"So… you shot him?"
Nina the Newbie slipping her flippers into her coat pockets. She shifted a bit to avoid the blood pooling at her feet. She didn't say anything.
"Nina, you don't just shoot criminals!" G worriedly ran a flipper over his head, gesturing to the dead polar bear with the other. "That's not what good guys do, we can't just…"
He trailed off, turning away from the body with incredulity.
"Well what was I supposed to do G?!" Nina retorted firmly. Her breath escaped in foggy puffs, as if to paint a picture of her frustration. "Don't act like we haven't been chasing this guy for what, five years now?"
"She's right you know…" Jet Pack Guy mutters. Rookie lightly elbows him in disgust.
"See, thank you, someone with common sense here! Go on, please, tell them I'm not crazy, Guy," Nina pleads.
Jet Pack Guy keeps his gaze fixated on the (quite literally) smoking gun a few feet away from him. He silently thanks God that his sunglasses are keeping his expression unreadable. "Well," he begins, "She has a point. Herbert's been captured before and he's escaped before. What were we going to do this time? Honestly. Put him in some cell?"
G hesitates to answer. "… Yes. Yes, we would have. But-"
"And what? Keep him there for life? Wait for him to break out, like he always does? I'm not necessarily speaking as an agent here, but as a citizen? And as a person with common sense? I would have probably done the same."
"It was a tight situation. Tensions were high." Nina quickly adds.
Rookie sidesteps away from Guy non-subtly. He shivers a little as the breeze kicks up, still chill from the recent blizzard.
Jet Pack Guy continues. "Right. And to add to that, remember the first time we caught him? Before Nina came back, G, I told you we should send him back to the Arctic, or at least to the Falkland Islands or something, but you didn't listen to me, did you Gary?!"
"Guy, no, don't talk to him like that…" Rookie manages to squeak. His eyes are fixed on the bits of grey and pink meat splayed on the otherwise pristine snow. His face has a (slightly more) green pallor.
The newbie crosses her arms and furrows her brow while beside her, Dot uncomfortably tousled the hairs of her wig. She said nothing, but gave Rookie an empathetic look.
Salty ocean air intermingles with that of iron. Rookie couged and swallowed with a visibly pained expression while the anger-colored penguin stares daggers at the scientist.
Suddenly, Nina broke the tension. "If anything, I don't see why we didn't do this before. It would have saved us a lot of embarrassment."
"Nina!" G says.
"… Thanks for saving us, Nina." Dot adds with a weak laugh. She frowned and quickly looked down.
The Director entered the scene after coming back from a brief walk to clear her mind.
"Oh, thank you, Aun…. Director." Nina corrected herself. She still wasn't used to calling Aunt Arctic by her codename, given that she just found out who The Director was a moment after splaying the bear's grin all over the snow. "What's the verdict?"
She paused to wipe her glasses, giving Herbert's broken body a cursory glance and then staring pensively into the sunset.
"Given the circumstances…" she said, a bit confusedly, "I would have to look more deeply into this later." She gave the corpse an aporetic little kick. "But as of now, you're free to go."
Nina gives a relieved sigh. "Thank you." She shrugged off some glares and began to make her way back home.
