She hadn't expected for Drake to attempt anything, but the moment he had she didn't know what else to expect. He was never this forward, and if he had been Drake would silently acknowledge her approval beforehand. She knew he hadn't been in a stable state of mind, but it hadn't stopped the thought from grazing upon her consciousness. Maybe if the ghoul had pulled away again before the duck had any further attempts, he'd give up on it.

Yet, the moment Morgana had done so, his sickness had only gotten worse. He had grabbed her with more strength than he likely had, and she couldn't seem to rip herself away from his devastated expression. The bats began yapping behind her, despite Drake even hearing the sound. The idea they concluded was tempting.

But she couldn't, not with him hurting this much. Doing so would only add to his list of pain. It wasn't to say that the snake still didn't choke her, temptation had always been an option, but Morgana had learned ways of repelling it. Sometimes a swat to the head would cause the serpent to look the other direction, while other times it took the willpower to yank and thrust out its fangs. She pushed Drake down, away from her. He groaned in the cracks of his despair; she felt him cling to her with dear life, like a fledgling uselessly grabbing at a branch, as it plummeted to its demise. Morgana would have given another verbal denial, until the duck looked at her.

It was a look she wouldn't ever have thought she could see on a living face. His gaze begged for her appreciation, almost starved, lost in the wallows of confusion. It was a gaze that an empty man often wore, a man who's time marked him with fragile bones and transparent eyes. It was gaze a hollow doll was carved for, its only serving purpose to watch as life shattered its body. Her Dark needed someone, someone who could convince him otherwise. He had lost his way so many times that he couldn't ever remember when there was a way.

She knew what Eek and Squeak were telling her, and she knew it was likely the truth. This wasn't about her, it was about him. If he needed her there, she needed to be there all the way through. It didn't matter the greed she might have felt, the horrible malicious idea that she might have been taking advantage of him, or if she even thought denial was best for him. Drake had spoken for himself without uttering a word, he knew what he needed. Yet Morgana was depriving him of it, disillusioning the necessity for a desire. Perhaps it was a desire, and perhaps it was still an essential all the same. The point was, the ghoul should be the last person to know the difference.

Morgana's own disillusionment was what had turned her to crime in the first place, mistaking her needs for wants. She simply wished the best for Drake, but had forgotten the idea that perhaps she was masking his own needs for the label of desires. Drake didn't want her. He needed her. Drake didn't want to be cared for. He needed to be cared for. A life without affection of any kind might as well have been a still-birth from the start.

She sighed, shunning the bats out of the room. They obeyed, contempt with their mistress finally understanding the stitches in the cloth. She brought Drake against the bed, going down with him.


Drake couldn't help it, the weeping seemed to come on its own accord. He dug his tears into Morgana's sleeping shoulder, doing his best in muffling his gasps of breath, lousy attempts to not awaken her. His memories crashed back into him, shaking the very foundations of his reality.

Launchpad was out of St. Canard, on a business errand for Duckburg. The pilot warned him, warned him. "D.W, I really don't want you doing crime without me." Drake scoffed, eyeing his friend amusingly. "I assure you, you won't be missing anything special. It's not like I'm going against the Fearsome Five."

"This isn't about me, I'm worried about you. What if something happens and I'm not there? You could get hurt and no one would know." Drake would have made a comical remark, if it hadn't been the way Launchpad had been looking at him. He let the pilot off with a "perhaps," yet the darkness in Launchpad's face never washed away. The shadows lingered there, clawing at his face with worry.

The few nights after, Launchpad had been packed for his errand. His fingers tangled over the doorknob, inches away from contact. The pilot gave one last look, the sharpened look of a pup. "Just don't go full out, alright?" Drake breathed, locking that stabbing gaze with a better friend than the duck could ask for. Drake forced a grin that was darkened by the same crevices Launchpad had. "I'll try."

He should have listened to Launchpad.


The first thing Drake focused on after his morning awakening was the thin strip of sunlight shadowing through the dark curtains, realizing his vision was in much better stability than the previous night. In fact, if he truly wanted to, the duck was likely well enough to haul out of the bed and leave for home. But he didn't. Instead, he merely focused on the light, listening to the light waves of breathing Morgana gave. It had been the most content he had felt in a long while.

His head hadn't been swarmed with clashing darkness any longer, but doubt still lingered there. Drake still hadn't known who he really was, who he was supposed to be. It wasn't like anyone could be raised to know their existing purpose, instead most seemed to leap off that dooming cliff and hoped something caught them in a net. Sometimes they would, others would rip through, and the unfortunate ones never found that safety net. The most dreadful cases were the ones that never jumped, staring at their ancestors before them, laying dead at the bottom of the rock.

Gosalyn had been what edged Drake closer to that cliff, but the duck still never made that leap of faith. He was frightened by the possibilities, the possibility of failure conquering his being. Yet, hadn't he already failed? Wasn't that the thing he told himself everyday?

Perhaps there was a difference: the thought of failure was more bloodsucking than true failure. Maybe morphing such an idea was a failure in itself at attempting to understand reality.

He thought too much.

Drake had lost track of just how long he had laid there, staring off as the light began to shift through each hour. Eventually, the sliver of morning light had vanished, despite the sun still illuminating shadows against the curtains. The duck concluded it must have been closer to noon then. His body still felt too exhausted to even consider a starving sensation.

A dim thought shook his attention; he had a sudden glimpse of Gosalyn arguing how camping was much more "entertaining" when it was with Honker's family. Drake remembered the boiling jealousy he had for it, the imbeciles hadn't even really camped. They just drove out to whatever nowhere they pleased, and yanked out the television and junk food. However, the duck couldn't argue the fact any longer when Launchpad suggested it would be a good "adult getaway" from children for a while. It could be a time where Drake could relax.

So much for that thought.

You aren't cut to be a hero. That was the nightmare Negaduck had left with, before the flames engulfed everything. What if he wasn't cut to be anything? That would mean everything Drake, or even Darkwing, did would have been as useless as the way the wind blew. The breezes were practically nonexistent, and the children would still beam sunburns and moisture under their armpits. He felt Morgana stir, but everything became still the moment Drake realized it. He had cast his eyes away from the gloom painted curtains, eyeing the bedroom door with dejection itching his gaze. He truly could get up and walk home, especially if he made the effort to walk here during a blizzard. Drake didn't wish to trouble Morgana more than he already had. He could already feel the burden of wasting her worry drawing him into a sea of solitude. He made a slow attempt to edge away.

An attempt.

A spike of adrenaline snatched Drake out of his consciousness, hitting a jackpot of his shackled desires. She forced a grip that stopped him dead in his tracks, and it was a grab that even a sleepwalker could never make. Drake's mind shuffled to a blank, a sense of humiliation overcoming him. If he wasn't certain, then it was a fact that Morgana likely felt his turbulent shivers. "How are you feeling?" He hadn't expected a question, therefore, he didn't give an answer. That, and he also hadn't expected the way the mumble sung, echoing and bulldozing through the chaos that was his mind.

He lost track of the minutes. Morgana shifted, laying weight on an arm. For the first time, Drake was thankful for the darkness that coveted the room. The shadows could mask the pain bashed and clawed on his face. Despite merely seeing only a silhouette, against the little light glowing from the curtain behind her, Drake was still fascinated by the ghoul's blind beauty. He didn't deserve her. Yet, here she was, bestowed upon him.

He felt a sensation drag along his backside, but he still refused to budge any further. "Talk to me." He didn't wish to, no, that was wrong. In fact, he didn't really know what he wanted. Many of his basic senses came back to functioning ability, but his brain was still fogged in dealing with recent events and discoveries. Drake was hurting her and he knew it. It didn't mean he knew what to do about it. She laced her fingers under his collar, her unseen gaze smothered in patience. He couldn't bake the right words nor tone.

He blurted a stupid mistake.

"What if he was right."

"What if who was?"

"Everyone." Drake stared into the fabric, feeling a pinching moisture enter his vision. Where was he supposed to start? He felt her cool skin around him, a coolness that comforted yet never froze. "Who is everyone?" He was spitting out white boxes of a crossword puzzle, yet Morgana's compassion never faltered. She wouldn't fill in the letters, but she wouldn't read into the questions either. She simply waited, allowing the time for him to wallow the answers for himself.

He sobbed a third time.


"I don't know who I'm supposed to be anymore." The fire that had engulfed the factory torched the thin twigs that tied his soul, shattering everything else ever connected to it. His mind, his sensitivity of emotions, even his pride. The fire was spreading, and the ash was suffocating him. Morgana hadn't let it.

"Nothing I ever do means a burnt head of a match." He hadn't recognized the embrace she was giving him, it was practically transparent against him. Drake coughed into her shoulder, gagging on his own despair; it was a miracle smoke and ash didn't spurt out with it. His chest pounded in a frenzy, and his face throbbed from his constant grimaces.

"You do enough." Drake hadn't predicted any sort of comment; for a long while, Morgana hadn't spoken anything. She had let him drool out what was stabbing him. At the very act of the ghoul speaking itself, Drake kept his voice diluted. "I don't."

"You do." Morgana's heavy tone established menacing authority, causing Drake to shrink under the brinks of it. "If you hadn't, St. Canard wouldn't be half what it is today."

"But that isn't me!" Drake shot his body away at the sense of pain, ripping himself away from the arms that observed with, not pity, but consoling sorrow. "Darkwing Duck is a myth. It's a face people look at and pretend is real. I'm not Darkwing, I never was. The only thing I ever did was create more illusions than there's meant to be." Another thought occurred to him, spiking misery's hunger for more pain.

"Drake isn't real either…Drake is another facade, another face that someone looks at and forgets." The duck drilled his head into his fingers, as if the gesture would smudge out the thoughts ingrained into his brain. "I don't know who I am." The silence was so deafening it shook Drake to the very bones.

"Then who am I?" The duck nearly gagged at his melting mouth. He didn't bother looking up to see her dark figure. The ghoul continued anyway. "If Darkwing Duck didn't turn me away from crime, then who did? If I hadn't fallen for Drake from under the mask, then who was it?" The venom in her words shattered Drake's humility into fear, the anxiety of the unexpected. He didn't have any clear answers that made sense.

"No one."

"It's you, darling." Drake was stumped on that note. Morgana slid her hands around his torso once more, and it wasn't to play an act. "You've filled your own head with this nonsense. You are what makes those things real. You made Darkwing. You made Drake. Are you not a father of a daughter? Are you not an enemy of some deadbeat off the street? It doesn't matter what name you go by. Darling, you've created a world with two separate 'you's,' when there wasn't a reason to. That's like questioning if you belong to your mother or father's family."

He felt her fingers tug at the feathers of his neck, and her breath drew near. "Dark and Drake are a flesh in one. You are living proof of that." He felt her weight against his, soaking the strength just as he had soaked the words. She was right.

He had been the heart of St. Canard when the city painted none, he had been the father of a girl who was fatherless, he was the best friend of a compassionate pilot with confound piloting training, he was the light that lit up a blind ghoul's path of thievery and robbery, he was the miserable neighbor of the death-throttling Muddlefoots.

But most importantly, Darkwing Duck, Drake Mallard, was loved. Always was, and always would be.


Author's Note:

Thank for bearing with me through the end. Hopefully, I hope that the ending was just as satisfying to you as it was to me! As always, all criticism is appreciated!