An observer would be forgiven for thinking that Falco had just sat down in front of a future-revealing mirror. The image in the glass was a reasonable guess as to what he would look like after fifty more hard years. There were the same cobalt feathers, gone silver at their edges. The downy red around the eyes was right, too; it had faded from crimson to blush, but it still made a striking contrast. Even the caution in the ice-chip gazes matched. Any sketch artist tasked with creating an age accelerated portrait of Starfox's sharpest-tongued member would have called it a perfect rendering.

But this elderly, orange-jumpsuited doppelganger was not an illustration of what Falco wanted to become. For starters, he had no interest in looking like a great-grandfather at the age of forty. Then there was the mere fact of the glass, laser-proofed and sound-blocking, which stood between them. Sighing, Falco pointed his beak towards the floor and let his forehead rest against the divider. His mature reflection copied him. It was the closest they'd been to one another in a decade. It was the closest that Cornerian law would ever let them be again.

Several heartbeats passed before Falco reached blindly for the handset on the wall beside him. The phone was an impersonal and outdated mode of communication, but he'd take what he could get. "…Hi, dad."

"Miglio." That single word – my son, what his father had always called him, right up until the last time they'd spoken – seemed to skip through Falco's ear and dive into his throat. There it balled up on itself, its six letters swelling with emotion until they made it hard for him to draw breath. "I've missed you."

"I know. I…" He couldn't say it. It was too much work to admit the truth, impossible to give voice to the very thing he'd been hiding from himself for half his life. He'd decided at age nine that pining for his parents was a weakness that he could not afford if he wanted to survive. Now, at nineteen, the habit should have been set. But it was still so hard, so hard not to give in to the pain and the want.

It was easier to be stoic about his mother, whose touch he knew he could never reclaim. But his father, whose demonstrated lessons in loyalty and love were what had brought them both to this point, still lived. As such there was hope, and Falco had never once needed Peppy to tell him not to give up on that. Even if this was the closest that hope could ever come to reuniting him with his father, Falco secretly clung to it. He had to; it was the only faith in the unseen he had left. The fact that he couldn't express his belief didn't make it any less real.

"I've been seeing you on the news, miglio." There was pride in the older man's voice, and a touch of awe. "You've gone so far."

"…Yeah. Well. I…got lucky. A few times, actually."

"No." The correction, spoken in a tone that was too gentle to belong to a once-feared gangland enforcer, made Falco's chest ache. How many of his youthful transgressions – things that should have landed him in shackles alongside his father – might have been avoided if only such soft chastisement had been available to him during the most turbulent years of his life? "You worked hard. You worked smart. You made yourself into the man I always knew you'd be." A beat passed. "I'm so proud of you."

Filial satisfaction briefly overrode the agony of the distance between them. Falco dared to look up. He found his father staring at him, crying unabashedly. "…Don't," Falco begged. The sight was unbearable. Pico Lombardi was a hard man, a made man, and made men didn't cry. The acceptable time for tears, if there'd ever been one, had been when Falco's mother had been gunned down in a botched assassination attempt on Pico himself. But there had been no grief then, except for what little Falco had shown. Pico had been a rock, expressing his emotions with vengeful action rather than vented anguish. He hadn't even flinched when the police put him in one car and social services put his screaming child in another.

Pico's eyes crinkled with a sad sort of amusement. "I'm not the man I once was, miglio," he confessed. "When they convicted me, the prosecutor said I'd shown no remorse for deaths I'd caused. If I saw that lawyer today, I'd tell him that I still don't feel what he thinks I should. But I do feel regret." The hand that wasn't clutching the phone rose and pressed itself against the glass. "Not for the choices I made, but for what those choices did to you." The older man's voice dropped into a hoarse whisper. "You were the last person I wanted to hurt."

"I…I know, dad." He'd never doubted that. His father's passion-stoked killing spree had always made a weird sort of sense to Falco. When people killed someone you loved, you killed them right back. It was eye-for-an-eye thinking that would have forever unsuited him for life in civilized Cornerian society had that society not needed him to fight a war. Now, of course, Falco understood the purpose of bureaucratic justice, and generally accepted its laws. But he knew in his heart of hearts that if it came down to it – if it were Fox or Slippy or Peppy that he had to watch bleed out on a dirty sidewalk – he would take the sentencing of the perpetrator into his own hands. "It's okay. I understand."

For a moment neither of them spoke. "Your foster family," Pico finally broached. "The people they gave you to after I was arrested. They were good to you?"

Before Falco could formulate a response to that complicated question a rough order came over the loudspeaker. "One minute."

Sixty seconds. Too fast. How could he explain his childish decision to flee that accepting home, to run back to the streets he knew, to form a youthful gang of his own, in such a short period? "It's a long story."

"Mm." The undertone of that murmur made Falco thinks that his father somehow understood all of the things he hadn't said. "But you have a good family now," Pico went on. It was a statement, not a question. "I saw them with you, on the news. The interviews."

There had been so many interviews in those first weeks after Andross' defeat. Falco wondered which ones his father had seen. He glanced at his watch; forty seconds left. No time. "I…yeah. I do."

Suddenly, there was so much he wanted to share. It didn't matter that he'd skipped over the bad stories, but he should have given his father a glimpse of his life now. It would have made the old man happy to hear about the good place Falco had found himself in. Instead he'd been an idiot and had wasted four of their five minutes talking around old agonies. There were so many better conversations they should have had.

The security lock on the door behind him clicked open. At the same time, the light over the portal on the far side of the glass turned green. Falco's fingers flew to where Pico's hand was still waiting. "Dad…I don't want to go."

"I know, miglio. But you have to. We both do."

It was the same exchange they'd had the last time they were separated by force. Falco, thinking that was the end of things, turned his head. He couldn't let his father see the moisture that was threatening to overspill his eyelids. If he did, what would happen to the pride of mere minutes before?

Then Pico spoke again. "You go, Falco. Go to your family. Take care of them. And," he added tenderly, "let them take care of you. There's no shame in it."

With that, it was over. A guard stepped up behind Pico and cuffed his hands behind his back before allowing him to rise from his seat. Falco watched as his father disappeared into a gray, impersonal corridor. Only when the door had closed behind him and the light above it switched back to red did he finally hang up the handset on his end.

"…Sir?" The guard on the free side of the glass, a woman with the sleek build of her greyhound ancestors, addressed him sympathetically. "I'm sorry, but there's another appointment in five minutes."

Falco shook himself. "Yeah. Sure. I'm going." Shoving his chair back from the window so that it screeched, he stood up and let the guard lead him away.