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Daisuke Bucklesby is what the books and the moving pictures call a cowboy. Gunslinging and eccentric and clicking around in his big dumb boots, eyeing potential prey from behind his broad hat’s rim. He’s told he’s got a mischievous grin and wicked eyes.

Daisuke Bucklesby is what the news on the television and in the papers call an outlaw. Rugged and dismal and gritty; a lone wolf, in charge of himself and nobody else. Nobody knows him; not really, and it’s going to good and goddamn stay that way.

Really, though, Daisuke Bucklesby is what Daisuke Bucklesby calls a piece of shit.

Then, one completely oblivious day, he meets Professor Comfrey MacLeod in a market. He catches a man trying to steal her wallet; just as he can hold the gun between his eyes, he glances over to see that she’s already got a knife to his neck.

In one fell swoop, the world around him comes crashing down. Her graying hair whips around her face like its in slow motion. Her smirk burns into the back of his eyes and lingers even when he closes them. She tells the man not to get mixed up with Comfrey MacLeod, and in that single moment, Daisuke has never wanted anything more than to get mixed up with Comfrey MacLeod.

A week later, she wrote him a letter asking if he knew what the Wind Rider Society was.

A month after that, he meets Marya Junková, Vanellope Chapman, and Montgomery LaMontgommery.

Two months after that, he’s left his life of crime behind, in favor of the great, big blue sky.

Three months after that, he’s in the room when Artemisia MacLeod gives birth.

It’s only been a bit since Daisuke started actually seeing Comfrey anywhere outside of his bedroom, the first in a long line of women to really tug at his gut when she smiles, but he’s rushed into the room like he’s blood. The infirmary is loud and noisy and filled with nurses and patients and absolutely dreadful wafts of unidentified smells, but Daisuke is some of the only family allowed in.

He wants to do something, but he can’t. He just sits there. He watches Comfrey as she holds Artemisia’s hand, her son Hutch on the other side, both pleading with her to stay calm. She wails in pain as the midwife soothes her. And Daisuke just stands in the corner, silent, not even offering reassurance -- and nobody asks for it. They probably don’t expect it of him.

He absent-mindedly thinks about what his birth must’ve been like. His mama, rest in peace, probably smoked a cigarette before, during, and after; Daisuke can hardly picture her doing anything without one. His daddy was maybe in the room, maybe his Aunt Delilah or his Marmee, but they certainly weren’t holding his mama’s hand. And they definitely didn’t let any boyfriend in.

Boyfriend. Daisuke hates to go that far. He hates pushing a narrative onto Comfrey that she needs to make room for him in her life; a life that’s clearly very good, very loving, full of people that will be around for a long time. And they’re introducing new people, new people they want, what with the baby-

Daisuke hears a cry.

He’s in awe as they move the baby to Artemisia’s arms. Big, clear eyes, rosy pink skin, and a tuft of brown hair on the head.

Daisuke is overcome with something. It’s not quite pride; he doesn’t know Artemisia or Hutch well enough to say so. It’s not quite sadness; he knows this moment is so much bigger than that and him. And it’s not quite happiness either; that’s not his baby, his blood.

But he watches as the MacLeods swarm around Artemisia, cooing and sniffling, in awe of this creation -- this human that she’s just made exist -- and something is stuck in Daisuke’s throat. Some existential feeling looms over him and tells him this is it. Your life will never be the same.

He ducks into his pocket and takes a swig from his flask. He still doesn’t say anything.

Comfrey looks at the baby with these big, tragic eyes, like it’s the only thing that’s ever existed in the whole entire world. Like it’s holding the world, in its tiny, pink little hands. Like nothing else will ever matter again.

She looks like this often. She looks like this just looking at a particularly interesting cloud, or at her favorite meal, or when the team gets a big puzzle they’re all going to need to hunker down to work on. It’s a look Daisuke adores, the most quintessentially Comfrey thing about her.

Here, though, this time, he believes her.

“Congratulations, Mrs. MacLeod,” says the midwife. “Have you picked out a name?”

Artemisia says the baby’s name like it’s been rehearsed for hours, days, weeks. Then she starts crying.

Daisuke thinks it’s time he steps out.

-

The baby is on the Zephyr whenever Comfrey can get Hutch to allow it.

Today, the baby is crying. And yesterday. And the day before, and probably tomorrow and the day after too -- in fact, Daisuke’s half-convinced it just doesn’t stop crying. When he’s babysitting and the tears start, his body completely shuts down and calls for Comfrey before he can stop it. Like her name is a gut reaction. A reflex.

He’s never been great with emotions.

Comfrey, though, Comfrey knows how to handle the baby. She cradles and sings and knows exactly what is needed and when, like it’s hers. Not even like it’s hers, like it’s her. Like she’s talking to herself.

Daisuke is completely in awe of it. It’s a side of Comfrey he’s never seen before, and probably never will again. She’s nurturing, and sensitive, and a beacon of warmness and welcoming that isn’t familiar. Worse, it isn't familiar, but it is natural -- like she’s had it in her all this time, and nothing has changed from before the birth. As if she’s just been like this and Daisuke didn’t notice.

It’s a side of her Daisuke doesn’t know. And it’s a side much, much too big for him.

“Ah, the professor’s little kitten.”

Daisuke turns and catches sight of Marya, just as she makes it to his side and leans against the wall with him. She holds out a hand.

Daisuke squints at her. “What?”

Marya sighs and rips a cigarette out of Daisuke’s hand -- one he, frankly, didn’t know he was smoking -- and takes a puff. Her gaze falls on Comfrey too, something different about the look in her eye, though Daisuke can’t place it.

Instead, he huffs. “I think you’re probably a little too young to be smoking that, Junker.”

Marya smiles a little to herself. “Please. Don’t pretend you don’t notice that I steal one after every big combat we get into.”

Daisuke blinks like he’s been hit between the eyes. “Uh- I didn’t notice that,” he says earnestly.

It's Marya's turn to go slack, the naivete in her big sky eyes popping out when she makes this face. “Well, pretend I didn’t say it, then,” she demands. “Keep…not noticing.” She passes the cigarette back to him.

Daisuke sighs, takes another hit, and turns back to Comfrey. The Little Kitten giggles at her like the meltdown of the century wasn’t happening two minutes ago, and Comfrey laughs right back. It rings in Daisuke’s ears like they’re bells.

“How’s it feel to no longer be the kid anymore?” Daisuke forces out, trying to pay attention to Marya, pushing his cards as close to his chest as they can get.

Marya laughs. “Can’t say I mind it,” she confirms. “Especially with such a cute little baby on board.”

Daisuke watches the baby in question -- the brown hair tuft bobbles as Comfrey bounces and hums quietly. “You don’t mind all the diaper changin’?”

Marya has some kind of far-away look on her face, but turns to face Daisuke. “Well, in Scrapsylvania, we have a saying: If the baby is cute, the future is bright.”

Daisuke has to laugh. “That can’t be the saying.”

“How would you know? What are you, a spy?” Marya is joking, but she has a tone about her that makes that vaguely unclear…pretty much at all times. She yanks the cigarette from out of Daisuke’s hand suddenly.

“Junker,” Daisuke chastises.

“What? It’s just a cigarette, Pappy.”

Daisuke sighs again, shaking his head, and glances back over at Comfrey and the Little Kitten. She’s holding her arms just right so they can both see how pretty the sunset is tonight, like an oil painting of oranges and reds; nothing compared to the woman in front of it.

“I told you not to call me that,” he finally says, a playful smirk on his lips.

Marya raises an eyebrow, smiling similarly. “It’s what Van calls you. And Monty.”

“Van and Monty are maybe twenty years younger than me,” Daisuke says, rolling his eyes, even though the smile never leaves. “They’re makin’ fun of me. You’re a kid, you’re doing it on purpose.”

Marya’s jaw drops in fake offense. “You just told me I’m not the kid anymore!”

“Yeah, well, you’re still a kid,” Daisuke insists, and pulls the cigarette out of Marya’s hand. “Gimme that.”

Marya looks unbothered by it, and if she isn’t, she doesn’t say so. “Y’know, Pappy,” she drawls, putting emphasis on his nickname, “If all goes well…when that kid grows up, there’s going to be someone who has to call you Pappy. What will you do then?”

Something very thick grows in Daisuke’s throat again; something that hasn’t been there since the birth. It’s overwhelming and stings in all of his senses, lighting his body ablaze with a deep, dark feeling. Something burning, powerful, total.

A Pappy. Daisuke never had a Pappy. He hardly had a mama or a daddy, nothing much more than Ghost Dog and his guns to keep him company, much less a Pappy.

How do Pappys act? Are they supposed to be good role models? Because, well, Daisuke’s already failing -- he’s smoking a cigarette with the youngest person on the whole ship, and not stopping her while she picks on him. He’s just watching Comfrey play with the Little Kitten rather than asking if she needs help, maybe even a break, if she wants it -- not to mention his long, winding list of criminal history that he just can’t seem to leave behind.

Plus, “if things go well”...Marya means if Daisuke and Comfrey are still together in a few years time. He’s never seen the rest of his life with somebody else, and trying to picture it now is like painting a canvas white. He thinks of a funeral with guests, a home with an extra bedroom, an old picture in a wallet.

That’s big. That’s so much bigger than him.

When that kid grows up, there’s going to be someone who has to call you Pappy. What will you do then?

Daisuke attempts to swallow it and can’t. He fights like Sisyphus before saying “Take a big, damn sip of brandy.”

-

The Wind Riders were not supposed to leap into combat today, but everybody knows them; one misstep out there in the world and look at that, they have.

Daisuke isn’t there. He’s on the Zephyr.

He’s watching the Little Kitten.

He and Comfrey are fighting, he thinks, technically. They’re a day out from going on a new quest and they’re already in combat -- externally and internally -- and that’s probably why she sent Daisuke back to the ship. Sure, his leg is all fucked up from the gunshot he took to the thigh, but Comfrey always let him stick it out.

Today, she angrily said, Back to the Zephyr, Daisuke.

To be honest, Daisuke is roiling in his anger: anger that she didn’t deem him useful enough to let him keep fighting, anger that she had the nerve to tell him what to do in the first place, anger that he listened. Anger that, if Comfrey told him to jump off this ship, he would.

The ring in his pocket sits heavy. He’s not sure when he’s supposed to give it to her. Right now, it feels like another gun he’s holding. Or maybe another bullet wound.

Daisuke wraps his leg, grimacing at the blood that gets on his hands. It’s certainly not his first gunshot and definitely not his last, but it’s no small feat. He sees the blood soak through the gauze before he’s even done a full go-around.

The Little Kitten coos from somewhere to the side. Daisuke shakes his head a little.

“Don’t get into the sky life, kid,” Daisuke mutters, maybe to himself. “Just…stay on the ground like your mama and daddy tell you.”

He wonders when the other Wind Riders will be back. They didn’t even leave, like, Sylvio or someone behind. It’s a completely empty ship other than a whining old cowboy and a baby crawling around the deck. He hears Marya’s blunderbuss go off somewhere in the distance and Monty shouts with glee.

“Ba?” asks the Little Kitten, of few words, like Daisuke.

Daisuke shakes his head once more. “Don’t worry about it, kid, it’s just your Grandma…bein’ the hero. Like she’s always gotta be.”

“Gan-ma?”

Daisuke chuckles a little. “Yeah, your Gan-ma.”

The Little Kitten crawls to Daisuke’s side, stumbly and staccato with every movement, but makes it there. Daisuke has been a little frightened looking at the baby these days -- with every passing day bearing more and more resemblance to Comfrey -- but a big, mostly toothless grin gets him pretty good. He can’t hold any resentment for anything so small and so, so adorable.

“D’awww…” Daisuke mutters, patting the brown tuft of hair. “What a cutie you are.”

The Little Kitten sits, pointing off at where Van’s maniacal laughter is echoing out from. “Ga!” the baby says, smile still wide.

Daisuke cocks his head. “You wanna go out there?”

The baby smiles bigger. “Ga!”

He laughs. “Naw, you can’t go out there,” Daisuke chastises. “That there fight is dangerous! You see what it did to me?”

Daisuke points at his wound, still in the process of being bandaged up. He has a vague notion in the back of his head that maybe he shouldn’t be showing a baby a gunshot wound, but the Little Kitten doesn’t cry or anything. Just kind of stares at it in fascination.

“Ohhh…” says the Little Kitten, like everything Daisuke’s said makes sense now.

“Yeah, oh,” he laughs, moving to wrap his leg some more, now that he thinks about it. “That’s why I say you shouldn’t get into the sky life. It’s nasty business.”

Just as Daisuke turns his head, he feels a squishy, chubby thing land on his wound, and a sharpshooting, searing hot pain blazing through his limb and into his chest. It’s hot and fast and hard. It’s so hot that he gets nauseous. It’s so fast that he feels light-headed. It’s so hard he gets whiplash.

“Aw, fuck!” Daisuke all but screams, reaching for his leg and cradling it as best as he can. He sucks air through his teeth and rocks back and forth, shaking, but the pain keeps reverberating through his bones, rattling him until it hurts so bad that it numbs.

The damn baby giggles, clapping excitedly.

“Augh…” he grumbles, turning to look at the Little Kitten. He wants to feel angry, he wants to yell-

There’s that half-toothy smile again. The baby thinks Daisuke’s doing a goddamn bit.

“You’re, like, a fuckin’ demon baby, aren’t you?” Daisuke asks in astonishment, an iron grip on his thigh. “Freaky ass kid.”

The Little Kitten appreciates it. Laughter bubbles out and spills over in the same way it would from Comfrey, a waterfall into a plunge pool, boiling water out from a pot. Every day he notices something new about the two of them. He can’t believe Artemisia is the one who gave birth.

He wonders quietly if Comfrey even looked and acted this much like Comfrey when she was this young. When the Little Kitten grows up, will the legacy of the Zephyr carry on? Will a new generation of Wind Riders emerge, headed by this baby, doing more than Daisuke and his team of Riders ever did? And will he be responsible for it? Will he bring them up as his own, will he be around to see it all?

He glances back at the Little Kitten, babbling still, and watches as a grubby little hand reaches for his. It paws at his fingers, trying to take hold of one of them, and Daisuke just watches as it happens.

He misses Comfrey. He’s mad at Comfrey.

Daisuke pulls his hand away from where it’s resting and moves to keep wrapping his leg.

“Alright, kid,” Daisuke mumbles. “Let’s wait for your Grandma, yeah?”

“Gan-ma!”

“Your Gan-ma. My bad.”

-

Comfrey MacLeod and Daisuke Bucklesby get married on the fourth of October in 1364.

The wedding is massive, but not intentionally so. They find a meadow somewhere out in the valley, just outside of Pilby, have a party there, and it doesn’t cost them much. The attendance, though, is a spiralling, incomprehensible number -- somewhere in the hundreds.

And they’re certainly not here for Daisuke.

Their wedding parties are full of Wind Riders. Comfrey fastens her pin to her dress so Daisuke puts his on his lapel; the wedding party does the same. Hundreds of faces he’s never seen before fill their seats and Daisuke has a few members of his various gangs sit in his family-designated seats. 

Monty’s his best man, more thanks to process of elimination than Daisuke would like to admit, and he catches him before the ceremony starts.

“I can’t even imagine how nervous you must be.”

Daisuke glances over his shoulder and sees his well-spoken friend, a far-off whimsical look on his face like everything is going to work out in the end. He always looks like that. But it’s extra…that, today.

“Aw, not really,” Daisuke lies. “Comfrey don’t make me nervous much.”

“You can be not-nervous about Comfrey and you can be nervous about the wedding,” Monty says. “I’d think you were capable of both, my friend.”

Daisuke sighs, rolling the scrappy piece of paper with his vows between his fingers, glancing at himself in the mirror. Monty holds eye contact with him in the reflection. He’s groomed his moustache and his hair has a little extra volume today.

“D’ya think this is a good idea?” Daisuke asks under his breath, gaze flickering between the paper and Monty.

He blinks at him. “The wedding?”

“Me getting married,” Daisuke clarifies. “Tyin’ myself down…do you think I can do it?”

Monty gives Daisuke a look that he can’t figure out. For a moment, he’s worried he has no idea what he’s talking about. This is so big; so much bigger than him or Monty. He’s never been married, he’s never been as fucking lonely as Daisuke is, like, all the time, he’s never-

“Are you worried you can’t?” Monty asks, eyebrow cocked.

Daisuke sighs. “More that I’m no good at it,” he admits miserably. “Like I’m only gonna hurt Comfrey, doin’ all this.”

“How so?”

Damn LaMontgommery. He’s always saying something. He’s always gotta be the wise guy, the great and knowledgeable advice giver. It’s Daisuke’s own fault for asking.

“It’s not about other women, or anything like that,” says Daisuke. “Comfrey’s the right pick.”

Monty cocks his head to match his eyebrow. “Then what is it?”

Daisuke sighs. “Me.”

His friend gives him a sad look -- for a second, Monty gets it, before he drifts back to confusion -- and purses his lips. “Pappy, I don’t think there’s anything to be worried about. Really.”

Daisuke frowns, then finally turns to look at him. “I’m a fuckup, Monty.”

Monty’s face mirrors his. “Aw, c’mon, now…”

“What if she doesn’t know me the way she thinks she does?” Daisuke laments. “What happens when she wants me to settle down, I-? I can’t settle down, I can’t retire.”

“You’ve got a long time until then, if it happens at all,” Monty protests.

“I- I don’t know, I can’t…” Daisuke takes a long, deep breath. “I’ve never been afraid of losing something before.”

“And you’re afraid now?”

Daisuke takes a deep breath. “No. I’m not scared at all. That’s what’s so terrifying.”

Monty opens his mouth-

The lavatory door squeaks open. Monty and Daisuke whip around.

There’s nobody there, even when the hinges rattle around and the door swings back and forth rhythmically, accentuating an entrance that never happens.

Daisuke squints. “What the-?”

“Bap-by!”

Looking down, Daisuke catches sight of that brunette tuft of hair waddling his way. The Little Kitten bumps up against his calves, wrapping grubby hands around him, as far as they’ll go.

“Well, hello, there!”  says Monty, kneeling down like he’s talking to a literal kitten. “What are you doing over here? Where’s your mom at?”

Daisuke smiles to himself and ducks down to pick the Little Kitten up, popping his hip to hold the kid steady. “Now shouldn’t you be gettin’ dressed?” he grins, poking at the house clothes Artemisia must’ve picked out. “You’ve got some flowers to throw for me, yeah?”

The Little Kitten giggles, fingers stuck between newly-forming teeth like they’re each their own mini, chubby, fleshy pacifier. Daisuke laughs right back. He feels Monty’s stare on the two of them as he drums his thumbs on the baby’s back.

He wants to say it’s not mine. Not my kid. Not my family.

But he can’t. He really, really can’t.

Daisuke clears his throat. “We should, uh…head back.”

“Yeah.” Monty gives Daisuke another one of those weird looks before clapping his shoulder. “This is going to be good, Daisuke.”

“Yeah.”

Yeah.

-

After a particularly successful romp at the South Pole, Comfrey and Daisuke host a dinner for the Wind Riders, the Gotches, and all of their families.

Preparing for it irks an embarrassing little flutter in Daisuke’s gut. Putting out the plates and folding the napkins and setting up the big potluck table satisfies a never-ending itch to be productive. Daisuke doesn’t know shit about shit, so he can’t cook for shit, at least compared to Comfrey, so he appreciates a task -- even if it’s there to get him out of the way.

More importantly, it’s homey. He’s doing this with Comfrey. There’s something nice about it, being a host, helping others and getting thanked with nothing other than their appreciation. Daisuke’s never had a home with a ton of people in it, nevermind one that ate family dinner.

He’s setting up a highchair for the Little Kitten when Comfrey catches him.

“I don’t think they’re coming,” Comfrey says, like she’s hardly doing more than reporting the weather.

Daisuke pauses. He knows he has to navigate her odd tone, he just doesn’t know exactly how yet. The wording implies a vague disappointment, maybe, but her tone is completely level.

“The kid?” Daisuke asks.

Comfrey hums. “None of ‘em.”

Daisuke blinks. “‘None of ‘em?’”

“Hutch or Artemisia, I mean,” Comfrey reiterates. “I don’t think they’re coming, so I don’t think we’ll need the highchair.”

Comfrey rummages through a nearby drawer and finds the exact ladle she was looking for -- distinctly, the old fucked-up one that they don’t use anymore, considering that Hutch and Artemisia had bought them a new one. Either way, she puts it on the potluck table, admiring the work she’s done so far. “We need room for Monty’s pie…” she mutters to herself. “Van said something about aioli…”

Now, Daisuke is really at a pause. He isn’t sure if now is the time to comment or not. Is it the good husband thing to do to say something, to discourage this, to scold her family, to ask what went wrong? Or is it the Daisuke thing to do to not say anything at all?

“Is there…a reason for that, or…?”

Way to middle-ground that, jackass.

Comfrey hums, once again, like they’re talking about a new road opening up. “Hutch doesn’t want the kid around these parts.”

Daisuke squints. “Around Pilby?”

She sighs. “Around us, Daisuke. They don’t like the Wind Riders. I guess we’re not a good enough influence for all of them.”

Daisuke looks bleakly over at the chair, studying its every curve and nail. He thinks about how long it took to build. He thinks about the Little Kitten kicking so hard the whole thing almost falls over.

“That can’t be right…” he mutters, almost to himself.

Comfrey sighs again, letting her hands slip into her pockets as she turns to look at him. “It’s just dinner, Daisuke,” she reassures him, happily walking up and planting a kiss on his cheek. “We’ll see them for the holidays in a few weeks.”

Still, though, even when Comfrey walks away and pretends it’s all well and good, Daisuke knows it’s plaguing her. She wants to hear the patter of the kid’s feet against the tile more than anything. Daisuke doesn’t know if she’s ever wanted anything as bad as that. Windriding, inventing, fame-gaining…

Daisuke, even.

-

They do see Hutch and Artemisia for the holidays. The Little Kitten is there too.

It doesn’t go particularly great. But it goes fine.

Until dinner.

“Rounded some stuff up. I think the Wind Riders are heading out west next weekend,” Comfrey says at one point, completely off-handedly.

Hutch sips the broth they’re all sharing, looking up oddly through his bushy eyebrows. There’s a very pointed beat of silence before he speaks again, smacking his lips. “Where?”

“Somwehere in the Confederated Imperial Republic, I think,” Comfrey says, stirring her spoon in the soup. “One of my informants says the Ministry of Deranged Science has some reach there. We’re looking into it.”

Artemisia shakes her head as she spoonfeeds the Little Kitten. “The Ministry?” she asks incredulously. “Why’re you getting messed up with them?”

Daisuke swallows nervously, but makes sure to force out his suave Bucklesby grin. “D’aw, don’t worry, Artemisia. Nobody’s getting messed up with no one. We’re heading out there to make sure they’re not…overstaying their welcome, I s’ppose.”

“They’re taking away our rights, y’know,” Hutch mutters, swinging his spoon around, droplets of soup landing on Daisuke’s face. “They’re workin’ with the Empire. They want all of us to be their ducks in a row. They wanna take our rights, take our sovereignty, take-”

Comfrey sighs. “Alright, calm down, Hutch,” she breathes. “You know I hate them as much as you do. We’re going out there for that.”

Hutch doesn’t look nearly as convinced as Comfrey does, but he bites back whatever genuinely hurtful thing he was going to say, and instead settles on, “I don’t see why you need to do it at all.”

“Because nobody else does,” Comfrey bites out, and though Daisuke can catch the venom in it, her voice never leaves its level. “People sit on their asses and complain, but they don’t do anything. Someone has to.”

Daisuke knows Comfrey well enough to know she means people like you, but is genuinely shocked to hear that she doesn’t say it. Nothing stops her from speaking her mind, not even Daisuke, not even Marya, not even Hutch. It’s something he admires about her, knowing he lets everyone make decisions for him, never trying to start anything. It’s a basic building block of Comfrey, one of her core senses of self.

And yet, she keeps her mouth shut.

Artemisia hums, clicking her tongue against her teeth. She feeds the baby another spoonful of broth. “Violence isn’t helping anybody.”

“You guys house guns and drugs to protect your home from people like the Ministry,” Comfrey points out. “Wouldn’t it be better if you didn’t have to?”

“We don’t do it for them. We do it for us,” says Artemisia. “I’d do it if the Ministry or the Empire was never even thought up. We live in a world that does not value our rights as individuals, and if you don’t stand up for yourself, you risk losing them.”

Daisuke’s still quiet, as he tends to be, but it’s like the heat of Comfrey’s rising blood pressure is radiating onto him. Hutch and Artemisia are close -- so close to getting it -- but depart from the point last second, every single time. Sometimes, it’s hard to see how Hutch could’ve possibly been raised by Comfrey, what with a take like that.

Other times, it’s really obvious. Someone as strong-willed and opinionated as Comfrey can only raise a strong-willed, opinionated child -- no matter what opinion that may be.

“Well, how can we expect anything to change if we stick to the individual?” Comfrey asks. “Someone has to make an example.”

“Well, why does it have to be you?”

Daisuke can feel the tension thickening as he scrapes his spoon against the bowl, trying to fill the horrid bouts of angry silence with some sort of noise. Artemisia’s frustrated, shaky hand collects less and less soup to feed the Little Kitten.

Comfrey finally scoffs. “Do you see anyone else taking any initiative?” she asks. “I can’t complain and expect someone else to fix it. If I have a complaint, it's my job to do something about it. Isn’t that what you’re doing?”

“We are not seeking trouble,” Hutch insists. “You’re asking to get hurt, Ma.”

Comfrey laughs a little. “Well, good, maybe I’ll make a martyr of myself, or something.”

Daisuke winces. “Comfrey…” he mutters, warning.

“That’s not something you should be proud of,” Hutch insists. “They want you to stand up to them. They’re using you.”

“What if I was the one using them?”

Hutch sighs, and then looks up to hold perfect, stone-cold eye contact with Comfrey. “Then I’d say you were a damn fool.”

“Better than being a sheep, Hutch.”

Artemisia very suddenly stands up, her chair squeaking loudly against the tile. The loud noise startles Daisuke so much that he jumps, the whole table looking up at her. “I’m getting more broth,” she announces, leaving the room.

Hutch sighs loudly, standing to follow her. “Artemisia…”

Comfrey grabs Hutch’s sleeve. “Hutch.”

Hutch yanks it away. “Don’t, Ma.”

He rolls his eyes before they land on Daisuke, something off about the anger on his face, not quite accusatory, but certainly judgmental. Daisuke watches him roll his tongue around in his mouth, deciding exactly what to say.

He lands on, “You’ve done enough,” and then leaves the room.

Comfrey sighs miserably, burying her nose between her thumb and pointer finger. Daisuke is quick to put a soft hand on her shoulder.

“It’s alright, Comfrey.”

Comfrey shakes her head. “Maybe we should leave.”

Daisuke twists his lips, glancing over his shoulder to get a glimpse of the other room. Artemisia shakes her head, shoulders tensed, while Hutch talks to her under his breath. They’ll be there for a while.

“D’ya think?” Daisuke asks.

Comfrey sighs. “I don’t think there’s much else we can do.”

Daisuke knows that’s not true. He knows that when Hutch and Artemisia come back, they’ll either ask them to leave themselves, or pretend like this never happened. They’re attempting to patch their ever-worsening relationship as much as Comfrey is, and though the bond’s shattered glass isn’t totally repairable, they don’t want to just throw it all out. Leaving would probably make things worse, in fact, it would probably force a harboring grudge for all of this. 

He reaches over and takes his wife’s hand. Daisuke loves Comfrey. It bubbles in his gut and burns in his throat. It’s so much bigger than he is. He doesn’t think he could ever want anything more than for her to feel safe and secure. And if leaving is the only way to do that…

A devastating wail comes from Daisuke’s right. The two turn to see the Little Kitten, face crumpled, hands bunched in the air -- the soup right out of reach.

There’s that feeling again. The one Daisuke keeps getting somewhere in his chest. It feels like a million tiny little shards poking at his lungs, attempting to draw blood, never succeeding. He just watches as the baby cries, parents fighting in the other room, unable to do anything about it, confused and hungry and alone.

Kind of like him.

“Aw, kid,” says Daisuke, dropping Comfrey’s hand to make it to the bowl of soup. He takes a scoop and holds it towards the kid. “It’s okay, it’s alright.”

With a sniffle, the Little Kitten looks at the food oddly, a faint cock to the head as big brown eyes stare down at a matching palette broth. Tiny balled-up hands bobble up and down. The Little Kitten looks between Daisuke and Comfrey, as if to say, Should I?

“Go ahead. Just some soup. ‘M sure your folks won’t mind.”

The Little Kitten gives them one more vaguely confused glance before gnawing on the spoon, drinking up all that can be drunk.

They do wait, the eerie tick of the clock ringing out in an echo across the room, the hushed and panic mutter of a couple’s quarrel happening behind the wall.

But the baby is eating. Comfrey puts a gentle hand on Daisuke’s shoulder as he works his magic.

“Just when I thought nobody could save the night,” she says, “here comes my Daisuke.”

-

Quests gone-wrong aren’t too uncommon; there’s just never been this level of wrong for the Wind Riders to go.

“On my back! Oi, on my back!” yells Van, squatting to a more appropriate height. “Get ‘er up there!”

Monty comes running in from the Ministry office, Marya draped in his arms, and wraps each of her limbs around Van’s torso. Blood leaks from a massive gash in her head, practically as big as her face, her eyes dimming and brightening like the flickering light on a screen. Her breath is shallow and her face is frozen, but Monty keeps patting her back to knock some wind into her.

“C’mon, Junker. C’mon, Junker, don’t give up now,” he keeps muttering.

Daisuke is as useless as he always is, practically doing nothing as his comrades handle it all themselves; a sense of urgency on their lips that he certainly feels but cannot articulate. Marya bounces limply on Van’s back as she starts making her way to the deck of the Zephyr, and all he can do is watch.

A cold hand hits Daisuke’s shoulder. When he turns, he meets the eyes of his wife.

“She’ll be alright,” Comfrey insists, a look on her face that holds significantly less panic than the rest of them. “Someone radio Sylvio. He’ll have a bed in the infirmary ready for her.”

“Already did, Professor,” Van musters, shifting to hold Marya more efficiently. She whines quietly from her place there. Van mutters some quiet apologies.

“Fantastic,” says Comfrey. “Start running.”

Van listens, quickly accompanied by Monty -- but in all that panic, Daisuke notices a tone.

He whips around. Comfrey has turned back to the office.

Anger boils in Daisuke’s chest and erupts in his throat. “Comfrey!” he shouts, grabbing her wrist. “The fuck are you doing?”

Comfrey looks at him incredulously, surely as stunned as he is by the uncharacteristic grab for her, but only tugs the one time. “I’m getting what we came here for.”

Of course she is. They go all the way to the Confederated Imperial Republic and Comfrey can’t accept that they’ve certainly lost, even here, window-shootout narrowly survived. It’s a mere moments before the department goons come for whoever and whatever’s left, definitely expecting to knock out an easy one with how injured Marya is -- though Comfrey is obviously no unwelcome kill for them.

“Later,” Daisuke insists, the sternest he’s ever been.

“There won’t be a later, Daisuke!” Comfrey points out, still moving that way. “The Ministry-”

“Fuck the fucking Ministry!” Daisuke insists, grabbing Comfrey by the shoulders. “Sweetheart-”

Comfrey shakes him off, a look on her face that is so cold and unsolicited that it pangs in Daisuke’s chest. It’s not the loving look he’s used to.

“Don’t you ‘sweetheart’ me,” Comfrey proclaims. It’s not even a yell; she doesn’t even yell at him. But it’s big. Bigger than him. “You need to go before something happens.”

“I’m not leaving without you!”

It’s then the loud bang of a door hitting a wall rings out from down the hall, a mob of footsteps close behind.

It all goes like a slow-motion film reel:

First, Daisuke sees the shadows from down the hall. It’s one, then two, then five, then twenty, and they know exactly where the two of them are. He knows that if they don’t move now, they never will again.

Second, Daisuke turns to see Comfrey. Her back is somehow already to him, moving at a speed he’d think impossible of humans. He understands all at once that, at this point, she’s not even running to get to what they need. She’s running to beat him there.

Last, Daisuke sees the Zephyr through the window. It’s not too far away -- Monty and Van are already climbing up the gangplank -- and wouldn’t take a superhero to beat the Ministry to. 

He hears the clomping of boots, the heavy breathing of Queen’s Smog, and the angry orders of bloodthirsty men. It would satisfy them for years to come to kill Daisuke right here, right now.

It’d satisfy them longer to kill Comfrey.

Daisuke hardly has a choice to make. The second he thinks it, he’s his between the eyes of a MacLeod family portrait -- Comfrey with her hands on Hutch’s shoulder; Hutch stood closer to Artemisia than his mother with an arm around her waist, and both of them holding a gentle, smiling baby.

But the Little Kitten just looks at Comfrey like she’s hung the stars.

Like Daisuke does.

He doesn’t even wonder for another second. Before she can get to the desk, Daisuke pins Comfrey’s arms to her sides and throws him over his shoulder, bolting for the door.

“DAISUKE!” he hears, somewhere far-off and foreign, but it’s too late.

-

Comfrey’s locked herself in her office again.

It happens, every once in a while. She gets overwhelmed or overworked or just straight up frustrated with herself and decides that the only way to cure it is by working more. She hides the spare key and could be in there for anywhere between an hour and a week. It’s always hard to say.

Daisuke can almost never pinpoint why.

Today, he can.

Marya’s healing pretty well; Monty told him she’ll be walking again by morning, but that it was a close one -- far too close, especially for the kid. The Wind Riders didn’t get any of those papers they needed, but they got Marya, and that should be enough.

Not to Comfrey. Daisuke knows, not to Comfrey.

He expects it to be done early. No big deal -- this quest has been a bit more stressful than the others, and Haunch had warned the crew of an incoming battle that he knows he should probably be preparing a bit better for. Comfrey is a reactionary person, and her stress can sometimes shut her down. No reason to panic yet.

Then Daisuke reads a book in bed, waiting up for her and the squeaking door, but it never comes. He stops reading and cuddles up to go to bed, one eye peeking open waiting for a shadow in the hallway to pass by, but it never does. The longer the clock ticks by, the harder the springs in the mattress seemingly become.

He’s worried. He’s worrying. Daisuke Bucklesby doesn’t worry, but he’s goddamn sick to his stomach thinking about wherever Comfrey is, whatever she’s up doing -- surely not sleeping. Knowing her, Comfrey could be dead by now, working out a way to bring herself back, even in the afterlife. The possibilities are endless with her.

Daisuke hardly waits another hour before kicking off the bedsheets and walking her way.

He knocks on the door, wincing a bit as he wonders if he’s interrupting, and scuffs his feet on the floor. “Comfrey?”

“Busy, Daisuke.”

Well, at least he got a response. Daisuke picks at a piece of lint on his denim. “You comin’ to bed there, love?” he asks.

There’s a delayed reaction, some pause like she’s listening, but it disappears as soon as it comes. “Maybe in a bit,” she says. “I got some work to do.”

Daisuke worries his lip. “Well, you need any…company?”

Comfrey sighs shakily from behind the door, her voice closer than before. “Can’t,” she insists. “You’re too distracting.”

Daisuke smirks, his ear against the wood of the door. “‘Distracting,’ huh?”

That earns a giggle. Daisuke’s heart pangs against his ribcage. “Oh, very,” Comfrey agrees, her voice just as teasing. “The most distracting.”

“I could, uh…distract you some more?”

Comfrey snickers, but it’s like Daisuke can see the smile fade from her face, even when it isn’t there. She clears her throat, and the shuffling of some papers comes from inside, before she regretfully musters out, “I’ll take you up on that later, mm’kay?”

Daisuke’s heart lodges in his throat again. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, just…why don’t you head to bed? It’s just this one night. I’ll be there soon.”

Daisuke swallows. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

He waits a moment, trying to get his wobbly feet to unstick, trying to get his heavy limbs to move, trying to get his tired eyes to blink, but none of it works.

“You’re not…mad at me, are ya?”

The words slip out before he can process them. In his perfect world, they wouldn’t have come out so harshly, so accusatorily, so insecure -- but they’re out now, spilled out on the floor like word vomit.

There’s no response.

Daisuke swallows. “You don’t…hate me, or nothin’...right?”

Still, nothing. Daisuke stuffs his hands in his jean pockets, picking at whatever junk is left in there, waiting for an answer that never comes. There’s not even papers shuffling or anything.

Maybe she did die.

“Comfrey?”

“I don’t hate you, Daisuke,” she finally says. “I love you very much.”

Daisuke swallows. He knows she means it, but there’s a thickness there that he can’t quite translate. He keeps picking at his jeans.

I love you like you’re the damn sunrise, Daisuke thinks. I love you like a pill. I love you like the Ministry loves Queen’s Smog. I love you like the whole world is desolate and you’re one drop of fucked-up water. More than you could ever know. Bigger than you could ever know.

“Okay,” is what he says.

There’s another beat of silence as the papers shuffling resumes. Daisuke doesn’t move.

Comfrey catches it. “Go to bed, Daisuke.”

“Okay,” he says again.

Instead, before he can ever think of it, he sits on the ground, leaning his head against the door.

“Goodnight, Comfrey.”

“‘Night, Daisuke. I love you.”

Daisuke nods off before he can answer. It’s just this one night.

-

It wasn’t just that one night. 

The Wind Riders are not speaking today. There was a huge blowup at dinner last night, and Daisuke swears to God he hasn’t seen a single person since then. Not even Comfrey.

It’s odd how empty the Zephyr seems to be when practically everybody is avoiding each other. There are one or two Gotch-assigned crew members that straggle along, giving him nervous smiles, but nobody else. Marya isn’t swinging from the rafters, Van isn’t doing her morning pushups, Monty isn’t up to see the sunrise, Onion isn’t sparring with Haunch, Sylvio isn’t obsessively sorting through what’s left of the crew’s supplies, and Comfrey-

Comfrey. She wasn’t even in bed when Daisuke woke up, and her office door is shut again. 

Daisuke knows that it probably wasn’t in his relationship’s best interest to side with Monty, but danger is danger. Comfrey wants to head back, to try again to infiltrate the Ministry, to prove they’re working with the Empire, and that’s, simply put, a horrible idea. It doesn’t mean Daisuke loves her less, but somebody had to tell her she was wrong.

It’s not like he was screaming his take from the rooftops, it’s just that…when she asked…

Maybe he’s a bad husband. Maybe he should’ve backed her up, but Daisuke cannot bear the thought of parading everyone out there again, especially Marya, freshly healed, but as delicate as a thin-layered scab.

All the rage he’s known, deep down, that Comfrey felt, is back in an instant. The hair on the back of his neck is practically always stood up, waiting for a confrontation that he should know better will never come. What’s left is Daisuke all by himself, wandering the deck of the Zephyr, completely -- for the first time in a long time -- directionless.

He checks the time. Nine-twenty-one in the morning.

It’s five o’clock somewhere. He heads to the kitchen.

There, finally, does he find Van.

“Pappy,” she breathes, like he’s come back from the dead or something. Her hand is deep in a bowl, mixing something with a whisk. “Good morning.”

Daisuke nods stiffly. “Mornin’, Van.” He gestures to the icebox. “Just here for my morning beer.”

Van’s nose wrinkles in a comical mix of disgust and humor, scoffing a bit at him. “‘Morning beer’? You really are old.”

Daisuke swats lazily at her and grabs the penultimate beer from the six-pack, cracking it open with his teeth with the loudest, crispest, most satisfying pop he’s ever heard. He whistles, and Van laughs.

“That’s sweet music to me,” Daisuke explains, and leans against the countertop to watch Van work. The bitter taste wakes him up like coffee should.

Van senses the question before Daisuke even asks it, so she says, “I’m makin’ a crème brûlée.”

Daisuke’s eyes bug out of his head. “Right now?”

Van eyes him warily. “You’re drinking,” she points out, giving him a wry grin. “Besides, it’s stress-baking, so it’s allowed.”

Well, there goes the illusion of peace. Daisuke sighs, an attempt at letting her know that he gets what she means, but she still bites her lip and cocks her head up at him shyly.

“You haven’t…talked to her today, have ya?”

Daisuke frowns, swallowing that ever-burning thick lump in his throat. “Uh, no,” he says. “She wa’n’t in bed this morning.”

Van sighs loudly, going back to whisking. “I can’t say I’m shocked.”

“She means well, Van,” Daisuke insists. “It’s just…Comfrey bein’ Comfrey.”

Van shakes her head. “Yeah, well, there comes a time where that’s not what the team needs.”

It’s odd. Daisuke’s seen Monty butt heads with Comfrey, he’s seen Marya get teenaged snippy with her, he’s even seen Onion poke at her once or twice. But even though she’s known Comfrey the longest of all the Wind Riders, Daisuke has never seen Van so upset with her. Even as a boatswain, in charge of a crew.

“I think she thinks it is what the team needs,” Daisuke says. “Not that I agree with her, but-”

Van huffs, angrily dropping her whisk on the table and dusting off her hands. “She’s not thinking about the team at all, Pappy,” she argues. “She’s only thinking about herself. What she wants.”

Something in Daisuke knows that, surely, must be the case. Comfrey’s never been one for total compassion, total empathy -- it’s not why he fell in love with her and it’s not why he loves her now. But to say it out loud always sounds so horrible, like she’s some horrible, selfish person, who doesn’t care about anyone or anything, when that’s not true at all. She’s just-

“-complicated,” Daisuke catches Van saying, having missed the first half of the sentence. “I’m offended she’d ask at all.”

Since Daisuke can’t twiddle his thumbs, he takes a big swig of his beer, shaking his head to himself. “I think it’s just a stressful situation, and that-”

“Oh, God, Pappy,” Van drawls. “Do you seriously believe that?”

Daisuke clamps his mouth shut. “Do I believe what?” he asks slowly, treading lightly.

Van shakes her head too. “That this is just a…complex situation, and that we’re all stressed, and whatever bullshit you’re tellin’ me right now?” Van grabs a hand towel and wipes off the dust that won’t come off her hands.

Daisuke shrugs forcefully. “I don’t think I’d say it if I didn’t mean it, Van.”

She shakes her head again. “God.”

“What?”

She sighs. “Look, I know she’s your wife, man, but…you gotta stop defendin’ her,” Van says sternly. “I know you love her, but she’s…she’s wrong, Pappy. Really wrong.”

Daisuke bites the inside of his cheek until it feels like it might bleed. He takes another shaky sip of his drink. “Yeah.”

-

He lays awake in the infirmary one night, next to Comfrey, just watching her sleep.

She got stabbed. He wasn’t even in the room.

In the books and the moving pictures, they always say they’re worried their wife won’t come back. That she’s stretching herself too thin, putting herself on the line, and they just can’t take it anymore.

Daisuke doesn’t feel that. He knows she’ll be fine. If Comfrey couldn’t protect herself, she would’ve never made it this far. Even better without him there.

But frankly, he’s no use to her. He wasn’t in the room when the blade met her arm. Haunch was. Van was. Daisuke had fucked off somewhere with Monty and Marya and none of them had caught the calvary of spies who snuck in through the open back door.

The fight was fine. That’s not the problem. Comfrey got stabbed.

She’s sleeping fine; there’s maybe a stiffness that wasn’t there last night, but it’s not anything absurd. She’s breathing alright and she’s not going to suddenly stop. The swoop of her shoulders curve into her arms like they always have, and each and every freckle on her back is in its place.

Still, though. She got stabbed. And Daisuke wasn’t there.

It’s not that she would’ve died. It’s just that he wasn’t there.

At some point in the night, the infirmary bed they’re attempting to share is hurting his back too much, and Daisuke needs to stretch like a cat before his body is stuck in this position forever. He inches his limbs forward a little at a time, hoping for minimal mattress spring creakage, and slips out of the room.

Down the ship he wanders until he finds himself in the mess hall.

There’s this big picture down there of all the Wind Riders, hanging above the table they share every night -- their younger versions of themselves watching each and every one of them like bad omens, waiting to be fulfilled. None of them have any idea what awaits them in the next few years: the many quests, the many heartbreaks, the many things in between.

Daisuke sits in front of it sometimes and just looks at it. He tries to take it all in, when he can. They had to sit for that picture for a while, and even then, everyone in it looks so happy to be there. So fulfilled by their lives that haven’t even begun.

Comfrey stands in the front, her hands on her hips, her long, graying hair flying in the wind. Flanking her are Sylvio and Haunch, then Van with a big sneer on her face, Monty with that pleasant look he’s always got, then Onion, then Daisuke and Marya at the very end.

Marya’s the only member who looks very visibly younger. If Daisuke thought she was a kid now, he has no idea what he must’ve thought then. Her cheeks are bigger and her lip ring looks vaguely infected and clumsily placed. But she holds herself with the same determination, so it’s the same Marya.

In fact, he can’t even believe how little her faith has been shaken. Even after that incident in the CIR, she’s fighting every day, tooth and nail, like her breath is a big fuck you to a universe that keeps trying to knock her down.

She grew up right in front of them all. Daisuke didn’t even notice.

He stares at Comfrey some more. At the point of taking this photo, they’d only slept together the one time, and it was a total accident -- what Daisuke had expected to be a fluke. He remembers spending the whole day trying not to trip over his words and be a professional about it. He’d never had to try like that before. No, Comfrey was the one who was cool and collected, and it only made it all the worse.

That Comfrey didn’t have a grandkid yet, which would’ve been obvious regardless of the year the photo was taken, considering said grandkid isn’t in the picture. Comfrey would’ve insisted, Daisuke’s sure, even in an all-crew picture. Even now, at the rate the Little Kitten is making appearances on the Zephyr, it’s a bit empty without the pilot-to-be.

This grandchild-less Comfrey, this single Comfrey, this unmarried Comfrey, this unstabbed Comfrey stares down at Daisuke. The big determined smile on her face starts to look warped, something horrible behind it; all-knowing.

Daisuke heads back to the infirmary. Comfrey could’ve stopped breathing the same, or something.

-

The last Wind Rider adventure docks back in New Pilby on a random Tuesday. And nobody knows it yet.

Daisuke gives Monty a little pat on the back, he clasps Van in a firm handshake, and he can’t escape from a hug with Marya. He says less passionate goodbyes to the rest of the crew but he goes home with Comfrey.

There are the occasional visits. Van, of all people, is seeing some guy from the Uplands, and last he heard, Monty’s talked about writing some books. Comfrey says she sees Marya often, but it’s not until she off-handedly mentions that she’s going on a quest alone that Daisuke starts to get it.

He really gets it when he and Comfrey decline the invitation to Van’s wedding.

Once again, Daisuke lets Comfrey do the heavy-lifting. Frankly, Daisuke would’ve been more than happy to go, but she mentions something about the trip being too hard to make, and that’s that. They don’t go, and he doesn’t think Marya or Monty do either. The letters stop coming after that, and frankly, Daisuke’s pretty sure they’re far gone from New Pilby at this point.

Without the Wind Riders, there’s nothing left for Daisuke but to get back into Pilby’s rhythm.

It means gunslinging. It means bootlegging. It means robbery and moonshining and getting in with the wrong people yet again. A cycle that will never end.

Comfrey hates it. Daisuke knows Comfrey hates it.

But she keeps adventuring anyway.

The two stay in touch with the other Wind Riders — Sylvio, Haunch, and Onion — but Daisuke stops coming with them at some point, when his life of recklessness closes that door. He tries to be sad, but tires of the effort as the quests become more repetitive and focus less on helping others -- more like helping themselves to whatever riches Zood may offer.

Fucking Zood. That’s Comfrey’s new venture; a completely bullshit legend meant to encourage sky-eyed landlubbers into leaping to their premature deaths. Well, Daisuke isn’t sky-eyed, he hardly gives a shit about what’s above or below him, so maybe he can see Zood for what it really is in a way Comfrey can’t.

Daisuke tries, really tries to choke it down. Especially as Comfrey’s decisions become ethically questionable, worse than his, more self-serving and misprioritized than he’s ever known her to be. Especially as he sees her less, their schedules completely opposite, her stretches away from home growing longer and longer each go around.

And in the midst of all of this, Comfrey is the one who asks him to settle down.

Like he hasn’t been the one sitting at her door like a wet dog. Like he hasn’t been falling asleep in his rocking chair waiting for her to come home. Like he hasn’t been doing this, running around with the wrong crowds and getting involved in petty crime, for this. For them.

And Comfrey MacLeod has the nerve to ask him to stop. To ask him to just be.

Daisuke Bucklesby has never been able to just be. He has to keep going. He doesn’t stop and he’s never planned on it. But Comfrey wants to move to the Uplands, to give up on adventuring, to ride out the rest of their lives as it leads them.

And Daisuke doesn’t know how to stop running.

-

“I can’t do kids, Comfrey,” says Daisuke one day, while they’re fighting again. “I can’t do the Uplands, I can’t do retirement, and I can’t do kids.”

Comfrey looks up from where she washes her dinner dish, a look on her face very un-Comfrey-like. It’s confused — maybe even scared, and letting him know it.

“It wasn’t- I wasn’t suggesting…” Comfrey starts, then clamps her mouth shut. “I’m not talking about kids, Daisuke.”

“That’s not the point,” says Daisuke. “You’re not listening to me. I’d be a bad influence on any family-”

“You’re perfectly fine with my family,” Comfrey insists. “In fact, you’re great with my family.”

  Daisuke shakes his head. “Naw, your boy hates me.”

“My boy hates me, Daisuke,” she says, stress laced in each word. “That’s not because of you.”

Daisuke sighs, resisting the urge to fidget with his ring like he normally would. “Then why did you say I’m good with your family?”

Comfrey shakes her head. “My grandbaby loves you, Daisuke,” she says. “Practically worships the ground you walk upon. And you haven’t come with me to visit in years.”

It’s true. Something like eight years into this now, and Daisuke hardly sees the kid anymore, but he hears all about the adventures and misadventures from Comfrey, who visits her family all the time. Daisuke isn’t sure he’s seen Artemisia in years, much less the Little Kitten. He wonders off-handledly if the resemblance to Comfrey is anywhere near as striking. Daisuke hasn’t been around both of them at the same time since the baby started talking.

And it’s on purpose. That kid came too close to depending on him, to needing him in a way he’d never be able to provide. Daisuke has no idea what he’d do with himself if he let the Little Kitten down and that is a feeling he knows he can’t house anymore. And Comfrey…

Daisuke sighs. “That’s a little out of proportion, I think.”

“It’s my grandkid, and I’m telling you, it’s not,” Comfrey insists. “If you’d just open your eyes-” 

“Comfrey, I can’t do that,” Daisuke says firmly. “I can’t do any of that.”

“Any of what?” Comfrey asks incredulously. “Being happy? Being normal? Just…being people?”

Daisuke shrugs forcefully. “I mean…yeah,” he insists. “I’m not meant to be an inside dog, Comfrey.”

  She shakes her head. “You’re fuckin’ married, Daisuke. You’ve been married for years.” She drops the dish in the sink and wipes her hands. “If you’re not an inside dog, you shouldn’t have gotten a damn ring.”

-

After the divorce, Daisuke stays in New Pilby. Comfrey goes somewhere or other. They have sex one more time on a really bad night, and then that’s it.

It’s now that it really sets in for him that the Wind Riders are over, and aren’t coming back. It was nothing more than a brief stint, a period of his life that hardly exists in the grand scheme of things, and his days will be spent alone once more.

He finds himself most nights at the bottom of beer bottles, a pack of cigarettes deep, looking at old pictures and letters from his wife- ex-wife, wondering what could’ve been if he would’ve just bucked up. Other nights, he finds himself the same, pounding it’s for the better into his brain.

The next five years are a blur. He gets older and older, but his work doesn’t stop, and each job, no matter how ludicrous, feels the same as the last. He goes through the motions of putting his finger on the trigger, knocking back the bottle, putting out the cigarette with his boot, falling asleep on the couch, but it’s like a costume. Like he’s roleplaying in his own life. Like a ghost going through the motions from when he was alive.

Sometimes Daisuke feels like it's fair. Like it’s good riddance and that Comfrey doesn’t know what she lost. Sometimes Daisuke can convince himself that he was supposed to be alone and that it was ridiculous to even try to deny that.

It’s not like that usually, though. Usually, he’s wracked with his sadness, wracked with memories and the tragic nostalgia of the house he used to share with her. He stops sleeping in their old bed eventually and hardly spends a sober minute even on his premises. Ghost Dog nudges him awake when he falls asleep on the floor, which is more than once.

He’s too old for this. At some point, he’s going to be grieving the love he had for longer than he even had it. The worst part is that he knows it wasn’t a mistake. He knows that this is the only way he will ever live, the only way he’s ever been able to live. He rides alone. It’s him and his thoughts and his guns and his Ghost Dog.

So when he gets the letter from Comfrey, he thinks he’s misreading it. His vision is all blurry and he’s halfway through the next bottle already, so he throws it on the table and figures it’s a bill of some kind. Maybe the Pilby cops on his ass again.

Then, the next morning, when he’s nursing a horrible hangover with a remedy Artemisia taught him, he finally catches her handwriting on the cover. For Daisuke.

He rips it open. It goes like this.

Daisuke,

You may have heard by now that I’m leaving town. The Wind Riders are coming — though I’m sure you know which aren’t — and I know you know that I wish you’d come too. We have big plans and a big lead. Perhaps the next time you hear from me will be from Zood.

You may have also heard that Hutch is done with me. The divorce was one of his last straws — one of too many immature and reckless decisions I’ve made, he says — and he and Artemisia don’t want me around anymore. While this guts me, I guess I understand it. I’ve never been a good influence. I’m sure you know that well.

It’s now that I regretfully request a favor from you. I know it’s been a long time, but if there’s absolutely anything you can do for me, even if you never do anything for me ever again, I ask you this one thing: I want you to watch my grandchild.

I know you’ve said you can’t do families, that you’re terrible with mine (though you never were), that you’ll fuck things up in a way that is unfixable. While I hold your opinion of high value, I worry for that kid, the spitting image of me. I’d watch myself if I could. But as my adventures take me elsewhere, I don’t want what happened to me to happen to my grandchild. 

I know adventure calls to that kid. Selfishly, I ask that you don’t let it. Though I’d like it if it did, I ask that it doesn’t. There are many people in this world who hate me, Daisuke, and my last name isn’t doing anybody any favors. Hutch and Artemisia won’t want to see you, so please, do it quietly. Just keep my baby safe. As if it were yours.

I’m very sorry to ask this of you, Daisuke. I’m very sorry to contact you at all. But you know I wouldn’t unless I must.

Thank you for everything. All my love,

Comfrey MacLeod.

P.S. The kid asked to be called Olethra. What a beautiful name. Make sure everyone uses it.

Chapter Text

Olethra MacLeod is nothing like Daisuke remembers.

On his first day on MacLeod-duty, he spots her in the crowd and wonders for a full four and a half seconds if he’s traveled back in time. He’s sure she already had the stark MacLeod genes before she started her various affirmation therapies, but the second he sees her, he’s hit like a brick between the eyes. He sees the Zephyr, the squishy pink hands, the ring in his pocket, the old office, picture frame after picture frame in it, Artemisia and Hutch and…

Olethra looks just like Her, is the point.

He never thought he’d see her face anywhere else ever again.

She’s nearing thirteen years old now, but Daisuke only ever knew her when she was a little toddler. Now, she’s growing up -- her brown hair is long and she stitches herself dresses to wear to school everyday.

And it’s not that Daisuke ever felt burdened by his ex-wife’s request, but in the time since he read the letter, he’s been stewing in the morals of it all, wondering how bad the MacLeod family has it that he has to protect her from people. That is a lifelong commitment; one that, if it ends any earlier than that, would be entirely his fault.

Then, he thinks of long summer nights on the deck of the Zephyr, arms around the woman he loved, chin on her shoulder, eyes closed as the cool breeze hits his face. It smells like weed and wine and her hair curls against his cheekbones, and she plants a little kiss on his temple, and it’ll never end.

In this dream, there’s the faint giggle of a Little Kitten. His wife laughs, rubs her thumbs against where his hands rest on her waist, and makes some sarcastic, loving comment about needing to get back to the baby. Daisuke snickers and presses his nose into her collarbone, taking in the faint parchment-y scent of her perfume, and he tells her that he loves her. Even though she didn’t ask.

They’ll never leave this spot, here. Wind and rain and snow will come and they’ll get older, but the world could fall off its axis and spin off into space and none of that would matter. They’d be standing here, rocking side to side as she hums, listening to a Little Kitten play with her toys. 

And in that thought, it’s all worth it, even if it kills him.

-

Olethra is just the greatest kid.

She’s lively, she’s sensitive, she’s intuitive, she loves to laugh. And she’s got a wicked humor too, the kind that earns scolding from the adults around her and scandalized snickers from the kids in her wings. She looks proud of each and every one, like she doesn’t even care what anyone thinks of it.

Hutch and Artemisia are very kind with Olethra, clearly attempting to put her in a bubble she keeps popping, but it doesn’t discourage them from support. Daisuke sees Hutch in the market with fabric that Olethra wears in a dress a few days later; he catches Artemisia in the makeup shop the week of Olethra’s birthday; he, one time, passes by as Olethra follows her mother into the women’s lavatory.

It’s good to see. At first, he thinks this is all the protection she needs. He almost gives up here.

Then comes Kevin.

Kevin, this snobby-ass kid who moved from somewhere in the Uplands to his massive house on the clean side of Pilby, which he would really like everyone around him to know. He’s taller than the boys, prettier than the girls, and richer than all of them combined. He’s going to go to some big, fancy university some day, and probably become some legislature fuck who has a thing or two to say about Daisuke’s misadventures.

Now, Daisuke’s one rule for watching Olethra is that he doesn’t make it an everyday, every-place kind of thing. He doesn’t come to her school, he doesn’t go to the farm, and he doesn’t leave town. Instead, he knows where in public to be and generally when -- whispers through the grapevine, as shaky as they are, work wonders when you have the connections Daisuke does.

He’s in the market, like always, when he sees Kevin for the first time. Olethra is at a jewelry stand, admiring a beautiful necklace with a group of classmates, giggling quietly.

“MacLeod,” Kevin sneers, giving Olethra the once over.

Daisuke catches it immediately: her shoulders tense and her breathing seizes, a look of utter terror on the face that usually holds so much joy. The classmates surrounding her scatter practically the second Kevin’s voice rings out, leaving her there, all by herself.

“Kevin…” Olethra mutters, to no satisfaction. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” Kevin grins, giving Olethra another judgmental look. “Still wearing dresses?”

Olethra picks at the one she’s wearing -- purple and blue, one of her favorites. “Yeah, I make them myself,” she says defiantly, though her voice stays small.

Kevin scoffs like that’s idiotic, grabbing the lace on the sleeve and rolling it between his fingers. “I can tell,” he says. “Are you buying costume jewelry to go with the clown outfit?”

Olethra rips her arm away from him. “I’m just looking.”

“Stealing, more like,” Kevin insists, leaning against the counter. “Right?”

Olethra blushes a deep red, shrinking under his gaze. “What? No!” she exclaims, rubbing her arm where he grabbed it earlier. “I don’t- I wouldn’t do that.”

“Yeah, you would, I saw you take those limes from the fruit stand last week,” Kevin says.

Daisuke scoffs at the absurdity of it. Olethra is a lot of things, but certainly not a thief. She’s too self-aware for that; too guilt-ridden and pure of heart. Plus, she’s taller than the other girls her age, and operates lanky limbs like a baby giraffe. No way she could get away with something like that.

Daisuke awaits her denial, but is shocked to see her face twist into shame. “That was different,” Olethra insists. “Those were for my guinea fowls.”

Daisuke’s taken aback as something swells in his chest. Is it weird that he’s prouder of her this way?

“The actual fuck is a ‘guinea fowl’?” Kevin asks incredulously, looking at Olethra like she’s started speaking in tongues. “Is that some made-up shit from your books?”

Suddenly, Olethra’s blush turns into a frustrated flare, her eyebrows knitting together. “My books aren’t made up! They’re biographical!”

“Whatever. It’s little kid nerd shit.”

“They’re about my grandma,” Olethra insists. “Y’know, Comfrey MacLeod? The one and only?”

Daisuke’s heart drops out of his ass. He hasn’t heard anyone say her name in ages, much less Olethra -- especially now that the family doesn’t see her anymore.

And the books. Daisuke had been vaguely put off by Monty’s book-writing ventures, with absolutely no desire to pick up a single one of them, but the fact that Olethra’s reading them…and they must be those books, right? Not some other books about Comfrey, if those even exist? Do they? What are they saying about him, about Comfrey, about his team? What are they telling Olethra?

Kevin’s laughter snaps Daisuke out of his spiral. “Yeah, I know who your grandma is, twerp, I don’t give a shit.”

Olethra frowns. “Don’t call me that.”

Kevin sighs again. “My dad says you MacLeods are all the same. Dirty thieves. Taking what rightfully belongs to hardworking people,” he explains. “Your grandma’s crazy, y’know.”

Olethra’s face warps into exactly what Daisuke’s must be doing: some amalgamation of horror, outrage, and incredulousness. “No, she’s not,” she says. “My grandma is a genius.”

“A goddamn freak, is what she is,” Kevin says. “She’s off to the loony bin, where she belongs. Crazy, dirty thieves like the MacLeods belong in-”

BANG!

It’s just the ground. The dirt path erupts, close enough to Kevin that it sprays him right in the eyes.

The crowd around them panics immediately, screaming and erupting into confused conversation and hustle and bustle. Kevin is included -- he shrieks like a little girl and books it. “Holy shit!” Daisuke can hear him calling.

Daisuke blows the smoke off of his gun and tucks it away. He had it coming. It was never gonna hit him; kid’s a total wuss.

In the chaos, as fast as the crowd is moving and exclaiming profanities, Olethra stays completely put. She stares at the ground, where the dirt exploded -- she digs at the hole with her boot, but the bullet’s too deep; she’ll never find it.

People pass her by, but Olethra looks up.

Before she can make eye contact with him, Daisuke is gone.

-

About a year in, Daisuke learns that more people hate Comfrey MacLeod than she had ever told him.

It starts with the Kevins of the world -- people who have something to say without a candle to hold for it, and for a while, that’s Olethra’s only threat. She’s the absolute gift of Gath, but even Daisuke can’t deny that she’s an odd kid: excitable, a little nerdy, and she smells like day-old hay a solid ninety-eight percent of the time.

Still, though, he can’t imagine not thinking each and every one of those oddities aren’t the perfect puzzle pieces that make her Olethra. It’s who she is -- who she’s always been -- and in the year of getting bullies to buzz off and petty thieves to back up, that’s becoming more and more clear to him.

Then one of Daisuke’s drinking buddies at the saloon mentions a rumor about CIR folk running around Pilby.

At first, Daisuke can’t believe it. “That’s absolute horseshit,” he tells his friend, and he believes it, because what the fuck would the Confederated Imperial Republic be doing in New Pilby? This, of course, was before the politics of Gath got as sticky as they are today, but Daisuke’s all about believe-it-when-I-see-it.

And then he sees it. Not even hidden, either, just out and about in their uniforms and thick Eisengeistian accents. The posh way they speak may muddle some of it out, but Daisuke knows the syllables of the MacLeod name as if they’re the rhythm to his favorite song.

He rounds up a few guys (including his drinking buddy) and gets them out of town before they can do anything -- in and out of an alley behind the bar like it never even happened -- but he thinks about it for months to come. Years after their mission in the CIR, and Comfrey still has people from it coming after her.

What the hell is she doing out there?

Daisuke pushes the thought down until it knots up in his throat, but it never really goes away. Every day is another reminder of what she never shared with him, the life he’s no longer a part of, the person who is still out there and still knows every vulnerability about him. He will never be totally anonymous ever again, which is increasingly obvious as the various Comfrey-hunters recognize him by name.

It makes the grip on his gun shaky, the set in his jaw shifty, the strength in his step faulty. When Olethra is being followed by a bunch of guys in fringe masks, one of them shouts Bucklesby! in fear. When Olethra is being staked out by CIR officers, they spot him and begrudgingly moan It’s Daisuke! And when Olethra’s at the amusement fair, Daisuke spots how the men who follow her onto the rollercoaster mouth Pappy from far away. 

It’s silly. It makes him feel so small.

But he can’t be small. He’s got a little girl to protect.

-

Daisuke never gets caught, until he does.

When he spots Olethra today, as planned, he isn’t prepared for someone to be with her -- much less a Gotch kid. Daisuke’s not sure which one he is, some Woolyworth or Kindlesnap or Hicklebottom or whatever the fuck they name their kids, but he looks to be on the younger side, closer to Olethra’s age than he thought the Gotch boys were. He knows it’s a Gotch because of that firm browbone and that permanent confused curl in the lip; Cadswitch, rest in peace, had the exact same ones.

The roughneck fuckers in the bowler hats get out of a little buggy to approach Olethra personally -- some guys Daisuke’s seen around town offhandedly, but never up close -- and they’re talking to her with these big snarls on their faces like they’re about to bite. He can’t hear what they’re saying from this far out in the alley, but all he needs to know is that one of them grabs her elbow, and suddenly, the whole scene goes red.

Daisuke’s thoughts go a million miles a minute.

She’s too far away for him to spook the guys without hurting her, but she’s completely isolated by the port here, away from town- she needs to kick; why isn’t she kicking? Why is that Gotch kid just fucking standing there? Move! And do it now, before Daisuke has to- he’s going to have to, of course, and he’s going to have to move now, now, now, now, which pockets did he put Biscuit and Gravy in? Where’s Ghost Dog? Should he stay hidden, should he move, should he-?

“‘Scuse me, fellas!”

It comes out of him before he can even think about it. But his feet take him there before his head can, approaching the situation as calmly as he can muster, though a roiling anger burns in his chest, dwarfing him and his sensibility.

Man, this better be badass.

Daisuke forces out a grin. “I’m looking for a place for an old man to just sorta dribble out a little piss,” he says, hands in his pockets. “If there’s a spot around here.”

He doesn’t look at Olethra. He feels her burning gaze drilling holes into his face, studying him in a way he doesn’t want to think about -- familiarity, recognition, full-circle understanding…

The men’s recognition, though, hits Daisuke hard and fast, that rush of dangerous adrenaline burning through his body. One of them scoffs. “Why don’t you piss up your ass, you old dog?” he asks, a cock to his eyebrow. “Get lost, Pappy.”

What the fuck did he just call me?

He flashes back, for the first time in a long time, to his time on the deck of the Zephyr. Junker teasing him with his cigarette in her hand, Monty’s crackly laugh after a long day, Van over his shoulder seasoning his bean recipe. They all call him Pappy and giggle when they do.

And nobody else calls him that.

Daisuke rolls his eyes. “You’re toast.”

In one swoop, hardly more than a second, Daisuke whips out his favorite gun and shoots once, twice, and doesn’t even have to move the third time. Two guys double over, moaning and groaning, and the third -- cursed with mercy -- stares at Daisuke in horror. He just looks back at him, not even moving.

“Is there a place for me to dribble out a little piss?” Daisuke asks again, unable to deny the smirk on his lips. 

The guy fucking cries, falling to his knees in fear. Daisuke, frankly, is taken aback -- it’s not the first time it’s happened, but damn, is it shocking -- and, again, feels Olethra’s stare on him.

Well, it was badass for a moment, he supposes.

Daisuke swallows. “Uh- nevermind.” He shifts awkwardly. “Not what I-”

“Piss on me,” the guy whines in terror.

“No-”

“Was that what that was?”

“No, I was-”

“I’m just trying to read it right.”

Daisuke sighs loudly and spits on the ground. “Go on. Get.”

He listens, running off and leaving his buddies behind, who are either losing so much blood that they’ve fainted or they’ve died. Oh, well.

Finally, finally, Daisuke must turn to Olethra, and hold eye contact with the Little Kitten he once knew, for the first time in more than fifteen years.

Her eyes are a honey brown, her hair is long and tumbling and chestnut, her cheeks are a rosy red with a spray of freckles across her button nose, and her sharp jaw is almost identical to-

“Greetings and salutations, my friend,” says Daisuke, a shaky smile coming to his face. “I-”

“Oh my God, it’s really you!” she exclaims, a wondrous look in her eyes. “You- you even said your catchphrase! ‘Dribble a little-’”

“Yeah,” Daisuke mumbles, cutting her off as best as he can. “I got, uh…a weak bladder.”

“Yeah! Yeah, yes, canonically weak!” Olethra rambles, her eyes hazy, struck with stars. She’s not even thinking about what she’s saying, finally swallowing. “Tha- thank you, thank you.”

Daisuke nods, his gaze unable to leave hers. He knows that look -- excited, daring, naive and unaware. She’s ready for anything, unknowing of what’s to hit her, ready for it anyway.

She’s sky-eyed.

-

When Daisuke hears Comfrey is missing, he can’t help it. He has to go.

-

Daisuke can’t believe it, but he lets yet another MacLeod drag his ass back to the deck of the goddamned Zephyr.

It cannot be emphasized enough how little he cares about the sky life, how out of place he feels on this crew with this group of people who love it so dearly, how unworthy he is to be taking the place of somebody who would appreciate it more than he does. All the weights of a thousand nitpicks and hairs-out-of-place make him feel so small here, like it did back in the day, like he’s destined to feel anywhere.

But even then, he can’t deny the little rush he gets from seeing everyone again. Not everyone, exactly, just Van, and Monty, and Junker, but it feels close enough, if not for the gaping hole where she-

Daisuke pushes it down. Not now. Not now.

Aside from the old Wind Riders, there’s the Gotch boy that Olethra befriended, Maxwell, who refers to himself as a “gentleman fister” -- whatever the hell that means. He’s the youngest Gotch, maybe thirty or so, but is accompanied by his absolutely insufferably posh older brother, Wealwell, so it’s kind of like Cadswitch is here with them in death. And of course, there’s dear Olethra, who wrapped Daisuke up in all of this again, just like Comfrey did, once upon a time.

So, really, it’s not so different.

Except in all of the ways that it is.

Van’s married now, of course, to a twerpy stowaway named Bert, and works out of some swanky restaurant in the Uplands with an unfortunate name. She’s loud and possibly has a thicker accent than the last time Daisuke saw her, but it’s still Van.

Monty is an author, which Daisuke already knew, and is running around doing some kind of environmental activism that Daisuke hates to say he doesn’t really understand. He knows it’s important, and that Monty’s still all kinds of famous, so if his old best man is satisfied that way, then he supposes it can’t be too bad.

And Marya runs a toy store, of all things, in the rubbley streets of her hometown in Scrapsylvania; last time he had heard, she was out flying with some new crew, raising the next generation of Wind Riders. Clearly, they’re not here, and she’s not flying anymore, so something surely changed, though she doesn’t talk much about it.

She doesn’t talk much at all, actually. She’s hollow and gaunt, hardly more than a sack of bones with working lungs (though Daisuke catches that she didn’t kick that smoking habit, so he’s not sure how that’s possible). When he knew her, Marya was the Junker. She was a bubbly little thing, with a bright light in her eyes and a taste for adventure, the worst thing to ever happen to her being that attack in the CIR…

Clearly, times have changed. For everyone, frankly, and it’s hard to watch -- Daisuke hesitates to admit the flood of panic he felt when he registered what the new splash of steamed gold was protruding from Van, but it came to him, hard and fast. And Monty has all these gray hairs now, with thick, furrowed stress wrinkles in his forehead, rendering him practically unrecognizable from the artist Daisuke once knew. 

They’re old now. They all are.

Basically means Daisuke’s ancient.

It gets more obvious when Mordecestershire hits their deck -- Daisuke vaguely remembers the name, he thinks, but the guy is from the CIR, and all those pricks are the same. This guy’s old too, and it takes everyone and their ma’s willpower to get through one fight, while they’ve hardly been in the sky for more than ten minutes, and there’s surely much more to come. Daisuke’s back aches from jumping and his joints shake when they bend. They’re not as young as they used to be.

But even then, even then, there’s a mystique to it -- some kind of light in the air when Monty asks to pull a Pilby ‘71, which Daisuke surely hasn’t thought about since, well, ‘71 -- that shoots hotwired bolts of electricity through Daisuke’s body, a shot of jitteriness he hasn’t felt in years. A sense of living that hasn’t hit like it used to.

And when Olethra comes in with the MechLeod, killing the very last goon at the helm, a wild frenzy in her eye like his death was worth a million drugs, Daisuke expects to feel panic.

He doesn’t. Oddly, he’s proud.

-

Everyone goes back to where they used to sleep, as if nothing’s changed, and no time has passed. For Daisuke, it means the bed he used to share with Comfrey.

He hasn’t slept in a proper bed in a while -- he’s either not sleeping at all or crashing drunkenly on the couch -- and, admittedly, this is one of the better ones to come back to. The quiet creak in the springs isn’t even annoying like it used to be; it’s homey, like a melody he hasn’t heard in years, a splinter of what used to be his normalcy. The whistle of wind outside the window is enough to make Daisuke cry, especially as he tucks into bed and slips into the left side -- completely out of habit.

He’s in and out of sleep, most of the night, desperately teetering between an overwhelming comfort and a horrifying distress. On one hand, he’s back with the Wind Riders, traveling on the Zephyr, up in the air for one last adventure; on the other, Comfrey is missing, and Daisuke is looking for her, running around on a dangerous quest with her dear granddaughter as they follow her.

Frankly, Daisuke has a horrible pit in his stomach that begs the question if they’re searching for a person or a body. He can’t let himself think about it for too long -- the thought absolutely guts him; the idea that he’ll never see Comfrey again, that when he left, it was too late, that he’ll have to pull a wailing Olethra off of-

“Oh, somebody’s already-”

“Ow! Hey-!”

“Sorry! Sorry.”

Daisuke peeks an eye open just as the creaky door starts to swing, annoyingly loud and disrupting, but it makes the voices a bit more clear. Two women stand in the doorway -- one, frail and small, like the living dead, and one, athletic and tall, with a pillow in her arms.

“Are you-?”

“I was just gonna…”

Marya glances over at the bed and almost makes eye contact with Daisuke; he shuts his eyes before she can catch him. She gasps quietly and lowers her voice. “Oh,” she mumbles. “Pappy’s already in here.”

“Yeah, he-” there’s a gap here, Olethra must be shrugging, “he told me he was just gonna crash here tonight, so…”

“Yeah, I- I suppose it’s his bed, too.”

“Yeah.”

There’s a long stretch of silence -- so long, in fact, Daisuke needs to blink a little just to check that they’re still here, which they are -- before a little bit of shuffling rings out. A weight dips the other side of the mattress, though only one.

“You’re not going to sleep up here?”

Olethra must be the one on the bed, but Marya takes a second to respond. “No, I’m just- I was going to sleep here,” she mumbles, coming from somewhere in front of Daisuke. “I just need a change of scenery, y’know? The…airflow in my room is…not good, so.. I’ll be awake before him anyway, it’s no big deal.”

It’s like Daisuke can hear the frown on Olethra’s face when she says, “Okay.” Then, she says, “Take my blanket.”

Marya tsks disappointedly. “Oh, no,” she laments. “Olethra…I couldn’t-”

“Please? It’s cold.”

Marya huffs, waits a moment, before a begrudging groan escapes her lips. “Well, what about you?”

“I’m in a bed! I’ll be fine.”

There’s another long stretch of silence -- Daisuke’s not sure where it’s going from here, but he half-expects it to be done. Marya is not one to take help, especially not from someone younger and less experienced; she may be shellshocked and insecure, but she knows her value, maybe even to her detriment.

Still, though, Daisuke hears the thin pat of skin-to-blanket.

“Goodnight,” Olethra says, her voice melodic and pleased, curling up where she sits.

Marya hums. “Goodnight, Olethra.”

And then it goes quiet.

Daisuke expects to feel the bed shift some more as Olethra gets comfortable, but it doesn’t. He peeks an eye open after a second just to understand his surroundings -- Olethra is curled up at the foot of the bed, nothing but a pillow and her limbs to keep her warm. Marya, meanwhile, is on the floor, entwined with Olethra’s blanket and the sextant, clasped in her hands.

He wants to tell them both, Stop that. Get in bed. Make yourself at home. But his mouth feels like lead, wired shut, unable to articulate a single word, much less come lay over here with me. Daisuke grips the blankets with iron white knuckles and does not dare move a hair.

He waits, and he waits, and he keeps looking for a way to speak, but it never comes, and his bones ache with a creak anticipating to be released. The cool autumnal air leaks into the room and has this smell, something so homey and nostalgic, it almost moves Daisuke enough to…well, move.

It doesn’t, though, and he never does. It’s not until he hears Marya’s snores that he realizes his window is long-closed; he might as well go to sleep now.

The mattress shifts again. Daisuke can’t help it -- he peeks an eye open and pops a glimpse at Olethra, who is wrapped up in herself like she’s in hibernation. On the other side of the bed, trotting his way over to her, is Ghost Dog, who chases his tail in a few circles before wrapping up against her. Though definitely fast asleep, a faint, pleased smile crosses Olethra’s lips.

Something roils in Daisuke’s throat for the first time in a long time -- some dark feeling telling him that a dog was able to comfort Olethra before he was, that he could’ve pulled her aside and asked how she’s been feeling, that he could’ve at least gestured for her to get comfortable-

FWOOM!

Daisuke covers his eyes as an ugly, yellow light beams into the room. Damn lighthouses; Comfrey used to tie blankets over any glass to avoid them, especially as their days got longer and more taxing. Gathie governments got real smart with aeronauts like Comfrey, and their compromise were these ugly, fuckass spotlights -- and Daisuke was pretty sure there weren’t any for a few more miles, so they must’ve added even more, which is mildly infuriating.

On the floor, Marya shifts. She doesn’t quite wake up, but the light illuminates her face, burning right into her shut eyes and surely irritating her slumber. A tiny groan of irritation escapes her lips -- a second longer, and she’s surely awake.

Daisuke sits up, completely silently, as years practicing with Comfrey found him. Gently, reaches over to his nightstand, where his old wide-brimmed hat rests, and ducks low to place it over Marya’s eyes, the tip hardly touching her nose. Like a baby and a pacifier, Marya’s stirring rests.

Daisuke glances once more at Olethra. Her hair frames her quiet face in an etienne, a bout of peace on her normally animated face. For once, she’s resting.

He leans forward and folds the comforter over her and Ghost Dog. 

-

Monty leaves Daisuke and Olethra alone in the big Zoodian forest, with nothing around but the MechLeod and the big, protruding leaves. She asks him to help tinker, and though he doesn’t know much, he agrees, and then it’s just the two of them.

It’s quiet, for a long moment. Daisuke’s never been alone with her. He knows so much about her and wants to know more, but Olethra…

He doesn’t want to freak her out. She’s twenty; Daisuke can hardly remember being twenty outside of the ball of nerves that sat in his chest the entire duration of the year. She has questions to ask him, he knows, and he’s got things to say and apologies to make, she surely knows, so it helps nobody to be silent.

So, he bites the bullet, and he swallows hard.

“Well, Olethra, I just wanted to…” Daisuke takes a deep breath, “...chat for a second.”

Olethra has this look on her face after he says it -- maybe it’s relief, or maybe it's some kind of warped panic, but something certainly crosses her face -- but she swallows too and nods curtly. Her hands fidget with a piece of MechLeod paneling.

“I realized I’ve sort of been…” Daisuke wrings his hands. How to put this? How to make her feel safe? How to keep it casual? “...Our relationship has sort of been a little…one-sided.”

Olethra giggles a little to herself, ducking her head low and tucking some hair behind her ears. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Well, I was just sort of…taking out the people who bother you from a distance and not really conversing with you,” says Daisuke, his throat tightening up. “So, I guess that’s…I don’t know if that rings true for you, or…?”

He looks back up at her, finally catching her gaze from under her bangs, and is able to locate a vague confusion there. She knows that about him -- he’s already explained it -- but it’s surely been on her mind, a very large accusation with very little explanation.

Daisuke sighs. “Remember your high school bully?”

Something flashes in Olethra’s eyes. “Yeah. Kevin.”

Kevin. “Yeah, Kevin.” Visions of a snot-nosed freckly prick dance in Daisuke’s head, shoving Olethra to the floor, picking at her dresses, calling her the wrong name…

“He moved away.”

Daisuke glances over at her again. He can’t really read her face this time, but she waits for him, as if testing; as if anticipating something from Daisuke that will cause a worldview shift.

He doesn’t want to freak her out. She’s young, still interpreting freedom for the first time, making her life her own and weighing which decisions are hers and which are designed by fate. The last thing he’d want to do is make her feel like she’s had no autonomy since Comfrey left, something already so upsetting to her on its own, without Daisuke’s interference.

He wonders if she remembers him from before. When she was a Little Kitten and he was her real Pappy.

So, he swallows. “Yeah,” is all he says. “Yeah.”

Now he can read her expression, a confused disbelief in her wide eyes. Daisuke shakes his head -- “He did,” he insists, not technically lying.

“We-”

It slips out of his lips before he can think about it. “I sent him on.”

Olethra blinks. It’s certainly not the answer she was expecting; her mouth moves to form words, though no noise other than various squeaks emerge. “I- wait, what?”

Daisuke shrugs, kind of embarrassed about it, now that he thinks about it. “He did move away,” he explains. “Because I packed up his bags, and- and I bought him a train ticket, and I said…y’know, go on and get.”

Olethra stares at him wordlessly -- there’s a moment here where Daisuke becomes hyper-aware of the fact that, while he’s been watching over her, she’s been reading about him her whole life. He’s a celebrity to her; Daisuke’s been worried about finding his footing as an ex-family member, when to Olethra, he’s never been family at all-- he’s the guy on posters, a name on a page, a story they tell kids to keep them in line.

It hurts a little. It’s isolating.

“Oh, woah,” Olethra says, a faint smile playing at her lipline, stars bright in her eyes. “That’s so cool to hear.”

Abort, abort, abort, abort, abort- Daisuke can see the puzzle pieces falling into place, just in the reflection of how big her eyes are when she looks at him. Very quickly, she’s idolizing him, putting him on this perfect, prim pedestal -- exactly where she holds Comfrey.

“But I’m just saying!” exclaims Daisuke, every word punched out of his body with vigor. “We should have…conversations, ‘cause I’m realizing-”

Olethra nods. “Yeah, yeah.”

“It’s…maybe a strange dynamic.”

What’s the point of this again? Daisuke can’t get the taste out of his mouth that they’re just talking about the concept of talking, no actual meaning coming to any fruition, none of the words he actually wants to say coming out of his mouth.

“Well, maybe at some point, I can even it out!” suggests Olethra, offering a polite smile, picking at her dress once more. “If someone’s giving you a hard time, I can…silently erase them…?”

She says it so awkwardly, but Daisuke knows she means it. He offers a smile, “I love it.”

She smiles back. “Cool.”

He swallows that lump in his throat that never leaves. “We could also…have a conversation…?”

Olethra shakes her head in disbelief, rubbing her clammy hands against her clothes, muttering to herself. “Oh, totally! Totally, yeah, um…”

She looks around, desperately clamoring for something, anything; he can tell. She’s just as nervous as he is.

“Um…what was my grandma like?” she asks innocently, a bit wobbly.

Wow, she really is nervous. Daisuke stirs in this horrible, aching pit in his chest, like he’s failing her, like he’s failing her with this conversation, like it’s all lead up to this only for him to fail her so catastrophically.

He tries to be funny. But he also tries to say something comforting. It comes out tragically.

“Oh, she was so hot.”

Daisuke cringes immediately, worse when Olethra attempts to grit out a friendly smile, failing miserably as her embarrassment floods to her cheeks.

“Wait, sorry,” he blubbers, trying to recover, “I’m realizing that’s…not the way to connect-”

“No, no!” Olethra says, laughing awkwardly. “I’m sure she was…um, legs for days!”

No idea what that means. Daisuke nods curtly. “Uh, yeah, legs for days.”

Olethra looks back down, picking her dress so much that Daisuke’s frankly shocked it doesn’t tear at the seams, obviously itching to get back to her work. She opens her mouth to say so; Daisuke attempts to beat her to it.

“I just-”

“Olethra! Pappy!”

Daisuke exhales. Monty’s back.

Olethra nods in acknowledgement and runs for Monty as fast as she can, leaving Daisuke there, staring at the Zoodian forest.

-

Daisuke hears Olethra ask for him. He turns around.

She’s holding a ring on a silver chain.

He hasn’t seen it in so long. But he knows what it is.

A lifetime ago, maybe even two or three, Daisuke Bucklesby forged a ring all by himself. In its bindings, he carved the words on high we go, and he gave it to Comfrey MacLeod as a promise to be by her side for eternities and forevers that never came.

Daisuke wore his ring on his finger, back when he did wear it. The day he took it off, there was a thick, white band of skin marking years of hidden sun. When he took it off, it was like he never did at all. When he took it off, the ring was still there for weeks to come. And when he took it off, he didn’t get to just be done.

It may seem silly to think, but Daisuke’s never realized that Comfrey didn’t have that. There was no mark that stuck with her. She took off the necklace and left it here, in this office, and never had to think of it again.

On a bad day, Daisuke still sees that white band, eating his hand until it consumes his skin and swallows him whole; a little thing in such a big world.

He holds the ring like it's broken; like it's a pearl in his shaking hand. He tangles his fingers in the chain like they’re shackles, digging into his skin, marking them red and raw. It’s so heavy here, like this.

 “Pappy?”

Daisuke doesn’t realize he has tunnel vision until he looks up; vertigo washes over him until his eyes go out for a moment. Olethra bleeds into frame, Van behind her, both watching him with the biggest, saddest eyes he’s ever seen.

Olethra doesn’t look like a kitten like this. She looks like Comfrey.

Daisuke swallows and closes his fist around the ring. “I’m fine.”

-

Daisuke hasn’t made his special beans in years. But Monty asks him if he will. So he does.

While he’s in the kitchen, Olethra finds him.

“Oh. Hey, Pappy,” she hums, her hair tied up in braids for the night, a silky matching pajama set adorned. “What are you up to?”

Daisuke hums. “Just makin’ dinner.”

Olethra blinks confusedly. “You’re making dinner?” she asks, tugging at the ties in her hair.

He shrugs, glancing over his shoulder. “Figured someone should give Bert a break for one night, dontcha think?”

“I guess,” she drawls, wandering further into the room. Her bare feet pad across the tile floor, the steps light and feathery. “I don’t think I even knew you knew how to cook.”

Daisuke gives her a playful look. “I’m eighty-one years old, Olethra.”

She blushes. “Well, yeah, I just mean…” Olethra waves her hands, trying to find the right words to recover. “I just mean I didn’t know that you could cook well. Like, what the hell are you making right now, this shit looks gourmet-” Olethra leans over the edge of the pot, gazing in nosily.

Daisuke moves the spoon out of the way, laughing a little. “Just some beans.”

Her eyes practically bug out of her head with confusion; her nose crinkling. “Beans?”

“Of the ‘special’ variety. I’m pretty famous for them ‘round here,” Daisuke chimes, giving Olethra a grin. “Monty asked. Don’t tell me he wrote all those damn books and didn’t mention Pappy’s Special Beans even once?”

Olethra shrugs. “The books aren’t really about the…in-between stuff.”

Daisuke cocks an eyebrow. “The ‘in-between stuff’?”

“Like, hanging out on the ship. They’re kids books,” she explains, leaning against the counter. “It’s about the adventure.”

Daisuke hums. “Well, I think the ‘in-between stuff’ is part of the adventure.”

Olethra sighs, blowing her bangs out of her face. They twist and fall in the air, right where they were before, as if nothing happened at all. “I’d argue it’s most of it, even,” she whines, back to toying with her braids. “We have, like, five seconds of adventure, and then it’s more waiting on the ship.”

So young. Daisuke kind of wants to laugh, but he gets it -- she had a picturesque idea of being a Wind Rider that couldn’t be further from the truth. This idea of back-to-back constant thrill, flying from high to high until an inevitable colossal final battle, winning in the end because that’s what the good guys do. It’s nothing more than a fantasy, an idealistic dream of exploration.

Real expeditions are almost entirely lackadaisical, but that’s too harsh of a reality for this sky-eyed sprout. He’s not trying to piss all over her dreams.

So, he sighs.

“Twenty years ago, when we were explorin’ all the time, and we were always on quests ‘n shit…” Daisuke shrugs. “We always made time to have dinner as a group.”

He wipes his hands, a little smudged with seasonings, flicking his fingers off above the placemat. Just the smell is enough nostalgia to last Daisuke a lifetime; if he were anywhere else in this moment, he’d transport back to right here, in this very kitchen.

Though, before, it had always been Comfrey keeping him company here, doing her research while he cooks -- not talking, just breathing each other’s air. She said she liked the quiet humming coming from the other side of that room. Daisuke can’t even remember what song that must’ve been anymore.

“If someone was in the infirmary, we had dinner in the infirmary,” Daisuke continues. “If someone had to keep watch outside, we ate outside. One time, Monty got poison ivy, and we couldn’t go in his room; we all ate outside his door and talked to him through the walls.”

Olethra pouts her lip. “Aw, that’s sweet,” she coos.

“But it’s stuff like that that makes us good in battle, y’know?” Daisuke asks, refocusing on the beans. “How am I supposed to see the big things about everyone if I don’t know the little ones that got them there?”

Olethra shrugs. “I guess that makes sense.” She plays with her sleeve. Olethra loves to fidget. “But you guys never get sick of each other or anything?”

Daisuke cracks a wicked grin. “Already sick a’ me?”

“No, I didn’t say that!” she whines, laughing a bit and swatting at the air. “I just mean…I’ve only been stuck with my parents my whole life, and…” Olethra trails off before deciding that a shrug is a good enough closer.

If there’s anyone Daisuke can imagine being sick of, Hutch and Artemisia are good options. They’re intense, and not the fun kind of intense that Olethra is, full of passion and joy and artistry and zest for life. They’re intense in almost every opposite way. They hate Comfrey so much, stand for everything she doesn’t -- the people who feel close to Comfrey could never, ever, feel close to either of them.

But the thought of Olethra being stuck there hurts a little. Stuck in a family that can’t see her fullest potential. Stuck in a body she finds no comfort in. Stuck on the ground when she yearns for the sky.

Daisuke hums softly. “I s’ppose we get sick of each other. Everybody does, every once in a while.”

“But?”

He sighs. He puts the spoon down one last time and holds Olethra’s gaze. There’s something sad about her today --  maybe all the time -- but it's sticking with him.

“But you still love ‘em, at the end of the day,” Daisuke confirms, a gentle smile on his lips, feeling like a wise old man. “They’re still your crew. Even when they fuck up.”

Olethra sighs. “Yeah, but how do you know that, though?”

Daisuke shrugs. “Well, we’re all here, aren’t we?”

-

He likes it when people visit him in the captain’s quarters, but tonight, Daisuke locks the door.

He sits at the desk, he closes the windows so as to not disturb the candle he’s lighting, and he opens a letter.

Dearest Daisuke-

Daisuke immediately puts the parchment down and swallows that ugly lump in his throat. Her handwriting is the heaviest cursive he’s ever seen, but every word decodes himself before him. He knows how she writes his name.

Dearest Daisuke,

It’s not likely this will ever make it to you.

Well, it wasn’t, yet it has. She always makes it to him, even in ink under his thumbs, even in dreams where he swears she was there next to him, even in memories that hit him hard and fast like concussions. It was never likely, but it was always going to happen.

True planes of existence stand between us, and yet, as I write this, can imagine your sweet face, your overgrown whiskers, and your dusty boots beside the bed.

It’s true. She used to pick on him for how dirty his shoes always were, tracking mud through their house and into their room and across their nice carpet, leaving plenty of mess for one of them to clean up in the morning. At some point, when Comfrey left, Daisuke stopped worrying about the mess. It was always bound to come back.

As I lie in a bed in the captain’s quarters, barrel snoring deeply beside me, sheets pooling at my waist, I am left thoughtful, reminiscing on a different captain’s quarters with your smooth chest by my side. With every deep snore bubbling out of Goldbeard’s barrel, I find I miss your little sleepy sniffles.

Something flutters in Daisuke’s chest.

Did we make a mistake, my love?

Every mistake. All the mistakes. Any mistake, any ever made by any motherfucker in history who has ever dared to, absolutely pales in comparison to the one they made over a decade ago; the one that haunts every action and every reaction since. It’s not a matter if they did; it’s why.

With every man, woman, or crystal construct I caress, I find my mind always wanders to you, Daisuke. No matter how hot or built or chiseled they are, no matter the many, many nights of passionate sex I’m entangled in throughout the years, not one of them can take the place of you in my heart.

Alright, Daisuke thinks, Brag.

We were electric, I know, but more than that, we were real. Stable. I have never wanted to be one thing forever, but maybe I could’ve been yours.

He’s been punched thousands of times; so many that he can hardly recall them as individual moments rather than mildly interesting facts about his day. Yet this -- maybe I could’ve been yours -- that’s more than a punch, it’s a stab. That’s a dagger through the heart, twisted in circles upon impact, ripping him open until there’s no organ at all.

I loved you, do love you. Yours is the only wedding ring I’ve ever saved, you know. I keep it on a chain in my favorite office to ensure it is not lost in my travels.

He keeps his too. He’s never been married before, but he would’ve kept it even if he had. Even if he had been married and remarried three or four times over. Even if Comfrey was proven to be a figment of his imagination. Her ring would stay in the pocket in his wide-brimmed hat.

I know you have kept my Olethra safe over the years.

Happily. With thrill, even. Such a little thing that has given him so much purpose. He holds the task in his heart like a blood oath; like it were in his vows, like he promised it to her from birth. He’d do it again and again.

I am forever indebted to you for that.

Don’t be. It’s more than Daisuke’s pleasure. It’s the journey of a lifetime. He can’t imagine a life without Olethra MacLeod, though he supposes there was a time he’d say the same about her grandmother -- yet, at this point, he’s been divorced for longer than he was married.

Love through the ages,

Wait-

Comfrey.

But there has to be more. They have to have more time. There has to be more on the back-

P.S. Do you still have my skin-toned swim cap? I am in desperate need of it.

There’s a long moment of silence.

And then Daisuke laughs. And he lights a cigarette.

-

Daisuke is the only person who notices Olethra is gone. He slips out the door while everyone is arguing and finds her in the hall, his own hat slipping off of her head and onto her temple.

When they make eye contact, he sees something in her gaze. A guttural terror, a pleading that it’s not true. It can’t be true.

Daisuke doesn’t know. The letter from Haunch was rough. 

He offers her a smile. “Sorry,” he lies as smoothly as possible. “My head was…gettin’ a little cold.” He gestures at the hat on her head.

For a moment, he thinks she’ll quip back at him. He thinks she’ll give him some snide, judgmental yeah…right, that pokes at his lungs until he lets out his own chuckle. That’s the MacLeod he knows.

She doesn’t, though. She pushes this dreadful smile out, wobbly and warped, before bursting into tears.

And just horrible, horrible tears, at that. Her face has contorted into a carnal distress, her chest is heaving with panic, her hands are shaking as they find their way to cover her mouth. Olethra is absolutely wracked with sobs, gripping herself in a frenzy, attempting to find purchase on reality.

“Aw…” escapes Daisuke’s lips before he can even think about them moving.

And Olethra launches herself into his arms, burying her face in his chest.

For a moment, he freezes. He thinks of the baby that punched him in the bullet wound all those years ago, the little shit. This isn’t her. This is the baby that Comfrey used to show the sunset every night.

“It’s alright, kid,” Daisuke promises, wrapping his arms around her. He rests his head on hers. “It’s alright. It’s alright.”

Olethra shakes her head. “But she was bad.”

She says it like she wants Daisuke to tell her no. That Comfrey was a perfect person their whole marriage, that a magic spell was cast on them that forced their divorce, that somebody was holding her at gunpoint to put all these people in so much danger. That she loved her, and that meant something -- that they’re searching for someone who deserves to be searched for.

For as many years as Daisuke has been trying to push the thought down, in this moment, it finally clicks. He knows all at once that that isn’t true. He knows who Comfrey is -- a mess, a headstrong, hyper-focused, tunnel-visioned, imperfect, beautiful mess.

So, he just sighs. And he separates from their hug, looking down.

“Y’know…” he mutters, trying to find it within him to be honest. “I think sometimes…the people you love aren’t always their best selves. It’s hard to find a way to love them anyway.”

It’s not the answer Olethra wanted, but she understands that it’s the truth. She sniffles, rubbing her nose.

“Yeah,” she says. “I just…I didn’t really know her, so I think a lot of this stuff adds up, and…”

She’s picking at her dress again. Daisuke wishes she’d stop; she’s going to rip this perfectly good one that she spent weeks making.

Olethra sighs heavily and sniffles again. “I just think my parents are so boring,” she laments, spreading her arms. “So, I thought I found these new, exciting people who get me, and get my grandma, but then it’s like…they also think she’s flawed, kind of…to the core? And…” She drops her arms, shrugging. “I don’t know. I think it’s really just a hard truth.”

Daisuke nods, watching her carefully. He realizes, finally, that she’s not picking at her dress at all -- her hand is fidgeting in her pocket.

He squints at her. “Whatcha got there?”

Olethra looks up, her eyes barely meeting his from under the hat, and blinks. “Oh,” she says, moving her hand. “I found this photo.”

She holds it up. A young Olethra -- a Little Kitten, from just after when Daisuke must’ve gotten divorced -- rides her guinea fowls, wearing a big, dumb cowboy hat, a big grin on her face like she’s having the time of her life.

Next to her, like this, his questions are answered.

She really has always been like this. Adventurous. Sky-eyed.

A MacLeod.

“Wow, you’re…getting after it, on there,” Daisuke mutters, lost in thought.

Olethra nods. “Yeah. I was really young then.”

He wants to laugh. He doesn’t. He says, “Yeah, that’s cool.”

She says, “Yeah.”

Shakily, Olethra moves her hand away, tucking the photo back into her pocket. She swallows thickly, pushing down some other kind of emotion Daisuke must not have clocked. His eyebrows furrow as he analyzes her and watches her glance at the door.

Daisuke holds an arm up. She looks at him quietly.

“You don’t have to go back in there just yet, if you don’t want to,” he assures her, offering a gentle smile. “Take a breather.”

Olethra swallows again and hugs herself, glancing at the floor. “I’m just…” she says, “I really want to find her.”

Daisuke hums. He waits for her to continue.

She does. “I feel like she must’ve had a good reason for it,” Olethra tells herself, wringing her hands, “so I just…”

Something shifts. She takes a deep breath; though her voice was wobbling a moment ago, she levels it. “I feel antsy,” she finally says.

Daisuke nods again. “I feel that way too.” He pushes a curl behind Olethra’s ear. “We’ll find her,” he promises.

Olethra smiles a bit when he touches her, graciously, like it was her hint at reality. As soon as it comes, it goes, and she worries her lip. “Do you think she hurt the girl that Marya was helping?” she asks him.

It’s a big question. Daisuke doesn’t know much about Ludmila, but Marya has made it quite clear that she remembers Comfrey being there, saving her life. He sees a world where she must choose between a hysterical, grieving Marya, and a Marya that died far too young, and chooses the one where she gets to say she did.

But purpose. Comfrey is all about purpose. She says to do it because you are capable; do it because there are those who cannot. Set wrongs to right and freedom’s fight to ever chase the day in winged flight, says her poem, and she’s always been that way, even when she was young, even before Daisuke knew her. If she made a choice, she made it with a purpose.

“I don’t know,” Daisuke says, because he doesn’t. “If she did, then I don’t…”

Then I don’t know her at all. Then I never did. Then she’s the worst of all the things everyone ever said about her.

“I don’t…”

I don’t know. I don’t know her. Not anymore. Not today. Not the person you know. Someone else. Someone I loved once. Someone I still love. Someone you don’t even know.

“I…”

I love her like a pill. I love her like the Ministry loves Queen’s Smog. I love her like the whole world is desolate and she’s one drop of fucked-up water. More than she could ever know. Bigger than she could ever know.

It makes Daisuke feel so small.

“Nothing in me believes she would do something like that on purpose,” says Daisuke, because that’s the truth, and that’s as far as he can go.

“Okay,” says Olethra, who nods. She takes a long, grounding, deep breath, and nods again. “Okay.” She swallows. “Cool.”

Daisuke nods too. “But…you know that doesn’t make it right.”

“Yeah.”

Yeah.

-

Olethra, Olethra, Olethra, Olethra-

She’s covered in blood. Something sticks out of her head. Monty holds her body, half-standing, half-breathing, half-alive. Emphasis on alive. But hardly. Maybe it would be better if she was dead.

Mordecestershire found them. Because of course he did.

Daisuke’s not listening to Monty. He’s laser-focused on Olethra.

Olethra, Olethra, Olethra, Olethra-

He wasn’t supposed to let this happen. Not to her. She could have died -- why have so many people been so close to death in his care? He’s put in charge only to fuck it all up, like he always does, like he’s always done-

He should’ve gone with them. Monty could’ve gone with Maxwell, or maybe with Marya and Van, or better yet, they all went with Olethra, and she didn’t get hurt. Better yet, she didn’t come at all. Better yet, she’s back home and on the farm.

Blood oozes from her head and she tries to run into the MechLeod. She trips and falls and shudders. Marya gets to her before Daisuke does.

Olethra, Olethra, Olethra, Olethra-

After two long decades, Daisuke finally understands Hutch and Artemisia. Trapping her like a princess in a tower. That way, Olethra is safe, not risking her life for something so abysmal and unnecessary. She’s too headstrong, too driven, too sure of her fact as opposed to other fiction. She’s going to get herself killed. Even if she can handle herself, she’s going to do it.

It’s Comfrey. She’s just like Comfrey.

-

It’s all worse after Katur.

She was hardly going to make it through the night after Oda. After the temple, Daisuke is half-convinced Olethra might just up and die.

He’s up all night in the infirmary. He just sits there and watches her sleep, making sure she keeps taking those long, huffy breaths. She drools a bit.

Daisuke feels so small. So powerless against everything. He can’t do this again -- love only to lose. He can’t sacrifice his peace for a person who will never know it. He’s too old for this. He’s too old to be sad for the rest of his life.

He holds Olethra’s hand. She hasn’t let go since Katur. He hasn’t planned on being the first to break it, even when she got clammy. The other hand sticks out a thumb, slitted between his teeth, biting anxiously.

She’ll be fine. This time. But what about next? What about the time after -- what happens when Olethra’s funeral is scheduled before Daisuke’s?

He’s convinced he’s been cursed with time. No matter how reckless, how free-spirited, how selfish he forces himself to be, he just won’t die. It’s been an excruciating eighty-one years of finding the most unsafe person alive and latching onto them for Daisuke, and every entry into that book is a firm reminder that life is just fucking cruel that way.

He supposes that’s why Comfrey sent him here to watch Olethra. He’s meant to prevent the very thing that happened. Just like with Comfrey, just like with Marya, just like with all of the Wind Riders, just like his ma and his daddy. Just like them all.

What a joke.

Olethra stirs in her sleep, whimpering in pain. Daisuke lets her drag his hand to her side -- she curls up into his palm, pressing his hand to her face. Her freckles dance as she smiles contently, falling back to unconsciousness like nothing had happened at all.

Daisuke uses his other hand to cover his face while he cries.

-

He thinks of that fantasy he used to have. The one of the summer nights on the Zephyr.

Daisuke’s married. There’s a breeze. He holds his wife and there’s a grandkid somewhere around, giggling. There’s weed and wine and all that. Her hair tickles his chin. He loves her. He tells her he does. She didn’t ask, but he tells her.

It’s a dream from forever ago. It’s not what it used to be, memories muddled in a lifetime of knowledge, details skewed between what was real and what was idealistic, but it’s always with him, somewhere. He knows the feeling it brings him more than the details.

Daisuke’s hat is in his hand. He places it on his heart.

When they first met, Daisuke used to do this all the time. He’d tease her and call her little lady or baby and she’d cringe, swatting at him and giggling, telling him off for talking to her like that. He’d lean in all suave-like, ask her for a forgiving kiss, and she’d give him one like she’s bestowing a kindness upon him.

He still sees her in his mind from back then. Honey brown eyes, long and tumbling and tortuous hair, rosy red cheeks. A big constellation of freckles, too, if the sun hit her face the right way on the right day. Her button nose, her sharp jaw, her wicked grin.

When Comfrey MacLeod gets off the Zephyr Mark II, that’s all he can see.

Chapter Text

Olethra hid when Comfrey returned. Daisuke saw it. And he didn’t have words for it.

He doesn’t have many words at all in this moment. He can’t help but spectate his own life again.

Marya isn’t even here. She’s inside somewhere. Daisuke can’t blame her. He wonders bleakly if she’s watching through a window or a crack in the door, or if she’s put on a record, smoking a cigarette. He wonders if she’ll ever forgive her.

Daisuke didn’t have the time or the mind to wonder about forgiveness when Comfrey resurfaced. He just moved, right to her, where she planted her lips on his and everything made sense for a moment. It was simple there, at that time.

The more he stands here, though, the more everything contorts; the more heaven’s trumpets start to squeak and rupture. Comfrey’s alive, Comfrey’s here, Comfrey’s still in love with him -- oh, God, Comfrey’s alive, and here, and still in love with him -- and all of that comes crashing down so fast.

Daisuke’s pictured this so many times. A joyous reunion of tears and love confessions and apologies. Well, Comfrey wouldn’t apologize -- she’s never been one for sorries -- but Daisuke would. And they’d hold Olethra, a family once more, and Comfrey would lead them right to Straka, or Tazgw’agwa, or whoever it is they’re fighting now. They’d all go back to Gath and retire there to a little house on a hill in Pilby and everything would be perfect.

Now, though, Daisuke watches Comfrey touch Olethra -- holding her shoulders and pushing curls out of her face and murmuring loving praises into her temples.

Selfishly, something in him burns; roils.

Comfrey wasn’t here. She doesn’t even know Olethra anymore, not in a time where she’s come into herself, not while she’s been fulfilling her potential. Here she is, exclaiming various iterations of look at you! and forcing her to twirl, but Daisuke’s already seen it all. They all have. Everyone except for Comfrey.

Comfrey, who disappeared from her family for a decade to dabble in the politics of a made-up land. Comfrey, who sent Daisuke to do the heavy-lifting. Comfrey, whose careless actions got Haunch killed. Comfrey, who surely would’ve done the same to any one of these people on this very deck -- even to Daisuke, perhaps even to Olethra.

“You made it!” he hears her say, somewhere off in the distance, his ears still ringing. “You found Daisuke! Did you get my message?”

Daisuke laser-focuses on Olethra, as he finds himself doing these days, only to find that she’s already looking at him. Like a kid at the doctor’s office hearing words she’s never heard before. Like a baby giraffe silently pleading for help walking. Like a lost puppy asking for him to open the door.

Olethra’s a bit breathless when she says, “The one that you left on loop?”

Comfrey is still Comfrey, even a decade later. She responds at a million words per minute, almost like bumbling to herself, alone in her office, the door locked, Daisuke not allowed in -- “The one- I left a message. The broadcast at Ramansu Power Station.”

Olethra nods. “Well, that was how we were able to find Ramansu, and that’s how we were able to find the true temple, and how we were able-”

Daisuke cringes before Comfrey can even get the words out. Her eyes bug out of her head and she flinches like the revelation punched her in the face. “You’ve been to Katur?” she asks incredulously, her eyes never leaving Olethra.

She swallows. “We’ve been everywhere.”

Her eyes are starting to get darty, her hands fidgety -- picking at the seams of her dress once again. Daisuke catches another glimpse at him, but as soon as it comes, it goes.

Comfrey warily follows her gaze to Daisuke before flickering back to Olethra. “What were you doing at Katur?” she demands, her voice raising.

Olethra gulps. She shrinks under Comfrey’s gaze.

Daisuke takes a step forward, vision flashing with red. “We were just-”

A gentle hand rests on his shoulder, giving it a reassuring squeeze. Olethra carefully nudges him out of the way and looks Comfrey dead in the eyes to say, “Looking for you.”

“For me?”

Daisuke blinks incredulously -- almost more incredulously than Comfrey does -- and really sits with her response. For me?

Yes, for you. Yes, for you, because as far as we knew, you were long dead with a trail of mysteries yet to be solved. Because you were fucking missing for a decade. Because you’d either gone mad or killed yourself before you could, and now you stand here, some amalgamation of both. Because it’s all been for you -- everything has been for you, in the twenty years I’ve known you. I love you like a pill. I love you like a pill.

And yet, Daisuke can’t get mad at her. He’s never been mad at Comfrey, not once in twenty years, not even when she left him. He just keeps watching her talk to Olethra.

If he closes his eyes, maybe, he can pretend that this is all a dream, just like the others. Selfishly, he wants to love this; to forgive her for everything now that she’s back. At least she came back. Plenty of people never do. Most people, even.

A week ago, he said, The people you love aren’t always their best selves. It’s hard to find a way to love them anyway. But it’s not true. He hates that it’s not true, not for him. He forgives when it’s Comfrey. He forgives, and forgives, and forgives.

The whole thing is bitter, where it sits on his tongue.

It’s warm. It roils. It sits in his throat like a lump.

-

Maybe it's some kind of an itch, or a divine premonition, or just some wise old man intuition. Call it what you will, but Daisuke gets an inkling that tells him to go on a midnight stroll around the deck of the Zephyr.

He was right. He finds Olethra sitting on the steel ledge, legs tucked under her chin, lasso tied around her waist to keep her sturdy.

Daisuke sighs and approaches her. “Hey, kid.”

Olethra jumps a bit, whipping around to catch Daisuke’s gaze. She laughs a little bit when she does, shaking her head and pushing her hands through her hair. “Of course you found me.”

Daisuke hums. He leans against the steel. “How’d I know you’d be here?”

“I dunno. But it just makes sense that you would.”

“How come?”

Olethra rolls her eyes, laughing a bit more. “‘Cause it’s, like…the cinematic thing to happen.”

Daisuke laughs too. “Aw, I can already see the scene in Monty’s next book.”

Olethra lights up, twirling her hair between her fingers. “You think I’ll be in his next book?”

Daisuke laughs more. He reaches into his pocket and slots a cigarette between his pointer and his middle, flicking open a lighter with a tinny tink! “C’mon, now. Don’t dawdle. Tell me what’s wrong.” The flame catches. “Why aren’t you in bed? It’s late.”

Olethra’s giddy smile fades to something a lot more solemn -- not quite a frown, but as knowing as one. “I feel like you know why,” she mutters, like she’s mourning.

Daisuke exhales and watches the smoke leave his lips, floating off into the deep violet of the night. “Yeah,” he mumbles, another little cloud speaking with him, “Yeah, I know.”

The Comfrey of it all. They had a long conversation about it with the other Wind Riders, but mum’s the word since then. Purposefully, sure, as emotionally exhausting as it's been to discuss the aeronaut in the room. But for Olethra and Daisuke -- her family -- it’s not enough. They can’t just go to bed and sleep it off, as bad as they’d like to.

Daisuke rolls the cigarette between his fingers, a careful skill he’s practiced in sixty years of smoking, getting just close enough to the bud to feel the heat but not to get burned. He can feel Olethra staring at him. If she thinks she’s getting a hit…

“It’s like, I don’t know how to feel,” Olethra laments, rubbing her arms. “Y’know? Like, I’m kinda happy, because she’s back, but it’s like…now we have to do this stuff with the Straka, and it’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just that…it’s kind of her fault that we have to, and…” 

“Yeah, sure,” says Daisuke. “It’s a bad thing that we have to fix, and the fixin’ part is fine, but there’s only a bad thing because…” He can’t even bring himself to finish it.

“Yeah.”

Olethra bites her lip and stares right through Daisuke. He doesn’t look back -- he picks a spot on the wall of the Zephyr (now deemed Mark I) and doesn’t break his gaze. He wants to take a drink, and his flask weighs heavy in his pocket, but he doesn’t touch it. Not here. Not in front of her.

“Are you okay?”

He thinks he’s the one who said it, frankly, until he looks back to Olethra. Her staring has warped into something much more concerned, a wobble to her lip that wasn’t there before. She’s waiting for his answer. She asked.

People don’t particularly run around asking Daisuke if he’s alright. He’s not sure he’s been asked that question earnestly, outside of the throes of battle, in twenty years. Not since he’s been married to Comfrey, surely.

“Pappy?”

Daisuke carves out the room on his face for a weary smile. “Yeah, I’m alright, Olethra. Thanks for askin’.”

Counterly, she frowns. “Are you sure?”

Daisuke puffs out more smoke. It twists and swirls in the air, like an angry stormcloud following the Zephyr’s MacLeod widows wherever they go. He keeps the smile on his face, like he knows something she doesn’t (he certainly does not). “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Olethra shrugs. Fidgeting with her dress again. “I don’t know, I feel like…I’m this sad, and I didn’t even know her, really.”

And I did?

“And you did.”

“Aw, you know her just fine, Olethra,” Daisuke insists, pushing down that everlasting lump with another hit. “She’d say so, at least.”

“Yeah, but…” Olethra shrugs, leaning back into her knees. “I don’t know. Most of ‘knowing’ her came from reading about her and idolizing her. Not, like, talking to her. But she was your wife.”

“I guess.”

The seriousness makes Olethra laugh a little. “She was,” she insists.

Daisuke cracks a wry grin too. “No, I know, just…”

“‘Just’ what?”

He hits the cigarette again. “I dunno. I don’t think anybody really knows Comfrey MacLeod.”

Olethra’s smile disappears. As if this is pulverizing -- as if this is the worst of her fears about Comfrey confirmed without saying anything at all. “Even you?” she asks him.

He exhales. The smoke cloud does a little dance, mixing with his breath in the cold Zoodian night.

“Yeah,” Daisuke admits miserably, his smile faltering. “Even me.”

-

Daisuke doesn’t dream.

Maybe he’s just old. Maybe his mind is so weary and battered that there’s not much life left to fantasize about. Maybe he’s not creative or he’s chronically uncurious or something along those lines. Or maybe he just doesn’t dream; hasn’t in a long time.

Maybe that’s all true, but he does dream that night.

He goes to bed after hours awake with Olethra, very literally talking her off that ledge; he tries to avoid getting too complicated with his feelings, but frankly, it just makes him woeful. Like he hasn’t been honest with Olethra, like he’s shielding his true feelings for the sake of hers, like she’s being transparent with him and he’s failing her that way.

So he goes to bed feeling heavy, guilty. But he wakes in his dream weightless.

It’s his house, but the sun is seeping into the windows for the first time in years, turning everything a warm yellow and orange. His creaky old record player with the crooked needle scratches and whines as it plays his old favorite song, the one he hasn’t heard in years; some old man crooning about the upcoming holidays and family and cheer and all that.

Normally, it’d bum Daisuke out. No family left to celebrate with. Nobody to swap gifts with; no tree and no decorations, nothing special about the day.

But there’s a ton of people here. And Daisuke knows all of them.

His drinking buddies, their kids and their partners, the old Wind Riders, the new Wind Riders, Artemisia and Hutch, Olethra, Ghost Dog, Ludmila, even Wealwell is here, and Daisuke’s not even mad about it.

When he sneaks away into the kitchen, he finds Comfrey, holding a box in her palm, wrapped neatly with a bow. She beams at him -- her smile is worth a thousand of those breezy nights on the Zephyr. She tilts her head up and kisses him sweetly. Her lips are saccharine; she’s just had some of Van’s baklava. It feels so real.

“Finished just in time,” she grins, holding the box for Daisuke to see. “I hope she’ll like it.”

“She will,” Daisuke insists. He can’t stop smiling. “I know she will.”

Comfrey frowns. “You don’t think it’s too showy to give it to her like this?”

“Olethra’s been beggin’ for a Wind Rider badge since she could talk,” he points out. “I don’t think she cares how it happens.”

Comfrey exhales, nodding to herself. “You’re right, you’re right.” Like it’s a calming mantra.

Daisuke cracks a sarky smirk. “I always am.”

That’s certainly one way to break her. Comfrey gives him a playful look of disbelief, the one the wrinkles in her forehead are quite familiar with. “Oh, always, huh?”

“Yep. Always.”

“Would you stake your life on it?”

“I would.”

“What about mine? Would you stake my life on it?”

Daisuke’s still grinning. “This ain’t a test, is it?”

Comfrey’s nose crinkles as she smiles back. “Is it?” she teases.

“Well, darling, did I pass?”

“Answer the question,” Comfrey insists, crossing her arms. “Then I’ll decide.”

Daisuke thinks for a moment, but he finds it. “I would stake your life on anythin’,” he says.
“Because I know that if you were in trouble, you’d use that head a’ yours-” He taps her on the center of her forehead once, twice, “-to get yourself out of it.”

The flirtatious look in Comfrey’s eye settles into something softer, calmer, gentler. She twists her lips like a schoolgirl, bashful and flustered.

Daisuke smirks like he won the lottery. “Good answer?” he asks all innocently.

Comfrey rolls her tongue in her mouth. “It was alright.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“So I pass?”

She sighs and takes a quiet step closer to him. Under this roof, in this room, as close to her as he is, it’s like their own sanctuary is made in their breath; their eye contact. There’s no world outside of the patches of green in Comfrey’s eyes and the fading freckles on her cheeks.

She reaches up with her free hand and holds the back of his head, carding through what’s left of his hair with her thumb. “I guess I’ll allow it, just this once,” she smirks, “since you’re so handsome.”

Daisuke smiles softly. They inch closer. “Oh, am I?”

“You are.”

“Well, ain’t that-?”

“EUGH! Grandma! Pappy! Gross!”

Comfrey and Daisuke shove their bodies apart, turning and finding Olethra in the doorway, a wrinkle of disgust in her nose. She looks so physically repulsed that Daisuke has to chuckle; it escapes him before he can even register it.

“Aw, ‘m sorry, Olethra.”

She certainly does not accept the apology, walking further into the room, moving to complete whatever mission she’s been sent to do. “I took down all the mistletoe and everything,” she laments, shaking her head. “I went out of my way.”

Comfrey gasps playfully. “You took down my mistletoe?”

“Yes!”

“Why?”

Olethra gestures vaguely. “‘Cause you guys are all…cute, or whatever! It’s gross! Stop.” She grabs something from the junk drawer, certainly a request from her mother, and stops in her tracks to eye Comfrey’s hand.

Comfrey, holding Olethra’s gift, of course, moves swiftly to tuck her wrist behind her back. “Ah-ah-ah! No peeking!”

Olethra blinks. “Oh, that’s for me?” she asks incredulously, pointing at herself.

“It may or may not be.”

Olethra grins. “What is it? What’d you get me?”

“Olethra!”

The Little Kitten turns to Daisuke. “Pappy’ll tell me, right?” she asks, giving him her biggest, sappiest, doe-st eyes and pouting her lip. 

He has to admit, when the sunset hits her brown eyes like this, they’re absolutely gorgeous. Daisuke drowns in them. Something tugs at his heart as he imagines the little baby that used to run around this place.

He opens his mouth. Comfrey swats at his arm.

“You shut your mouth, Bucklesby,” she curses him, wagging a finger in his face. “If you say anything-”

“Alright, alright!” Daisuke holds his hands up in surrender, turning back to Olethra. “Sorry, kid. Captain’s orders.”

Olethra groans. “Fine. Whatever.” She heads back for the archway. “Gotch is asking for you guys, by the way. He wants to play Pass the Parcel.”

“The hell is Pass the Parcel?” Daisuke mumbles.

“Be right there, baby!” Comfrey chirps.

Olethra grins like she’s hung the stars and leaves the room. Comfrey giggles, turning back to Daisuke, and tangling her fingers in his belt loops. “Now, where were we?” she asks him.

When Daisuke opens his mouth, he opens his eyes.

The room in the Zephyr is cold and dark.

-

They talk to Comfrey again when they get to Mount Charuk. They manage to have a meal.

Daisuke keeps staring at Comfrey. He feels gross -- dirty, invasive, perverted -- like he’s somehow betraying her by even being near her, knowing his feelings for her are so deep, so drowning.

They kissed yesterday, which he feels like they should probably talk about. She probably won’t; she’s not a talker. Well, she is a talker. But when they kissed for the first time, twenty years ago, on accident, awkward and horrible and deeply romantic like it was sixty-something-year-old Daisuke Bucklesby’s first ever, neither of them dared speak of it for a nauseating week. The thought of doing that again is physically revolting, especially at his age, but he supposes all of his rules go out the window when it’s Comfrey.

Which is why he’s here, at dinner, in this room, looking at her, at all. Knowing what she’s done and where she’s been and who she’s become. He doesn’t even care. She could’ve crashed into that buggy that his mama was driving, burnt down that house with his daddy in it, shot that first gun that got him right between the ribs, slit the throat of Haunch Saxon herself…Daisuke knows, deep down, he’d take each hit like a kiss.

He watches her talk to Olethra quietly. The bite of yesterday’s shouting match still stings -- an open wound of Monty’s angry voice and Marya’s non-appearance and Van’s quiet resignation. Olethra is more like herself today when she talks to her grandmother, bubbly and lively and refusing to hide, but it might be worse that way. Comfrey doesn’t deserve that.

Yet, he wants her to. He wants this to be his everyday.

Dinners with the Wind Riders, like the old days. Everyone’s here, sans Haunch, of course, who is very notably gone, and very notably missed. The announcement of his death is devastating; Daisuke has a moment where he’s hyperaware of the thank he feels to be with everyone else.

This is silly. He joined the Wind Riders as a boon, an escape to a new world during a midlife crisis, a lovestricken path to a better future. He was never meant to get attached the way he has, to be back here today, to care about family dinner with people who share no ounce of blood.

Maybe all things change.

Well, Daisuke is still sneaking glimpses as the professor laughs. The corners of her eyes crinkle and her lip curls on the left side.

So maybe not all things.

-

Olethra is falling.

Pushing everything else aside -- the massive wound in Daisuke’s arm, the explosion of the Zephyr, the Straka above them -- Olethra is falling.

She jumped. Daisuke doesn’t know why she jumped.

Daisuke will never get it. She leaps into the beak. She heals the monster -- the very thing they’re up against, will be up against. She grabs something small from its maw. She jumps. The Zephyr explodes.

In all the noise, Daisuke can still hear Comfrey call for her granddaughter.

The fire and pressure and light and heat all erupt in Daisuke’s face -- he has to cover his face with his arm, trying desperately to keep his eyes trained on Olethra. He’s trying so hard. She’s illuminated with an angry orange glow, flames threatening her way, hurrying to swallow her.

Daisuke turns to Comfrey. She’s already running to try something -- God knows what, there’s nothing to try -- and even though everything is happening at a million miles per second, it somehow happens like time is frozen, like he’s stuck and cursed for this to never end.

He imagines all the horrible and gruesome ways he’s going to watch Olethra die. Like each and every one of them have already happened.

The split-second before she hits the ground, Daisuke swears his heart just stops. Fully.

Her body thuds hard. But she groans when it does.

Daisuke can’t even justify the noise that comes out of him -- some old-man whimper that he’d have the heart to make fun of in any other situation -- but he’s by her side before he can even register it. He sees Comfrey’s shadow come up behind him as his hands reach for Olethra, pulling her up carefully.

“Olethra. Olethra,” Daisuke murmurs, wiping rubble and blood and sweat from her face. “Kid, are you okay?”

She blinks slowly at him, surely concussed, surely in lots of pain regardless of that. Cracking a grin and showing off a chipped tooth, Olethra licks blood off of her teeth. “Pappy. Hey. Yeah.”

Daisuke doesn’t know what else to do. He can’t heal her. He can’t fix it all. And he knows that everything is about to get worse. So much worse. They’re in Zern, maybe? In some land of flame and fire? And the Zephyr is gone -- years of memories and belongings and stories and lifetimes-

Comfrey pushes her way in, clasping the girl to her chest. “My babygirl!” she wails, tucking Olethra’s head under her chin. “Oh, God. God.”

“Grandma…” Olethra whines, voice muffled by Comfrey’s aviator jacket. She complains, but she doesn’t move.

For a second, all Daisuke can do is watch. That’s all he ever does: watch as the world moves without him, watch as everything happens before him and not with him. He’s a victim to time, crushed under the boot of choice paralysis, frozen with fear instead of ever making a choice.

It’s a miracle Comfrey ever cared about him at all. He’s cripplingly unmotivated.

She’s got to be thinking it too, even now. God, is that why she left? Because he couldn’t do anything? Because she knew that he’d disappoint her, disappoint her family, get her Little Kitten killed as soon as he got to know her? Look at her, she’s wondering about it now. She’s doubting him, she’s blaming him, she’s screaming at him to care- he does care, he cares infinitely; he might care more than her. But he can’t move, he’s scared to move, he-

Comfrey grabs his arm, looping her fingers like a cuff, just above his elbow. His panic freezes where it festers in his throat.

Before Daisuke can ask, Comfrey yanks him toward her, and wraps an arm around him. Olethra catches the hint before he does -- the arm once pinned between her and Comfrey’s stomachs now inches around his back, pulling him in.

They’re hugging him.

They’re both hugging him.

Olethra is alive, Comfrey is back, and they’re hugging him. He never thought he’d hug either of them ever again.

Daisuke’s eyes sting. In the back of his mind, he wonders where the other Wind Riders are; if they’re just watching this exchange quietly or if they’re preparing their next moves. He wonders if this is muddying his suaveness, killing his street cred.

He doesn’t even care. Comfrey’s curls brush against his cheek. Olethra’s waves graze the whiskers on his chin. They’re both alive.

This is the way it should be.

-

“God, I miss ya,” says Comfrey, mid-conversation.

She says it in front of everyone. Daisuke had simply cracked a joke, his accent admittedly thicker than usual, but she says it like it’s the most serious of moments. Like she had to share it before she exploded.

Something flutters in Daisuke’s gut. Nothing in him has fluttered in decades. He’s vaguely aware of the other Wind Riders, especially Van, who’s giving him a look; he fights heaven and hell not to give her a snot-nosed response.

Daisuke’s all focused on Comfrey anyway.  The soft smile she wears when she tells him she misses him, the gentle knowing look in each of her eyes, the dusty blush across her nose.

He works for it, but he finds the confidence, and opens his mouth. “I miss you t-”

“Pappy got a shot in that power station!”

Daisuke chokes down his vague annoyance -- she’s helping, she’s trying to help -- and catches Van’s gaze. She’s smiling awkwardly and gesturing towards him like he’s a big prize; showing off the man he’s become in these few short weeks together.

Comfrey’s brows furrow. “‘Got a shot’?””

Daisuke throws a thankful glance Van’s way. “I made a call,” he clarifies, trying not to feel too cocky, but also secretly hoping it’s worth impressing Comfrey. 

She doesn’t look so. Her smile is fading and falling into confusion.

Daisuke clears his throat. “I shoot all the time,” he points out, like that should be obvious, like he was stupid for implying otherwise, “but I…made a shot, and…it was a smart one!” He taps his forehead. “And it made me think of you, ‘cause…you’re smart…?”

What a fumble. Daisuke can see the end now.

Instead, Comfrey just laughs a little bit, bashfully, like he’s said something suave. “Ah…” she mumbles. “The only thing smarter than you, Daisuke, is how it’s gonna smart when I…”

The silence is loud. Van coughs louder. “Are there rooms in this mech, or is it just one big…?”

Daisuke knows that was embarrassing. He knows there was no point and that it wasn’t clever nor cute nor witty. It’s not this big romantic gesture; she’s done better, much better, and this is hardly a passionate love proclamation.

But Daisuke is so goddamned charmed.

“What are you talking about?” Daisuke asks, a coy grin spreading on his lips involuntarily.

The other Wind Riders keep murmuring to themselves, attempting to leave the room as fast as they can. He hears Marya’s repeated “No, no, yeah, no…” like a mantra.

“So good at everything except for flirting,” Maxwell mutters, shaking his head, turning to Van, who is also blubbering for words.

Doesn’t even matter. Daisuke’s still laughing at her. So charming. So goddamned MacLeod-charming. “You’re gonna hurt me?” he asks her, still teasing.

Comfrey blushes a furious bright red, like a little girl with a crush, a color Daisuke’s never seen on her face before. It’s so unlike her, but a good unlike -- a reminder that he still has an effect on her. She just shrugs embarrassedly.

Marya cackles, covering her mouth in horror. Monty squints at them like they’re his next study.

Maxwell clears his throat. “I’m gonna go sit in the other room for-”

The conversation moves on when Marya puts it back in place, but Daisuke enjoys his opportunity to sneak glances as a now nervous-looking Comfrey. They hold eye contact for a moment, her lips pressed together shyly, a cock in his eyebrow.

Daisuke finally takes a second to look over at Olethra. She’s already looking at him, but her gaze flickers away when he looks back, playing dumb with her big, innocent doe eyes. She nods fervently as Marya makes her points, but Daisuke doesn’t miss her little grin.

-

Ignoring the implication of meeting with Comfrey in a bedroom, Daisuke follows her there. He’d follow her everywhere.

She holds a gold bullet to her eye, squinting the other shut for focus, rotating the thing between her fingers. “There it is,” she murmurs, her voice low and rumbly. “Aurum Radiozoodus. Look at that.”

Comfrey holds it up for Daisuke to see. He leans forward, his hand ghosting over hers, too hesitant to take it from her. The dim light from the room sparkles against the surface, flashing in Daisuke’s eye. It’s amazing how something so little, so much smaller than him, is going to do so much damage.

“Powerful mineral,” Comfrey mutters to herself, going on one of her soliloquizing tangents, “This energy might have some…”

“What’d you say it was called?” Daisuke asks her, just to snap her out of it.

Comfrey blinks. “Aurum Radiozoodus?”

“Radiozoodus,” Daisuke mumbles, looking down. The workbench here is riddled with Comfrey’s things; he had hoped to see something he recognizes, but he doesn’t.

“That Zoodian energy should be able to disrupt Straka,” Comfrey explains. “Any concentrated energy either from that, or Zernian, should be able to…” She huffs. “I think physical damage is gonna be the hardest to get one over on old Straka, there, but…”

 Daisuke sighs, turning around to lean against the bench, crossing his arms. He catches her gaze. “I know we’re trying to balance a couple things here, but…” The eye contact is too intense. He blinks hard. “I just kind of worry with the bullets.”

Her brows furrow. He swallows.

“I don’t wanna hurt…and- and I don’t know how big of any chance there is of anything like this happening, but if there’s even some sort of infinitesimal way in which we can bring back or help Ludmila…” Daisuke shakes his head, cracking his knuckles. He looks back to Comfrey. “Do you think the bullets could damage that?”

He wants the real answer. He doesn’t want some bullshit MacLeod workaround. He wants whatever truth he can get -- whatever he can tell Marya with a straight face.

Comfrey rolls her tongue in her mouth and puts the bullet down. She finds his gaze again. Every time they do this, the room burns. He feels himself choking on the smoke. She looks away.

“Daisuke, I…” She sighs. She tries again. “I have missed you so much out here.” There’s a long pause. “And you’re asking me for a technical answer to a question of the heart.”

Daisuke exhales, then rubs his mouth, each of his fingers grazing the thin wrinkles on his chin. He doesn’t let his eyes leave Comfrey’s, even when hers leave his. The room is on fire. She won’t give him an answer.

“Those bullets are going to be able to pierce whatever protection Ludmila has,” she explains. “And she is central, not only to the Naughtomata and those armies, but she’s central to the Straka itself. She commands it, she created it.

“Is there a technical way to stop Ludmila from a thousand years of ruling Zern with an iron fist? I don’t know. What I know is that those bullets will get the job done.” Comfrey shakes her head sadly. “I trust you to know more than me when you have to give up on a dream.”

Fuck, does Daisuke know. That dream of him and her on the Zephyr, holding each other, the nice breeze, a Little Kitten, weed and curls and wine and lips and whatever. All those details are gone now, lost to time; a dream that could’ve only existed the first time he had it.

“You might make that call now,” says Comfrey, “or you might make that call in the last moment where that call can be made, but I trust you either way.”

She shouldn’t. He wishes she wouldn’t. He can’t be the one to kill Ludmila, to destroy Marya, to put an end to this quest. Daisuke can’t even get his feet to move when he’s struck with choice.

But Comfrey trusts him. He knows she does. He knows because she said it, but even if she hadn’t, he would know. He knows because she entrusted him with Olethra -- a twenty year oath yet to be broken.

He thinks of Olethra. He thinks of Olethra fidgeting with her dress pockets. Daisuke’s pocket is heavy. He moves to dig through it.

“Y’know, I forgot to tell you,” Daisuke says. “I found some of your stuff along the way.”

Comfrey tilts her head at him. “Yeah?”

Daisuke pulls out a neatly folded square of paper. “Yeah, I found your letter,” he laments, holding it between his fingers, letting the words fall out before he can think about them.

He feels frozen, but Comfrey just smiles warmly. That fire isn’t warming him up none. “Aw, I’m glad,” is all she says.

“It’s beautifully written,” he adds.

“Thank you. I appreciate that.”

He swallows and pulls out something smooth and wooden. “I found your pipe,” he chuckles nervously, examining it like she’s done something wrong.

Comfrey laughs. “Oh, shit,” she giggles. “D’ya wanna blaze?”

She holds up a lighter in front of his face, flicking it on and off tauntingly. The room fire flares with it. His throat is dry. He thinks of the other object in his pocket.

He cannot, absolutely, under no circumstances, do this shit sober.

Daisuke coughs. “Yeah, let’s actually get into that.”

Comfrey smiles and takes the pipe from his hand, opening a wooden box at the edge of her workbench. She packs the pipe like she always has, her hands small and nimble, working like she’s done this every day since he left her. She might’ve, frankly.

Daisuke swallows. Now or never.

Just as Comfrey lights the pipe, wrapping her lips around the mouth, Daisuke yanks the cool silver out of his jeans.

“I found your ring.”

Comfrey pauses, turning back to Daisuke. Her eyes lock on the dangling band, connected to a cold metal chain, icy against the burning heat of the room. It swings back and forth like a hypnotic charm. A comical amount of smoke slips through Comfrey’s teeth as she cracks a crooked grin.

“Well, you wanna hand that back?”

Daisuke hands it back wordlessly, the smell of weed so unfortunately familiar and warm and Comfrey-like that he stumbles for his ground. He wants to rip the pipe out of her hand to give him a damn hit already, just to make it through this moment, especially as she stares wistfully at the wedding band, but he waits for her. He always waits.

“I think that’s basically everything,” he says, trying to avoid looking at her now. He chokes when he remembers the office. “Oh, we found your, uh…sexual astringent.”

Comfrey blinks out of her daydreams, giving Daisuke a playfully confused look. “You found my sexual astringent?” she teases. “Oh, that stuff’s awful.” Her grin is knowing. “What about the…?”

“What’s the word I’m looking for?” Daisuke asks bashfully, really itching for that pipe.

It’s like she knows he’s writhing under her gaze. She puts the ring on her hand, unlinking the chain and tying it around her neck as a separate. Comfrey sighs dreamily, taking her sweet time, while something dances in Daisuke’s gut, observing the ring on her hand. “My sexual ungent,” she finally corrects.

“That’s what it was,” Daisuke says simply, swallowing harder, having a hard time looking away from her hand. “‘Astringement’ was not what I was looking for.”

She laughs to herself. “Well, hey, if you don’t use the urgent, you might need the astringement, y’know what I’m saying?”

Daisuke coughs. “Unfortunately, no.”

She laughs harder, taking another hit from the pipe. “Alright.” The smoke leaves her mouth in pirouettes. “Well, where’s that?”

Can we please stop talking about your sex before I fucking kill myself? 

“I’m realizing I don’t have it on me,” Daisuke admits, patting his pockets. “Maybe Monty has it.”

Comfrey blinks incredulously. “What’s Monty using it for?”

Daisuke shrugs. “Hand cream, or something?”

Comfrey laughs -- like, a real laugh, hearty and honest. “Why?”

Daisuke bites the bullet, reaching out for the pipe. “I don’t know. Guess we’ve been lost without you.”

She scoffs, but hands over the pipe. “Have you been lost without me?” she asks boredly. “It seems like Monty’s a bestselling author. Van’s got a restaurant, Marya’s got a toy shop?” She shakes her head shamefully, looking down. “I mean, I shouldn’t be bitter. What the hell?”

“No, it-” Daisuke takes a hit. The immediate buzz is horrifically satisfying. “It has been different.”

“I couldn’t bring Van because of the Chapman curse,” she clarifies. “And Marya, I couldn’t, because I knew that if she found out what happened to Ludmila, it would destroy her. And I was pissed at Monty, and he- he was right, but he…he didn’t have to say it.” She shakes her head again. “Maybe he did, I don’t know.”

Daisuke likes to watch the puffs of smoke leave his lips, but he stays focused on her, even as she fidgets with her hands. A MacLeod-ism.

“I feel like if I stop running, I’m gonna collapse.”

He’s never heard her say it, but it’s not news. It’s the thing they all know about Comfrey, the reason for her every choice. But it is a comfort, in a weird way. A confirmation that she doesn’t act this way because she hates him.

“Sometimes we can see that in your eyes a little bit,” Daisuke admits.

Comfrey sighs. “What was I supposed to do? Go back to the farm and mend the burnt patches from the guinea fowl?”

She feels around for Daisuke’s hand with the pipe in it, not turning his way. Instead of taking it from him, she drags his hand to her lips, taking the hit like his hand belongs to her. It does. Right now, it does; some kind of awe churns in Daisuke’s gut as he watches. Still amazing him, twenty years later.

“Y’know, there’s a lot of people who depend on maniacs,” Comfrey points out, pipe in the corner of her mouth. “If I’m not out here doing this, then…how would we get out of Zern? I mean, obviously, we’re in Zern because of-”

“You don’t have to explain yourself to me.” He doesn’t mean to say it, but he does. “I’ve known you a lot longer than that.”

She pauses. Studies him for a moment, smoke seeping from her mouth, carefully tracing his outline like she’s drawing it herself.

Daisuke shrugs. “This is what you do.” He presses his lips together, wetting them with his tongue. “I just wish…”

We had more time? We did this somewhere else, somewhere more romantic? We never did what we did? We never met again? We didn’t have to do this at all? This wasn’t so complicated? This didn’t have the weight of decades; the weight of a younger Daisuke that he can’t disappoint?

“I feel I…”

Haven’t done enough? I’ve done too much? I’m not enough for you? I shouldn’t be enough for you? I’ve only dragged you down; you doing this now is going to kill me?

“I feel…”

I love you like a pill. I love you like the Ministry loves Queen’s Smog. I love you like the whole world is desolate and you’re one drop of fucked-up water. More than you could ever know. Bigger than you could ever know. I feel you, I feel you, I feel you, I feel-

“I feel like I made a mistake that I left when I did.”

The silence is so loud. Each bit of it crackles like fire, embraces the two of them, frames her face and illuminates her eyes.

Daisuke clears his throat. “Seems like it all kind of went sideways after that.”

She gives him this look -- this horrible, overwhelming look, joyous and tragic and forgiving and accusing all at once. She worries her lip and shakes her head. She nudges the pipe back his way.

“I was very quick to let you walk out of my life,” she admits. “I think…the second it wasn’t working for you anymore, I said…’if you actually feel that you’re about to lose this man, you’re gonna fall apart. So just keep flying.’” She wipes her hands on her pants. “And it was easier then, because of the Wind Rider Society, and I was famous, and acclaimed, and there was so much shenaniganery to just lose myself in-”

“I also feel like as soon as the Wind Rider Society stuff started happening, I felt like that was a little stuffy for me, and I left as soon as it got at all complicated in a direction I didn’t want it to be,” Daisuke admits, shrugging. “That’s not all on you.”

Comfrey sighs. She turns to lean against the workbench too. “Well, it seems like things were plenty simple. Just…looking out for Confederated Imperial goons going after Olethra.” She huffs -- one of her curls falls in her face. “That’s eight years tramping around, taking pot shots at goons from the bottom of a whiskey bottle.”

Olethra, Olethra, Olethra. Only someone as wonderful and perfect as the woman in front of him could make someone as wonderful and perfect as that little girl. His heart pangs with every thought of her; he’s never loved, been loved, as much as he does with her.

He smiles softly. “It was kinda fun.”

Comfrey smiles too. “Yeah. I guess you liked things when they were simpler.” Finally, she turns to him, so they’re face-to-face for the first time this whole conversation.

She breathes it out: “Maybe they’ll be simple again.”

-

When it's over, Daisuke lays in her bed and watches her breathe.

He used to do this all the time. He used to take joy in it, watching the slope of her naked back curve into her hips and disappear under the bedsheets. Those sculptures of her in Katur can hardly do her beauty justice. It’s a visceral kind of elegance, the kind that upsets you to look at. The kind that makes you ask how anyone can just exist, looking like that, all the time.

She’s sitting up, tying her hair into a neat bun, working to get her big curls to fit in one place. She’ll notice him if he moves, so he stays completely still, one hand propping up his chin like in lecture.

He knows they have to go. He knows they’ve spent too long here.

Comfrey turns over her shoulder and gives him a world-class smile. It’s not quite her regular comical, teasing look, and not quite knowing, not quite innocent either. Just a smile. A smile for only him.

“Checkin’ me out, Bucklesby?” she asks. He thinks it's meant to be playful, but it comes out soft.

Daisuke hums, reaching out to touch the bump where her curls meet, bunched up in her fist. “I just like your hair,” he professes, rolling each ringlet against his fingertips.

She scoffs. “Losing more every day,” she admits, reaching to feel it for herself. “I swear to God, I’ll kill these Wind Riders myself if they don’t kill me first.”

“You’re tellin’ me,” chirps Daisuke, still scratching at her hair.

Comfrey’s look stays the same here, in this quietness. Here, Daisuke can pretend they’re in his home in Pilby, waking up to the sunrise, both late to their previous responsibilities. Here, the Straka and the Confederated Imperial Republic and the Naughtomata don’t matter. Here, it’s just them, in this burning sanctuary, ablaze with a love that makes him feel about fifty years younger. He wasn’t ready then, but he’s ready now.

They just gotta get through this fight. And then things can be normal.

Just this part, then it’s over.

Comfrey’s fingers graze over his own, rubbing his wrinkling skin against her velvety palms. It’s here, for the first time, that her lips close and twist, dropping her smile into something softer.

Then, she opens her mouth and bites his finger like a toddler.

“Ack!” Daisuke hisses, withdrawing. She giggles mercilessly as he shakes off his hand. “Don’t do that!” His smile is cracking through his faux anger.

“Sorry, it was too tempting.”

She gets up to get dressed. Daisuke rolls over miserably, knowing it's for the better, feeling like it’s a punishment.

“Daisuke?”

He looks up once more at this beautiful angel; this goddess sharing the bed with him. Never in his eighty years did he think he’d get so lucky, win out so hard with someone at all, much less someone as daring, as brave, as intelligent, as gorgeous, as-

“Don’t you ever take my pipe again, you hear me?”

Daisuke snickers. “Alright, Comfrey.”

-

He finds Olethra later. She’s eyeing him in a way he’s never seen before.

“What?” he asks pointedly, crossing his arms and leaning against the wall. “Why’re you lookin’ at me like that?”

“I’m not looking at you like anything,” Olethra insists, and then keeps looking at him like that.

“No, that, you’re doin’ that,” Daisuke says. “You’re doin’ this thing with your eyes. They’re all wide. Like you’re judging me.”

Olethra hums. “Should I be judging you?”

“For what?”

She shrugs innocently, a pout to her lip that’s more performative than sad. “I dunno. Just…if you had something to tell me.”

Daisuke squints at her. “I don’t.”

“Right, right, no, of course.”

Daisuke sighs at her, knowing her face well enough to notice the way it distinctly does not change after their conversation hypothetically ends. Her pupils focus forward but feign left; he can very plainly see her lame attempt at nonchalance.

So, he cocks his eyebrow at her. “Do you have somethin’ to say to me?”

Olethra blinks. “Wha- no.”

“Okay.”

“I was just asking.”

“Sure.”

“I was.”

“I believe you.” He doesn’t. But he whistles loudly, clapping his hands. “So, if that’s all you got for me-”

“Are you fucking my grandma?”

Daisuke chokes, like really chokes, thumping his fist against his chest until he’s rid of his cough, though not of his impending panic. “Am I what?” he asks incredulously, all but shouting.

Olethra’s face burns bright red. “Sorry, sorry! I didn’t mean to be so…”

“That’s a fuckin’ crass way to put it,” Daisuke snaps, really trying to deny this being funny in any way. “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

“I kiss your mother with that…!” Olethra sighs dejectedly, gesturing vaguely. “Nevermind. Yeah, I do. Sorry.”

Daisuke shakes his head, pinching the bridge of his nose and dragging the skin around his eyes. “What are you trying to ask me?”

She huffs, throwing her arms up in defeat. “You were in that room for a long time with Grandma.”

“Yeah.”

“What were you doing?”

His heart thrums in his throat. He shrugs. “Talking.”

Olethra deadpans him. “‘Talking’?”

“Yeah.” Daisuke swallows thickly. “She was showing me her gold bullets.”

Olethra blinks again. “Is that a euphemism?”

“Olethra!”

“Look, just-!” She takes a long, deep breath, dragging one of her hands through her hair, smoothing out the waves until her fingers tug at her dead ends. “You’re gonna be careful, right?”

Daisuke’s brows furrow again. “What?”

“Ew, Pappy! Not like that! Gross! Just-!” Olethra shakes her head. She picks at her dress like she always does, rolling the fabric against her thumbs. “Are you going to be careful to not get…like, hurt?”

Oh. Daisuke frowns. “Olethra…”

“I love her and all, of course,” she defends. “But y’know…last time was like…?” Olethra shakes her head, her cinnamon curls bouncing. “I don’t know what I’m saying. I sound crazy. I love her. I want you guys to be happy. I’m just a little…”

He’s never seen her look like this before. Her hand resting on her lasso, hair pulled back, boots strapped tightly, fully prepared for a battle that’s raring to go. Yet Olethra looks hesitant, wary, like toying with the wires on a ticking time bomb.

She’s not far off. Daisuke supposes her points are valid. He knows she doesn’t mean it personally; if it were her, he’d say the same. They’re holding each other accountable. It’s what they do.

Realistically, he knows what he’s doing is reckless. But he’s too old to care about reckless. Everything is reckless. Choosing not to and choosing to and jumping off the side of the Zephyr are equally bad for him; the fact of the matter is that she’s here and he has to do something about that. He might as well pick the one that brings the softest knife to his tender heart.

And unfortunately, the knife is all he’s got.

“We’re gonna work it out after this,” he promises her. “Just this part, then it’s over.”

-

“You ready for this?”

The call of the Straka echoes somewhere in the distance -- a scratchy, visceral screech accented with clicking noises louder than any gun Daisuke’s ever owned. Mr. Big Britches scampers off with the allies they’ve collected along the way and leaves the Wind Riders. Just them and it.

Comfrey looks at Daisuke with that old-fashioned MacLeod daring-do; nearly ninety years of life and it’s never escaped her, not even once. He sees that in Olethra too; it used to scare him, maybe, but he thinks he could only ever connect with someone with that glint in their eye. It’s a part of his life; a thing that will always be true. In that, there’s some kind of comfort.

So, in giving him that look, Daisuke actually feels at peace about the fight.

“Ready as I’ve been for anythin’ in my whole life,” Daisuke jokes, cracking a sly grin out of the corner of his mouth.

Comfrey’s eyebrows raise. “Your whole life?” she asks incredulously.

He hums affirmatively. “Whole thing.”

“More ready than you were for our wedding?”

His grin falls into a softer tilt, gazing down on her from where he stands. She’s as beautiful as ever; as beautiful as the day they met, as the day they kissed for the first time, as the day they got married, as the day he left her, or she left him, or whatever happened. In the fore of battle, she’s radiant; in her habitat.

Daisuke nods with a faux contemplation. “I was pretty ready for that, wasn’t I?”

“I’d sure hope so.”

He thinks back to being locked in the men’s lavatory, Monty straightening his tie and telling him it’s all going to be alright, Olethra padding up to him and gnawing on his hand before she had any real teeth. It feels like lifetimes ago and last week.

Daisuke takes her hand, taking a second to stroke the ring now adorned on her fourth finger, and presses a firm, apologetic kiss into her knuckles. Comfrey chuckles, rolling her eyes.

“Alright, Bucklesby,” she teases. “That’s enough from you.”

He presses another kiss on her hand before she can tug it away, just to pick on her. “‘M sorry,” Daisuke promises. “I’m the most ready I’ve been in twenty years.”

“I like the sound of that much better.” She holds the hand with the ring on it, fidgeting with the band. It still fits like a glove. “Go talk to your people. I’m gonna set up with Torse.”

Daisuke frowns. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” Then, she grins like a kid. “What, you went ten years without me, and now you can’t go two minutes?”

Yes. “No.”

She hums. “Thought so.” She leans up and kisses him on the nose. “Be right back.”

Before she goes, Daisuke grabs her hand and tugs her back. He’d like to say it’s more romantic than it is, but she stumbles a bit before letting him do it, laughing a bit when she does. Daisuke pushes the hair out of her face and just absolutely plants one on her.

Their first real kiss in years. Not during sex, not in the heat-of-the-moment, not as part of a habit with no feeling behind it. A real one; one that just exists on its own, one that Daisuke gave her because he wanted to and he can. It doesn’t mean anything other than I love you because it doesn’t need to. It just gets to be.

She gives him another, snaking her arms around his shoulders. His hands still slot in her hips nicely, like puzzle pieces, and hers slide across his jaw to cup it gently. When she separates from him, she smiles again, and it’s almost better than the kiss.

“I’m gonna go now,” she whispers.

“Yeah?” Daisuke asks, hazy. He feels like he might still be high.

“Yeah,” she grins, but she doesn’t move.

Daisuke leans in a little closer. “Starting…?”

“In a second.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

She loves him. All these years later and she still loves him. All that time and all those people and all that random sex meant nothing because it got to be him in the end. Daisuke Bucklesby has never been the third choice, much less the first. He’s a shithead, a rowdy, a slummy asshole from the streets of New Pilby when it was brand New Pilby. Eighty years of choice later, and he finally doesn’t have to choose at all.

“If anything happens out there-”

“Oh, stop it,” Comfrey chastises, flicking the back of his neck with her fingers. “Don’t talk like that.”

“I’m just sayin.’” He rubs the bit of skin on her back where her jacket has rolled up with his thumbs. “If it did. I’m happy I got to do it with you.”

Comfrey cocks a playful eyebrow at him. “Oh, you’re happy you got to do it with me?” she asks, her teeth shining at him. “That’s very kind, sweetheart, but now doesn’t feel like the time.”

He huffs and drops his arms. “Ugh. You and Olethra really are related.”

Comfrey giggles and gives him an apologetic kiss on the cheek. “Sorry, sorry,” she giggles. “Thank you. I’m happy to do this with you too.”

He smiles. Just this part, he thinks. Then it’s over.

-

The inevitable happens like this.

It’s a regular fight, at first. The Wind Riders have done this before, hundreds of times, with hundreds of foes -- maybe not with the Corrodi or the Naugtomata or the Straka, but a goon is a goon, and a bullet is a bullet. They move like a machine, all facets of each other, nobody any match for the crew of the Zephyr.

There’s bloodshed, sure, but all fights go that way. When the first bullet rings in Daisuke’s ears, it’s nothing; it’s almost like white noise. Comfrey’s holding her arm but she gives him a confident thumbs up when he sends a glance her way.

The second bullet is louder. He hears a groan, but it’s laughed off; she might even crack a joke here, if Daisuke recalls correctly. He remembers his chest swelling with pride as Olethra takes off in the MechLeod, even stronger when Comfrey takes another wound like it’s a paper cut. Nobody takes down his girls.

By the time they’ve hit her thrice, Daisuke’s a little worried, but not truly panicking. Monty’s standing in front of her, shouting something or other as she hobbles backward, but not away -- Comfrey MacLeod never hobbles away from a fight still taking place. She beheads a Corrodi like it’s nothing. She and Daisuke exchange grins (even though hers wobbles).

A fourth. He’s got nothing to worry about. He knows he doesn’t. She can handle herself. They all have very specific orders to target her, surely; it’s not because she’s badly injured that she’s stumbling around like that. She’s just making a plan. Stop worrying. She wouldn’t want you to worry.

A fifth hit. Something itches at him. They’re not all bullets, but they’re all hits. Each comes with a groan that makes his aim wobbly, a brief darting of the eyes that gets him stabbed once or twice, but nothing he’s not used to. He’s making his way over there anyway. Van is there too and so is Monty. She can hold on until then. It’s fine.

Six. Something’s wrong. She’s coughing blood and her knees are buckling from under her. His panic is bubbling in his throat now -- he’s never felt panic watching her fight before. Her aviator jacket is soaked red and her curls are falling out of her bun and sticking to her face with sweat. It’s fine, he thinks. She’s fine. Just this part, and then it’s-

Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten, eleven, twelve-

“Best to start at the beginning,” the voice says. “Finish the rot. This is the first infection.”

Daisuke doesn’t see it. He doesn’t know what happens here. He doesn’t know who’s talking or about what. He’s looking down the hole; he’s shooting down the hole.

“GRANDMA!”

Olethra. She’s screaming.

Comfrey. She’s not.

Daisuke’s head whips around too many seconds too late. The MechLeod is already holding a person, his person, limp and wheezing. Eyes shut. Hardly breathing. More blood than he’s ever seen in his whole life, oozing out of her like it’s neverending.

Monty says something. The MechLeod puts the person on Courtney’s back.

“What happ-n? Wha-?”

Any more syllables taste like vomit. Daisuke’s entire body goes numb. Words aren’t coming out of him, not really, not like they should. They’re breaths, croaks, though no air enters his lungs.

He’s moving, maybe? His feet are. His eyes aren’t. Someone calls for him. His ears are ringing so loud but he swears to God it’s Comfrey, but maybe that’s Comfrey in the MechLeod, isn’t Comfrey the person with the hand on his shoulder? Daisuke puts his hand there. Nothing. He looks at it. It’s blood. Blood on his shoulder. Doesn’t hurt. Not more than anything else. His blood is going cold but it’s nothing.

She lays on the ground. He’s still stumbling. He can’t even run. He sees her rasping, her breaths so small they sound like hisses. Why isn’t he running, why can’t he run? Move. Move. She’s waiting for you, move.

“Co-?” It doesn’t come out. She locks eyes with him, and as soon as she does, they flutter shut.

Daisuke shakes his head. “Comfrey. Comfrey, hey.” He grips her arms. “Comfrey.”

Only breath as acknowledgement.

“Pappy.” Monty grabs his arm, yanking him away, spinning him around and planting his hands on his jaw. He shakes him. “Pappy, are you going down?”

What does that mean? What does any of this mean? Where’s Comfrey? What is she doing down there, why is nobody helping her, why is she wheezing? Get up, get up, get up, she gets up, she always gets up-

“Pappy!”

“I don’t know,” Daisuke slurs, his head turning slowly. He catches sight of her black boots, torn to shreds, fixed up with Onion’s patchwork. She hangs off of Courtney’s back limply, her arm next to his. Her skin is the wrong color. It’s gray. Why is it gray? Has she always been on Courtney’s back?

“Hey. Hey.”

Daisuke shakes his head. “I don’t…” He swallows. There’s a fight. There’s a fight. Olethra’s in the fight. “Where are you going?”

Monty’s gaze is stone. “I’m going to help Van.” He means it. He’s never meant anything more.

Daisuke processes. He’s going to help Van. Vanellope Chapman, Van. Yes, Van, right. “Okay.”

His gaze leaves Monty again and goes up into the sky. The MechLeod is stomping around, furiously crushing Primarchs like bugs. Olethra loves animals. She loves life. He can’t see as well as he used to, but he hopes she’s not crying. He can’t see her cry. He’ll cry.

It goes back down. Comfrey is on Courtney. She just lays there, still. Not even in her sleep is she still. She’s never been still a single second of her life. This isn’t her life. Yes, it is. What the fuck is happening?

Daisuke turns back to Monty. This was his best friend, once. His best man, at least. He can see the way he’s searching for sapience, sapience that won’t come.

Why can’t he do anything? He has spent his entire life on the sidelines, watching people move, letting things happen to him, failing at choice until the lack of it is nothing more than suicide. He’s just standing here. His wife- Comfrey fucking MacLeod is dying in front of him, and he is just fucking standing here.

For the first time, Daisuke admits it. “I don’t know what to do.”

Monty shakes his head. “Me neither.”

Daisuke looks up. Olethra rushes to Marya’s side; she knows nothing yet, just knows that Ludmila is her priority. And Olethra’s going to help make that so. Because that’s Olethra, that’s always been Olethra, and Comfrey…

He can’t just fucking stand here. He can’t be a victim to his life over and over, letting it steamroll him until he’s soaked into the dirt. He cannot live with himself if he makes no decision -- no decision would be worth making ever again.

Longspot Gotch is behind him and Comfrey fucking hates that guy.

When Monty charges for Van, Daisuke whips out Biscuit and spins the cylinder. There’s some amount of bullets in here.

It’s not Daisuke’s problem. It’s Longspot’s.

-

When the fight ends, Daisuke hasn’t walked further than ten feet from Courtney.

He’s not even really sure it’s over until he sees him duck down, letting Comfrey roll onto the ground gently. Daisuke’s feet finally run.

“Comfrey, baby,” he mutters, grabbing one of her hands. “Comfrey.”

She blinks very slowly, only hints of her chocolate irises meeting his. The setting sun hits them so nicely; he always loved the warm amber they turned on nights like this.

“My Daisuke,” she mumbles. “Hi.”

“Hi, honey,” he whispers, his voice softer than ever. “Hi.”

“Is it done?”

Daisuke swallows. Something is burning, burning, burning in every facet of his body. “Yeah, Comfrey, it’s done.”

She grins. It’s half-assed. She doesn’t half-ass anything. It looks like it hurts to do, but she does it. “Good.”

He opens his mouth. What the fuck does he say? How fast does he say it?

Something pounds into his side, nearly knocking what little wind is left in him; a flash of near-identical color and shape. When his eyes adjust, Olethra’s figure, half on top of him and half on top of Comfrey, sulks horribly.

She’s a sobbing mess. Her breaths are quick and horrible, like each is a chore, a shaking hand over her mouth. Her nails are covered in dirt and blood and soot. Comfrey doesn’t say her name -- Daisuke’s not sure she can -- she just kind of mumbles in appreciation of her sight.

“Grandma, oh, God, I can- Marya can-”

Daisuke shakes his head. “Kid. Olethra, honey-” He tugs at her arms.

He looks up briefly. All the Wind Riders stand here, stone-faced, not daring to look anywhere but her face. Lumila’s here. She stands by herself. Wealwell is here with another Gotch -- the one who was helping them -- and their various crew and allies and friends gather. Like building a wall, protecting this moment from the world outside.

Bert holds Van.

Daisuke will never-

Something soft strokes his cheek. He looks down.

Comfrey’s put her hand there, rubbing gentle circles behind his ear. She’s grinning like this is fucking funny. But there’s substance to it, like it’s an inside joke with years of riffing behind it, like Daisuke gets it. Like only Daisuke gets it.

He grabs her wrist. He kisses her palm. One isn’t enough -- he moves until he’s kissed it all, pressing his lips to every knuckle, every line, every inch that holds her light.

She turns. “Olethra,” she mumbles, though the girl is still bumbling. “You did so good, kid.”

Olethra shakes her head, her nose wrinkling. “Grandma…”

“This is the start of something wonderful,” she insists, using what little strength she has to emphasize her words. She holds her gaze firmly. “Where’s Marya?”

Olethra sobs. “She’s fine!”

Another shadow crosses over her. Junker kneels, her somber face holding bags and stress and wrinkles that shouldn’t be there at her age. But she’s smiling through her tears, putting on a brave show for Comfrey.

“I’m right here,” she whispers softly. She presses her lips together and swallows the emotions. “Olethra saved me.”

Comfrey could not be more elated, even in this, even here. Daisuke’s still kissing her hand -- not really kissing, just ghosting his lips over her ring, holding them there. He’s still doing this when she finds the strength to raise her eyebrow at Olethra. “Apple doesn’t fall far.”

Don’t say that. Don’t say that. Not now.

But Marya laughs, her cackle wheedled down to hardly more than a breath. “Got a habit of picking up my sorry ass,” she confirms.

“Olethra saved Marya and Ludmila,” Gotch says, from somewhere. “Both of them.”

Comfrey blinks. For a moment, life reenters her. “Ludmila?” she cries.

She kneels too, next to Olethra. Comfrey gasps, marveling at her face, long-forgotten -- surely much worse nonlinearly. They don’t speak, they just see each other, eye to eye. Comfrey makes a noise, like a fainting flame, and readjusts her hand to hold Daisuke’s.

“I sp-spent another ten years, more or less, running around here in Zood.” She laughs a little. “I’m damn near ninety, biologically!”

Nobody likes this answer, Olethra the least. She wails. Daisuke moves to hold her with his other arm; she grabs him, squeezing his skin like a reminder this is real.

“I want you to know, I couldn’t be prouder,” Comfrey says, “I could’ve made it back home and gotten sick. Died in a bed.”

I hate that word. Don’t use that word. Stop. Stop. Someone stop. Didn’t he say he’d do things for himself?

“Instead I got shot with fire acid on top of a giant, soot-covered crow full of poison robots.” She grunts. “Shot in the back by a terrible investor in a wingsuit who made bad deals.”

Comfrey thinks that’s hilarious. Olethra laughs incredulously. Daisuke can’t move.

“Hey.” Van sniffles. Daisuke’s never seen her cry. “It’s gonna be a great book, though. It’s gonna sell like gangbusters and the money from that is gonna save a lot of mice.”

Monty’s crying too. He can tell by the way Comfrey looks at him and says, “Oh, the little mice.” It’s the softest look she’s ever given him. “Monty, how are you gonna make me look in your book?”

Silence. “Somebody’s gotta save the world.”

Comfrey laughs a little. “Yeah…someone’s gotta…’bring hope to starry night, set wrongs to right, and freedoms fight, to chase the day in w-winged flight.”

Not the poem. Not the goddamn poem. She read that to him after their first night together. They had laid in bed, naked, tired, embraced in light. Comfrey asked, can I read you something? Daisuke said, that depends. Not a reader type. Comfrey asked, for me, will you?

For you, anything. Anything forever.

I love you like a pill. God, I love you like a fucking pill.

Comfrey squeezes his hand three times. She smiles at Olethra. “I love you, kiddo.”

I love you like the Ministry loves Queen’s Smog. I love that they weren’t the ones to do this. I love that they never got you; that you never let them.

Olethra mouths that she loves her back. Comfrey grins like that’s her greatest reward. The grin is Daisuke’s.

I love you like the whole world. I’d love you if it was desolate and I’d love you if it was fruitful. I’d love you if this was fair. I’d love you if you were one drop of fucked-up water, if you were ten of them, if you were a river, a lake, an ocean.

The tears come. Comfrey’s lip wobbles when she sees it; she uses what must be the last of her energy to raise her thumb and swipe at Daisuke’s eyes. It’s jagged and does nothing, just smears it. She doesn’t even notice.

I love you more than you’ll ever know, Comfrey. You could never understand how much I love you. Nobody could. Nobody will.

“I love you,” she tells him.

“I love you,” he says too.

Bigger than you could ever know. So much bigger than this. Bigger than any mistake you’ve made. Bigger than death.

Comfrey looks at them all, in this moment. She revels in what she’s created; what she’s leaving behind.

She smiles when she whispers, “‘On high we go.’”

I will always love you.

-

There’s a beautiful sunset the night of the funeral. She would’ve adored it.

He can hear it now. It’s a perfect rainbow, she’d say. Zood! Glorious Zood!

I’ve never really got the ‘sunset thing’ before, he’d tell her, shrugging. I mean, they’re beautiful, ‘n all…

Isn’t one of your rules that sunsets are non-negotiable? she’d ask, laughing, pushing curls behind her ears with a cigarette. Seems pretty ‘negotiable’ to me. What’s not to like?

I just mean that the day ends at some point, he’d explain. That’s what’s non-negotiable.

Then isn’t that the ‘sunset thing’? She’d shrug and point at all the colors in the sky, a beautiful portrait of everything she stands for. That the day ends, and it ends so beautifully?

Aren’t you sad that the day is over, and you just… He’d shake his head. You just sit there, and you watch it? You don’t try to stop it?

Well, why would you try to stop it? Her eyes would sparkle in the golden hour, or maybe with the mischief of wisdom. Why’d you want to stop this? Look at it. It’s perfect.

It really is. Even in this silence, in this numb of hurt, he gets it. Each color bleeds into the next, one and in itself, but part of each shade around it. Not one could be missing and leave it as beautiful as it is now.

He hasn’t talked much. He was never much of a talker before Comfrey, and without her, it's less innate. He can’t smoke, he can’t eat; he can’t do much more than sit his ass on the Zephyr and stare at the world around him. The way it just keeps going.

He’s not sure where they’re going. Someone probably knows, but he hasn’t asked. He doesn’t plan to. He’ll leave when he’s ready, but he’s not.

The world really does keep spinning without Comfrey MacLeod in it. It’s incredible, really, that anyone can live without knowing she is. He doesn’t know how he did it before.

He doesn’t really know how this is different, either. Did he really think she was coming back before? Was he lovedrunk enough to completely miss this future for the both of them? Was it worse to be here? What if he hadn’t come at all; what if he hadn’t found Olethra that morning? What if-?

There’s a tap on his shoulder. He doesn’t expect to turn and see the MechLeod, but he does.

“Olethra?” he murmurs.

Not Olethra. Just the MechLeod. It holds out its claw to him.

Her ring. On her chain.

He stares, for a moment, in awe and wonder. It glints in the dimming light of the sunset, the carved on high we go near blinding.

He takes it, rolling his tongue until that lump in his throat bursts. He’s feeling so small again. “Now, where’d you get this?” he asks the machine.

The thing whirrs, some mechanical something or other moving around and beeping at him until the radio shifts into place. Somehow, it feels like eye contact. An intimate moment between people who’ve known each other for lifetimes.

The dials turn.

ZZP! “Olethra, this is-” ZZZZ-ZZZP! “Dangerous and wonderful-”

He knows the voice immediately.

For a moment, there’s a sickly excitement; an adrenaline that pumps through him as his body briefly wonders if that’s really her. If he could bottle that up and drink it, he’d never smoke again.

But it’s gone in a second, and this horrible, buzzing sorrow washes over him, neverending and total. It’s an ache he hasn’t felt perhaps in years, perhaps since his parents died, perhaps in another life.

ZZP! “A new world beyond any-” ZZZZZP! “A new world of wonder…dangerous- full of adventure!”

He just stares at it. Suddenly, it’s very clear, hauntingly so when it plays more.

“On high we go, cloudward, ho.”

It all knocks him down again; that wave of agony, a hurt he hasn’t felt since the moment she died. He inhales, trying his best to keep it down, but it just won’t budge. It’s burning his eyes and roiling in his throat.

The MechLeod leans down. It presses its head to his.

It feels like she’s here. Like she’s talking to him.

ZZZZZP! “Olethra. Look-” ZZ-ZZ-ZZP! ZZZZZP!

He looks up. The radio buzzes.

 “Look...after…Olethra!”

-

He’s in bed for the first time in a few days that night. The window whistles as wind passes them by. The quilt he wears in bed is the perfect temperature.

But he can’t quite sleep.

The other side of the bed, this entire quest, had been empty. Nobody’s shared a bed with him in a great many years. He’d found peace in Pilby; in the quiet of nothing and nobody. Ghost Dog snores at his feet and that’s always been enough.

Tonight, though, it’s hauntingly quiet there, almost like when Comfrey went, she carved out a piece of his mattress. Like there’s a hole where she used to lay her head.

He just stares at it.

Until there’s a knock on the door. “Pappy?”

He turns. In the doorway is a beautiful young woman -- a girl who’s coming into herself every day, learning the ropes of adulthood, newly twenty-one, but is kicking the ass of what little she’s been given. A zombie of a girl, but pretty as ever. Someone’s perfect creation.

He sits up on his elbows. “Olethra.”

She smiles at him, but it's crooked; sad. Her voice is thick. “Yeah. Um…” Olethra shifts, tugging on her braids. “Can I…um, can I sleep here?”

He smiles. “Yeah, sweetheart, you can always sleep ‘ere.”

She lets out a bashful laugh, pulling at her nightgown, then nodding. “Okay.”

He scoots over in the bed and makes space for her, holding the quilt up for her to slip under and cozy up into. Neither of them make the comment, but he knows they’re both thinking about who it smells like, even now, even days later.

As soon as Olethra lays down, he opens his mouth to say something -- maybe to ask her if she’s comfortable, maybe to compliment her braids, maybe to just say a simple goodnight and finally get some sleep.

She’s faster than him, though. She barrels into his chest, burying her face into the crook of his neck.

He coos softly and wraps his arms around her, gently resting his head on top of hers. “Hi, kid,” he whispers, trying to beat any tears.

“I love you,” she whispers back.

Pappy smiles now. It’s a real smile. He can’t help it.

“I love you too.” Bigger than you can ever know.