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Ever since Moonwatcher had moved out to Sanctuary with him, Winter had been having strange dreams. Some part of him liked to fantasize that this was what prophecy was like for her. It gave him a feeling of connection, like they had something in common that was just the two of them. He also knew that he would never ask her, or make the comparison, because he didn’t want to risk making her upset - but then, he ALSO knew that she knew already. That was one of the many perks of having a girlfriend who could read your mind. You could never keep a secret from her. Technically, he could, actually. She’d allowed him to keep the Skyfire for as long as he wanted. It was something to ‘Keep him safe.’ As if he needed to be kept safe from the best dragon in the world. He’d been half-way through throwing it out into the ocean, where hopefully no Seawings would stumble across it, when he remembered Darkstalker and decided that maybe it was worth keeping. Just in case. In a drawer beside his bed. Beside their bed.
Winter recalled his wandering thoughts, and turned his attention instead to the Nightwing curled up beside him. This was not the first time he’d woken up in the middle of the night and found himself admiring just how beautiful she was. Apparently, more dragons needed to grow up hunting for themselves in the rainforest. She was lithe, and strong, and sleek, and her scales blended into the darkness just right, and it meant that if he wanted to, he could focus his attention on those beautiful starlit scales of hers. If he only looked at them, he could almost, for a moment, feel like he was at home. The Ice Palace’s enchantment had meant that he could see the stars perfectly every night, no matter where he was. He could almost convince himself that he was looking back up at that same roof, now.
Except that he wasn’t. He felt horrible for thinking it - he knew that he SHOULD consider this his new home. A place without the constant yelling, away from the tribe that had tried to have him killed and then disowned him for daring to stay alive. A place in the world away from most other dragons, with the dragon he wanted to be with most in the world, where he could devote his time to watching weird little scavengers run around, and where Moon even supported him, instead of berating him and hitting him for his stupidity. If this was one of those tales that the skalds sometimes told, this would be his happily ever after - his righteous reward for his bravery and perseverance in face of impossible odds. He’d saved his tribe, he’d ended the thousands of years long grudge, the bad-guy was gone, and he had Moon.
So why was it that he was waking up in the middle of the night from dreams about how he wasn’t doing enough? Why did his thoughts always come back to Narwhal’s death at the mountain, and about how he’d taken too long to save Hailstorm? Why did he feel like he’d failed, and he was still failing right now? Why did it feel like Moon-
Winter blinked, as he realized that he was no longer watching her sleep. He was looking into her eyes, which were looking back at him with an almost overwhelming empathy. He’d woken her up. He’d thought too loudly AGAIN! Useless Snowfla-
“You’re not useless.” Her voice cut him off, a little bit scratchy from sleep. Clearly, she hadn’t been watching his thoughts for too long. At least, not consciously. That was good. Moonwatcher yawned, her muzzle stretching open for a moment, before she hummed and turned her coiled-ball-of-Moon towards him, so that she could face him without stretching her neck as far. “Bad dreams again?”
“Mmh.” Winter answered. He wasn’t going to admit it out loud. He didn’t want to be a burden. He wanted her to go back to sleep, wake up in the morning having forgotten all of this, and give him time to sort out this weakness inside of him. Whatever part of him that was broken like this, that just couldn’t hold itself together even when-
“Winter.” Moon cut in again, “I’m not going to forget. This happens almost every night. Are you okay?”
Be strong. Be Vigilant. “I’m fine.” Winter insisted, even though the chill in his tone was a touch more biting than he would have wanted it to be, and accordingly, Moon drew back about half an inch. “Winter, you useless snowflake, now you’ve gone and hurt her!” The Icewing shifted to draw himself up, and only now realized that he’d been tensing nearly every muscle in his body for Ice-Spirit-Knows-How-Long. “I just keep getting these weird dreams, and they start making me think when I wake up.” He continued, offering a little bit of an explanation by way of apology.
“Weird dreams?” Moon asked, as though she truly didn’t know. He wasn’t sure if she did or not - probably not, she wasn’t usually the type to feign ignorance of something, and when she did she typically did a much worse job of it.
“It’s hard to describe…” Winter admitted, “It makes sense when I’m asleep, and then I wake up and the idas just don’t work anymore. All I know is that I’m not doing enough. That I should be working harder. That this place, it’s wonderful, but I don’t belong here because… Because-” He stopped short, realizing he didn’t have any way to finish that statement. He hung his head downwards in shame, “I spent my entire life wanting something like this. Not exactly like this, I always thought it’d be in the Ice Kingdom, but this is even better-” 'This has you.' He thought, in the pause between words, “Now that I have it, though, I feel awful. Like I don’t deserve any of this. There must be something wrong with me, but I don’t know what. Maybe I’m just ungrateful.”
Moonwatcher didn’t answer immediately, instead, she grew thoughtful. He knew that look, it was her ‘trying to figure something out’ look that she wore when she was perplexed. It felt strange and uncomfortable, being looked at like that. You weren’t supposed to address those feelings. You were supposed to stamp them out, cut them off at the source as a sign of weakness and-
“What sort of Snowflake is useful?” Moon asked, once again cutting off his thoughts from getting any worse. She was far too good at that. It did not, however, make the question make any more sense to him.
“What?” Winter returned, bewildered.
“You keep thinking the same phrase over and over again. You call yourself a ‘Useless Snowflake.’ What does that mean? Is it a comparison to a useful snowflake?” She asked, her head tilting.
Winter looked deep into her eyes, not really wanting to answer, because he knew how she’d react, but he also knew that she’d already seen the thought and there was nothing for it now but to decide whether or not he wanted to lie to Moonwatcher. He did not. “That was my father’s nickname for me.”
“Nickname?”
“Pet-insult, really.” Winter explained, “Especially after I got Hailstorm captured-”
“After the Skywings captured Hailstorm.” Moon corrected him gently.
“Right. After that happened,” Moon frowned at his unwillingness to repeat it in a manner that didn’t blame himself, but she didn’t interrupt again, “He got a lot worse. Angrier. More bitter. Every time I did anything wrong, he’d slap me, or hit me on the back of the head with his tail and call me a ‘useless snowflake…’ among other, less savory things. At first I was surprised, but I got used to it.”
Moon’s eyes widened, “Winter- That’s horrible!” She protested, a look of genuine shock on her face.
Winter’s head shook once in response, “No, it’s not. He was right.” He explained, “He’d only do it when I made a mistake. Which was… Almost all the time. Several times a day.” But he could see the look on Moon’s face. She wanted to fight him over that, and he did not want to explain to her all the ways that he was a failure. He changed directions, instead. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot more ever since he died in the Battle of Jade Mountain.”
The Nightwing fell silent at that. She knew how hard it was for him. Winter hadn’t even been allowed back into the Ice Kingdom for his father’s funeral. She’d made it very clear to Winter that she had no idea what Queen Snowfall was thinking with that decision, and that if they ever met, she’d give the Icewing Queen a piece of her mind. Winter appreciated the thought, but really didn’t want Moon to have to deal with the fallout of that.
“So that was his… Phrase for you?” Moon asked, after a few long moments of silence, her voice once again gentle and entreating.
“Yes.” Winter concluded, “I think he called me that more than he called me Winter.” Moon made a face, but she didn’t lash out again.
“You also think about Hailstorm a lot still.” She added on, nudging his mind in a different direction. “Didn’t he forgive you?”
Winter waved a talon back and forth in the air slowly, “More or less. He’s not mad at me for the fact that he became Pyrite, but he is mad at me for the way I treated him afterwards. I thought that being like my parents, and reminding him of home would help him forget about the time he spent as a Skywing.”
“Did you ever think that maybe he wanted to remember that time?” Moon prompted him, earning a sharp snort from Winter.
“Why would he want to do that?”
“Would you want to forget your time in Jade Mountain?”
“That’s completely different!” Winter protested, “He was a prisoner, who was trapped using animus magic by an evil abusive queen! He couldn’t even have his own thoughts! It was horrible! Jade Mountain was just being around dragons from other tribes.” There it was. Something had just clicked in Moon’s head. He recognized the look in her eyes when she’d solved a puzzle. Usually, her ‘trying to figure something out’ look wasn’t separated very much from her, ‘I’ve just figured it out’ look. She was a clever dragon.
“Winter, would you mind going for a flight with me?” She asked, standing up, and beckoning with a wing. “I want to stretch a little bit before I try to go back to sleep, and it’d be a lot better if you were there with me.”
“I suppose.” Winter agreed, standing up and following her to the door. As they stepped out, the cool night air washed over them again. It was always nice for Winter - as much as he loved Moon, staying in a small space with her over time made the air hot. She didn’t do anything wrong, she was just a Nightwing. They breathed fire. She was warm. Enough time in a place, and that place got warm. He didn’t really mind, of course, but it made stepping outside feel all the sweeter, even as she shivered faintly from the same blast of cold. Around them, Sanctuary stretched out in every direction. A few dozen dragons, most of them in half complete wooden houses or lean-to’s, almost all asleep. The few who were awake nodded at the pair as they walked a few steps away from the first prototype scavenger pen (which had not kept the scavengers there for more than a few hours) and leapt into the air.
Moonwatcher really was beautiful, and it was only more apparent once she was in the night sky. The way that her wings blended into the stars, and her body almost vanished against the darkness made her hard to see, but he enjoyed the challenge. Focusing on her felt rewarding. It felt like the more he looked at her, the more he began to notice little details. How the scales on her wings were improvements over the constellations above, the little crack on one scale near the base of her tail, the small crease at the base of a wing from the way that she folded them together. It easily absorbed all of his attention, so he was snapped out of his reverie when Moon spoke to him again, “I know you hate what Pyrite was.” Obviously, he agreed, “Back when we were flying with her, I noticed this pattern with her thoughts. She had the same few thoughts, over and over again. I told you about that. They were stuck in a circle, remember?”
“Of course.”
“Winter, your thoughts do the same thing.”
“WHAT!?” He roared at her, and he immediately went to his ear- he’d left the earring at home, but it shouldn’t have - Darkstalker was gone, wasn’t he? So who could possibly put a spell on him now!?
“Not like that!” Moon corrected quickly, “You’re not under any sort of spell. You are having the same few thoughts over and over again, like a circle. ‘Useless snowflake,’ ‘I don’t deserve to be here,’ ‘I need to be doing more,’ and so on. I swear I’ve heard that from your head almost as much as how much you love me, but you never talk about it.”
Winter smiled faintly, and looked away, down to the ground. “Sorry, I didn’t want to worry you…”
“Three moons, Winter!” Moon cried, “I WANT to be worried about this! I decided to move to this frozen patch of land in the middle of nowhere, and help you build a scavenger sanctuary because I wanted to be with you, and I wanted to share in your life! So no! No more of this, ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine’ nonsense. I’m here, I’m not going anywhere, and we’re dealing with this together. Alright?”
Winter’s heart was a mess. This was the crux of his failure. He was so useless he couldn’t even manage his own feelings. He needed a Nightwing to do it for him! A Ni- No. Moonwatcher was more than ‘some nightwing,’ and he knew that. He’d been working so hard to get over his tribalism, and now he was thinking like that again - about Moonwatcher of all dragons! Maybe his father was right. His intellect really did rival that of a dead pigeon…
“WINTER!” Moon shouted at him. “Do you understand what I just said?”
“Yes! I understand.” He snapped back, before moving to retreat inwards again. Moon banked to the side, though, turning towards the mountain range that overlooked Sanctuary to the east and he had to focus intently to follow the shifts in the night sky so that he could stay near her.
“Good. Now let me continue.” Moon demanded, giving herself a little bit of space before doing exactly that, “Your thoughts keep going to the same places, doing the same thing, but they’re not your thoughts, Winter.” Now he was lost, but she kept going. “It wasn’t animus magic, it was repetition, taking a dragonet who didn’t know any better, and telling him the same thing over and over again until he believed it - but the effect is the same. Pyrite even had the same thoughts. She thought she wasn’t very good at anything, you keep thinking that you’re useless…”
“So?” Winter asked, significantly ruffled. “So I happen to have a few of the same thoughts as that sickening… Not-dragon. So what?” Although he had to admit, the idea that he had anything at all in common with Pyrite made him feel nauseous.
Moon sighed, and flapped her wings harder in frustration, “What I’m saying, Winter, is that your parents did the same thing to you.”
There was a beat where that hit Winter’s head, and a second one where he went to protest, only to remember Moon’s words from a few moments ago. They’d… Done that to him? They’d altered his thoughts? They made him think… He forgot to flap his wings, and almost fell out of the air before he managed to catch himself. Moon immediately curved their path downwards to the nearest rocky outcropping of the foothill that they’d been flying alongside.
If their words had gotten inside his head, then that meant that… “Exactly.’ Moon agreed, “Those aren’t your thoughts. They’re their thoughts. All that time with that wall, being blamed for your brother’s absence, all the times that they got mad at you - you started to believe it.”
“I don’t think I’m useless.” Winter argued back.
“You have dreams about it almost every night.” Moon countered, turning, and landing on the rocks with Winter touching down alongside her shortly after. She turned her head upwards, fulfilling her namesake, as though the moons were going to guide her through what to say next. “Winter, do you think that dragonets are always perfect immediately? Or do you believe that they make mistakes sometimes, and need space to learn and grow?”
“Obviously, they need some amount of patience.” He snorted, “You should see them the first time they try to eat real food, even.”
Moon nodded her head once, “So, when you were a dragonet, do you think that you should have had to be perfect all the time, immediately?”
“That’s different!” Winter protested, again. A protest that earned him only a disappointed look. “I got my brother captured. I could never do anything right… I deserved it.”
“Winter, you were three.” Moon insisted, her tone almost flat as she pointed out the obvious. “You were a three year old dragonet when that happened. You could not possibly have been responsible for your brother being kidnapped by another tribe! And the way you’ve told me the story, they said the same thing to you before that happened, too!” She stopped staring at the moons, and instead turned, reaching out and grabbing his shoulders. He realized only now that the reason she’d been looking away was that her eyes were filled with tears. Her talons squeezed into his scales hard enough that it hurt, but only a little bit, and he was far too shocked to care.
“... But Hailstorm was so mad at me…” Winter tried, giving explaining it one more try, hoping Moon would listen. Unfortunately for him, she’d been listening for a long, long time.
“No, he wasn’t.” She demanded. “You had a spear at your chest, Winter! A group of Skywings wanted to kill you, and you wouldn’t leave! He did the only thing he knew how to do to make you go away, so that you’d live! He never held it against you! Why do you think he forgave you so quickly afterwards?”
Winter had no answer. The Icewing stared down at Moonwatcher, into her tear-filled eyes, and began to realize that he, himself, was starting to shake. He couldn’t place why, exactly. He just knew that he was trembling and that it got even worse the more Moon talked.
“You had the worst moment of your life. Your brother and only close friend was stolen from you at spear-point, and he had to hurt you to make sure that you got away, and when you got home, you were told it was all your fault. That you’d done something wrong again. As if you’d conjured the Skywings out of the ether to kidnap Hailstorm and take him prisoner. As though you, a three year old dragonet were supposed to fight them all off on your own! As though you hadn’t just lost the only friend in your life!” She leaned forward, and put her head on his chest, as tears began to fall down her cheeks. His wings wrapped around her, instinctively and protectively, as though something might creep out of the shadows and snatch her away while he wasn’t looking. That feeling gave him enough focus to stop trembling, and enough focus to realize that he was crying, now, too. He didn’t know when that had started, but in his attempt to stop, he only sniffled in a very undignified manner. He could already feel the pain from the tail-whip that was going to get him, but… It never came.
“Winter, you deserved so much better.” Moon whispered. “You didn’t do anything wrong. What happened with Hailstorm was bad luck. And then what happened to both of you was awful. You were made to think that you’re useless, and pathetic, and that nothing was right with you, but I don’t see that. I see an amazing dragon who clawed his way desperately through that, and still managed to do amazing things…”
Winter snorted bitterly, at long last finding his voice again, “If only.” He rumbled, “I started out with everything. I was a prince, I had piles of treasure, and I grew up with the princesses that would one day be queen… And now…” Now he had this warm feeling of a Nightwing pressed into his chest. He could feel her tears streaking down his neck after they left her cheeks. His grip tightened, and he held her closer, this time, like she might try to leave if he wasn’t careful.
For a long time, neither of them said anything. They held each other close in the moonlight, their tails entwined, their wings pressed together, their hearts beating in the same heightened tempo of adrenaline and grief, listening to one another’s heavy breathing.
Once again, it was Moonwatcher who broke the silence. “You’ve done so much, Winter.” This time, she pulled away. He tensed, and tried to keep her at his chest, but she pushed back and he relented. Even so, she only tucked herself against his side, instead, so that she could look in the same direction that he did, and stay hidden underneath his wing. “You righted an ancient wrong in your tribe. You saved an innocent dragon from a fate worse than death, even knowing you’d lose everything you’d ever known for it. You freed your brother, and you helped me realize what Darkstalker was up to, even when I couldn’t see past his honeyed words, myself. Then, even after how they hurt you, you stood up for your tribe and fought with them- and they STILL exiled you.” She took a deep breath, and this time, she directed his vision downwards, to the small town that was slowly growing in the valley beneath them and her voice came out, quiet and soft, “So you made your own Sanctuary.”
“Winter, you’ve done amazing things in your life. You’ve overcome animus dragons, you’ve stood up for your tribe against impossible odds, and against itself. You’ve made something out of nothing…” She leaned in, and once again pressed her head against his shoulder, tilting her nose upwards into the crook of his neck. “I’m sorry about what happened to you, but Winter, you’re the opposite of useless. You’re a hero, as much as those exist in the real world, anyway.”
There was a longing in her voice for something that he couldn’t quite figure out, but there were too many thoughts swirling in his head all at once. He could feel something inside of him melting. Something splitting apart. The last grasp that he had on the Ice Kingdom, on the way he’d grown up. The years of watching his name on the rainkings wall, of being hit, and beaten, and yelled at, being called a…
Moon didn’t interrupt him this time, he did. He stopped the thought. Between his father and Moonwatcher, he knew who he trusted more. He knew this wouldn’t be the last time he felt like this, but something was different. Something had shifted. As he looked down at Sanctuary, as he felt the warmth of the wonderful Nightwing pressed against his side, he felt something he hadn’t felt this truly in as long as he could remember. He was happy. More than that, he was proud. He’d built something. He was the type of dragon that Moon could love - one who did the right thing, one who stood by his beliefs, one who tried to understand others and do what was best for them, no matter what.
“I love you.” Moonwatcher whispered, her tail twining carefully around his own to avoid the spikes.
His gaze slowly shifted from Sanctuary upwards, staring at the moons above in their brilliant starlit sky.
“I love you, too, Moonwatcher.”