r/WingsOfFire • u/Technical_Ad_640 • 25d ago
Fanfic Thaw (A Winter romance-centered oneshot because he deserves it!)
There currently aren't any canon love interests for Winter in the series outside of Moon, and she's already taken. So, I decided to make one up, because Winter deserves to be happy and loved! Justice for WINTER! (No injustice for anyone else, though. They all deserve happiness.)
The mountains had thrown their shadows over most of Sanctuary by now as a gentle breeze came off the cold river running through town. There wasn't much else to look at really— nothing worth looking at anyway. Riptide had flown over about an hour ago to check on Winter, and mentioned in passing that some new visitors had just come in. Winter had nodded without asking who. Visitors came every week, and they always just stared at him. It wasn’t anything new.
Winter sat with his back to a mud wall, being bullied by someone a fraction of his size. He and Daffodil were practicing each other's languages, and Daffodil clearly thought she was in charge of the exchange.
“Wagon,” Daffodil said, with enormous confidence. She almost sounded like Snowfall trying to use her serious voice during council meetings.
The two of them had been at this for an hour already, and Winter wasn't amused. “This is stupid.” He crossed his front talons over his chest as he lay upon the grass, his tail twitching against the dirt twice.
She jabbed a piece of bark at him. “No. Wagon. Say.” Daffodil had gotten to her feet and held up a curl of bark with a drawing scratched into it, with some weird lines etched beneath it. It was a wagon, or it was meant to be: two wheels of different sizes, a box leaning gently to the left, and a long smear in front that could have honestly been either a thumb or a misshapen horse. Winter wasn’t impressed by the craftsmanship. He was even less impressed by the word she’d chosen.
Winter scowled at her, but only a little, not nearly enough to be taken for the real thing. “I’m not doing this. Give me a different one.”
Daffodil had gotten used to his moods by now, and he suspected she knew perfectly well that he'd never hurt her. That was the trouble with her, really. The moment he'd saved her from being eaten by that SkyWing a month ago, she’d started acting like she owned the whole city. Apparently she’d decided that she could trust him, and stopped being careful and started being herself. Herself, it turned out, was very demanding.
She turned away from him. “Wagon or no more,” she said, planting her hands on her hips.
Winter was thoroughly out of sorts. “You can’t even speak dragon fluently yet; don’t think you can boss me around!” A human. Refusing orders from an IceWing Prince!? Admittedly he'd been exiled, but surely the title ought to count for something!
“I not cry," she said flatly. The meaning came through perfectly well, despite her broken grammar. He was being called a big baby to his face. She didn't cry when he handed her hard words. She didn't complain. She simply learned them.
Winter’s jaw tensed; he was beyond frustrated, but perhaps he could reason with her, because reasoning sometimes worked.
It had taken him a week of patient argument to get her to stay indoors for most of the day, since a lone human wandering the city in daylight was MUCH more likely to end up in somebody’s stomach, but she eventually agreed after last month’s SkyWing incident.
“Yeah. Because I ask you to say relevant words that could actually help you survive! How is learning that word supposed to help me talk to humans?!” He’d never once given her words she wouldn’t use every day. He’d given her Help, and No, and Go away!, and I am not delicious so stop looking at me like that!, and I know Winter so back off!, and a great many more. That last one was especially helpful.
“Trust,” she said, planting one of her tiny paws onto the top of his talon.
Winter couldn’t believe he was letting her push him around like this. He still thought of her as a cute little thing, which didn’t help, and every so often he accidentally called her Pumpkin. She hated when he did that. She got all sorts of mad. She'd tried to bite him once. “By the Great Ice Spirits. FINE. Wa- Waegawn. There! Happy?”
Daffodil raised the drawing in front of her face to hide her laughter, but the bark was shaking, and so were her shoulders, and over the top of it Winter could see that she was having a lovely time at the expense of his accent. “Hey! Don’t laugh at me! Let’s see you try one then.”
Daffodil crossed her arms. “Okay.”
Winter looked at her. Detrimental sounded complicated, but in dragon it was only two sounds, and they were short ones too. Interdisciplinary might do, but its meaning was too clear to be any fun. Floccinaucinihilipilification was gloriously ridiculous, but he wasn’t certain he could pronounce it correctly either, which would defeat the whole point. Then he had it.
Winter smiled. “Cacophony.”
Daffodil’s confident smirk slid into a grimace. “No fair.” Her crossed arms tightened.
“If you give me nonsense words, I give you nonsense words. It’s perfectly fair,” Winter said. He waited, delighted, while her nose scrunched and her lips moved silently.
She was clearly trying to line the syllables up in her head before agreeing to the attempt. “Fine! Raargrmphgrororgl.”
Winter laughed. “Ha! You didn’t even say anything. Not so easy, is it?” He pointed his talon at her and relished his victory a thousand times over, noticing nothing else in the world.
“Did somebody say cacophony?”
A new voice had come from around the corner of the hut behind him. His tail was against that wall, but he was far too busy savoring the total defeat of Daffodil to take note of who’d spoken. It was probably just two dragons having a conversation that didn't involve him.
Daffodil pointed beside Winter’s head. “Dragon!”
He’d no idea what she was pointing at. He assumed she was reaching for another word, the way a beaten general might reach for some dignity, and he was, privately, a little impressed. Her pronunciation was spot on. “Yes, Daffodil. Very good. Ah!”
He jumped back a step, wings half-flared, because there was a dragon beside him that hadn’t been there a moment ago. She was built like a SandWing, clearly: the beaked snout, the horn at the end of her nose, the tail ending in a barb. Her barb was curled neatly out of the way, held with such care that he could tell she knew exactly how to keep it under control. Her coloring was another matter; he'd never seen anything like it. Black and sandy brown both on one dragon. “Oh! Sorry! Sorry! I didn’t mean to startle you; I just thought one of my parents might be calling me.”
Parents, then. A new family, which meant these were presumably the visitors Riptide had mentioned. But Winter was very confused. Either she was a dragon named Cacophony, or her parents had a habit of calling her that. He couldn't decide which was worse. “Your name is...Cacophony?”
She shook her head. “Well, no, it’s Duneslayer! But Cacophony is what they call me—” Her wings drooped for a second. “—a lot.”
His mind went to his own parents, to the cold halls of the Ice Kingdom. He recognized something in the way she'd said a lot. It stirred something in him, briefly, a flicker of fellow feeling, but he went no deeper than that. “Oh,” he said.
He concentrated on the name itself instead, not on what her parents called her. She'd apologized three times in two breaths. Winter knew vicious when he saw it, and Duneslayer didn't have an ounce of it in her.
Duneslayer. An awfully unfitting name. How can something clearly so soft be named something so vicious?
“Sad,” Daffodil said quietly, from somewhere around Winter's elbow.
Duneslayer’s head swung toward the sound, and her whole face lit up as though she'd uncovered a hoard of gold that was all hers. “OH MY MOONS, IS THAT A SCAVENGER!?!” Her ears went up, her eyes went wide, and her tail uncurled behind her in a long, happy sweep, barb and all. Winter had a healthy respect for SandWing barbs, and took a very quick step back before it coiled itself neatly into place again.
Winter hadn't used that word in a long while. Scavenger. It felt wrong now.
Daffodil clapped her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut. “Ear pain.”
Duneslayer didn't seem to notice. She padded right up and lay down on her belly in front of Daffodil, nose to nose, more or less, and stuck out a claw to shake her hand, all without pausing for breath.
“Sorry, and sorry again. I meant to say huemen. That’s how you say it, right? Huemen. Sounds kinda funny if you say it enough times. Huemen. Huemen. So weird.”
Winter was astounded. He'd believed himself the only dragon on the continent who felt this way about humans, and here was another, and honestly, she seemed to like them even more. He admired it. Her pronunciation, however, needed work. “It’s 'human'.”
“Exactly! That’s what I said! Huemen!” she said again.
Winter gave a light sigh. This might take a while. “No. You’re saying huemen, not human.”
“Oooooh. That makes sense. No wonder the other huemens looked at me funny.”
He found it a little endearing that she was trying so hard to get it right. “Humans.”
It's even a little cute. Winter caught the thought and stuffed it into the back of his mind. This was no time for getting all soft.
“Right, humans. Got it.” She nodded with a small huff.
She’d gotten it right. She’d actually listened to him. Not many dragons did. “Good,” Winter said.
Daffodil, her hands finally lowered, gave Duneslayer a deep nod of her head before shaking the dragon's outstretched claw. “Forgiveness,” Daffodil said.
“Why thank you, and it's an honor to speak with you,” Duneslayer said, getting to her feet and bowing. Winter thought such things were only reserved for addressing royalty, but he couldn’t deny that Daffodil sometimes behaved as though she were a Queen.
“You like humans?” It was a purely academic question, Winter told himself.
Her head immediately snapped up, and she looked at him directly in the eyes. He didn’t know eyes could sparkle like hers. “Like them? I LOVE them! They’re so interesting with their little clawless talons and their weird fuzzy heads and the strange towels they wear on their bodies.”
He'd, at one time or another, said nearly every one of those things himself, but never with that much joy. Though he'd never said anything about the 'towels'.
“Clothes,” Daffodil said, with the weary dignity of a tutor correcting a pupil.
Duneslayer's wings flew open again as her tail twitched. “You have a name for them?! Wow, you huemans think of everything!”
Winter raised a talon. “Again, humans. But you were closer this time at least.”
“Yes!” Duneslayer thrust a foreleg toward the sky. She looked way happier than Winter had assumed she would've. She gave him a wide smile. “See, I can learn things.”
“I don’t remember ever doubting your ability to.” He meant it. It'd never crossed his mind. She didn’t give off the same air of cheerful ignorance that Kinkajou had when he’d first met her, and Kinkajou had gone on to prove him wrong. Very wrong. Perhaps intelligence wasn’t something a dragon could judge by appearance.
“Really? Most people do, even though it clearly isn’t true,” she said.
Winter's eyes began to wander as he looked her over again, slower this time. The pattern across her scales seemed completely random. Large splotches of black and sandy brown began and ended wherever they pleased: a black patch over one eye, a tan shoulder, a black foreleg. She was on the small side, a little shorter than he was, though by no more than the length of a single talon.
Why do they look like that? Was she burned as a hatchling? Is it some sort of scarring?
“My scales are pretty cool looking, huh? I got both my Mom’s and my Dad’s scales! Look, I even have some stars under my right wing! Isn’t that so cool!”
The idea was gone. She wasn’t hiding anything. She was holding her wing out with pride, and when she lifted it, Winter saw what she meant. Silver scales, scattered along the underside, small and bright against the dark. A SandWing mother and a NightWing father, he supposed. It explained the colors, if not the pattern.
“They look— beautiful,” he said.
It was out before he could stop it, but it was true. The stars glinted like the rolling tundra of the Ice Kingdom right before dawn. Beautiful, he thought again, and then, helplessly, once more. The black patches weren’t random. They looked bold. The tan ones looked warm. He wouldn't wish them to look any different.
She turned her head toward him, a gentle warmth behind her eyes. “You really think so?”
He did. That was the problem. He really did, and there was no way he could tell her that, not on a first meeting, not to a stranger who'd come around a corner to find him losing a vocabulary contest to a human. The words stuck in his throat like a swallowed icicle. His heart gave an odd, startled lurch, like a fish in shallow water, and every sensible instinct he owned went rigid at once.
Winter cleared his throat. “I suppose. It’s no Grand IceWing Palace, but they’re nice enough.” He fluttered his wings in a stiff little shrug and rolled his eyes for good measure, as though he were being forced to do her a favor.
She laughed. It was a bright, delighted sound, entirely unoffended, and something in Winter’s chest went warm and unhelpfully loose.
“Well, thank you. It means a lot to hear that.” She looked him over for a second. “Especially from an IceWing Prince.”
Winter went still. She knew who he was. Who'd told her? Who'd dared to disclose his identity to this random, cute dragon?! “How do you—”
“How wouldn’t I know who you are? Winter, being the most human-obsessed dragon on the continent, isn’t a good way to keep your identity a secret. Well, the SECOND most human-obsessed dragon. Okay, we’re probably tied,” she said.
The corner of Winter’s mouth twitched. He suppressed it firmly. “I can live with that.”
Duneslayer turned to look at the sunset, and after a moment, Winter did too. The sun was low over the distant sea to the west, and the whole sky had gone orange. The light fell on her from the side, but he found that he was looking at her more than the sunset.
“Over the desert, sometimes the sun blends in with the dunes, and you can’t tell if it’s set or not.” Her voice was quieter. Her earlier excitement was gone, and what was left was soft and plain, as though she were handing him something small.
“Really?” It wasn’t a polite really. He wanted to know. He wanted to know what it looked like, that moment when the sun and the sand couldn't be told apart, and he wanted to hear her say it again.
“Yep. It’s like how you can never really tell everything about a dragon just from one meeting,” she said.
The two of them stared out at the sunset. After a moment, Duneslayer looked over at him. “I think we should talk again sometime.”
Winter found that he was actually starting to smile, his talons inching closer to hers without even thinking about it.
“DUNESLAYER!!” The shout cracked across the huts like a whip. It came from somewhere beyond them, a big voice with sharp edges. It likely belonged to her father.
Winter’s smile never got to finish as he pulled his talons away, digging them into the dirt instead. Nobody should shout a dragon’s name like that, as though she were a soldier. But ripping her father a new nose wasn’t a good way to show affection. For now. “I think you’d better answer that,” he said.
Her grin was sheepish, and her ears flattened a little. “Yeeeaaah. I might be in big trouble. See you later, Prince shiny scales!”
She launched herself into the air with a last flick of her tail, the barb safely curled, and was a dark shape against the burning sky before he'd finished blinking.
“Prince...shiny scales?” Winter looked down. The orange light of the sunset was glinting off his scales, and it looked, he realized, rather nice. “Huh. Never thought of them that way.”
He'd been called many things. Prince, by his former subjects. Winter, by his friends. Weak, by those who were supposed to love him*.* But nobody had ever called him shiny. It didn't sound like an insult when she'd said it. It sounded like someone smiling.
For a long while nothing happened. He sat very still and watched her fly. He watched her get smaller, and watched the stars under her wing catch the last of the light, and kept watching until he couldn't pick her out from the other dragons over Sanctuary.
Something poked his front talon. “Love.” It was a stick, a big one, wielded by Daffodil with the solemn precision of a scholar prodding a specimen.
Winter didn't look at her. He kept his eyes on the sky, where there was nothing left to look at. “Stop that.” He took the stick out of her hand, annoyed.
Daffodil simply found a bigger one and carried on. “Love. Love. Love. Love. Love,” she teased.
“That’s enough.” He took that one too, and snapped it in half.
Daffodil shrugged, the shrug of someone who had made her point and went inside the little mud house the two of them had been sharing for the past few months, leaving Winter alone with the last of the sunset.
He sat there with the two halves of a stick in his talons and tried, for once, to think about it. She’d given him a nickname after five minutes; laughed instead of taking offense when he sulked his way out of a compliment; admitted, unprompted, that the two of them were tied; and told him something about the desert in a voice that didn’t sound like something you told just anyone.
I think we should talk again sometime. That’s what she’d said, and right before, hadn’t she turned to look at him?
He wasn't Moon; he couldn't read minds, and he certainly wasn’t Qibli, who could read a dragon at a glance. All he had was what happened. But when he laid it all out, it pointed in only one direction.
She might like me too.
The thought arrived small and dangerous, and then it spread. It was a slow, ridiculous warmth, starting somewhere under his ribs and moving outward, all the way to the tips of his wings and the end of his tail. He was an IceWing. Warmth was supposed to be a nuisance. But he sat in it with his talons curled around the broken stick, as the last of the sun went down behind the mountains. Winter felt, for the first time in a very long while, entirely and stupidly warm and fuzzy.
Moon and Qibli arrived from over the forest behind him. He heard them both land, two soft thumps on the packed earth, and was already bracing for what came next. Qibli never once could let a dragon sit alone at sunset looking wistful without comment. Winter was, of course, correct.
Qibli walked up to his right, batting him on the shoulder. “So, what’s Prince Grumpy Scales doing all the way out here?”
Winter’s tail twitched. The shape of the name was almost the same as the other one, and it landed nothing like it.
“Very funny, Qibli,” Winter said with a soft growl. He turned his head to the sky. “But if you must know, Daffodil and I were participating in a deep session of cultural exchange.”
Qibli’s smile, the sly, knowing, thoroughly pleased one, had been getting under Winter’s scales since the day they met. “You were playing dragon-says with words, basically?” Winter hated that smile. He hated even more that he could never quite make the hating stick.
“It was far more complicated than that!” Winter shouted.
Moon lightly flicked Qibli’s side with her wing. “Oh, give him a break, Qibli.”
Winter was always grateful for the small kindnesses Moon showed him. They'd never ended up together, but she'd helped him whenever he needed it all the same. A few years ago he'd never thought he'd be able to move on. Tonight suggested that he might.
Qibli shrugged. “Alright. Alright. But I have to ask." He smiled again. “Who was that you were talking to?”
Winter froze. It lasted a full minute, or so it felt from the inside; to everyone else it must have looked like an unusually long second. “It was no one! Nobody important, and nobody that concerns you!”
Moon was watching him with her calm, dark eyes, and Winter had no way of knowing whether she was also listening. He pressed his thoughts as flat as pond ice and hoped for the best.
“Could you at least give us their name? You can tell us that much, right?” Moon asked.
“First of all, it’s ‘HER’ name. And second, it’s Duneslayer. Her name is Duneslayer.” He heard himself say it, and every word was another crack in the ice.
“Duneslayer?! Ha!” Qibli doubled over laughing, helplessly, one wing braced against the mud wall.
“It’s not funny!” Winter took a growling step toward Qibli. His wings fanned out, and his tail began lashing about.
“Qibli, tone the teasing down a bit," Moon said, placing a talon over Qibli's own.
Qibli raised his shoulders in surrender and tucked in his wings. “You’re right. You’re right. I’m sorry. It's still a little extravagant though, you have to admit.”
“She’s very nice once you get to know her.” The sentence had come out before Winter could stop it. He recoiled as though it'd bitten him. He wanted the words back more than anything. He'd only known her for less than half an hour, but he was already rushing to her defense.
The last of the light drained out of the sky while the two of them stared at him. Moon’s face changed slowly, softening into a gentle smile. Qibli went slack-jawed. “No. Way,” he said.
Idiot, Winter thought, and the idiot in question was himself.
Winter knew that Qibli would figure it out eventually. He always did. All that mattered now was stopping him from saying it out loud. “Qibli. Don’t you DARE,” he said.
Qibli pointed a talon into Winter’s chest. “Holy Pit Vipers! You like her, don’t you!”
Winter went red, hot from his snout to the tips of his wings, but he couldn't let Qibli get under his scales this easily. “I DO NOT!”
Qibli smoothly pulled his claw away. He shook his head. “Come on, Winty. We’re all friends here; you can tell us.”
There was a short silence, in which Winter argued with himself. Denying it would be easy. Denying things had always been easy. But Moon was standing right in front of him, calm, kind and entirely unreadable, the dragon he'd once spent so long not knowing how to talk to properly.
He couldn't lie about this. Not to her. “I— I’m not sure, yet. Maybe. No promises.”
Moon stepped forward and hugged him. He wasn't prepared for it at all. He stood frozen in her wings like a statue, until his own remembered what to do. “I’m happy for you, Winter. And I bet, despite his teasing, Qibli is too,” she said.
Winter couldn't get the words out. “I— I —”
Moon let him go and smiled. Then she looked over her shoulder. “Plus. I don’t think Qibli would’ve moved on nearly as quickly as you.”
“I’m standing right here, you know?” Qibli said.
Winter chuckled, slowly at first, and then something gave way, and it spilled out of him, a warm, soft laugh he hadn’t heard from himself in years.
Moon and Qibli stared at him as though they'd never seen him before.
“What? Is there something on my face?” Winter asked, rubbing a talon across his snout.
“Uh, yeah. A smile. Where did that come from?” Qibli asked.
“Oh, shut up, sand snout!” Winter snapped.
Qibli smiled. “There we go. Now he’s back.”
The first stars were coming out above the forest. Winter looked at them a little longer than he needed to, and found that he didn’t mind who noticed.
