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He reminds you so much of the dragon you met on the very first day of school, regal and pristine and perfectly sculpted and, of course, so completely intimidating that you barely recognize him at all.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Winter says with a growl.
So you stop looking at him like that, force your attention to the trees in the distance or the stone underfoot on this isolated ledge in the mountains far above Jade Mountain Academy, and try not to let the guilt show on your snout. You definitely didn’t notice that he lacked the skyfire bracelet that Turtle had given all of you guys a long time ago. You definitely didn’t try your best to look into the IceWing’s mind even though you knew he hated it so very much, but you were so desperate that you would do anything — anything — to keep him here.
But when you did try to peer inside of him, all you found was a terrible wall of ice, but one far different than the one you butted up against the first time you made the mistake of reading his mind.
This one is deliberate, lacking the rough icy opaqueness you’re so familiar with. It’s refined, hewn carefully by the claws of his mind’s eye, and crystal clear — behind the barrier you can see the anger, the melancholy, the despair swirling in his mind. It’s so close, but so far away that you cannot do anything but acknowledge its existence.
Winter regards you with a look that should have upset you, but all you can feel is a distinct forlornness in your heart. “I learned to shield my mind from mind readers,” he says as he looks down at you. “After everything with Darkstalker, I thought it was important enough, so I looked through the IceWing libraries for scrolls on how our ancestors did it in the past. Turns out there’s a lot of information from our history about it. Did you know it was standard training back then?”
As he goes on and on about the fruits of his research, you know that most other dragons would be angry at being talked at like this, but you look beyond his blustering bravado and simply try not to laugh. It wasn’t humor borne of mockery, nor belittlement, but rather, the fragile, tragic irony of the situation that fails to escape you, something that he will never realize for himself:
You no longer need to peer into Winter’s mind to know what he feels.
His last few words drag you back into the present no matter how unwilling you are to return. “... And, well, if there’s ever another threat that can read other dragons’ minds, then I’m prepared. More than prepared, actually.”
His words are pointed, and you know that you deserve his ire. “Winter,” you say haltingly, your breath crystalizing in the cool winter air, “you know it’s not like that.”
It’s a pathetic step forward, and one that he treats with little mercy. “It’s definitely like that,” he says, crossing his arms. “Or have you forgotten just about everything that happened between us all?”
“I know what happened,” you say as his words immediately put you on the defensive. “I was there for it. We were all there for it.”
“But were you there for it?”
He stares at you, glacial, crystalline eyes boring into your soul, as if daring you to just respond with carelessness. So you take a minute and think about his words, trying to decipher some deeper meaning to them beyond their rhetorical nature.
“I think I need you to explain what you mean,” you say carefully.
“What’s wrong? Why can’t you just pick it up from my head?”
“Winter, don’t be mean.”
You know he regrets his outburst but, in typical fashion, only steels his heart further. But you can see how his muzzle tightens and his eyes narrow, and in itself that is apology enough for you. “Sure,” he says, throwing the word out in the open like a bomb. “You were all there for it. You, me, Qibli. For most dragons, it was just us saving the world. We were in a horrible situation and made the most of it, and despite our differences we managed to subdue a terrible threat before it could destroy all of us. Well, almost all of us.”
It’s hard to ignore the snipes, the jabs, because while they are true they lack context, but it is Winter’s turn on the stage and not yours, so you simply chide him gently, remind him that not everything is so simple, so black and white…
And he stares at your scales, and then his own, and then you find yourself regretting the turn of phrase. “Of course it’s not so simple,” he whispers with a quietude that unnerves you. “But that’s how you see it.”
“It’s not—”
He cuts you off with a snarl. “Have you ever considered the way I see it?”
You remember your tact from before, and again you find yourself with all of the questions and none of the answers. But this time, you don’t quite have the courage to ask him, and given the way he stares at you, wintry scales shuddering with poorly contained rage, you conclude that he will tell you anyway.
But it’s hardly in the way you expect. He doesn’t move his mouth, doesn’t say a word, but something in his eyes changes, and you find yourself… overwhelmed.
No amount of coaching from anyone, even Darkstalker, could have prepared you for the onslaught of memories flooding the air between you. You hadn’t even registered that Winter had lowered his frigid defenses until visions plague you one after the other, crashing down into your mind like water from a waterfall until you barely contain it at all.
Flashes of his childhood come first, and with it all of his emotion, the disappointment of failing your parents, the fear of judgment from siblings far superior than you in every respect. You can hear their remarks ringing in your ears — moons, you couldn’t even kill a polar bear? What happens if you’re engaged in actual combat? Can we trust you? Should we trust you? His life is nothing but rigor and discipline and acting as a dragon he knew he could never become.
The visions of his heritage melt away, and you catch just a glimpse of Winter staring at you with hardened eyes, his feet planted before him and scoring the rocky platform underfoot. Do you see what I see? he seems to ask, but before you can say anything at all, you’re buried again in his maelstrom.
He finds a school out there, a ridiculous place where every wing and color of dragon can attend and learn, and so he does so and finds his stuffy, rigid culture instantly challenged by dragons who he would have murdered on a battlefield in a different life. Despite his best wishes, he learns from them, discovers who they are and how they live, and for a fleeting moment, the iceberg that is his soul trembles, ice and snow tumbling away from it as he, for the first time in his life, questions what it means to live.
But as soon as he has that in his grasp, he loses it all. His friends — real, actual friends, nothing like the stiff transactional dragons in the Ice Kingdom, find his ideas repulsive, and cast him aside just as easily as they had let him in, and here he learns of a new kind of betrayal, so he returns to the Ice Kingdom, friendless and empty-clawed, and in quick succession loses his sister, his father, and then his family and tribe altogether.
Before you can even process the emotion of it all, what he feels about having everything and then losing it all, he slams the window into his soul shut, but this time the wall frosts over until you can see nothing through it, not even an iota of his thoughts.
But it’s not necessary. It wasn’t necessary — after all, you could read him. Right?
“And so,” Winter asks with a horrible growl, one that shakes you to your very core with its savage intensity, “do you understand what I see? Do you understand what I had to go through?”
“Winter, it’s not— this isn’t—” You’re left flustered, uncertain of what to say next, and you latch onto the first thing that surfaces in the thick of your mind. “Qibli and I didn’t mean to do this. Just because I chose him doesn’t mean that I don’t care about you!”
He let out a dry, paltry laugh. “I know what I showed you,” he said coolly. “Do you think I cared about that in the end? Did you ever see me lament about how you chose him over me? I’ve shown you everything and you can’t even see past your snout.”
“Winter! Don’t you—”
“No, Moon! Don’t you talk to me like that,” he spat. “Really? After all of this, you still have the nerve to tell me that you care? Where was this care when you abandoned me? When you failed to seek me out again? When you chose to believe in a genocidal dragon instead of me?”
There it was, at long last: the crux of his argument thrown out in the open, and though you’re more than aware of its existence for as long as you’ve known Winter, you somehow still don’t have an adequate response for it, so you think.
But this time, your flat-footedness costs you. “I’m done here,” he hisses, flaring out his wings. “Done with you all. How could you ask me to stay after all of this? How dare you ask me to stay after all of this.”
His words hammer into you, the blunt damage crushing your heart one blow at a time, and though you try to contain yourself because moons, you know IceWing loathe sentiment, you cannot help but let tears fill your emerald eyes. “It wasn’t meant to be like this,” you say, a crack fracturing your voice. “Winter, please.”
He stares at you, and though you wish that the sight of your tearfulness wouldn’t have an effect on him, it does — but not in the way you expect. You feel a tendril of some emotion radiate from his heart, something that escapes past the walls that he had built around himself, and you seize it as hard as you can, for it is want, desire, a need for belonging, one that speaks of nothing but utter and infinite desperation.
Despite it all, he wants to stay so badly.
He bows his head, lowering it so you can barely see the sparkle of sunlight on his cheeks. “I can’t,” he says. “I need to leave. I cannot be around any of you, both for my sake and yours.”
“My sake?” The words slip carelessly from your maw, but faced with such stakes and the sudden intensity of your heart, you lose your propriety. “What do you mean, my sake? Think of the rest of the winglet. Think of Qibli! Think of me! Who are you really doing this for?”
“Fine!” A terrible snarl forms on his muzzle, and you realize too late that you’ve cornered him with expectation. “Fine. It’s just my sake, then, and none of yours. And why shouldn’t that be the case? After all of this talk about how you guys care about me and fail to measure up, I’m not allowed to be selfish about my happiness? I’ve endured so much already,” he said, his jaw quivering and agape as his breathing grows heavy. “I don’t think I can take any more.”
It’s defeat, plain and clear, and as much as you don’t wish to admit that, only someone like Kinkajou could push past the melancholy that Winter had built around himself.
“I’m sorry,” you say.
“... I am, too,” he says back.
You approach him closer, sensing that he is not long for your world, but he snaps at you. “Stay back,” he warns as tears fall freely down his cheeks. “Stay away from me, NightWing.”
You don't even have a name to him anymore. He effortlessly crushes what little resilience you have left; all you can do is sob as quietly as you can and grit your teeth. “Promise me?” you ask, your request nearly whisked away by the frigid winds buffeting you both. “Promise me that you’ll come back someday. Please?”
It’s a selfish request, and one that you knew you shouldn’t have made, but it burns deeply in your chest, contorts your body to its will, and you hang on Winter’s every last breath desperately as he fails to assuage the agony surging through his scales.
“Maybe,” he says, and you know even that single word, that small sliver of commitment, brings him immense pain, and a fresh wave of tears floods your eyes. “I have to go now, Moonwatcher. Goodbye.”
And before you can even react, he springs upwards, as if his entire body were waiting for this very moment since he asked to talk with you this morning, and leaves you with one less friend in your embattled world.