had bothered to ask after it.

Every time he looked at its broken face, he could not help but see the scans of Canard’s internal organs. The ones that showed a cracking pattern of his crushed rib-cage and sternum, that followed the exact same lines. Nosedive had not done so, he was too terrified to try and be discovered, and yet he was sure that the two patterns would overlay perfectly had he compared them side by side. It was too distinctive a pattern to have been coincidence.

Emily hadn’t done anything. Whatever else she was, whatever the thing inside her was supposed to be for, he was sure that she had told the truth, and whatever horror had happened after she had immobilized Canard would have happened regardless of her methodology.

But, Nosedive. Useless Nosedive. He’d managed to kill his brother’s best friend.